No it doesn't. As the GP pointed out, it only prevents Congress from making laws against it, that's all. It puts the US in the relatively unique situation that people can trade their human rights for money, in many other countries that would be against the law. I didn't want to argue the merits of each approach, just thought it was interesting that it's so different. Another curiosity is that the actual text of the UN declaration - which the US didn't ratify - is mainly made in USA.
There are interests of different quality involved there: the interest of the patient to be treated well and receive high quality care - vs the interest of the doctor to earn a living. I think it's clear that the first interest is a lot more important. Besides - this is the situation *any* business is in. It's not really a problem: a good doctor - just like a good restaurant - will generate good reviews, too. Statistically it's very unlikely that all whining patients use the same doctor, everybody will have a few.
The US is actually one of the few democratic countries which does not guarantee it's citizens freedom of expression. Most others have ratified the universal declaration of human rights and thus give their citizens the protection of article 19 of the declaration. (See http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html)
Well there is one installation of this (German-designed) maglev train in China. There are no plans to add another one in China or any other country. There isn't a single installation of it in Germany either. I'm not sure whether having maglev trains in the US would be a good idea. The idea of replacing air travel with something really convenient (city-center to city-center) like a maglev train is intriguing. It could potentially provide a nicer and faster way to travel on certain routes. It might also be a good way to save fuel. However whatever is getting in the way of adopting it in the US - other countries seem to have the same problem. Maybe the this maglev system isn't as suitable for the job as it seems, maybe it's just too expensive to make sense, maybe it just can't compete with conventional rail systems. There are lots of high-speed train systems (e.g. ICE, TGV, bullet train) which offer very similar advantages and which have been proven in many installations all over the world. Maybe it would make sense for the US to look into that, too.
Optimistic, but I don't think that's the way it will go. Traditionally, if a country has a surplus of males they go and conquer a neighboring country. War reduces the number of males, and the conquered country provides the women for the rest. The Chinese sign for peace is "" - a women in a house (not sure if that will show up on Slashdot, but you can just google for it). I think that's a well-chosen sign.
It may not happen this time, but a surplus of unhappy males always creates a volatile situation. Partially the problem is solved by Chinese importing women from neighboring poor countries (like Vietnam), but while that may help in China it obviously creates a problem elsewhere.
Re:Parents choose their baby's name
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 2, Informative
Hi there - I'm married to a Taiwanese lady we have one daughter.:-)
I think what you state is not completely correct. In traditional Chinese culture ancestor worship is very important. If you sacrifice something at a temple, then your sacrifice goes to support your ancestors in the afterlife. Problem is that your sacrifice only goes to the ancestors which have your family name. So if you have no male heirs you are not only suffering without support in the afterlife, you are also failing to provide for your ancestors. That's why many Chinese (particularly in rural areas) feel they ought to have at least one male child - combine that with a one-child policy and you have a big problem on your hands.
As much as I'm a privacy advocate... Fact is most criminals are not particularly clever - often they make mind-numbimgly stupid mistakes. One of the tasks which the police has to solve, is to process the stupid criminals quickly, so that they have resources left for the more intelligent ones. Besides, in theory you can avoid any one mistake, but in practice it's impossible to avoid all of them.
So suppose the police intercept the conversation example you used. What does it tell them? Well - first they are going to find out that neither of the people involved actually has an aunt emma, or indeed any aunt who owns cats. Alternatively they might be aware that the people involved don't exchange a lot of private information, hence are not close enough to care about the cat of some relative. So they know it's a code and from that they know that something is going to happen. The recipient is a suspected drug dealer, the sender a suspected supplier, so they guess that it's about a drug deal. Possible action: keep a close watch on the recipient of the message - he may receive the drugs soon, or he may establish contact with the persons receiving the drugs.
Even if they can't guess the first thing about the content of the message - intercepting it can still yield information. E.g. it could tell them that the recipient is online now - using the IP address they could identify his location - or they could obtain a voice sample which could be used for identification. They could use the time someone calls to identify their daily routine - if suddenly a call is made at an unusual time (e.g. 2 am for someone who usually sleeps early) then they can guess that something interesting is going on.
Taken to the extreme opposite - if intercepting communications between criminals would never yield results, then wire tapping in all forms would have to be stopped. We could determine whether that's the case by analyzing criminal cases - is wire tapping evidence never introduced, is wire-tapping information never used to guide investigations? If that's not the case, then we shouldn't expect a zero return for skype-interception either.
The "loony left" in this case includes noted left wingers like John McCain and Giuliani , chairmen of oil companies, just about every government of the first world, the vast majority of published climate scientists...
That also means it is protecting the income of application *developers* who sell through the iPhone store.
However they are doing that at the expense of developers who don't sell or don't want to sell through the iPhone store, and at the expense of iPhone owners who are deprived of using the apps they want.
I am a trader. I earn what I get in trade for what I produce.
This is the worst definition of the term "trader" that I've ever seen. A trader buys stuff and resells it. If you are selling what you produce you are a producer. The contribution of a trader is that he identifies where things can be made cheaply and bring them to markets where they'd otherwise be expensive.
Really, if you pay closer attention, it Palestine would stop attacking Israel it would be over.
Israeli "settlers" would still continue to expand into Palestinian territory.
If you let Israel wipe out Gaza and kill everyone on it tomorrow
It never ceases to amaze me, how some people are able to casually advocate genocide. Personally I'm not a psychopath.
Looking at the logistics of it: killing 1.5 million requires considerable infrastructure. You'd need to construct some death camps to conduct industrial-scale murder (area bombing only goes so far), maintain a strong military regime which can round-up the victims and force them into the death camps. The death toll would of course be order of magnitudes higher than 50 years of conflict. It would be more efficient just to drive out the population the way Israel is doing it now. In any case - the conflict would not stop no matter which method of genocide was used in Gaza. There are plenty of refugees in countries around Israel, there is no apparent reason why they would stop attacking Israel. The Hezbollah in Lebanon have already shown that they are able to withstand Israel with guerrilla tactics, so there is no reason to assume they would stop.
According to the article [...] the long-standing U.S. trade embargo against the island makes it difficult for Cubans to get Microsoft software legally and to update it. So in other words: it doesn't look like MS has violated the embargo.
Doesn't happen in a vaccum, does it? I suspect children killed by Israeli cluster bombs are just as dead as those killed by Palestinian suicide attacks or Palestinian rockets. Sure one site starts, then the other side "responds", the there is retaliation to the responsce and so on. After a while it's just a continuous stream of mutual violence.
Israel will not get peace unless it's stops it's policy of stealing Palestinian land. Steadily expanding settlements, "security areas" and the like is just stealing by another name.
On the other hand Palestinians will not get peace unless they stop being the world's biggest morons. Shooting rockets at someone a thousand times more powerful gets you invaded and your infrastructure destroyed? Huh, imagine that.
It's not about blame, it's just recognizing the problem for what it is: currently the carbon emissions are caused by a small percentage of the world population. I don't think anyone can blame us for trying to live comfortably, rather than having lots of starving kids. If somebody wants to blame us, it's certainly not me. Nobody set out to cause climate change, just like nobody set out to cause the plague.
However knowing the problem helps us solve it. Right now we can control carbon emissions just by changing things in our own countries. In the future we'll need to ensure that developing countries won't increase their carbon output either. It's an engineering problem, not a moral one. There is nothing wrong with wanting to live in a nice place, having internet access and a large TV, having heat when it's cold and a fridge to keep perishable food and all these other nice things. We just need to find a better way to generate the energy we need to accomplish these tasks. We have lots of engineers and scientists - we can solve the problem.
There doesn't seem to be much information out there. The professor exists though: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~kvp1/ . He also has a paper available on "probabilistic boolean logic" http://www.cs.rice.edu/~kvp1/probabilisticboolean.pdf . However that doesn't explain any technology benefits which would give an insight how he wants to trade accuracy for speed or power.
I suppose the simple way would be to just reduce core voltage and violate setup times. Similar to overclocking this would in many cases work without noticeable errors. I found an article which would indicate that he's indeed looking in that direction: http://legerdemain.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/the-probabilistic-chipsa-heresy"Palem's idea is to lower the operating voltage of parts of a chip-specifically, the logic circuits that calculate the least significant bits"
So that would mean he's using less power for some parts of the chip, where he doesn't need so much accuracy, but providing normal power to other parts.
Interesting concept, but as a chip designer my suspicion is that this will never leave the prototype stage. There have been many ideas like this one before, and there are a few hard barriers which they usually can not overcome: design for test/yield, designflow and competing evolutionary approaches:
Design for Test (DFT) means he'll need to figure out how to automatically generate tests which can identify broken chips. This is a well-understood problem currently, but the "low power areas" of his chips will introduce unknown values to the "high power areas". This means the test coverage will sink, and this in turn means: more defect chips will be identified as operating correctly. (Not operating correctly in the areas in which he needs accuracy, that is.) He might be able to solve this by using more complex more adaptable tests running on better testing hardware - however that means increased test cost, and test cost is a big factor in overall manufacturing costs.
Designflow means he'll need to develop tools which can handle the additional complexity during device development. For example verification is one of the biggest factors in development. Now if you introduce more variability into some parts of the device, then you need to run more tests to investigate how the different outcomes of the "low accuracy areas" effect the "high accuracy areas". With standard digital design you have just one outcome for a digital block - now if you have e.g. 20 different outcomes that could potentially mean you need to run the same test 20 times - one for each result. More time spend in simulation essentially means longer time to market - again a very critical issue.
Competing evolutionary approaches - there are a lot of them already in use. One approach is to just clock-gate certain parts of a chip, or (if leakage is too high) you can even turn-off the power to some parts of the chip. You might just have a part of the device running which checks occasionally if the rest of the device is needed and activates it on demand. (See Freescale's MPC560xS for an example.) You could also just pick a less accurate algorithm for your "fuzzy" tasks (silly example: using 3 decimal points rather than 8 - you could even calculate in advance how much your error could be - less digital logic means less power consumption, too.)
Now having said all that - he may very well find solutions for all these problems and I wish him luck. I just wanted to give an idea of the obstacles he needs to overcome. However so far he just has a prototype - as counter-intuitive this may sound: that's the easy part. Getting to this stage means he has 20% of the problems solved. That's great, but if we hear from this again it will be in a few years at the earliest.
It's a global conspiracy. All the developed nations in the world came together just to find a way to slow their economic growth. Probably assisted by hippies like the Shell corporation.
Overpopulation is a long-term problem, because eventually the majority of people who are poor and have a negligible carbon output, will want to raise their living standards, too. However the current problem has very little to do with overpopulation.
Why, where do you see the benefit for society in changing the regulation in that way? One possible problem could be that suddenly there are 5 different digital TV standards in the US, moving to another state could mean your TV would no longer be able to receive any programs etc. It's like electric power - the US uses 110 Volts at 60 Hz. If every company could use their own voltage and frequency, it would be much harder to sell and manufacture electrical appliances. Supply would be less stable since you can't easily link the networks etc. Standardization has it's problems, but it brings huge benefits, too. The US has a huge advantage in having the worlds biggest domestic market - would be a pity to lose that.
I can't say you are wrong, but there was no information in the article stating that they haven't tested the cards. All the article said is that there are none in practical use yet. That does make sense - installing the readers before there is a sizable number of cards in circulation, would be a waste of money. Regardless whether the scheme as a whole makes sense - it's certainly reasonable to wait with installing readers until the readers would save you time. Assuming that you can't possibly issue new cards to everybody at the same time, you will need a phased approach. If you use a phased approach there is no better way than to issue cards first and install readers later.
I know people love stories about government incompetence, but it will not be possible to improve in this area unless we are also willing to think things through. If everything the government does is assumed to be stupid, then in turn any criticism of government activity will also be assumed to be stupid. Put yourself in the shoes of some government administrator - once he's been criticized a few times for his actions, and once he's experienced that each time criticism has been uninformed and badly thought out. Well once that happened he will very easily slip into filing all criticism under "ill-informed whining".
"liability concerns"... this is in China... I think if they have a single victim of some state organized action and encounter a good lawyer in that context, they resolve this by beatings or executions. Remember this is a country which moves over a million people in order to build a dam somewhere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Relocation_of_local_residents
Yeah this "surrender" stuff never gets old, right? Of course watching a war on TV is so much more brave than putting your country in the path of the world's most powerful war machine at the time. Why are the French singled out as "surrender monkeys" and not say Poland, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Yugoslavia? I rather suspect this particular accusation wouldn't have become a staple of American chauvinism if de Gaulle had joined the Nato.
The king apparently plays a very important role in Thai politics, unfortunately. My impression is, it's not so much the military using him as a figurehead, but him pulling the strings without officially admitting to being involved. He seems to use the military regularly to overthrow the government whenever he doesn't like the guys who were elected.
Him pardoning people who "offend the monarchy" very much fits into that pattern. He doesn't actually do anything to get the law of the books, just pretends it's not him who is the driving force behind it. I think the Thai's worship of the king is the root to a lot of their problems.
Mind you, this is only my personal opinion, I'm by no means an expert on Thai politics. Luckily I live in a country where I can freely debate my thoughts with others, though.
Slashdot Mirror
No it doesn't. As the GP pointed out, it only prevents Congress from making laws against it, that's all. It puts the US in the relatively unique situation that people can trade their human rights for money, in many other countries that would be against the law. I didn't want to argue the merits of each approach, just thought it was interesting that it's so different. Another curiosity is that the actual text of the UN declaration - which the US didn't ratify - is mainly made in USA.
There are interests of different quality involved there: the interest of the patient to be treated well and receive high quality care - vs the interest of the doctor to earn a living. I think it's clear that the first interest is a lot more important. Besides - this is the situation *any* business is in. It's not really a problem: a good doctor - just like a good restaurant - will generate good reviews, too. Statistically it's very unlikely that all whining patients use the same doctor, everybody will have a few.
The US is actually one of the few democratic countries which does not guarantee it's citizens freedom of expression. Most others have ratified the universal declaration of human rights and thus give their citizens the protection of article 19 of the declaration. (See http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html)
Well there is one installation of this (German-designed) maglev train in China. There are no plans to add another one in China or any other country. There isn't a single installation of it in Germany either. I'm not sure whether having maglev trains in the US would be a good idea. The idea of replacing air travel with something really convenient (city-center to city-center) like a maglev train is intriguing. It could potentially provide a nicer and faster way to travel on certain routes. It might also be a good way to save fuel. However whatever is getting in the way of adopting it in the US - other countries seem to have the same problem. Maybe the this maglev system isn't as suitable for the job as it seems, maybe it's just too expensive to make sense, maybe it just can't compete with conventional rail systems. There are lots of high-speed train systems (e.g. ICE, TGV, bullet train) which offer very similar advantages and which have been proven in many installations all over the world. Maybe it would make sense for the US to look into that, too.
It may not happen this time, but a surplus of unhappy males always creates a volatile situation. Partially the problem is solved by Chinese importing women from neighboring poor countries (like Vietnam), but while that may help in China it obviously creates a problem elsewhere.
I think what you state is not completely correct. In traditional Chinese culture ancestor worship is very important. If you sacrifice something at a temple, then your sacrifice goes to support your ancestors in the afterlife. Problem is that your sacrifice only goes to the ancestors which have your family name. So if you have no male heirs you are not only suffering without support in the afterlife, you are also failing to provide for your ancestors. That's why many Chinese (particularly in rural areas) feel they ought to have at least one male child - combine that with a one-child policy and you have a big problem on your hands.
So suppose the police intercept the conversation example you used. What does it tell them? Well - first they are going to find out that neither of the people involved actually has an aunt emma, or indeed any aunt who owns cats. Alternatively they might be aware that the people involved don't exchange a lot of private information, hence are not close enough to care about the cat of some relative. So they know it's a code and from that they know that something is going to happen. The recipient is a suspected drug dealer, the sender a suspected supplier, so they guess that it's about a drug deal. Possible action: keep a close watch on the recipient of the message - he may receive the drugs soon, or he may establish contact with the persons receiving the drugs.
Even if they can't guess the first thing about the content of the message - intercepting it can still yield information. E.g. it could tell them that the recipient is online now - using the IP address they could identify his location - or they could obtain a voice sample which could be used for identification. They could use the time someone calls to identify their daily routine - if suddenly a call is made at an unusual time (e.g. 2 am for someone who usually sleeps early) then they can guess that something interesting is going on.
Taken to the extreme opposite - if intercepting communications between criminals would never yield results, then wire tapping in all forms would have to be stopped. We could determine whether that's the case by analyzing criminal cases - is wire tapping evidence never introduced, is wire-tapping information never used to guide investigations? If that's not the case, then we shouldn't expect a zero return for skype-interception either.
The "loony left" in this case includes noted left wingers like John McCain and Giuliani , chairmen of oil companies, just about every government of the first world, the vast majority of published climate scientists ...
However they are doing that at the expense of developers who don't sell or don't want to sell through the iPhone store, and at the expense of iPhone owners who are deprived of using the apps they want.
This is the worst definition of the term "trader" that I've ever seen. A trader buys stuff and resells it. If you are selling what you produce you are a producer. The contribution of a trader is that he identifies where things can be made cheaply and bring them to markets where they'd otherwise be expensive.
I realize you just copied that text, but still...
Israeli "settlers" would still continue to expand into Palestinian territory.
If you let Israel wipe out Gaza and kill everyone on it tomorrow
It never ceases to amaze me, how some people are able to casually advocate genocide. Personally I'm not a psychopath.
Looking at the logistics of it: killing 1.5 million requires considerable infrastructure. You'd need to construct some death camps to conduct industrial-scale murder (area bombing only goes so far), maintain a strong military regime which can round-up the victims and force them into the death camps. The death toll would of course be order of magnitudes higher than 50 years of conflict. It would be more efficient just to drive out the population the way Israel is doing it now. In any case - the conflict would not stop no matter which method of genocide was used in Gaza. There are plenty of refugees in countries around Israel, there is no apparent reason why they would stop attacking Israel. The Hezbollah in Lebanon have already shown that they are able to withstand Israel with guerrilla tactics, so there is no reason to assume they would stop.
According to the article [...] the long-standing U.S. trade embargo against the island makes it difficult for Cubans to get Microsoft software legally and to update it. So in other words: it doesn't look like MS has violated the embargo.
Israel will not get peace unless it's stops it's policy of stealing Palestinian land. Steadily expanding settlements, "security areas" and the like is just stealing by another name.
On the other hand Palestinians will not get peace unless they stop being the world's biggest morons. Shooting rockets at someone a thousand times more powerful gets you invaded and your infrastructure destroyed? Huh, imagine that.
That's already available for most Windows PCs - it's called Linux.
However knowing the problem helps us solve it. Right now we can control carbon emissions just by changing things in our own countries. In the future we'll need to ensure that developing countries won't increase their carbon output either. It's an engineering problem, not a moral one. There is nothing wrong with wanting to live in a nice place, having internet access and a large TV, having heat when it's cold and a fridge to keep perishable food and all these other nice things. We just need to find a better way to generate the energy we need to accomplish these tasks. We have lots of engineers and scientists - we can solve the problem.
I suppose the simple way would be to just reduce core voltage and violate setup times. Similar to overclocking this would in many cases work without noticeable errors. I found an article which would indicate that he's indeed looking in that direction: http://legerdemain.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/the-probabilistic-chipsa-heresy "Palem's idea is to lower the operating voltage of parts of a chip-specifically, the logic circuits that calculate the least significant bits"
So that would mean he's using less power for some parts of the chip, where he doesn't need so much accuracy, but providing normal power to other parts.
Interesting concept, but as a chip designer my suspicion is that this will never leave the prototype stage. There have been many ideas like this one before, and there are a few hard barriers which they usually can not overcome: design for test/yield, designflow and competing evolutionary approaches:
Design for Test (DFT) means he'll need to figure out how to automatically generate tests which can identify broken chips. This is a well-understood problem currently, but the "low power areas" of his chips will introduce unknown values to the "high power areas". This means the test coverage will sink, and this in turn means: more defect chips will be identified as operating correctly. (Not operating correctly in the areas in which he needs accuracy, that is.) He might be able to solve this by using more complex more adaptable tests running on better testing hardware - however that means increased test cost, and test cost is a big factor in overall manufacturing costs.
Designflow means he'll need to develop tools which can handle the additional complexity during device development. For example verification is one of the biggest factors in development. Now if you introduce more variability into some parts of the device, then you need to run more tests to investigate how the different outcomes of the "low accuracy areas" effect the "high accuracy areas". With standard digital design you have just one outcome for a digital block - now if you have e.g. 20 different outcomes that could potentially mean you need to run the same test 20 times - one for each result. More time spend in simulation essentially means longer time to market - again a very critical issue.
Competing evolutionary approaches - there are a lot of them already in use. One approach is to just clock-gate certain parts of a chip, or (if leakage is too high) you can even turn-off the power to some parts of the chip. You might just have a part of the device running which checks occasionally if the rest of the device is needed and activates it on demand. (See Freescale's MPC560xS for an example.) You could also just pick a less accurate algorithm for your "fuzzy" tasks (silly example: using 3 decimal points rather than 8 - you could even calculate in advance how much your error could be - less digital logic means less power consumption, too.)
Now having said all that - he may very well find solutions for all these problems and I wish him luck. I just wanted to give an idea of the obstacles he needs to overcome. However so far he just has a prototype - as counter-intuitive this may sound: that's the easy part. Getting to this stage means he has 20% of the problems solved. That's great, but if we hear from this again it will be in a few years at the earliest.
I'd suggest for you to post something less ominous and make your point if you do have one. I suspect that's not the case, however.
It's a global conspiracy. All the developed nations in the world came together just to find a way to slow their economic growth. Probably assisted by hippies like the Shell corporation.
Overpopulation is a long-term problem, because eventually the majority of people who are poor and have a negligible carbon output, will want to raise their living standards, too. However the current problem has very little to do with overpopulation.
Agreed in principle. Powerpoint shouldn't be a problem, though. Haven't seen one that didn't open correctly with OpenOffice in a long time.
Why, where do you see the benefit for society in changing the regulation in that way? One possible problem could be that suddenly there are 5 different digital TV standards in the US, moving to another state could mean your TV would no longer be able to receive any programs etc. It's like electric power - the US uses 110 Volts at 60 Hz. If every company could use their own voltage and frequency, it would be much harder to sell and manufacture electrical appliances. Supply would be less stable since you can't easily link the networks etc. Standardization has it's problems, but it brings huge benefits, too. The US has a huge advantage in having the worlds biggest domestic market - would be a pity to lose that.
I know people love stories about government incompetence, but it will not be possible to improve in this area unless we are also willing to think things through. If everything the government does is assumed to be stupid, then in turn any criticism of government activity will also be assumed to be stupid. Put yourself in the shoes of some government administrator - once he's been criticized a few times for his actions, and once he's experienced that each time criticism has been uninformed and badly thought out. Well once that happened he will very easily slip into filing all criticism under "ill-informed whining".
"liability concerns" ... this is in China... I think if they have a single victim of some state organized action and encounter a good lawyer in that context, they resolve this by beatings or executions. Remember this is a country which moves over a million people in order to build a dam somewhere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Relocation_of_local_residents
Yeah this "surrender" stuff never gets old, right? Of course watching a war on TV is so much more brave than putting your country in the path of the world's most powerful war machine at the time. Why are the French singled out as "surrender monkeys" and not say Poland, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Yugoslavia? I rather suspect this particular accusation wouldn't have become a staple of American chauvinism if de Gaulle had joined the Nato.
Him pardoning people who "offend the monarchy" very much fits into that pattern. He doesn't actually do anything to get the law of the books, just pretends it's not him who is the driving force behind it. I think the Thai's worship of the king is the root to a lot of their problems.
Mind you, this is only my personal opinion, I'm by no means an expert on Thai politics. Luckily I live in a country where I can freely debate my thoughts with others, though.