Guess who's uneducated here, and not counting the fact that film is still considered superior in terms of contrast ranges compared to digital...?
It has only been in the last 5-7 years that professional photographers have started to consider '35mm' format digital cameras as production ready for still photography, i.e. close enough to equaling film to make it worth their time. It is commonly accepted that a high-quality 35mm full frame color image contains about 20-25 megapixels of color and luminance data. Most Hollywood films were historically shot in what you might call "half 35mm", i.e., basically a frame size of 24x18mm, so use half that. A 70mm format image contains about 8-1/2 times more image size than a half frame 35, which is where IMAX size screens get their detail and fun. Times 24-30 frames per second, seconds per hour, 2 hrs, you get a minimum of around 2 terabytes of data. AKA 120-2 sided high density DVDs for the half 35mm copy, or 18 terabytes for the IMAX version. i.e. roughly 1100- 2 sided high density DVDS for the Imax version.
For archival purposes, consider the expense of all those DVDs vs keeping one master copy of the film in a can....
If I were a small muni like in my example, I'd rather have a deal with Toshiba that essentially says "if we make our plug out electrical capacity properly compatible (i.e. the transformers, et. al. in the transmission substation are properly equipped to handle the extra juice), and [with the proper site planning for a larger unit] we can trade up to the 4X power unit when it becomes available for an upgrade price of X and Toshiba will find a new home for my 200Kw Plant. Sort of like leasing the capacity and allowing for growth within the lease plan, but I'm not expert on how a contract could structure that kind of arrangement or how the Toshiba should be involved in any upgrades...
Interestingly enough ThinkGeek publishes a warning at the bottom of the sales page for their laser as follows:
"Warning: Green lasers are very powerful. Pointing at aircraft may land you in jail. Without a Monopoly card to get you back out..."
So the idea that a peson doesn't know that they are not supposed to lase an aircraft kinda gets shot right there, because I'll bet every green laser sold carries the same kind of warning.
We can probably agree that at first glance, the FBI going after this couple because the pilot of the helicopter had a headache for several hours seems like using a jackhammer to swat a fly. But consider: lasing an aircraft (putting a laser on an aircraft) for any reason is a federal offense, making it the FBI's domain. [FYI the reason it is a federal offense to begin with is that the air space over the country is not considered "state property", otherwise you could have a California Aviation Administration, a Nevada Aviation administration, etc. etc. and all of the aviation systems need to work together]. Coupled with the fact that virtually everything you can do with an aircraft can have an interstate commerce connection, making it Federal vs. state anyway)
Anyway, this has to be considered a significant offense for two reasons reasons, the first being the one they quote: disorient a pilot and you put the pilot and any one in the neighborhood of the craft in danger. Think of the response if you dropped a paint filled balloon from an overpass onto a vehicle on a busy freeway, same type of thing. The second reason is similar: because lasers are damn straight sighting mechanisms and reflect back to an observer in an electronically or optically observable manner, anything from a high powered rifle to an anti-aircraft gun or missile can be targeted on the aircraft resulting in a significantly higher probability of a hit.
What the law can't do is say "well, there's no harm to doing ___X___" if every time someone does ___X___, other people are put at risk. Which is why "driving under the influence" is a crime even if no one got hurt. Maybe the couple doesn't deserve a huge fine and twenty years in jail. But they did the crime even inadvertently and there has to be a measurable penalty as a deterrent to other idiots doing the same thing.
My question is, are we readers on slashdot so reactive to anything the government does that we tacitly give permission and headline space to all of the idiots of the world who get in trouble for doing what they ought to have known they shouldn't?
If the figures are correct, then presumably a production unit plus the fueling works out to about $3.5MM USD. Which is a heck of a chunk of change to dedicate to what would in effect be a "40 year plan" to amortize the capital for the up front cost. Which then makes the economics of this thing something along the lines of "for group of customers X or company Y, 200KW buys me the following capabilities, and I can guarantee the investment value based on those capabilities...
A made up example -- for a community hospital in a small municipality, next to City Hall, the fire station, etc. Let's assume that 200KW per hour plus the trigeneration heat if it can be developed is enough to run the electricity for and warm the hospital and fire station, and city hall, plus providing the charging for all of the mini-metro hybrid bus fleet, etc. This might make a compelling case that a municipal bond investor might sign up for. Let's say that the bond is put out there for 10 years, meaning that the municipality expects to pay about $400K per year back to the bond from tax and other revenues, and that the cost of any alternate energy scheme per year which does all that, is $500K. As a voter I'd vote for that bond to be issued, and as an investor I'd buy that bond in a heartbeat. Because the benefits for the next 30 years are nearly free to my community afterwards.
My question is, what if after a year the hospital/town/etc. discovers that they need an average of 400KW hr., now what? because as far as I can tell there's no way to upsize this system directly. (An interesting question for a Toshiba Sales rep, methinks).
Actually your source is better than the article I read -- which obviously quoted from it. But it still makes the case, and I particularly like the emphasis that one of the group members (Bill Pate) has when he stated that "if the software isn't perfect, some of the people we go to meetings with might die."
Granted, most of the code we write doesn't have quite that strong an incentive in terms of code quality. If the web page isn't exactly right, it's not that big a deal. But as a programmer in corporate environments for going on 20 years now, I wish the companies I worked and work for would have a similar emphasis "if this doesn't work right ____________ suffers, and we can do our jobs better than that...".
The Shuttle team just happens to be the best example of HOW to do it that I know of.
Watch what you say there, because the shuttle's software code is some of the best stuff out there, given that it is multiply redundant, and hasn't had a major failure that I know of, ever. The shuttle software team is known for doing code reviews at a level that most companies I know of can only dream of -- I remember an article several years ago that showed their code to be provably bug free at a something like 3-4 bugs per 500,0000 lines of code.
What seems cool about "open source" relative to this project is that it may make the specifications much more solid in all areas (any interested engineer can spot problems or suggest enhancements, not just NASA paid engineers, but at the same time I doubt that all of the rocket specs CAN be fully open sourced, because if you can put a rocket into space with sufficient accuracy to put a manned craft into lunar orbit, you can also put a warhead on that same rocket and plop it with decent accuracy anywhere in the world.
Which, given the rogue elements in our world and a number of fairly rich folks willing to fund the rogues, is, as you might surmise, NOT A GOOD THING.
my very humble proposition is that an ordered system can only arise from a random/chaotic state.
Yes, that is the exact counter-proposition to an ordered system "by design." Which calls into play all of the "does life exist here with sentience (on planet earth, that is" because the immense time period of randomness become ordered resulted in the "exact set of conditions required for a water planet with the proper building blocks at the right distance from the sun to go from random chaos to building blocks of proteins to single celled life to multi-cellular life to sentient life." Or, does the "design of a water planet to sustain life" require the current place in the solar system, etc., and the design of an ecosphere require micro-evolution, and... and... and....
No easy answers, i.e. all answers are complex, eh?
Because it really puts the so called "faith vs. science" argument into perspective. That argument quite simply boils down to how a scientific mind goes about answering one question: do the so-called "laws of nature" work because that's how the universe "IS", or is the universe the way it is because that's how the "laws of nature" were designed? [Or my thought: Even a "God" has to use the laws of nature to organize things into interesting things like universes, planets, beings, etc...]
I particularly liked the card game of bridge analogy and the author's conclusion where he stated:We don't know, and might never know, if science has overbid its hand. When in doubt, confronted with the complexities of the world, scientists have no choice but to play their cards as if they can win, as if the universe is indeed comprehensible. That is what they have been doing for more than 2,000 years, and they are still winning.
Interestingly enough, as a person of religious faith, I agree: scientists are winning the knowledge acquisition game faster than they ever have before -- and my faith is not threatened by the progress of knowledge at all for a simple reason: would it make sense for a designer (AKA a God) to organize/make a universe that doesn't follow comprehensible rules? or that this group of sentient beings known as humans can't set about on a centuries long search to understand what those rules are?
Because what I reject is the limitation imposed by atheistic scientists that the answer to that first argued question must be presupposed towards randomness, not design.
Let's say I have a biodiesel powered, water cooled generator (so that I can use the excess heat to warm my house or water or ?) or a wind-turbine, or some other peaking power source providing most of my house juice, along with a bank of these batteries. Plus the ability to use the house pack to charge a hybrid electric family vehicle with say a sixty mile range before I have to kick in the car's bio-diesel driven engine. Or vice versa: the vehicle's bio-diesel engine can be used to charge both the electrical drive train for the vehicle when on the road, or the home battery stack when the vehicle is plugged into the home's grid. This seems to be the ultimate win/win for home power.
The economic question is, "do I have to have tens of thousands of dollars of batteries to make this work, or will the batteries be cost effective and available for consumer use?"
as most of the edits took place in 2005 and were just recently noticed, and most of the edits are apparently fairly minor. Adding some "it is claimed" phraseology etc. here and there, where the underlying fundamentals of the article remained basically unchanged.
What I found more interesting is that apparently the Register doesn't like Wikipedia because they refer to it as "whackypedia", and the statement that the edits were made by a "Bush friendly" source inside the House. Maybe the Bush friendly angle is true -- the Register article asserts it to be so without quoting the edits or commenting, but there is no way to tell by an IP address.
Which tells me that the Register article is basically shoddy journalism. No fact digging, no fact checking, polemics instead of the who what when why where that journalism is supposed to accomplish. So -- with all due respect to GOOD journalism, and while not a Bushie or US Govt. fan, I have to say that this tidbit is yellow all under.
Apologies for not being clearer. Sometimes the meaning that I have in my head doesn't make it to the page the way I think it does, and you are right to call me on that. I recognized that the person wasn't a child molester, so my phrase should have been that "because most sexual predators" do not reform. So that it would be obvious that I was not judging whether or not the fellow who was killed was a predator or not. So, I won't argue whether the convicted man was a sexual predator or not, because that would have only been know by his future behaviors -- and he was killed in spite of there not being any behaviors in the present. So I would assume him innocent (AKA reformed) before being proven guilty i.e. unless there was strong evidence to the contrary (probation violations on porn, etc.) that have not been reported.
Try this version: I am part of a neighborhood watch group. One of the guys on the group takes the time to go down to whichever organization in our area does the predator list, and at one point about 2 years ago he let us know that we had a person on the list move in within a 1/4 mile radius because I have three daughters in the age range that the person was convicted of molesting. Later, the person apparently moved, and to this day I do not know which neighbor it was because apparently there was no problem during the time he/she lived near by, meaning that the person may have been in that small minority of child sexual molestors that actually reformed.
Was I more careful when my girls were outside? you betcha. Did I caution them more about "stranger dangers" without trying to enforce a "scare tactic regime", you betcha. Did I pick on or seek out or discriminate against a neighbor? No, and not that I would have, but their relative privacy worked well in both directions.
Given that the QT libarary is now dual licensed under the GNU GPL and QPL licenses which ended the controversy over licensing with the FSF, I don't think it's a matter of throwing "his weight" at all.
The folks governing GNOME needs to either decide to be free or not free, and if they chose "not-free" there's nothing to stop one of the rest of us from forking the project, starting a new project, or whatever. So RMS gets nothing from joining the conversation at all. That said, if Richard Stallman or the FSF was to basically slap Novell upside the proverbial corporate head with a "get with the program with Gnome/Ogg/etc." cluestick (communique), I wonder if there would be movement more than if one of us tried to do the same thing...
The point is that "big brother" publishes a list of "bad people". And then there's a progression where it somehow becomes okay for a good people to know how to find and get rid of bad people.
Seems to me a minor party hack published that it was okay to exterminate folks with a particular ancestry in Europe about 70 years ago, and that Milosovic basically published that it was okay to kill bad folks in Croatia and Bosnia about ten years ago. For those US folks that think "it can't happen here", a governor of a US Midwestern state published in the 1830's that it was ok to exterminate an entire group of people just for what they believed. That order wasn't officially rescinded until 1976.
Now then, I won't argue whether the convicted man was good or bad -- because most child molestors do not reform -- nor will I argue that folks don't have the right to protect their kids from unreformed molestors. What I will argue is that publishing a list in a manner as easily accessible as the Internet may be the wrong way to go about protecting the neighborhood. Because otherwise mob and/or vigilant justice takes control and can very easily get out of hand. Leading to murder and/or genocide.
Mea culpa. I don't know if there were European or Asian drug companies that also had anti-ulcer medications being sold at $.75-$1.00 a pill like the US based medications (Tagamet etc.) when a $3.00 bottle of pepto and about $7.00 of antibiotics were the real cure.
What I do know is that once my dad -- a hospital pharmacist who would have known which companies were doing what at the time -- read the research, etc. he started to point the medical doctors in the area towards the simple solution as something to consider and the doctor's themselves moved away from just passing out and prescribing based on the samples provided by the American drug companies.
Obviously an exoskeleton can be used for that too. But she doesn't need armor. Just balance, and the robotics being worked on aren't armor size, but "robot human" size. Significant, no?
At some point my thought is that there has to be some way that Wikipedia can have discoursive (is that a word?) articles, i.e., if there are competing arguments, set up a Wiki Page that can't be altered so easily that points to both. And it may be important to prevent the antagonistic groups from editing each other's pages.
An example -- and I don't think this will be off topic when you see where I am going with it: for years a set of researchers in Australia insisted that most peptic and duodenal ulcers were caused by a bacteria called helicobacter pylori. Problem was, the treatment for the bacteria was a simple and very cheap course of antibiotics and pink bismuth (brand name is usually Pepto Bismol) for about two weeks -- which negated the value of some very expensive American-developed medicines who basically trashed the research in the medical community for years. The end of the story is that the researchers, Warren and Marshall were correct, and 80% of all ulcers ARE caused by that bacteria. In fact these two were awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work on H. pylori.
So what would happen if Wikipedia were available back then and the powers that be basically chose the wrong side and banned Warren and Marshall from editing articles on stomach ulcers, because another group had a vested interest in keeping the status quo? Which is where the real ruckus lies and why I am now backing Citizendium instead of Wikipedia.
I wonder if people get the significance of this, because robotics at it's core isn't always about autonomous arthromorphic creations. Sometime's it's about assistance.
I recently met an MS sufferer that has been completely confined to a wheelchair for years because the nerves in her legs don't fire properly, even though she has sensation and can tell when she is not balanced.
So take this so called "robot" technology, and make it something that becomes sort of like a small exo-skeletal muscle system. Call it robotically controlled balance assistance, or whatever you want.
End result, she's out of the chair. In the real world. Good, no?
Or if Groklaw has already tossed through the claims in this article, which, if I am reading it correctly is basically saying that on the core copyright issue, Judge Kimball got it wrong. But even then, I wonder how much it really matters, because when push came to shove, IIRC SCO couldn't or wouldn't even produce verifiable copyright violations that matter even a whit because they also distributed the same code under the GPL.
2,3 and 4. Spread as far apart in geosynchronous space as possible. Linked with as fast a set of communications processors as possible. With as much fuel as possible. So that you can point 3 or 4 of these at the same targets in the universe at the same time. Or point it at targets that are out of visible range of the hubble because of things like planet earth getting in the way.
Why? You want radio telescopy on a grand scale? How about a radio telescope with a 40,000 km edge to edge diameter? But then, I am not an astronomer, just a tinkerer so this may not make as much sense as I think it would. What think ye?
To the extent that "all government is local", this is a very important case, because while Uncle Sam may be great big and far away, if you are in a small city or town and are critical and can be outed via a simple subpoena, then what's to stop the local city or town government from instructing the local chief of police to make sure you get more than your fair share of traffic tickets, building inspectors from condemning your home, power co. operators from playing with the juice, in short any or all other governmental or quasi-governmental person who stands to benefit from a critic being silenced from engaging in a pattern of harassment, deception, etc.?
That said, with both the EFF and Google being against the subpoena, I don't really think that this stands a snowflake's chance in hell of surviving the legal challenges. And if the Superior Court judge gets it wrong, I would still see this going all the way to SCOTUS for resolution before the blogger would be outed.
Because if they can pull it off, and it grows beyond just an experimental state, they get Yahoo and/or DMOZ quality monitoring of the results in their main searches. Here's why: I don't use Google nearly as much as I used to because folks have figured out how to mess with the results. So where I used to get 100, 200, or 500 results, I am now getting hundreds of thousands, and there is little guarantee that the quality links will be at the top of the list any more.
So let's assume that millions of eyeballs are basically rating the quality of the searches on huge numbers of word combinations. Then assume also that Google has the monetary incentive to hire very good linguists, and demographically wise statisticians to figure out how to closely model the ratings results into the algorithms that Google uses to rank pages. Add Google's incentive to factor in geolocation, and other demographically oriented tidbits even without tracking "who you are" and what next?
My thought is that their rankings again shoot ahead in terms of quality and applicability to MY searches. Your thoughts?
Not 100% true in terms of WWII history, at least in some places. High altitude bombing was never very effective, but the naval bombers in the Pacific theater got very very good at hitting their targets with less civilian casualties. How do I know? Because I lived in Japan for two years about thirty years ago, and once had friends nearby who took me to the site of an old, bombed out munitions factory that was completely surrounded by really really old Japanese houses and a nearby religious temple. I was told by WWII generation Japanese people that lived there that the day the factory was bombed was quite amazing because sometimes they would see the "little planes" come in at really quite bizarre angles to literally pitch their bombs past the temples, etc. into the factory area only.
Their kindness towards me is probably the highest compliment that I can give a military flyer -- the so called enemy noticing that the American's weren't out to kill all of them, and describing it to a youngster like me that wasn't even there, 30+ years after the fact.
Slashdot Mirror
It has only been in the last 5-7 years that professional photographers have started to consider '35mm' format digital cameras as production ready for still photography, i.e. close enough to equaling film to make it worth their time. It is commonly accepted that a high-quality 35mm full frame color image contains about 20-25 megapixels of color and luminance data. Most Hollywood films were historically shot in what you might call "half 35mm", i.e., basically a frame size of 24x18mm, so use half that. A 70mm format image contains about 8-1/2 times more image size than a half frame 35, which is where IMAX size screens get their detail and fun. Times 24-30 frames per second, seconds per hour, 2 hrs, you get a minimum of around 2 terabytes of data. AKA 120-2 sided high density DVDs for the half 35mm copy, or 18 terabytes for the IMAX version. i.e. roughly 1100- 2 sided high density DVDS for the Imax version.
For archival purposes, consider the expense of all those DVDs vs keeping one master copy of the film in a can....
If I were a small muni like in my example, I'd rather have a deal with Toshiba that essentially says "if we make our plug out electrical capacity properly compatible (i.e. the transformers, et. al. in the transmission substation are properly equipped to handle the extra juice), and [with the proper site planning for a larger unit] we can trade up to the 4X power unit when it becomes available for an upgrade price of X and Toshiba will find a new home for my 200Kw Plant. Sort of like leasing the capacity and allowing for growth within the lease plan, but I'm not expert on how a contract could structure that kind of arrangement or how the Toshiba should be involved in any upgrades...
Interestingly enough ThinkGeek publishes a warning at the bottom of the sales page for their laser as follows:
So the idea that a peson doesn't know that they are not supposed to lase an aircraft kinda gets shot right there, because I'll bet every green laser sold carries the same kind of warning.
We can probably agree that at first glance, the FBI going after this couple because the pilot of the helicopter had a headache for several hours seems like using a jackhammer to swat a fly. But consider: lasing an aircraft (putting a laser on an aircraft) for any reason is a federal offense, making it the FBI's domain. [FYI the reason it is a federal offense to begin with is that the air space over the country is not considered "state property", otherwise you could have a California Aviation Administration, a Nevada Aviation administration, etc. etc. and all of the aviation systems need to work together]. Coupled with the fact that virtually everything you can do with an aircraft can have an interstate commerce connection, making it Federal vs. state anyway)
Anyway, this has to be considered a significant offense for two reasons reasons, the first being the one they quote: disorient a pilot and you put the pilot and any one in the neighborhood of the craft in danger. Think of the response if you dropped a paint filled balloon from an overpass onto a vehicle on a busy freeway, same type of thing. The second reason is similar: because lasers are damn straight sighting mechanisms and reflect back to an observer in an electronically or optically observable manner, anything from a high powered rifle to an anti-aircraft gun or missile can be targeted on the aircraft resulting in a significantly higher probability of a hit.
What the law can't do is say "well, there's no harm to doing ___X___" if every time someone does ___X___, other people are put at risk. Which is why "driving under the influence" is a crime even if no one got hurt. Maybe the couple doesn't deserve a huge fine and twenty years in jail. But they did the crime even inadvertently and there has to be a measurable penalty as a deterrent to other idiots doing the same thing.
My question is, are we readers on slashdot so reactive to anything the government does that we tacitly give permission and headline space to all of the idiots of the world who get in trouble for doing what they ought to have known they shouldn't?
A made up example -- for a community hospital in a small municipality, next to City Hall, the fire station, etc. Let's assume that 200KW per hour plus the trigeneration heat if it can be developed is enough to run the electricity for and warm the hospital and fire station, and city hall, plus providing the charging for all of the mini-metro hybrid bus fleet, etc. This might make a compelling case that a municipal bond investor might sign up for. Let's say that the bond is put out there for 10 years, meaning that the municipality expects to pay about $400K per year back to the bond from tax and other revenues, and that the cost of any alternate energy scheme per year which does all that, is $500K. As a voter I'd vote for that bond to be issued, and as an investor I'd buy that bond in a heartbeat. Because the benefits for the next 30 years are nearly free to my community afterwards.
My question is, what if after a year the hospital/town/etc. discovers that they need an average of 400KW hr., now what? because as far as I can tell there's no way to upsize this system directly. (An interesting question for a Toshiba Sales rep, methinks).
Granted, most of the code we write doesn't have quite that strong an incentive in terms of code quality. If the web page isn't exactly right, it's not that big a deal. But as a programmer in corporate environments for going on 20 years now, I wish the companies I worked and work for would have a similar emphasis "if this doesn't work right ____________ suffers, and we can do our jobs better than that...".
The Shuttle team just happens to be the best example of HOW to do it that I know of.
What seems cool about "open source" relative to this project is that it may make the specifications much more solid in all areas (any interested engineer can spot problems or suggest enhancements, not just NASA paid engineers, but at the same time I doubt that all of the rocket specs CAN be fully open sourced, because if you can put a rocket into space with sufficient accuracy to put a manned craft into lunar orbit, you can also put a warhead on that same rocket and plop it with decent accuracy anywhere in the world.
Which, given the rogue elements in our world and a number of fairly rich folks willing to fund the rogues, is, as you might surmise, NOT A GOOD THING.
Yes, that is the exact counter-proposition to an ordered system "by design." Which calls into play all of the "does life exist here with sentience (on planet earth, that is" because the immense time period of randomness become ordered resulted in the "exact set of conditions required for a water planet with the proper building blocks at the right distance from the sun to go from random chaos to building blocks of proteins to single celled life to multi-cellular life to sentient life." Or, does the "design of a water planet to sustain life" require the current place in the solar system, etc., and the design of an ecosphere require micro-evolution, and... and... and....
No easy answers, i.e. all answers are complex, eh?
I particularly liked the card game of bridge analogy and the author's conclusion where he stated:We don't know, and might never know, if science has overbid its hand. When in doubt, confronted with the complexities of the world, scientists have no choice but to play their cards as if they can win, as if the universe is indeed comprehensible. That is what they have been doing for more than 2,000 years, and they are still winning.
Interestingly enough, as a person of religious faith, I agree: scientists are winning the knowledge acquisition game faster than they ever have before -- and my faith is not threatened by the progress of knowledge at all for a simple reason: would it make sense for a designer (AKA a God) to organize/make a universe that doesn't follow comprehensible rules? or that this group of sentient beings known as humans can't set about on a centuries long search to understand what those rules are?
Because what I reject is the limitation imposed by atheistic scientists that the answer to that first argued question must be presupposed towards randomness, not design.
Let's say I have a biodiesel powered, water cooled generator (so that I can use the excess heat to warm my house or water or ?) or a wind-turbine, or some other peaking power source providing most of my house juice, along with a bank of these batteries. Plus the ability to use the house pack to charge a hybrid electric family vehicle with say a sixty mile range before I have to kick in the car's bio-diesel driven engine. Or vice versa: the vehicle's bio-diesel engine can be used to charge both the electrical drive train for the vehicle when on the road, or the home battery stack when the vehicle is plugged into the home's grid. This seems to be the ultimate win/win for home power.
The economic question is, "do I have to have tens of thousands of dollars of batteries to make this work, or will the batteries be cost effective and available for consumer use?"
What think ye?
What I found more interesting is that apparently the Register doesn't like Wikipedia because they refer to it as "whackypedia", and the statement that the edits were made by a "Bush friendly" source inside the House. Maybe the Bush friendly angle is true -- the Register article asserts it to be so without quoting the edits or commenting, but there is no way to tell by an IP address.
Which tells me that the Register article is basically shoddy journalism. No fact digging, no fact checking, polemics instead of the who what when why where that journalism is supposed to accomplish. So -- with all due respect to GOOD journalism, and while not a Bushie or US Govt. fan, I have to say that this tidbit is yellow all under.
Apologies for not being clearer. Sometimes the meaning that I have in my head doesn't make it to the page the way I think it does, and you are right to call me on that. I recognized that the person wasn't a child molester, so my phrase should have been that "because most sexual predators" do not reform. So that it would be obvious that I was not judging whether or not the fellow who was killed was a predator or not. So, I won't argue whether the convicted man was a sexual predator or not, because that would have only been know by his future behaviors -- and he was killed in spite of there not being any behaviors in the present. So I would assume him innocent (AKA reformed) before being proven guilty i.e. unless there was strong evidence to the contrary (probation violations on porn, etc.) that have not been reported.
Thanks for our correction.
Was I more careful when my girls were outside? you betcha. Did I caution them more about "stranger dangers" without trying to enforce a "scare tactic regime", you betcha. Did I pick on or seek out or discriminate against a neighbor? No, and not that I would have, but their relative privacy worked well in both directions.
The folks governing GNOME needs to either decide to be free or not free, and if they chose "not-free" there's nothing to stop one of the rest of us from forking the project, starting a new project, or whatever. So RMS gets nothing from joining the conversation at all. That said, if Richard Stallman or the FSF was to basically slap Novell upside the proverbial corporate head with a "get with the program with Gnome/Ogg/etc." cluestick (communique), I wonder if there would be movement more than if one of us tried to do the same thing...
Seems to me a minor party hack published that it was okay to exterminate folks with a particular ancestry in Europe about 70 years ago, and that Milosovic basically published that it was okay to kill bad folks in Croatia and Bosnia about ten years ago. For those US folks that think "it can't happen here", a governor of a US Midwestern state published in the 1830's that it was ok to exterminate an entire group of people just for what they believed. That order wasn't officially rescinded until 1976.
Now then, I won't argue whether the convicted man was good or bad -- because most child molestors do not reform -- nor will I argue that folks don't have the right to protect their kids from unreformed molestors. What I will argue is that publishing a list in a manner as easily accessible as the Internet may be the wrong way to go about protecting the neighborhood. Because otherwise mob and/or vigilant justice takes control and can very easily get out of hand. Leading to murder and/or genocide.
What I do know is that once my dad -- a hospital pharmacist who would have known which companies were doing what at the time -- read the research, etc. he started to point the medical doctors in the area towards the simple solution as something to consider and the doctor's themselves moved away from just passing out and prescribing based on the samples provided by the American drug companies.
Obviously an exoskeleton can be used for that too. But she doesn't need armor. Just balance, and the robotics being worked on aren't armor size, but "robot human" size. Significant, no?
An example -- and I don't think this will be off topic when you see where I am going with it: for years a set of researchers in Australia insisted that most peptic and duodenal ulcers were caused by a bacteria called helicobacter pylori. Problem was, the treatment for the bacteria was a simple and very cheap course of antibiotics and pink bismuth (brand name is usually Pepto Bismol) for about two weeks -- which negated the value of some very expensive American-developed medicines who basically trashed the research in the medical community for years. The end of the story is that the researchers, Warren and Marshall were correct, and 80% of all ulcers ARE caused by that bacteria. In fact these two were awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work on H. pylori.
So what would happen if Wikipedia were available back then and the powers that be basically chose the wrong side and banned Warren and Marshall from editing articles on stomach ulcers, because another group had a vested interest in keeping the status quo? Which is where the real ruckus lies and why I am now backing Citizendium instead of Wikipedia.
I recently met an MS sufferer that has been completely confined to a wheelchair for years because the nerves in her legs don't fire properly, even though she has sensation and can tell when she is not balanced.
So take this so called "robot" technology, and make it something that becomes sort of like a small exo-skeletal muscle system. Call it robotically controlled balance assistance, or whatever you want.
End result, she's out of the chair. In the real world. Good, no?
Thoughts?
2,3 and 4. Spread as far apart in geosynchronous space as possible. Linked with as fast a set of communications processors as possible. With as much fuel as possible. So that you can point 3 or 4 of these at the same targets in the universe at the same time. Or point it at targets that are out of visible range of the hubble because of things like planet earth getting in the way.
Why? You want radio telescopy on a grand scale? How about a radio telescope with a 40,000 km edge to edge diameter? But then, I am not an astronomer, just a tinkerer so this may not make as much sense as I think it would. What think ye?
That said, with both the EFF and Google being against the subpoena, I don't really think that this stands a snowflake's chance in hell of surviving the legal challenges. And if the Superior Court judge gets it wrong, I would still see this going all the way to SCOTUS for resolution before the blogger would be outed.
So let's assume that millions of eyeballs are basically rating the quality of the searches on huge numbers of word combinations. Then assume also that Google has the monetary incentive to hire very good linguists, and demographically wise statisticians to figure out how to closely model the ratings results into the algorithms that Google uses to rank pages. Add Google's incentive to factor in geolocation, and other demographically oriented tidbits even without tracking "who you are" and what next?
My thought is that their rankings again shoot ahead in terms of quality and applicability to MY searches. Your thoughts?
Their kindness towards me is probably the highest compliment that I can give a military flyer -- the so called enemy noticing that the American's weren't out to kill all of them, and describing it to a youngster like me that wasn't even there, 30+ years after the fact.
Yah. But more of a late breaking "Anglo/Welsh/Scottish/Irish/Germanic mutt in my case..." relative to the 1000 a.d'ers... :-)