I'm at a bar, I've had a couple drinks, but nothing excessive. It's not late and I can safely get myself home as I have done in the past, but there's a plausible chance I'd get busted for a DUI if I got stopped on the way home. I'm a little buzzed and 0.001% over is all it takes. I check my new iPhone app and lo and behold, there's a checkpoint on the only highway between the bar and my house. I don't want to spend the night in jail, so I take a cab instead.
That app would save me money and jail time, save my district a bunch of paperwork, and make the roads safer.
The other side of the argument is that people will know where the checkpoint is and try to drive around it. If anything, this being open should encourage better checkpoint planning. There are plenty of high traffic bottlenecks in every state, so that's a poor excuse. Worst case scenario is the appropriate side roads would need increased patrols.
If anything, we should pursue more nuclear power. Want to be safe about it? Start by redesigning, replacing or refurbishing the older US plants that have a remote chance to fail in the (overly dramatized) way the Fukushima plant did. From there, build more plants - especially in places that depend on oil or old coal plants to keep the lights on. It's an opportunity to make more jobs on all levels and regions, and will actually provide a return on the investment via lower power costs.
Right now fuel costs for a nuclear plant are less than half that of its closest competitor (coal) and that gap continues to widen. Throwing that away is totally unreasonable given the current state of the western economy. Even better would be to start using thorium 232 - there's three times as much of that in the Earth's crust as there is uranium 238 and many modern plants can switch over to that with relatively little modification.
Ignoring the drivel that goes through trade chat (which can be turned off), World of Warcraft by itself isn't unreasonable for a father/daughter pair in her age group - it starts off easy, there's plenty of reading, it's actively rewarding, and there's lots of action and content to go through. If you want to be able to play with her, it's hard to go wrong with an MMO like that. It's designed with group play in mind. Then again, introducing her to that may be the first step down the long road of lifelong nerdiness, so exercise discretion.
I'd also give another vote for Minecraft, especially if you can set up (or find) a multiplayer server to play on with her. Double on the nerdiness there, though.
I don't value any of those things in a mobile platform. I don't even carry a regular phone. What's wrong with taking care of that stuff at home, and actually taking a break from the mindless tech noise in favor of being engaged in your immediate surroundings when you go out?
Then next time you're in a city restaurant or coffee shop, take a look around at any of the groups of people under thirty. There's a pretty good chance that none of them are talking to one another, because they're all too busy playing games or texting elsewhere. I don't want any part of that. The benefit simply doesn't outweigh the cost to me, and it's not because of the money.
Doing all those things you mentioned at full speed on the freeway is an entirely separate problem.
It's interesting trying to imagine how we, as relatively tech-savvy generation x slashdotter types (yes, I'm generalizing), will function around new technology when we're older. I'm already old enough that some of this new-fangled stuff doesn't appeal to me, like smartphones or Facebook or Twitter - but that's because I find them useless and intrusive. Will that somehow eventually devolve into me not being able to figure out the TV remote?
I suppose it goes the other way, too. When we're older, how many people will be left that know how to set the timing on a small block Chevy? I'm sure more of our parents know about that than we do.
Don't forget about the part where it doesn't count miles driven on roads that are privately maintained or already tolled. If I now lived in the house I grew up in, I'd be driving several miles every day outside the state/federal road maintenance area. I certainly wouldn't be pleased with getting fined for that.
There's really no good way to do this that works as well as the gas tax. And even that isn't great.
I know exactly what you mean. Being decent looking, well dressed, in shape, having an education, a new car, a good 8-5 job with benefits and my own place doesn't do me a bit of good if there isn't anyone that'll go on that first date.
Mine is probably a two-fold problem though - there aren't 1000 women around my age within a 300 mile radius that I'd consider above the level of 'dreg'.
Fairbanks, Alaska. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
I wouldn't ever telecommute, even for a pay increase. I might not like most of the people I work with, but I need at least a little face to face social interaction to keep life worth living. Sitting in my dark room by myself reading emails and grinding away at decade old c scripts would remind me too much of the years when my existence consisted entirely of WoW and sleeping.
I took this crappy job just to get away from that.
I suppose I might just be an antisocial cellphone-Luddite (I don't have or want one), but what's the point of going through all this trouble to dodge minutes charges if you're going to have to pay for data rates instead? It's not like you'll get better service.
One could make a case for overly stereotypical pubescent girls, but are real people actually on the phone so much that there's a net gain?
At least from my observations, this seems to be because western parents born around/after the baby boomer era generally don't spank their kids anymore. Damn hippies. Sure, the whole positive reinforcement vs. negative reinforcement idea sounds good in theory, but children really need to have active repercussions for talking back or screaming when they don't get what they want. Otherwise their mindset is that they can do whatever, whenever, and sometimes even get rewarded for it. I've seen this kind of development twice with step-siblings that my parents couldn't hit.
My parents made no pretense with me of "this will hurt me more than it hurts you". I occasionally even got the belt when I acted out. Like my parents and their parents before them, when I got disciplined, it was for my own good. I'll certainly be spanking my children if they scream at me or act out. If I ever have any.
We're in the same boat here. One of the backbones of our staff system runs on a custom installation of Oracle Forms, which requires an ancient version of Jinitiator that doesn't exist under anything but IE6. It's really pretty sad, but it's not going away anytime soon.
While it is certainly mission critical, that's not the biggest problem. What we're facing is that it has been millions of dollars and endless man hours to implement. Even if we had to replace it, we couldn't. Those resources aren't available anymore. So we limp along with it.
At least I'm not slashdotting with IE6, but I can't speak for my coworkers.
The problem I see here is that dogs are still used because they have a sense of smell and hearing that we can't give to a machine. Sure, we can build sensors to detect the same thing if we know exactly what we are looking for, but we don't have the means to separate that particular wheat from the chaff in any sort of general sense. When we can build a learning, anomaly detecting artificial intelligence with search and rescue function similar to that of a dog, I don't think we'll be designing robots anymore. They'll be designing themselves.
The grandparent's second point may have some merit, but I don't see a quadruped "terminator" being more effective than a second bombing run or a bunker buster if we just want to kill everything. Don't want to kill indiscriminately? You're still going to need real people in there to make that judgement call.
Having a SSD for the OS and high demand applications, with a separate spinning hard disk for low demand generic storage is definitely the way to do it. I've been running a X25-M for my system drive at home for a couple years, and it is far and away the better way to do things. Coming to work and dealing with a one-drive system all day is a noticeable let down at this point, even if the rest of the machine is brand new.
It's too bad a setup like that is still considered rather exotic for typical users.
While I can acknowledge cool engineering when I see it, we discovered millennia ago that the wheel is better when designing mobile tools. Why do robotics researchers keep going back to animal shapes? This might be faster than a human, but that doesn't mean much. I guarantee it isn't faster, more efficient, or more practical than an AI-controlled motorcycle or trike.
Even Rosie on the Jetsons had wheels. Isn't that what we are supposed to be aiming for?
The problem is, that point isn't ever going to be reached. The population as a whole is far too complacent and oblivious to do anything about it, and the government bureaucrats really are free to do whatever they want. Just look at the rest of the outrageous security theater stories that come across Slashdot (or the news in general) these days. Very few people actually care, and even fewer vocally object. The best thing those that understand what's going on can do at this point is capitalize on these new security needs. It's going to happen anyways. There's a lot of money to be made, and the discreet, mobile, full body scanners are just a small part of it.
If that seems too unethical, leave the metropolitan areas. I don't see it being economically possible to run the scan machines through rural areas for at least a few years. After that point it's up to you how much you value your citizenship.
I see a striking resemblance between this and Atari's original 1979 Asteroids. I am curious how it took eighteen years to make that progress, though. Surely academia wasn't that far ahead of mainstream entertainment... or was it?
With a budget of 7.68 billion dollars, do you think you could produce a halfway decent antivirus? How about one that's better than McAfee's? I'd bet I could.
I'd be shocked if it cost that much to develop a new mainstream/enterprise operating system from the ground up.
I know everyone is boycotting Sony these days, but if you've got money to spend on a laptop, Sony's last VAIO Z might interest you. Desktop hardware (i7, DDR3, SSD, dedicated HD video) in a 13.1 inch case, available with aluminum or carbon fiber bodies. It only has the one distinguishing VAIO logo on the back of the lid. It got great reviews, too.
Problem is, they just stopped making it, probably because nobody could afford to pay three to five grand for it. Damn this economy. I'd take one over a Mac Pro any day. At least they are still on Amazon.
If this were true, then you would expect corporations to ignore labor laws, tax laws and pretty much every other rule and regulation from how many toilets per employee to what goes in the First Aid kits.
This is absolutely the case where the cost of complying with the law is greater than the cost of the punishment for being caught. Realistically, only the regulations with sufficiently heavy penalties are adhered to, particularly for small business. Run things with strict compliance to every knit-picking rule in every book, and the competition is going to run you into the ground.
What people have learned from Windows after all these years is that in general, US consumers would rather replace their electronics than reflash or reformat when they become compromised or otherwise less functional. Building a system with bulletproof security is actually counterproductive in the consumer market, since it would reduce how often a user purchases (or repurchases) the next big thing.
On the other hand, the secure system mindset works fine for corporate software development. They just have to charge in excess of an order of magnitude more for the product to pull in the same kinds of returns.
I was thinking the exact same thing. Asking for an arbitrary username and password combination (like facebook) on a job application would sort those who at least mildly understand data security from those who are completely clueless. How could someone be trusted with corporate credentials if they don't protect their own?
I certainly wouldn't hire someone who filled those fields in, and would shred their application immediately to protect myself. Of course, one of their accounts (or entire identities) would get compromised anyways and I would probably get sued for it because that's the world we live in. Oh well./pessimist
Occasionally the director here will wander through and look for machines that have been left unlocked and unattended. Email is a big part of what we do, so since I started working here we've seen a couple emails sent to our department's mailing list stating more or less "Hi, I have left my computer unattended and am posing a security threat to this University."
That mailing list goes to about thirty people, all of which are more than happy to berate and tease one another. There was never a formal punishment or even a direct scolding from the director afterwards, but it made enough of an impact to make it a one time issue for the people involved. At this point, locking the machine is as much a natural part of leaving my cube as is getting out of my chair. I'd say it worked - I certainly wouldn't want that kind of attention.
I remember going to the local toy store to get The Legend of Zelda with the original gold cartridge. It was my second console game after I had played out Super Mario Bros.
When did "Those were the days." become "Damn, I feel old."?
On another note, Hindsight is 20/20, but nostalgia is totally blind.
Different species of hummingbirds come in different sizes. An "average" hummingbird is smaller than this drone, but at least one species of hummingbirds is capable of growing larger than the drone.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm at a bar, I've had a couple drinks, but nothing excessive. It's not late and I can safely get myself home as I have done in the past, but there's a plausible chance I'd get busted for a DUI if I got stopped on the way home. I'm a little buzzed and 0.001% over is all it takes. I check my new iPhone app and lo and behold, there's a checkpoint on the only highway between the bar and my house. I don't want to spend the night in jail, so I take a cab instead.
That app would save me money and jail time, save my district a bunch of paperwork, and make the roads safer.
The other side of the argument is that people will know where the checkpoint is and try to drive around it. If anything, this being open should encourage better checkpoint planning. There are plenty of high traffic bottlenecks in every state, so that's a poor excuse. Worst case scenario is the appropriate side roads would need increased patrols.
If anything, we should pursue more nuclear power. Want to be safe about it? Start by redesigning, replacing or refurbishing the older US plants that have a remote chance to fail in the (overly dramatized) way the Fukushima plant did. From there, build more plants - especially in places that depend on oil or old coal plants to keep the lights on. It's an opportunity to make more jobs on all levels and regions, and will actually provide a return on the investment via lower power costs.
Right now fuel costs for a nuclear plant are less than half that of its closest competitor (coal) and that gap continues to widen. Throwing that away is totally unreasonable given the current state of the western economy. Even better would be to start using thorium 232 - there's three times as much of that in the Earth's crust as there is uranium 238 and many modern plants can switch over to that with relatively little modification.
Ignoring the drivel that goes through trade chat (which can be turned off), World of Warcraft by itself isn't unreasonable for a father/daughter pair in her age group - it starts off easy, there's plenty of reading, it's actively rewarding, and there's lots of action and content to go through. If you want to be able to play with her, it's hard to go wrong with an MMO like that. It's designed with group play in mind. Then again, introducing her to that may be the first step down the long road of lifelong nerdiness, so exercise discretion.
I'd also give another vote for Minecraft, especially if you can set up (or find) a multiplayer server to play on with her. Double on the nerdiness there, though.
I don't value any of those things in a mobile platform. I don't even carry a regular phone. What's wrong with taking care of that stuff at home, and actually taking a break from the mindless tech noise in favor of being engaged in your immediate surroundings when you go out?
Then next time you're in a city restaurant or coffee shop, take a look around at any of the groups of people under thirty. There's a pretty good chance that none of them are talking to one another, because they're all too busy playing games or texting elsewhere. I don't want any part of that. The benefit simply doesn't outweigh the cost to me, and it's not because of the money.
Doing all those things you mentioned at full speed on the freeway is an entirely separate problem.
It's interesting trying to imagine how we, as relatively tech-savvy generation x slashdotter types (yes, I'm generalizing), will function around new technology when we're older. I'm already old enough that some of this new-fangled stuff doesn't appeal to me, like smartphones or Facebook or Twitter - but that's because I find them useless and intrusive. Will that somehow eventually devolve into me not being able to figure out the TV remote?
I suppose it goes the other way, too. When we're older, how many people will be left that know how to set the timing on a small block Chevy? I'm sure more of our parents know about that than we do.
Don't forget about the part where it doesn't count miles driven on roads that are privately maintained or already tolled. If I now lived in the house I grew up in, I'd be driving several miles every day outside the state/federal road maintenance area. I certainly wouldn't be pleased with getting fined for that.
There's really no good way to do this that works as well as the gas tax. And even that isn't great.
I know exactly what you mean. Being decent looking, well dressed, in shape, having an education, a new car, a good 8-5 job with benefits and my own place doesn't do me a bit of good if there isn't anyone that'll go on that first date.
Mine is probably a two-fold problem though - there aren't 1000 women around my age within a 300 mile radius that I'd consider above the level of 'dreg'.
Fairbanks, Alaska. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
I wouldn't ever telecommute, even for a pay increase. I might not like most of the people I work with, but I need at least a little face to face social interaction to keep life worth living. Sitting in my dark room by myself reading emails and grinding away at decade old c scripts would remind me too much of the years when my existence consisted entirely of WoW and sleeping.
I took this crappy job just to get away from that.
I suppose I might just be an antisocial cellphone-Luddite (I don't have or want one), but what's the point of going through all this trouble to dodge minutes charges if you're going to have to pay for data rates instead? It's not like you'll get better service.
One could make a case for overly stereotypical pubescent girls, but are real people actually on the phone so much that there's a net gain?
At least from my observations, this seems to be because western parents born around/after the baby boomer era generally don't spank their kids anymore. Damn hippies. Sure, the whole positive reinforcement vs. negative reinforcement idea sounds good in theory, but children really need to have active repercussions for talking back or screaming when they don't get what they want. Otherwise their mindset is that they can do whatever, whenever, and sometimes even get rewarded for it. I've seen this kind of development twice with step-siblings that my parents couldn't hit.
My parents made no pretense with me of "this will hurt me more than it hurts you". I occasionally even got the belt when I acted out. Like my parents and their parents before them, when I got disciplined, it was for my own good. I'll certainly be spanking my children if they scream at me or act out. If I ever have any.
We're in the same boat here. One of the backbones of our staff system runs on a custom installation of Oracle Forms, which requires an ancient version of Jinitiator that doesn't exist under anything but IE6. It's really pretty sad, but it's not going away anytime soon.
While it is certainly mission critical, that's not the biggest problem. What we're facing is that it has been millions of dollars and endless man hours to implement. Even if we had to replace it, we couldn't. Those resources aren't available anymore. So we limp along with it.
At least I'm not slashdotting with IE6, but I can't speak for my coworkers.
The problem I see here is that dogs are still used because they have a sense of smell and hearing that we can't give to a machine. Sure, we can build sensors to detect the same thing if we know exactly what we are looking for, but we don't have the means to separate that particular wheat from the chaff in any sort of general sense. When we can build a learning, anomaly detecting artificial intelligence with search and rescue function similar to that of a dog, I don't think we'll be designing robots anymore. They'll be designing themselves.
The grandparent's second point may have some merit, but I don't see a quadruped "terminator" being more effective than a second bombing run or a bunker buster if we just want to kill everything. Don't want to kill indiscriminately? You're still going to need real people in there to make that judgement call.
Having a SSD for the OS and high demand applications, with a separate spinning hard disk for low demand generic storage is definitely the way to do it. I've been running a X25-M for my system drive at home for a couple years, and it is far and away the better way to do things. Coming to work and dealing with a one-drive system all day is a noticeable let down at this point, even if the rest of the machine is brand new.
It's too bad a setup like that is still considered rather exotic for typical users.
While I can acknowledge cool engineering when I see it, we discovered millennia ago that the wheel is better when designing mobile tools. Why do robotics researchers keep going back to animal shapes? This might be faster than a human, but that doesn't mean much. I guarantee it isn't faster, more efficient, or more practical than an AI-controlled motorcycle or trike.
Even Rosie on the Jetsons had wheels. Isn't that what we are supposed to be aiming for?
The problem is, that point isn't ever going to be reached. The population as a whole is far too complacent and oblivious to do anything about it, and the government bureaucrats really are free to do whatever they want. Just look at the rest of the outrageous security theater stories that come across Slashdot (or the news in general) these days. Very few people actually care, and even fewer vocally object. The best thing those that understand what's going on can do at this point is capitalize on these new security needs. It's going to happen anyways. There's a lot of money to be made, and the discreet, mobile, full body scanners are just a small part of it.
If that seems too unethical, leave the metropolitan areas. I don't see it being economically possible to run the scan machines through rural areas for at least a few years. After that point it's up to you how much you value your citizenship.
I see a striking resemblance between this and Atari's original 1979 Asteroids. I am curious how it took eighteen years to make that progress, though. Surely academia wasn't that far ahead of mainstream entertainment... or was it?
With a budget of 7.68 billion dollars, do you think you could produce a halfway decent antivirus? How about one that's better than McAfee's? I'd bet I could.
I'd be shocked if it cost that much to develop a new mainstream/enterprise operating system from the ground up.
Congratulations, John McAfee.
I know everyone is boycotting Sony these days, but if you've got money to spend on a laptop, Sony's last VAIO Z might interest you. Desktop hardware (i7, DDR3, SSD, dedicated HD video) in a 13.1 inch case, available with aluminum or carbon fiber bodies. It only has the one distinguishing VAIO logo on the back of the lid. It got great reviews, too.
Problem is, they just stopped making it, probably because nobody could afford to pay three to five grand for it. Damn this economy. I'd take one over a Mac Pro any day. At least they are still on Amazon.
If this were true, then you would expect corporations to ignore labor laws, tax laws and pretty much every other rule and regulation from how many toilets per employee to what goes in the First Aid kits.
This is absolutely the case where the cost of complying with the law is greater than the cost of the punishment for being caught. Realistically, only the regulations with sufficiently heavy penalties are adhered to, particularly for small business. Run things with strict compliance to every knit-picking rule in every book, and the competition is going to run you into the ground.
What people have learned from Windows after all these years is that in general, US consumers would rather replace their electronics than reflash or reformat when they become compromised or otherwise less functional. Building a system with bulletproof security is actually counterproductive in the consumer market, since it would reduce how often a user purchases (or repurchases) the next big thing.
On the other hand, the secure system mindset works fine for corporate software development. They just have to charge in excess of an order of magnitude more for the product to pull in the same kinds of returns.
It sucks, but I don't see it changing.
I was thinking the exact same thing. Asking for an arbitrary username and password combination (like facebook) on a job application would sort those who at least mildly understand data security from those who are completely clueless. How could someone be trusted with corporate credentials if they don't protect their own?
/pessimist
I certainly wouldn't hire someone who filled those fields in, and would shred their application immediately to protect myself. Of course, one of their accounts (or entire identities) would get compromised anyways and I would probably get sued for it because that's the world we live in. Oh well.
Occasionally the director here will wander through and look for machines that have been left unlocked and unattended. Email is a big part of what we do, so since I started working here we've seen a couple emails sent to our department's mailing list stating more or less "Hi, I have left my computer unattended and am posing a security threat to this University."
That mailing list goes to about thirty people, all of which are more than happy to berate and tease one another. There was never a formal punishment or even a direct scolding from the director afterwards, but it made enough of an impact to make it a one time issue for the people involved. At this point, locking the machine is as much a natural part of leaving my cube as is getting out of my chair. I'd say it worked - I certainly wouldn't want that kind of attention.
I remember going to the local toy store to get The Legend of Zelda with the original gold cartridge. It was my second console game after I had played out Super Mario Bros.
When did "Those were the days." become "Damn, I feel old."?
On another note, Hindsight is 20/20, but nostalgia is totally blind.
Different species of hummingbirds come in different sizes. An "average" hummingbird is smaller than this drone, but at least one species of hummingbirds is capable of growing larger than the drone.
Seems pretty logical to me.
You think 99.99% of people carry cell phones?
You may want to check your sources.