A way of identifying all those people who soil themselves!
I believe it's safe to say that using someone's gait to determine their relative guilt/innocence, ranks right up there with dumping a woman in a river to see if she's a witch.
You forgot the most useful aspect of this tech. To determine which couples just finished getting busy by how they walk!
Yesterday, my co-worker was watching the treadmill one. I asked him what it was about. He said it was youtube award winners. That looked pretty good for youtube, I wondered what the rest were like. Today I found out. I didn't like any of them other than the treadmill guys. Actually, I would have liked links to the top 20-30 for each category. Does any one have a link to not the winners, but all the runners up?
I don't know if it would be a good idea to subject myself to the runners up if those were the winners, but I tend to like runners up rather than the winners in any given awards show. I typically never browse through youtube. I only watch something on youtube if digg, slashdot, or various other sites have a youtube video on their pages. Now, I remember why I have that policy.
Indeed. Why not take a $4K Thinkpad and dip in to gold, and then take that and dip it in platinum, and then take the whole thing and roll in spotted-owl feathers? Better yet, just tape a check for $996,000 to it?
Better yet, take one of the One Laptop per Child laptops and sell it for $4 million (Only change a sticker that says "I paid $4 million for this!" on it.)
So they are combining their own version of Beanie Babies with a MMOPG? I see this making them lots of money if it catches on. The only question is has enough time from the last Beanie Baby crazy lapsed for those that are into that sort of thing to be into this version?
I don't even want to think about the number of Beanie Babie that my mom has. I could easily see folks like her going out and collecting all of these toys and then going to the companies MMOPG to register all her babies with the company.
Um, I like "sci-fi" just as much as the next guy. I think some one needs to show the difference between "Artsy" Scifi about the human condition/potential future hell holes with the use of X tech vs action flick with sexy woman sidekick/person to be saved. Think alittle. This isn't even about "scifi." Most people don't want to think about all that crap. They want to be entertained and have a good time. If I go into a movie wanting a good time, but come out freaking scared of X tech that could ruin the future if misused, I didn't have a good time and now some X tech won't be researched for fear of evil potential uses.
Sexy women and flashy explosions/effects sell orders of mag. better than any film that requires the audience to think to enjoy it. This applies to "every" type of film that I can think of.
Haliburton steals tens of billions and New Orleans gets thrown to the wolves to make way for rich people's condos. Oil companies control the government and manage to surpress information about global warming that will affect the lives of everyone on the planet. What people are really concerned with is the free exchange of music, movies and software. People really do need to get their priorities screwed on straight. Anna Nichol Smith and Brittany Spears get more press than global warming and Haliburton.
Energy companies and others need to buy up the RIAA/MPAA and use their content as Bread and Ciruses for the US public. The truth? We don't care about global warming. We figure that we have alot of internal land area, and don't care if Asia (China) gets flooded. It won't happen to US.;) We also are used to bending over and taking it from rich/powerful folks. If the rich/powerful folks really thought about it though, they'd try to get rid of media copyrights so the US public would be to busy listening vast music resources or watching tons of TV/movies, or playing around on the internet to notice getting reamed by the rich and powerful. The key trick though is that one group of rich/powerful folks needs to win against another group of rich/powerful before that media distraction occurs. The average US citizen won't even notice anything politics related for 8-12 years after media copyrights are removed. They'd be too drugged up on various content to notice anything else happening.
Ream sized paper trays need to be standard for all printers today. Why? Just so it would be easy to open the package of paper and dump the whole thing easily into the paper tray. Apparently this is something so tech. difficult it costs $200-$300 as an option on high end lasers. I'm thrilled that color laser prices have been dropping down to the $250-$300 range, but I'd like to be able to load some paper at home and forget about it. At the office, it's easy to have 6 reams of paper on a shelf somewhere near the laser printer, when you open a ream of paper, it's really annoying that some of these ink jets can only hold 50-75 sheets of paper. Heck, my color laser will only hold 350 pages without the ream paper tray option that costs ever so much. I can under stand them reaming us on inkcarts, but why can't they make a decent ream sized paper tray for the home user?
Without access in dorms, you would just get your lazy bum ass to a lab and do your paper writing there. The awesome social side benefit of this is bonding with other people in the same situation. Only the motivated ones would be in the lab anyway, so this is a great opportunity to create a high quality network.
Are you kidding? I wasted most of my time in college in the labs because I didn't have my own computer and on of the labs were open til midnight. I and 25-30 other students spend most of that time in chat rooms and such. Rarely did anyone do actual work in that lab after 5:00 pm. (Of coures, most of us had any homework done by 2:00 pm so that wasn't a big deal.)
But realize that we are talking about college students -- adults, not children. Providing them with unlimited internet access is an excellent idea -- it ensures that the lazy slackers wash out of college.
For my sophomore year, I had a freshman roommate who used the campus internet to play WoW all night long. Literally -- I went to bed at 2 after finishing engineering homework, was up by 8, and he hadn't moved. Because of that he slept in all day, only to wake up later and play more WoW. Went to classes once a week at best. Guess who dropped out with a GPA below 2.0? Guess who wasn't ready for the real world, and wouldn't be able to hold a job for ten minutes with that approach to life?
From my personal experience, my university gave out scholarships to almost the entire entering freshmeat. Those scholarships paid for tution and required you to keep a 3.25 GPA. 70-80% of new freshmeat lost those scholarships after the first two semesters. This has really nothing to do with internet access. I played more in college, but I usually went to bed somewhere between 12:30-1:30 and had a 8:00am class that I never missed though was late a couple of times. I tend to think 1/2 of the college environment in the US isn't about teaching/learning a field or "networking" contacts. It's about weeding out "bad" employees. It's o.k. for some of the rules to be relaxed. It's very enlightening to see how the students/subjects act without those tight rules on them.
In any case, I feel sorry for them because clearly they have stupid people in charge. But, on the plus side, they get some real world experience dealing with stupid people making decisions they have no say in.
Um, that describes the entire educational process from birth to college as well. You don't have much to any say in how your parents raise you, you don't have any say in what the standards are in the school that your parents send you. If there are lots of stupid people in charge with stupid rules, it's never been the student's fault. The student has never been allowed to modify rules that the adults have decided are for their own good.
They're only the "leader" because they have no significant competition in the after-market add-on card market. Just try and name two other sound card manufacturers.
You kill 2-5 people, you destroy maybe $3000 worth of property. One would think this is hardly worth the effort and sacrifice. But 5 or so such bombings costed Egypt a few billion dollars in lost tourism profits.
RIAA doesn't do this to profit from the lawsuits, but to stop people from using P2P. Create enough fuss around it, make people afraid of using it, show that no matter who you are, 8yo girl, mother of 8 kids, old granny, a guy after stroke, you're not safe. They don't care that you hate them, just like you hate the terrorists. They just want to scare you.
Report two domestic terror organizations the MPAA and the RIAA to DHS!
Maybe we can finaly stop paying farm subsidies. Quit growing tabacco and grow corn as a cash crop. Maybe a farmer can make a living again. The beef industry hates it of course because of higher costs. Expect prices to rise at the local hamburger joint due to rising costs.
Burger joint? We eat hamburger help twice a week or other meals that require beef, chicken or pork in them. This corn prices don't just affect beef. They affect chicken and pork prices as well. For those with the belief that the US should stop eating meat, this is a "good thing" since most meat prices will raise. To meat eaters though, this is a "bad thing."
Well, again, try explaining to your mother the finer points of what you do. And again (again) realize that specilized knowledge in a discipline does not make the knowledge useless -- it markes the discipline as a professional (rather than hobbyist) endeavor.
I just use the doctor analogy. I make sick computers well. I delete temp files, defrag, and run a virus scanner. It's the same as take two of these and call me if you still feel bad tomorrow. I explain that running defrag and the virus scanner is like sitting in the waiting room or the nurse taking your weight ect. until the doctor actually sees you. I explain anything like re-installing OS/major apps as drastic surgery with a chance of causing death if anything goes badly wrong. Giving mom that kinda of expectation, she is always pleased that the computer runs after I touch it and not entirely dead. Of course my boss thinks that I can raise the dead so it all evens out.
First, on the sports angle - it's sad that we would even compare some guy who scored lots of points in a game where you throw a ball in a hole and who could jump high to a guy who straps himself into skyscraper sized machine with enough fuel to incinerate Florida, escapes the atmosphere, throws on a suit and leaves the shuttle to walk around in the empty vacuum of space, tethered by a little stringy rope and risking his life every second of the way in a manner that no other man or woman on the planet could even comprehend.
I hate sports like the plague and actually like space stuff, but I got to say this is nearly stupid. Why? Because that "average everyone" can relate to those sports players just throwing a ball around well and getting paid for it. Using your discription of going into space, no one can relate to that, and it sounds really, really stupid/suicidical.
The "average everyone" that is into space scifi like things like Star Wars, Star Trek, or B5 among others. You know what? Space travel is routine and is as safe as traveling to your nearest fast food place. The average everyone doesn't want dangerous near suicidical, expensive trips into space. They want cheap, absolutely safe trips that is priced just alittle more than airplane travel currently is.
Second, on the Neil Armstrong angle. That the only space heroes we could conjure up are those that were around when most of our parents were still watching Saturday morning cartoons is the perfect illustration of how pathetic our desire for exploration has become. Astronauts today are doing far more heroic things every time they step into that suit above and beyond most other human beings.
Your definition and my definition of heroic are two very different things. Heroes are fire fighters, police folks, EMS, or red cross folks that go into known dangerous situtations to save other people's lives. Heroes don't just go into dangerous ares for constrution work. (If the construction work is unsual only that it is happening in space it isn't heroic, just dangerous which isn't the same thing at all.)
100% agreement with you. Notice, though, how (at the end of TFA) Microsoft's position is that product activation is for the benefit of their customers. Something along the lines of "products hacked to avoid activation may be faulty" and such. So, a forced patch through Windows Update would be 'for the good of the customers', to save them from the perils of running WGA-less Windows. War is peace, and all that.
One can only hope that in the long run such anti-consumer activity will come back to haunt them.
Um, from the MS P.O.V. those that haven't activated aren't consumers, they are pirates that didn't pay MS anything. Um, why shouldn't MS use their autoupdate service to lock out non-consumers that are using their product without paying? It could be much worse. MS could require their home version to have a verified name, home address and phone number and/or e-mail address before they'd even activate their product.
Only 4 comments so far on the topic of censorship on slashdot? Damn, it's too late someone much have censored slashdot from most businesses! Oh, no, think of the productivity gains that just made.
Your next question is 'where did the branes come from'? Branes are mathematical concepts. If someone tells you 1+1=2, you can't really ask where '1' came from. If there is a multiverse it has to have some sort of brane structure, in much the same way as if humans exist they have to have skin.
So the universe was 'created by nothing' in a pretty accurate sense, as a mathematical concept is as close to 'nothing' as anyone is likely to conceive. But in the end, Hawkings' words were chosen for showmanship, not precision.
So you are saying 0 + 0 = 1? Nothing and more Nothing is something. Or is it operator 0 = 1? Something happened to nothing that created something. Or you could just say that we are still in the nothingness/chaos except its very far away and there is something here. There is lots of nothing, but sometimes it makes something, but somethings always keep making more something else till one day the nothingness/chaos absorbs it all again.
Horseshit. When I was in school 20 or so years ago, you could count the number of fat kids (in a school of 2300 students) on your fingers, and a child who would be considered obese by today's standards was virtually unheard of. At my kids' schools, it's easier to count the kids who aren't fat than the ones who are, and there's at least one obese kid in any group larger than about ten.
I know it's all the rage to pretend that whatever problems our society causes itself don't actually exist, but this one is pretty easy to nail down. Anybody who says we don't have a serious problem with kids and their poor eating habits and lack of activity is either an idiot or a liar.
Haven't noticed at my kids local elementary school. They have several little plays and I didn't spot any overly fat kids. I wonder if anyone has tried mapping this across various regions. Maybe only certain areas have this problem? I don't know, but it's a valid guess. There was a post about floride in the water that could cause a medical problem. Odd thing is that I live in one of the few areas were the local community forbids floride in the water. There has been several attempts to get it added, but each attempt has failed. It seems like there needs to be more research. Let's dump all that funding for global climate change and devote it all to NIH and health issues because it'll be for the children and our own health.
People who start out as active young children are probably more likely to stay active into adulthood, at least moreso than less active kids. So in that sense, by teaching kids to exercise and be fit, you will potentially increase adult fitness.
Um, I hate sports and most excerise because of all P.E. crap in elementary, middle school, junior high, high school, and college. I've avoided all excerise as much as possible because of I finally free of it! Yeah, I'm heavier and fat, and it is because I hate excerise and sports.
What's the solution? Be Nazish and have the government go all Brave New World/1984 mandatory 30 minute excerises in the morning, at lunch and after work required by law for our own good. The sad thing is it'd take something like to really require us to move around. I guess we could also all be required to attend a yearly 1-2 week excerise boot camp for everyone over 18. Think everyone goes to their various military training locations and we just do the basic military excerises for 1-2 weeks and then go back to work afterwards. I'd hate it like the plague, but it would be good for my body.
1. The FCC controls airwave licenses. 2. A significant number of people out there do not have the means, or rightfully refuse to upgrade to a television capable of decoding over the air digital signals. 3. A significant number of people out there do not have the mans, or rightfully refuse to purchase cable and/or satellite service, yet they continue to watch TV via over the air signals. 4. Eliminating analog over the air signals will open up gobs of frequencies for other uses; including 2-way communications, IP communications, and more digital channels, both TV and radio. 5. Finally, $990 million is _nothing_ compared to how much auctioning off the new spectrum will generate in revenue for the FCC. The last auction generated something like $40 billion; $990 million in order to generate good will among the populace, and ensure that the working class (working poor) does not get cut off from their TV, is a win-win.
What did they spend the last $40 billion on? I don't have a cable or DSL because I can't afford $50-60 a month for their broadband internet. Have you read the reports on how much tax breaks (billions) Clinton/Gore gave to the telephone companies to rollout broadband internet across the US? I want the FCC, IRS, and which ever group that is responsible for trustbusting to go after those telephone companies for back taxes! I don't mind paying $15-20 for internet access. Come on it's not 1990 anymore, $15-20 a month should be more than enough to pay for broadband internet in the US.
5. I don't think the FCC should auction off that bandwidth for profit. I think we should demand our spectrum back and have it for things like what ever comes after 802.11whatever. If the FCC licenses it off for billions, then you and I'd be paying $50-100 a month for all those pontential services. Fine you might be able to afford that. I can't.
I've watched how my kids use it (9 & 12, and the next big consumer generation) and they watch stuff that people posted that they'd done themselves. TV is becoming less relevant to us old folks, who grew up on it... if I was the majors, I'd fear the next generation who doesn't care one whit about "their" content. Kids aren't "into" shows as they have been in the past, and will skip or watch an episode of something they see in passing on TV on a whim - when they bother to have it on at all.
Talk about the digital divide. I only have dialup at home. I only watch the occasional youtube during lunch at work. My kids barely even know it exists though. On the flip side, we don't have cable at all. We've deemed it too expensive. We do have VHS/DVD player, PS2 (with disc read errors), and N64. All the "TV" that my kids and wife watch are entire season DVDs. We usually only buy new ones for birthdays or Christmas. My kids play various older gen video games on the PC its usually GBA emulator stuff. (They just know to click the icon and open the game that they want.) About the only "online" resource that my kids are really aware of is wikipedia. They are strictly supervisored when online mainly because we are a single PC household and have to have an adult log on and do most of the browsing for them.
Is it a bit of a pain to do their net surfing for them? No. You don't just shove your kids out the front door and tell them to walk to/find the public library. You take them to public library/book store. The physical/online world is a dangerous place. To make sure your kids are o.k., you supervisor them yourself! O.k. That's my parenting advice for the day.
Slashdot Mirror
A way of identifying all those people who soil themselves!
I believe it's safe to say that using someone's gait to determine their relative guilt/innocence, ranks right up there with dumping a woman in a river to see if she's a witch.
You forgot the most useful aspect of this tech. To determine which couples just finished getting busy by how they walk!
Yesterday, my co-worker was watching the treadmill one. I asked him what it was about. He said it was youtube award winners. That looked pretty good for youtube, I wondered what the rest were like. Today I found out. I didn't like any of them other than the treadmill guys. Actually, I would have liked links to the top 20-30 for each category. Does any one have a link to not the winners, but all the runners up?
I don't know if it would be a good idea to subject myself to the runners up if those were the winners, but I tend to like runners up rather than the winners in any given awards show. I typically never browse through youtube. I only watch something on youtube if digg, slashdot, or various other sites have a youtube video on their pages. Now, I remember why I have that policy.
Indeed. Why not take a $4K Thinkpad and dip in to gold, and then take that and dip it in platinum, and then take the whole thing and roll in spotted-owl feathers?
Better yet, just tape a check for $996,000 to it?
Better yet, take one of the One Laptop per Child laptops and sell it for $4 million (Only change a sticker that says "I paid $4 million for this!" on it.)
So they are combining their own version of Beanie Babies with a MMOPG? I see this making them lots of money if it catches on. The only question is has enough time from the last Beanie Baby crazy lapsed for those that are into that sort of thing to be into this version?
I don't even want to think about the number of Beanie Babie that my mom has. I could easily see folks like her going out and collecting all of these toys and then going to the companies MMOPG to register all her babies with the company.
Um, I like "sci-fi" just as much as the next guy. I think some one needs to show the difference between "Artsy" Scifi about the human condition/potential future hell holes with the use of X tech vs action flick with sexy woman sidekick/person to be saved. Think alittle. This isn't even about "scifi." Most people don't want to think about all that crap. They want to be entertained and have a good time. If I go into a movie wanting a good time, but come out freaking scared of X tech that could ruin the future if misused, I didn't have a good time and now some X tech won't be researched for fear of evil potential uses.
Sexy women and flashy explosions/effects sell orders of mag. better than any film that requires the audience to think to enjoy it. This applies to "every" type of film that I can think of.
Haliburton steals tens of billions and New Orleans gets thrown to the wolves to make way for rich people's condos. Oil companies control the government and manage to surpress information about global warming that will affect the lives of everyone on the planet. What people are really concerned with is the free exchange of music, movies and software. People really do need to get their priorities screwed on straight. Anna Nichol Smith and Brittany Spears get more press than global warming and Haliburton.
;) We also are used to bending over and taking it from rich/powerful folks. If the rich/powerful folks really thought about it though, they'd try to get rid of media copyrights so the US public would be to busy listening vast music resources or watching tons of TV/movies, or playing around on the internet to notice getting reamed by the rich and powerful. The key trick though is that one group of rich/powerful folks needs to win against another group of rich/powerful before that media distraction occurs. The average US citizen won't even notice anything politics related for 8-12 years after media copyrights are removed. They'd be too drugged up on various content to notice anything else happening.
Energy companies and others need to buy up the RIAA/MPAA and use their content as Bread and Ciruses for the US public. The truth? We don't care about global warming. We figure that we have alot of internal land area, and don't care if Asia (China) gets flooded. It won't happen to US.
Ream sized paper trays need to be standard for all printers today. Why? Just so it would be easy to open the package of paper and dump the whole thing easily into the paper tray. Apparently this is something so tech. difficult it costs $200-$300 as an option on high end lasers. I'm thrilled that color laser prices have been dropping down to the $250-$300 range, but I'd like to be able to load some paper at home and forget about it. At the office, it's easy to have 6 reams of paper on a shelf somewhere near the laser printer, when you open a ream of paper, it's really annoying that some of these ink jets can only hold 50-75 sheets of paper. Heck, my color laser will only hold 350 pages without the ream paper tray option that costs ever so much. I can under stand them reaming us on inkcarts, but why can't they make a decent ream sized paper tray for the home user?
I wonder how low this organism's slashdot id is.
It's either -1 or i.
Without access in dorms, you would just get your lazy bum ass to a lab and do your paper writing there. The awesome social side benefit of this is bonding with other people in the same situation. Only the motivated ones would be in the lab anyway, so this is a great opportunity to create a high quality network.
Are you kidding? I wasted most of my time in college in the labs because I didn't have my own computer and on of the labs were open til midnight. I and 25-30 other students spend most of that time in chat rooms and such. Rarely did anyone do actual work in that lab after 5:00 pm. (Of coures, most of us had any homework done by 2:00 pm so that wasn't a big deal.)
But realize that we are talking about college students -- adults, not children. Providing them with unlimited internet access is an excellent idea -- it ensures that the lazy slackers wash out of college.
For my sophomore year, I had a freshman roommate who used the campus internet to play WoW all night long. Literally -- I went to bed at 2 after finishing engineering homework, was up by 8, and he hadn't moved. Because of that he slept in all day, only to wake up later and play more WoW. Went to classes once a week at best. Guess who dropped out with a GPA below 2.0? Guess who wasn't ready for the real world, and wouldn't be able to hold a job for ten minutes with that approach to life?
From my personal experience, my university gave out scholarships to almost the entire entering freshmeat. Those scholarships paid for tution and required you to keep a 3.25 GPA. 70-80% of new freshmeat lost those scholarships after the first two semesters. This has really nothing to do with internet access. I played more in college, but I usually went to bed somewhere between 12:30-1:30 and had a 8:00am class that I never missed though was late a couple of times. I tend to think 1/2 of the college environment in the US isn't about teaching/learning a field or "networking" contacts. It's about weeding out "bad" employees. It's o.k. for some of the rules to be relaxed. It's very enlightening to see how the students/subjects act without those tight rules on them.
In any case, I feel sorry for them because clearly they have stupid people in charge. But, on the plus side, they get some real world experience dealing with stupid people making decisions they have no say in.
Um, that describes the entire educational process from birth to college as well. You don't have much to any say in how your parents raise you, you don't have any say in what the standards are in the school that your parents send you. If there are lots of stupid people in charge with stupid rules, it's never been the student's fault. The student has never been allowed to modify rules that the adults have decided are for their own good.
They're only the "leader" because they have no significant competition in the after-market add-on card market. Just try and name two other sound card manufacturers.
Intel. Integrated audio is all I hear.
How cost-effective are suicide bombings?
You kill 2-5 people, you destroy maybe $3000 worth of property. One would think this is hardly worth the effort and sacrifice.
But 5 or so such bombings costed Egypt a few billion dollars in lost tourism profits.
RIAA doesn't do this to profit from the lawsuits, but to stop people from using P2P. Create enough fuss around it, make people afraid of using it, show that no matter who you are, 8yo girl, mother of 8 kids, old granny, a guy after stroke, you're not safe. They don't care that you hate them, just like you hate the terrorists. They just want to scare you.
Report two domestic terror organizations the MPAA and the RIAA to DHS!
Maybe we can finaly stop paying farm subsidies. Quit growing tabacco and grow corn as a cash crop. Maybe a farmer can make a living again. The beef industry hates it of course because of higher costs. Expect prices to rise at the local hamburger joint due to rising costs.
.50$ per lb tax on all meat?
Burger joint? We eat hamburger help twice a week or other meals that require beef, chicken or pork in them. This corn prices don't just affect beef. They affect chicken and pork prices as well. For those with the belief that the US should stop eating meat, this is a "good thing" since most meat prices will raise. To meat eaters though, this is a "bad thing."
What next a federal
Y'see, in the UK we pay approximately $6.40 a gallon of petrol. I don't think you have that much of a right to complain.
Hey, you just need a successful domestic tax rebellion, and then you can complain about it all you want.
Well, again, try explaining to your mother the finer points of what you do. And again (again) realize that specilized knowledge in a discipline does not make the knowledge useless -- it markes the discipline as a professional (rather than hobbyist) endeavor.
I just use the doctor analogy. I make sick computers well. I delete temp files, defrag, and run a virus scanner. It's the same as take two of these and call me if you still feel bad tomorrow. I explain that running defrag and the virus scanner is like sitting in the waiting room or the nurse taking your weight ect. until the doctor actually sees you. I explain anything like re-installing OS/major apps as drastic surgery with a chance of causing death if anything goes badly wrong. Giving mom that kinda of expectation, she is always pleased that the computer runs after I touch it and not entirely dead. Of course my boss thinks that I can raise the dead so it all evens out.
First, on the sports angle - it's sad that we would even compare some guy who scored lots of points in a game where you throw a ball in a hole and who could jump high to a guy who straps himself into skyscraper sized machine with enough fuel to incinerate Florida, escapes the atmosphere, throws on a suit and leaves the shuttle to walk around in the empty vacuum of space, tethered by a little stringy rope and risking his life every second of the way in a manner that no other man or woman on the planet could even comprehend.
I hate sports like the plague and actually like space stuff, but I got to say this is nearly stupid. Why? Because that "average everyone" can relate to those sports players just throwing a ball around well and getting paid for it. Using your discription of going into space, no one can relate to that, and it sounds really, really stupid/suicidical.
The "average everyone" that is into space scifi like things like Star Wars, Star Trek, or B5 among others. You know what? Space travel is routine and is as safe as traveling to your nearest fast food place. The average everyone doesn't want dangerous near suicidical, expensive trips into space. They want cheap, absolutely safe trips that is priced just alittle more than airplane travel currently is.
Second, on the Neil Armstrong angle. That the only space heroes we could conjure up are those that were around when most of our parents were still watching Saturday morning cartoons is the perfect illustration of how pathetic our desire for exploration has become. Astronauts today are doing far more heroic things every time they step into that suit above and beyond most other human beings.
Your definition and my definition of heroic are two very different things. Heroes are fire fighters, police folks, EMS, or red cross folks that go into known dangerous situtations to save other people's lives. Heroes don't just go into dangerous ares for constrution work. (If the construction work is unsual only that it is happening in space it isn't heroic, just dangerous which isn't the same thing at all.)
100% agreement with you. Notice, though, how (at the end of TFA) Microsoft's position is that product activation is for the benefit of their customers. Something along the lines of "products hacked to avoid activation may be faulty" and such. So, a forced patch through Windows Update would be 'for the good of the customers', to save them from the perils of running WGA-less Windows. War is peace, and all that.
One can only hope that in the long run such anti-consumer activity will come back to haunt them.
Um, from the MS P.O.V. those that haven't activated aren't consumers, they are pirates that didn't pay MS anything. Um, why shouldn't MS use their autoupdate service to lock out non-consumers that are using their product without paying? It could be much worse. MS could require their home version to have a verified name, home address and phone number and/or e-mail address before they'd even activate their product.
Only 4 comments so far on the topic of censorship on slashdot? Damn, it's too late someone much have censored slashdot from most businesses! Oh, no, think of the productivity gains that just made.
Your next question is 'where did the branes come from'? Branes are mathematical concepts. If someone tells you 1+1=2, you can't really ask where '1' came from. If there is a multiverse it has to have some sort of brane structure, in much the same way as if humans exist they have to have skin.
So the universe was 'created by nothing' in a pretty accurate sense, as a mathematical concept is as close to 'nothing' as anyone is likely to conceive. But in the end, Hawkings' words were chosen for showmanship, not precision.
So you are saying 0 + 0 = 1? Nothing and more Nothing is something. Or is it operator 0 = 1? Something happened to nothing that created something. Or you could just say that we are still in the nothingness/chaos except its very far away and there is something here. There is lots of nothing, but sometimes it makes something, but somethings always keep making more something else till one day the nothingness/chaos absorbs it all again.
Horseshit. When I was in school 20 or so years ago, you could count the number of fat kids (in a school of 2300 students) on your fingers, and a child who would be considered obese by today's standards was virtually unheard of. At my kids' schools, it's easier to count the kids who aren't fat than the ones who are, and there's at least one obese kid in any group larger than about ten.
I know it's all the rage to pretend that whatever problems our society causes itself don't actually exist, but this one is pretty easy to nail down. Anybody who says we don't have a serious problem with kids and their poor eating habits and lack of activity is either an idiot or a liar.
Haven't noticed at my kids local elementary school. They have several little plays and I didn't spot any overly fat kids. I wonder if anyone has tried mapping this across various regions. Maybe only certain areas have this problem? I don't know, but it's a valid guess. There was a post about floride in the water that could cause a medical problem. Odd thing is that I live in one of the few areas were the local community forbids floride in the water. There has been several attempts to get it added, but each attempt has failed. It seems like there needs to be more research. Let's dump all that funding for global climate change and devote it all to NIH and health issues because it'll be for the children and our own health.
Anyone who says dodgeball is stupid better not play FPSs.
Um, dodgeball hurts. FPS doesn't. Therefore Dodgeball is stupid.
People who start out as active young children are probably more likely to stay active into adulthood, at least moreso than less active kids. So in that sense, by teaching kids to exercise and be fit, you will potentially increase adult fitness.
Um, I hate sports and most excerise because of all P.E. crap in elementary, middle school, junior high, high school, and college. I've avoided all excerise as much as possible because of I finally free of it! Yeah, I'm heavier and fat, and it is because I hate excerise and sports.
What's the solution? Be Nazish and have the government go all Brave New World/1984 mandatory 30 minute excerises in the morning, at lunch and after work required by law for our own good. The sad thing is it'd take something like to really require us to move around. I guess we could also all be required to attend a yearly 1-2 week excerise boot camp for everyone over 18. Think everyone goes to their various military training locations and we just do the basic military excerises for 1-2 weeks and then go back to work afterwards. I'd hate it like the plague, but it would be good for my body.
1. The FCC controls airwave licenses.
2. A significant number of people out there do not have the means, or rightfully refuse to upgrade to a television capable of decoding over the air digital signals.
3. A significant number of people out there do not have the mans, or rightfully refuse to purchase cable and/or satellite service, yet they continue to watch TV via over the air signals.
4. Eliminating analog over the air signals will open up gobs of frequencies for other uses; including 2-way communications, IP communications, and more digital channels, both TV and radio.
5. Finally, $990 million is _nothing_ compared to how much auctioning off the new spectrum will generate in revenue for the FCC. The last auction generated something like $40 billion; $990 million in order to generate good will among the populace, and ensure that the working class (working poor) does not get cut off from their TV, is a win-win.
What did they spend the last $40 billion on? I don't have a cable or DSL because I can't afford $50-60 a month for their broadband internet. Have you read the reports on how much tax breaks (billions) Clinton/Gore gave to the telephone companies to rollout broadband internet across the US? I want the FCC, IRS, and which ever group that is responsible for trustbusting to go after those telephone companies for back taxes! I don't mind paying $15-20 for internet access. Come on it's not 1990 anymore, $15-20 a month should be more than enough to pay for broadband internet in the US.
5. I don't think the FCC should auction off that bandwidth for profit. I think we should demand our spectrum back and have it for things like what ever comes after 802.11whatever. If the FCC licenses it off for billions, then you and I'd be paying $50-100 a month for all those pontential services. Fine you might be able to afford that. I can't.
I've watched how my kids use it (9 & 12, and the next big consumer generation) and they watch stuff that people posted that they'd done themselves. ... if I was the majors, I'd fear the next generation who doesn't care one whit about "their" content.
TV is becoming less relevant to us old folks, who grew up on it
Kids aren't "into" shows as they have been in the past, and will skip or watch an episode of something they see in passing on TV on a whim - when they bother to have it on at all.
Talk about the digital divide. I only have dialup at home. I only watch the occasional youtube during lunch at work. My kids barely even know it exists though. On the flip side, we don't have cable at all. We've deemed it too expensive. We do have VHS/DVD player, PS2 (with disc read errors), and N64. All the "TV" that my kids and wife watch are entire season DVDs. We usually only buy new ones for birthdays or Christmas. My kids play various older gen video games on the PC its usually GBA emulator stuff. (They just know to click the icon and open the game that they want.) About the only "online" resource that my kids are really aware of is wikipedia. They are strictly supervisored when online mainly because we are a single PC household and have to have an adult log on and do most of the browsing for them.
Is it a bit of a pain to do their net surfing for them? No. You don't just shove your kids out the front door and tell them to walk to/find the public library. You take them to public library/book store. The physical/online world is a dangerous place. To make sure your kids are o.k., you supervisor them yourself! O.k. That's my parenting advice for the day.