The electoral college system guarantees that the citizens of lightly-populated states like Wyoming, Montana, Deleware, and the Dakotas have a greater percentage say in who is the President than a citizen of California, Florida, New York, or Texas has.
You need to repeat American History. Any system that will spilt the popular vote will never pass the smaller states. You think that is unfair. Nope. We of the smaller states think that it would be unfair that all future presidents would be from California, Florida, New York, or Texas and ignore the rest of the country. You know the best that I could come up with is another voting block on the election form on if your state should split their electoral votes or combine them. That would make things very exciting. It would force future Presidents to visit smaller states because you'd never know if those states will vote together or be split. The big fun thing would be the effect on the large states of California, Florida, New York, or Texas. I'd bet that they'd always split their votes rather than combining them, which would actually make your vote count for less if the smaller states stuck together rather than splitting their votes.
O.k. I work for a police department and was interested in looking at this tech for our department. Here are the two vendors that I found through Wired: http://www.g2tactics.com/ & http://www.remingtonelsag.com/ If your police department can afford 20K-30K for this device, then they should purchase it. I'm more worried on the tech. end on how it connects to NCIC and makes its very many queries. (We've had problems with our RMS interfacing with ACIC for vehicle returns and it taking a min. of 1 minute to get returns back from the state. These systems will be making thousands of searchs. I want to know real-world results and not what marketing says what it should be able to do.) We have 2 interstates and several state highways passing through our small city. I would love for a federal grant to buy 5-6 of them for each of our major transportation links. It wouldn't stop all stolen cars, but any passing through would be far more likely to be picked up. I don't have a problem with a computer scanning all the cars on a road and checking for stolen/invalid tags. The police officers would love this system as they would go into the stop knowing that the car has been tagged as stolen.
I think it's fine for it's intended purpose, but trained, competent, (dare I say union) checkers are far more efficient and I'm hoping that will deter grocery chains from deploying too many of these self-checkout lanes. A store with only self-checkout? Well, that'd be a store with a lot of fistfights.
Wait until Wal-Mart does RFID right. There won't be any checker because you just push the entire cart straight through an RFID reader and swipe your ATM card through it. That's what people what to use self-check out for not for some stupid 10 or less items. We want to use it for a cart load of stuff at a time.
You know that you have a point. I can see survival advantages for bigotry and selective hearing, but the others I'm not sure about. bigotry would be good to have in your genes so that you'd always pick mates that are near or similiar to yourself, and you'd have a dislike for those that weren't similiar. I'd think that it was meant to weed out mutants and start wars more than anything else. Selective hearing is easy to understand. Everyone believes that they are smarter than those in charge. If your clan leader or military unit leader/wife told you to do something that you didn't exactly want to do; you'd mentally only hear what you wanted to hear for your personal survival/happiness. I can't see any easy answers for close-mindness or zealotry. There must be some basic reasons why we developed and continue with that. Heck, our whole 9/11 reaction was zealotry against those pointed at to be responsible, and we have plenty that would be happily close-minded or use selective hearing to ignore the possiblity that we were initally wrong in who we pointed out. Zealotry is a survival method; we just don't know how.
War likely does effect evolution - but evolution of culture, not genetics. In fact, one can view non-physical entities such as cultures and religions as entities for which evolution does apply.
Um, as I understand it, evolution is just about those that survive to breed and nothing else. If young unmarried males go off to war and for whatever reasons don't come back, then of course war has been part of our evolution. We've been breeding ourselves to survive war. In some respects, war may be a good thing for humanity in general. I was about to say until we've developed atomic weapons, but thinking about it, if we acutally fought a couple of nuclear wars that would have breeding effects on the surviving population. I wouldn't want to be under a nuclear blast or survive through a nuclear war, but in some respects it would improve our human genepool. Here is an idea for you. What if our handful of uses of atomic weapons has left a genetic mark in the global population to be wary of nuclear weapons? Nah, it would make more sense for us to be afraid of sharp pointy things that are headed in our direction.
That Final Fantasy is never ever final. Not a problem in terms of job security. But how does one stay creatively fresh if the project never ends?
You know I don't really mind that they keep on putting out titles under the name. As far as I can tell, the only final fantasy games that had anything directly to do with each other were FFX and FFX2. I've played FF1,2,3, FFX,FFX2, FF7, FF8, & FF9. You know what? I've been becoming more and more unhappy with the series. The main male leads seem to all be either stupid, jerks, or some-what clue less. I've recently been replaying FFX. Honestly, I hate the story, I hate Yuna, Tidus, everything with Yevon, and blitz-ball. I like the sphere grid leveling, monster arena, and many side quests. I think the FFX2 was a bit backwards with its form of leveling.
What I really miss is FF1 and the ability to chose your entire party and class of everyone. To me the addition of the plot and fixed character type of FF2 & FF3 was what ruined the replay value of the series. I liked replaying FF1 with off the wall character classes. Each choice had a big difference in how you played the game. It wasn't until you could really customize armor and weapons that you regained some of the ability of forcing your characters to be/do what you wanted. I've always liked the stock FF characters and haven't minded a script. I would like to get rid of the whole save the entire world motify though. Why can't I just have a game with a gang of 4-9 characters of classes of my choosing that I don't have to mess with saving the world, but get to be an evil overlord or something where I just kill/capture random stuff/people and do random things? I'd love to play a FF parody that your party was the evil bad guys trying to either rule the world or stop several parties of good guys with your monster legions. Here's an idea: A game where there aren't really any good guys. They are all evil bad guys that want to rule the world and you just try to survive a bit without bringing down the government on you. I'd actually have liked if the FF was set all on one world instead of the whole let's just recycle some elements one game to the next. FF is just the one RPG series that everyone has been exposed to. I predict on the next FF series. You have an evil empire or a good empire that becomes evil and your small force has to either stop its leaders or awaken a magically locked force to do battle with the evil empire. I bet their will be an airship pilot named Cid somewhere and some moggles and chocobos. Ok. I like the chocobos except for the one that you had to breed chocobos for the chocobo races. The chocobo races just annoying like blitz ball. I didn't like that card game that they put in one, but some did so I won't hold that one against them. Why couldn't they do something like the gummi ship from KH2? That was fun. The one from KH1 was o.k., but not nearly as raw fun.
I'm not against the idea (of dropping either Orcs or Man U. *grin*), I just find it curious. Won't they have the same problem as with Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War, when all the Imperial Guard players had a sook about not getting to play their army (except as a "Dog of War" in one mission)? Or is the percentage of people buying this game who actually come from the tabletop version so low that it just doesn't matter?
I'd never heard of Warhammer 40K until I acquired a um, uh demo (cough, cough) of the RTS Warhammer 40K. I was impressed. I liked it far more than Warcraft except for one thing. I found it too easy. (I usually can't get through any RTS without cheats at somepoint this game even on "hard" I didn't need them.") It was awesome having an RTS that catered to just throwing the grunts away instead of resource collection. I latter found out about the table top game. I looked into it. Then I became really depresed at the resulting game. Why? Warhammer is a freaking huge universe. The first game should have released with 5-6 races min. or have something like a "build a race" option with tons of detail around a map and unit editor. The unit coloring is cool, but I'm thinking more of picking actual units from the vast store of Warhammer universe to become your army. I'll give them credit though, the output is first rate, and they wouldn't have pleased the die hard table top fans anyway. Warhammer really needs its own MMOG with update packs every 6 months or so just adding additional content that was too much to start off with. I'd hope that Warhammer MMOG is based around armies and will let you customize everything. The game is great except don't read up on the table top stuff unless you want to get disappointed in the game. It's like playing a D&D game and being happy, and then finding out all of the D&D universe and never quiet being happy with what little made it into that one game.
So the primary driver in primate development should be the predators which improved their pack social cohesion and group communication. Eagles, tree mammal predators from the polecat family and to some extent cats.
I wonder if anyone has tried studying what ways humans have been self-evolving over the past 6,000 years or so? We've developed to the point with our pack social cohesion that non-human predators are a rare threat that will be quickly eliminated by pack if seen as dangerous. The first thing that popped into my mind is how has war been a factor in human evolution? We've been applying our own selective pressures these last 2,000-3,000 years. Humanity doesn't preserve what it percieves as a dangerous predator species. We generally eliminate it from being a human predator. A few days ago there was a discussion about possible ESP in humans. I'd tend to think what little actual ESP abilities humanity actually has are actual group survival traits and not things that we'd normally classify as ESP. I don't think mind reading would have been useful, but a scout sending out "help I'm in danger" might be picked up by others of his group. Of course they could also evolve the "Please, don't let them see, catch, shoot, or stab me with the sharp pointy things, mental calls." Could some peoples that have typically been peasants through out their history have developed a solider/human predator sense that allows them to run away and successfully hide from soliders? Through war and other means, we've been selecting ourselves. Has anyone thought of what traits we have actively been selecting for?
Re:Couldn't be worse than some that I've had...
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The Robot Professor
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· Score: 1
Actually, I think we'll see these in fast food restaurants and any other establishment where cheap labor is desirable. After all, they speak English, are clean, and show up on time.
In the long term maybe, it all depends on cost. I'd be mixed replacing "low end" jobs with machines like these since then we'd need to find/create more "low end" jobs to replace them. If you actually could replace 90-98% of current human jobs with machines, then what would 98% of the population end up doing? I'd think that machines could never become "cheaper" than actual human labor. That's more a gut feeling than anything else. You'd find out the pros/cons of machines fairly fast though. Take ATMs. My wife and I prefer them 98% of the time to dealing with a human teller. We could do the same exact thing at McDonald's having an ATM with all the choices at the Drive-Thru and in store where a small key is despensed, where you unlock your food when it is ready. You could have either machines or people prepare the food, but you've just taken the human interface from the fast food process. I'd much rather push a few buttons rather than speak to a human fast food teller. I think the LCD displays showing what you've ordered have been the best fast food invention of the past few years. I don't mind removing humans from alot of processes, but let's remember that we still need jobs ourselves at the end of the day. Let's hope an automated AI compiler could replace most of our entire software industry.
I wasn't really speaking of Afghanistan, but I believe that now that the US is preventing their tradional means of killing of those that violate their usual morals that they'll adapt like these other neighboring countries and you'll see these honor killings happen there as well. You don't get it. I'm not saying that they are worse off. I'm saying that the girls are in more danger once they actually start acting westernized or sexually active and living what we'd consider and normal teenage life. I bet it isn't happening right now because most are more afraid of the US than of the women. Give it 5-10 years while most have forgotten Afghanistan or Iraq and see how those female suicide rates have climbed. I was first made aware of this through an AOL news article (happening in Turkey) and was surprised. The families were using every means at their disposal to make the female feel that their life was worthless and that to do the best for their family that they should kill themselves. I've just tried searching for any data concerning Afghanistan suicides or honor killings and haven't yet found anything. That only means that the data or news reports aren't open to you or I. It doesn't mean these things aren't happening over there.
Is corporate espionage actually valuable?... development plans are pretty widely discussed amongst employees. If something were to leak, I'm not sure what the value of it would be. The only real data points that are heavily protected are financial results and projections, and the product release dates that those rely on. But I'm pretty sure those are only protected for Wall Street purposes.
What kind of data do corporate spies hope to obtain? Would that data be actionable -- e.g, could a company come up with a competing product and be first to market if another company's already half way there?
I'd personally think software companies would generally not be directly targetted because there is alot of documentation and if KnockOff Product was released next month that had 95% of the same features and same UI, then they'd get sued by the real company.
Other than the finance side, which would be very valuable in and of itself, I'd think CAD/CAM files would be much more useful and difficult to obtain. At the company my dad works for, there are a handful of engineers with the CAD/CAM files. They don't have internet or any sort of external access. That data is backed up atleast in 3-4 different places daily. It is the life blood of their company and they'd have backups, but loosing any of the data would mean lost man-hours rebuilding the plans. It would only be possible for a data thief to physically steal a backup media from one of the backup locations so that unpatented or in progress patents can be built before they are aware of the theft. In the software world, I'd think that major companies could force a code audit and prove that code was actually stolen and used in another's product. In the physical world of engineering and unpatented/ or patent in progress work, an engineer could gain several leads and if it is discovered claim that they indepedently developed a similiar product. If they were stupid and lazy, and just used the stolen CAD/CAM files then it might be easy to discover. But if they changed all sorts of things and make no references to the stolen data in offical documents then it might be unprovable other than a similiar product.
Good companies get my dollar. Bad ones don't. That's how this is supposed to work." and she says, "Why do you have to be so political all the time?"
I'd like to think that most of America is like myself, and not like my girlfriend, but I have the feeling that most of my generation are idiots.
Um, if you want to hang with your girlfriend and friends, then you'd better atleast go into Best Buy. If anything thing, you could politely tell the pushy sales guy why you didn't buy anything from him. I'd say you ought to go in just so your friends and your girlfriend wouldn't think that you were slightly odd. A boycott is about not buying anything. It isn't about not "window shopping" or telling your friends that you know where you can find the same item either cheaper or with better customer service. I actually like Best Buy though I've been warned about them and only use them for DVD purchases. They have the largest selection of sci-fi/anime in stock in my small city. There is a slight premium, but one that I find within limits. I won't spend money on any high dollar item there though. I looked into hard drives there and was amazed at the premium that they were wanting. And I've been warned never to buy a computer or high dollar sound system through Best Buy. So I just stick with items under $40-50 that I can pick up only at Best Buy because no one else locally keeps them in stock.
If by "better" you mean "women are no longer dragged out into what used to be a soccer field in front of a crowd at lunchtime and shot in the head for daring to teach their daughters to read," then... yes, better.
Nah, now they are forced to suicide like Turkey makes its females that violate honor.
I read this web comic http://project-apollo.net/mos/index.html One of the main characters comes from Mars and the folks on Mars developed a group mind. The way it works sounds similiar to this, but on a much larger scale and seemlessly for any request. Say you wanted to cook supper and looked in your cabinet and couldn't think of anything. You'd briefly access the group mind, which would instantly send your supplies, about how long your want to cook it for, your personnal favoriate dishes, and your personnal cooking skill level to 400 top chiefs who all spend less than a minute looking at the data and sending back a dish that you could make within 15-20 minutes. The group mind would store all the recipes for future use.
I don't want to think about quickly solving problem, but I wouldn't mind handling the occasional request that is well within my abilities that takes less than 5-10 minutes of my time.
Couldn't be worse than some that I've had...
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The Robot Professor
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I bet this thing would do a better job than some of the professors that I've had. What's really funny, is that general ed. teachers may find themselves out of work as one of these teachs an entire class prerecorded material. The only negative is that it can't answer questions, but then again most teachers don't answer questions. They would just need to fill it with verbal outputs all saying, "find the answer yourself." If these were cheap enough, I could see them replacing some highschool teachers and some college either general ed or freshman level courses. I saw one post about super model versions next. Well, you know this is crafted after a teacher most wouldn't pick. They'd most likely pick a super model or atleast a very attractive person to use as the model for these things if they went into production.
Took me a while to find it since NASA doesn't talk about anyone else but themselves... Not exactly rewriting history but fishy nonetheless.
I'll give any agency credit on that one. Come on my website or my publication, I'll only talk about the things that I or my agency did. Mostly I wouldn't talk about what others have done in the field as I'm an attention whore and trying to get more funding. The other thing is that there may be legal issues if I talk about you or the things that your agency did. So I'd just politely pretend that you don't exist while bragging to my population for more money. What government agency does that not describe?
Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure I'd love to play WoW, but I have a job, I take night classes, and I'm trying to find that elusive thing called "girl". Dumping time into the hole of WoW would kill off at least one of those. And I think when I'm 50, I'd rather look back on the fun times I had with (eventual) children than fun times I had with avatars in a world that didn't exist.
As someone married at 20, and now 27 with a 7 year old and a 6 year old, let me tell you what you'll look back on... You'll look back on the times when you could just spend $50 on a game with out thinking if it is "kid friendly." You'll start looking at buying a Nintendo system not for yourself, but just so you don't buy any games that your wife would find offense for the kids to watch you play. When they learn how to play video games, you'll look back on the days when you could go home and waste time playing video games. You'll think hey it would be awesome if my whole family could play the same MMOG, then reality sinks in. You only have 1 computer and would have to buy one for each kid and the wife, and the wife won't let you. The other factor is that even if you could afford the computers/laptops and setup a game you'd have to choose one that your entire family will happily play together. You'll have to wait for Nintendo to make their Nintendo world's online game for your entire family to safely play together though you'll secretly long for the bloody thirsty Sony and MS games or maybe a game with some "adult content" though the wife would kill you if you bought on of those. Trust me. You'll get the girl. You'll breed. Then you'll find out that this wasn't as fun as you first thought it was.
Even if he wasn't responsible, he's now responsible for the cover up. If American voters aren't happy with his decision they can always vote him out.
I'm thankful that we pretty much limit our Presidents to two terms now a days. I'm actually ready for 4 years of Gore now. I was really divided between Bush and Gore, and for the most part I believe that Bush was the safer choice. I think that Gore would have invaded Iraq for the same reasons that Bush did except with widespread republican and democrate support. I think Gore could have actually gotten some secret black government project started to make the US completely energy self supporting. Bush has too much vested interest with the present energy companies to want the government to fund something radically new that would free the US from ever needing oil again. We don't need anything radically new; we just need to retrofit/or rebuild our current autos so that they'd all be fueled only by fuels/energy sources that are in the US. After 9/11, the government had enough public anger at the middle east, the public would have happily funded a project that would kick all the oil producing countries in the teeth by making energy efficient housing (would reduce energy consumation in heating/cooling to below 1/3 current levels if all older structures could be modified), getting rid of the internal combustion engine for all US transportation methods within 5 years by converting to electric or hybrid vehicles, or funding every little US project to reduce oil usage. Remember we could have done all that in anger and to forever punish the Middle East. That sort of effort would have destoried the entire Middle East if we could get rid of our oil need.
My cousin was even taught at school that Sally Ride was the first woman into space when this is patently untrue. Why the revisionism? is it just for the sake of a good first few paragraphs or is it something worse?
As far as I'm aware of, the Russians bet us in every space race contest. If we really wanted to be honest in our history books, we'd have the names of Russians as the First Humans doing X in space. A text book like that wouldn't sell in the US. It might sell in Europe, India, China, or Japan. I'd honestly think that India or China might be more honest about the history of human space flight. Of course, Chinese text books can always say something along the lines of X was the first Chinese citizen to do Y in space and be perfectly correct.
This is obviously what Nintendo is banking on with the Wii. They can run anything the xbox360 or ps3 can, and probably at a level of detail where consumers can't even tell the difference, especially not on most people's little 25" tube tvs.
You also forgot to mention that I'm not buying a hi-def tv just to play games on. Heck, at the price that they want for a hi-def tv I'm not going to be buying one for 5-7 years or until the price drops to the $300-$500 for the hi-def tvs. I think that I'm not the only one that could care less about "the future of TV" just for the sake of what I'd consider small resolution enhancments.
The things that make or break consoles, and are intimately tied together, are: 1) ease of development 2) third party support 3) fun games 4) price
The Saturn and Nintendo64 both failed due to #1 and #4, which both led to a failure in #2. The only reason either console "survived" is due to great first party games.
The Wii looks ready to dominate in all four categories. Processing power hasn't mattered in a long time, and will do nothing for the xbox360 or ps3 if they're missing those 4 things that are actually important.
I'm of mixed opinion on if processing really matters for the console market. I've been keeping tabs on the hardware acclerated physics card. I'm of mixed opinion if that'll take of in the short term for the PC. It's too late for that tech to get into this round of consoles, but I could easily see the next series of consoles including hardware acclerated physics.
The PS3 in particular looks ready to fail in all of these categories. It sounds like they've got really crazy and bad hardware, that will be extremely difficult to take advantage of. They've got a ridiculous price, which will make it very hard to gain any market share. Because of those reasons, they will have a lot of trouble getting third party games, and thus will be stuck much like the Saturn and Nintendo64, relying almost entirely on first party games and exclusives to sell the console.
I'll agree with you. I think that Sony or MS should buy Sega if at all possible for some first party titles.
Nintendo will need to do something really stupid to screw up their shot at the title this generation.
If Nintendo loses this battle, it will because of some third party not able to supply them in manufacturing the Wii. Everything that I've seen on the Wii looks like it is ready to regain their number 1 stop like back in the NES/SNES days. The good news for us is that neither MS or Sony will stop making consoles even if both of their present next generation systems both are total market failures, they'd both be able to build new next generation systems and throw money at 3rd party developers to make sure that they have games. I don't think this battle will be very interesting. I think in 6-7 years when the new MS/Sony systems come out the real interesting battle will happen.
I think Sony's approach with the PS3 takes their eyes off the prize. Since they already had market domination with the PS2, they started to look elsewhere instead of trying to figure out how to hang onto their dominance. Because of this, I think it is likely that the PS3 will not be the #1 console.
I think from what little that I've seen this time around Nintendo will come out on top in this round. I've been a historical Nintendo customer until the PS2. I bought the PS2 mainly for all the FF games that were for the PS1 that I could buy cheap and make the heck out of. I've been looking at following that same strategy after the new consoles launch by purchasing a used Game Cube and atleast the Zelda, Final Fintasy game, and Metorid Game for GC. If anything those should all be solid fun games that would cost vastly less than either Sony's or MS's offerring. I've not heard of a price for the Wii. I don't want to pay the early price penalty for any of the new products. I'm actually disappointed in very disappointed in Sony for this round. I thought that the PS2 would be the corner stone of Sony's long term plans of being the entertainment media box for every home. My long term idea of what Sony wanted the PS series to become would be a single box that was a gaming system/DVR/video/audio player/internet contented and downloading video/audio/games through the online Sony PS store and playing online games selling for the same price point as the PS2. Sony/MS could sell more downloadable content through their gaming systems than Apple sells if they set it up right. I'm disappointed because I envisioned that endpoint for maybe the PS4-PS5 with each system getting closer to the goal. The PS3 looks ill thought out compared to my dreams of what the PS series could have been.
Re:That's great and all, but...
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Growing Insulin
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· Score: 1
As someone who has now worked as an IT consultant to two insurance companies, I can say that there are things that happen in this business that concern me: unusual/difficult reimbursement and claims adjudication practices, extremely high levels of fraud from patients and doctors in certain parts of the US (cough, California, cough), etc.
Ideally, health insurance companies would be neither the "good guys" or the "bad guys." They would act more as an efficient, low-operational-cost vehicle for spreading risk across a population. It is within the collective best interest for an insurance company to remain solvent, while providing significant benefit to the policyholder.
Well, that's my point about them being "good guys" in the abstract. They arent' doing it for your benefit; they would be doing it to lower their long term costs. The problem is the handful of insurance companies that don't play by the rules and don't want to make any payments reguardless of fraud. I would consider an insurance company that was running by you last statement a very "good guy" company. The problem is that a hand ful of "bad guys" can screw up the whole system for the rest of us.
His solution to the hack that destroys a section of your profile is not that he will fix the site, but that you should install Flash 9.
You gotta love laziness! You know the weird thing is that is most likely the best thing that he could have done to "fix" his problem. I'm on several security mailing lists and get notices of all the holes in nearly everything. Do you want to know the real dirty secret? That process is worthless to me unless they happen to be announcing a patch to the product that fixes the problem. There is little to nothing he could have done if his problem was in a piece of software that he runs but doesn't write himself. About the only thing that, he could do to speed up develop of a patch is pray. Suggesting to users to update their flash players after a flash hack sounds like it should be a valid solution if the problem was in the vast majority of user's outdated flash players.
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The electoral college system guarantees that the citizens of lightly-populated states like Wyoming, Montana, Deleware, and the Dakotas have a greater percentage say in who is the President than a citizen of California, Florida, New York, or Texas has.
You need to repeat American History. Any system that will spilt the popular vote will never pass the smaller states. You think that is unfair. Nope. We of the smaller states think that it would be unfair that all future presidents would be from California, Florida, New York, or Texas and ignore the rest of the country. You know the best that I could come up with is another voting block on the election form on if your state should split their electoral votes or combine them. That would make things very exciting. It would force future Presidents to visit smaller states because you'd never know if those states will vote together or be split. The big fun thing would be the effect on the large states of California, Florida, New York, or Texas. I'd bet that they'd always split their votes rather than combining them, which would actually make your vote count for less if the smaller states stuck together rather than splitting their votes.
O.k. I work for a police department and was interested in looking at this tech for our department.
Here are the two vendors that I found through Wired: http://www.g2tactics.com/ & http://www.remingtonelsag.com/
If your police department can afford 20K-30K for this device, then they should purchase it. I'm more worried on the tech. end on how it connects to NCIC and makes its very many queries. (We've had problems with our RMS interfacing with ACIC for vehicle returns and it taking a min. of 1 minute to get returns back from the state. These systems will be making thousands of searchs. I want to know real-world results and not what marketing says what it should be able to do.) We have 2 interstates and several state highways passing through our small city. I would love for a federal grant to buy 5-6 of them for each of our major transportation links. It wouldn't stop all stolen cars, but any passing through would be far more likely to be picked up. I don't have a problem with a computer scanning all the cars on a road and checking for stolen/invalid tags. The police officers would love this system as they would go into the stop knowing that the car has been tagged as stolen.
10 years ago a grocer's cashier had a career, now he's a 'Courtesy Clerk' earning $6 bucks/hr.
10 years from now, you won't have courtesy clerk's but loss prevention specialist that supervise 10 of machines and make min. wage for the time.
I think it's fine for it's intended purpose, but trained, competent, (dare I say union) checkers are far more efficient and I'm hoping that will deter grocery chains from deploying too many of these self-checkout lanes. A store with only self-checkout? Well, that'd be a store with a lot of fistfights.
Wait until Wal-Mart does RFID right. There won't be any checker because you just push the entire cart straight through an RFID reader and swipe your ATM card through it. That's what people what to use self-check out for not for some stupid 10 or less items. We want to use it for a cart load of stuff at a time.
Interesting.... Based on some of the people I deal with every day, we've been actively selecting for the following:
1. Bigotry
2. Closed-mindedness
3. Zealotry
4. Self-induced stupidity
5. Selective hearing
You know that you have a point. I can see survival advantages for bigotry and selective hearing, but the others I'm not sure about. bigotry would be good to have in your genes so that you'd always pick mates that are near or similiar to yourself, and you'd have a dislike for those that weren't similiar. I'd think that it was meant to weed out mutants and start wars more than anything else. Selective hearing is easy to understand. Everyone believes that they are smarter than those in charge. If your clan leader or military unit leader/wife told you to do something that you didn't exactly want to do; you'd mentally only hear what you wanted to hear for your personal survival/happiness. I can't see any easy answers for close-mindness or zealotry. There must be some basic reasons why we developed and continue with that. Heck, our whole 9/11 reaction was zealotry against those pointed at to be responsible, and we have plenty that would be happily close-minded or use selective hearing to ignore the possiblity that we were initally wrong in who we pointed out. Zealotry is a survival method; we just don't know how.
War likely does effect evolution - but evolution of culture, not genetics. In fact, one can view non-physical entities such as cultures and religions as entities for which evolution does apply.
Um, as I understand it, evolution is just about those that survive to breed and nothing else. If young unmarried males go off to war and for whatever reasons don't come back, then of course war has been part of our evolution. We've been breeding ourselves to survive war. In some respects, war may be a good thing for humanity in general. I was about to say until we've developed atomic weapons, but thinking about it, if we acutally fought a couple of nuclear wars that would have breeding effects on the surviving population. I wouldn't want to be under a nuclear blast or survive through a nuclear war, but in some respects it would improve our human genepool. Here is an idea for you. What if our handful of uses of atomic weapons has left a genetic mark in the global population to be wary of nuclear weapons? Nah, it would make more sense for us to be afraid of sharp pointy things that are headed in our direction.
That Final Fantasy is never ever final. Not a problem in terms of job security. But how does one stay creatively fresh if the project never ends?
You know I don't really mind that they keep on putting out titles under the name. As far as I can tell, the only final fantasy games that had anything directly to do with each other were FFX and FFX2. I've played FF1,2,3, FFX,FFX2, FF7, FF8, & FF9. You know what? I've been becoming more and more unhappy with the series. The main male leads seem to all be either stupid, jerks, or some-what clue less. I've recently been replaying FFX. Honestly, I hate the story, I hate Yuna, Tidus, everything with Yevon, and blitz-ball. I like the sphere grid leveling, monster arena, and many side quests. I think the FFX2 was a bit backwards with its form of leveling.
What I really miss is FF1 and the ability to chose your entire party and class of everyone. To me the addition of the plot and fixed character type of FF2 & FF3 was what ruined the replay value of the series. I liked replaying FF1 with off the wall character classes. Each choice had a big difference in how you played the game. It wasn't until you could really customize armor and weapons that you regained some of the ability of forcing your characters to be/do what you wanted. I've always liked the stock FF characters and haven't minded a script. I would like to get rid of the whole save the entire world motify though. Why can't I just have a game with a gang of 4-9 characters of classes of my choosing that I don't have to mess with saving the world, but get to be an evil overlord or something where I just kill/capture random stuff/people and do random things? I'd love to play a FF parody that your party was the evil bad guys trying to either rule the world or stop several parties of good guys with your monster legions. Here's an idea: A game where there aren't really any good guys. They are all evil bad guys that want to rule the world and you just try to survive a bit without bringing down the government on you. I'd actually have liked if the FF was set all on one world instead of the whole let's just recycle some elements one game to the next. FF is just the one RPG series that everyone has been exposed to. I predict on the next FF series. You have an evil empire or a good empire that becomes evil and your small force has to either stop its leaders or awaken a magically locked force to do battle with the evil empire. I bet their will be an airship pilot named Cid somewhere and some moggles and chocobos. Ok. I like the chocobos except for the one that you had to breed chocobos for the chocobo races. The chocobo races just annoying like blitz ball. I didn't like that card game that they put in one, but some did so I won't hold that one against them. Why couldn't they do something like the gummi ship from KH2? That was fun. The one from KH1 was o.k., but not nearly as raw fun.
I'm not against the idea (of dropping either Orcs or Man U. *grin*), I just find it curious. Won't they have the same problem as with Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War, when all the Imperial Guard players had a sook about not getting to play their army (except as a "Dog of War" in one mission)? Or is the percentage of people buying this game who actually come from the tabletop version so low that it just doesn't matter?
I'd never heard of Warhammer 40K until I acquired a um, uh demo (cough, cough) of the RTS Warhammer 40K. I was impressed. I liked it far more than Warcraft except for one thing. I found it too easy. (I usually can't get through any RTS without cheats at somepoint this game even on "hard" I didn't need them.") It was awesome having an RTS that catered to just throwing the grunts away instead of resource collection. I latter found out about the table top game. I looked into it. Then I became really depresed at the resulting game. Why? Warhammer is a freaking huge universe. The first game should have released with 5-6 races min. or have something like a "build a race" option with tons of detail around a map and unit editor. The unit coloring is cool, but I'm thinking more of picking actual units from the vast store of Warhammer universe to become your army. I'll give them credit though, the output is first rate, and they wouldn't have pleased the die hard table top fans anyway. Warhammer really needs its own MMOG with update packs every 6 months or so just adding additional content that was too much to start off with. I'd hope that Warhammer MMOG is based around armies and will let you customize everything. The game is great except don't read up on the table top stuff unless you want to get disappointed in the game. It's like playing a D&D game and being happy, and then finding out all of the D&D universe and never quiet being happy with what little made it into that one game.
So the primary driver in primate development should be the predators which improved their pack social cohesion and group communication. Eagles, tree mammal predators from the polecat family and to some extent cats.
I wonder if anyone has tried studying what ways humans have been self-evolving over the past 6,000 years or so? We've developed to the point with our pack social cohesion that non-human predators are a rare threat that will be quickly eliminated by pack if seen as dangerous. The first thing that popped into my mind is how has war been a factor in human evolution? We've been applying our own selective pressures these last 2,000-3,000 years. Humanity doesn't preserve what it percieves as a dangerous predator species. We generally eliminate it from being a human predator. A few days ago there was a discussion about possible ESP in humans. I'd tend to think what little actual ESP abilities humanity actually has are actual group survival traits and not things that we'd normally classify as ESP. I don't think mind reading would have been useful, but a scout sending out "help I'm in danger" might be picked up by others of his group. Of course they could also evolve the "Please, don't let them see, catch, shoot, or stab me with the sharp pointy things, mental calls." Could some peoples that have typically been peasants through out their history have developed a solider/human predator sense that allows them to run away and successfully hide from soliders? Through war and other means, we've been selecting ourselves. Has anyone thought of what traits we have actively been selecting for?
Actually, I think we'll see these in fast food restaurants and any other establishment where cheap labor is desirable. After all, they speak English, are clean, and show up on time.
In the long term maybe, it all depends on cost. I'd be mixed replacing "low end" jobs with machines like these since then we'd need to find/create more "low end" jobs to replace them. If you actually could replace 90-98% of current human jobs with machines, then what would 98% of the population end up doing? I'd think that machines could never become "cheaper" than actual human labor. That's more a gut feeling than anything else. You'd find out the pros/cons of machines fairly fast though. Take ATMs. My wife and I prefer them 98% of the time to dealing with a human teller. We could do the same exact thing at McDonald's having an ATM with all the choices at the Drive-Thru and in store where a small key is despensed, where you unlock your food when it is ready. You could have either machines or people prepare the food, but you've just taken the human interface from the fast food process. I'd much rather push a few buttons rather than speak to a human fast food teller. I think the LCD displays showing what you've ordered have been the best fast food invention of the past few years. I don't mind removing humans from alot of processes, but let's remember that we still need jobs ourselves at the end of the day. Let's hope an automated AI compiler could replace most of our entire software industry.
http://vaw.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/5/2/16 46 4) 206%3C12%3ACHIFSH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4
http://vaw.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/7/9/9
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0899-2851(199821
http://polyzine.com/arabwomen.html
I wasn't really speaking of Afghanistan, but I believe that now that the US is preventing their tradional means of killing of those that violate their usual morals that they'll adapt like these other neighboring countries and you'll see these honor killings happen there as well. You don't get it. I'm not saying that they are worse off. I'm saying that the girls are in more danger once they actually start acting westernized or sexually active and living what we'd consider and normal teenage life. I bet it isn't happening right now because most are more afraid of the US than of the women. Give it 5-10 years while most have forgotten Afghanistan or Iraq and see how those female suicide rates have climbed. I was first made aware of this through an AOL news article (happening in Turkey) and was surprised. The families were using every means at their disposal to make the female feel that their life was worthless and that to do the best for their family that they should kill themselves. I've just tried searching for any data concerning Afghanistan suicides or honor killings and haven't yet found anything. That only means that the data or news reports aren't open to you or I. It doesn't mean these things aren't happening over there.
Is corporate espionage actually valuable? ... development plans are pretty widely discussed amongst employees. If something were to leak, I'm not sure what the value of it would be. The only real data points that are heavily protected are financial results and projections, and the product release dates that those rely on. But I'm pretty sure those are only protected for Wall Street purposes.
What kind of data do corporate spies hope to obtain? Would that data be actionable -- e.g, could a company come up with a competing product and be first to market if another company's already half way there?
I'd personally think software companies would generally not be directly targetted because there is alot of documentation and if KnockOff Product was released next month that had 95% of the same features and same UI, then they'd get sued by the real company.
Other than the finance side, which would be very valuable in and of itself, I'd think CAD/CAM files would be much more useful and difficult to obtain. At the company my dad works for, there are a handful of engineers with the CAD/CAM files. They don't have internet or any sort of external access. That data is backed up atleast in 3-4 different places daily. It is the life blood of their company and they'd have backups, but loosing any of the data would mean lost man-hours rebuilding the plans. It would only be possible for a data thief to physically steal a backup media from one of the backup locations so that unpatented or in progress patents can be built before they are aware of the theft. In the software world, I'd think that major companies could force a code audit and prove that code was actually stolen and used in another's product. In the physical world of engineering and unpatented/ or patent in progress work, an engineer could gain several leads and if it is discovered claim that they indepedently developed a similiar product. If they were stupid and lazy, and just used the stolen CAD/CAM files then it might be easy to discover. But if they changed all sorts of things and make no references to the stolen data in offical documents then it might be unprovable other than a similiar product.
Good companies get my dollar. Bad ones don't. That's how this is supposed to work." and she says, "Why do you have to be so political all the time?"
I'd like to think that most of America is like myself, and not like my girlfriend, but I have the feeling that most of my generation are idiots.
Um, if you want to hang with your girlfriend and friends, then you'd better atleast go into Best Buy. If anything thing, you could politely tell the pushy sales guy why you didn't buy anything from him. I'd say you ought to go in just so your friends and your girlfriend wouldn't think that you were slightly odd. A boycott is about not buying anything. It isn't about not "window shopping" or telling your friends that you know where you can find the same item either cheaper or with better customer service. I actually like Best Buy though I've been warned about them and only use them for DVD purchases. They have the largest selection of sci-fi/anime in stock in my small city. There is a slight premium, but one that I find within limits. I won't spend money on any high dollar item there though. I looked into hard drives there and was amazed at the premium that they were wanting. And I've been warned never to buy a computer or high dollar sound system through Best Buy. So I just stick with items under $40-50 that I can pick up only at Best Buy because no one else locally keeps them in stock.
If by "better" you mean "women are no longer dragged out into what used to be a soccer field in front of a crowd at lunchtime and shot in the head for daring to teach their daughters to read," then... yes, better.
Nah, now they are forced to suicide like Turkey makes its females that violate honor.
I read this web comic http://project-apollo.net/mos/index.html
One of the main characters comes from Mars and the folks on Mars developed a group mind. The way it works sounds similiar to this, but on a much larger scale and seemlessly for any request. Say you wanted to cook supper and looked in your cabinet and couldn't think of anything. You'd briefly access the group mind, which would instantly send your supplies, about how long your want to cook it for, your personnal favoriate dishes, and your personnal cooking skill level to 400 top chiefs who all spend less than a minute looking at the data and sending back a dish that you could make within 15-20 minutes. The group mind would store all the recipes for future use.
I don't want to think about quickly solving problem, but I wouldn't mind handling the occasional request that is well within my abilities that takes less than 5-10 minutes of my time.
I bet this thing would do a better job than some of the professors that I've had. What's really funny, is that general ed. teachers may find themselves out of work as one of these teachs an entire class prerecorded material. The only negative is that it can't answer questions, but then again most teachers don't answer questions. They would just need to fill it with verbal outputs all saying, "find the answer yourself." If these were cheap enough, I could see them replacing some highschool teachers and some college either general ed or freshman level courses. I saw one post about super model versions next. Well, you know this is crafted after a teacher most wouldn't pick. They'd most likely pick a super model or atleast a very attractive person to use as the model for these things if they went into production.
Took me a while to find it since NASA doesn't talk about anyone else but themselves... Not exactly rewriting history but fishy nonetheless.
I'll give any agency credit on that one. Come on my website or my publication, I'll only talk about the things that I or my agency did. Mostly I wouldn't talk about what others have done in the field as I'm an attention whore and trying to get more funding. The other thing is that there may be legal issues if I talk about you or the things that your agency did. So I'd just politely pretend that you don't exist while bragging to my population for more money. What government agency does that not describe?
Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure I'd love to play WoW, but I have a job, I take night classes, and I'm trying to find that elusive thing called "girl". Dumping time into the hole of WoW would kill off at least one of those. And I think when I'm 50, I'd rather look back on the fun times I had with (eventual) children than fun times I had with avatars in a world that didn't exist.
As someone married at 20, and now 27 with a 7 year old and a 6 year old, let me tell you what you'll look back on... You'll look back on the times when you could just spend $50 on a game with out thinking if it is "kid friendly." You'll start looking at buying a Nintendo system not for yourself, but just so you don't buy any games that your wife would find offense for the kids to watch you play. When they learn how to play video games, you'll look back on the days when you could go home and waste time playing video games. You'll think hey it would be awesome if my whole family could play the same MMOG, then reality sinks in. You only have 1 computer and would have to buy one for each kid and the wife, and the wife won't let you. The other factor is that even if you could afford the computers/laptops and setup a game you'd have to choose one that your entire family will happily play together. You'll have to wait for Nintendo to make their Nintendo world's online game for your entire family to safely play together though you'll secretly long for the bloody thirsty Sony and MS games or maybe a game with some "adult content" though the wife would kill you if you bought on of those. Trust me. You'll get the girl. You'll breed. Then you'll find out that this wasn't as fun as you first thought it was.
Even if he wasn't responsible, he's now responsible for the cover up. If American voters aren't happy with his decision they can always vote him out.
I'm thankful that we pretty much limit our Presidents to two terms now a days. I'm actually ready for 4 years of Gore now. I was really divided between Bush and Gore, and for the most part I believe that Bush was the safer choice. I think that Gore would have invaded Iraq for the same reasons that Bush did except with widespread republican and democrate support. I think Gore could have actually gotten some secret black government project started to make the US completely energy self supporting. Bush has too much vested interest with the present energy companies to want the government to fund something radically new that would free the US from ever needing oil again. We don't need anything radically new; we just need to retrofit/or rebuild our current autos so that they'd all be fueled only by fuels/energy sources that are in the US. After 9/11, the government had enough public anger at the middle east, the public would have happily funded a project that would kick all the oil producing countries in the teeth by making energy efficient housing (would reduce energy consumation in heating/cooling to below 1/3 current levels if all older structures could be modified), getting rid of the internal combustion engine for all US transportation methods within 5 years by converting to electric or hybrid vehicles, or funding every little US project to reduce oil usage. Remember we could have done all that in anger and to forever punish the Middle East. That sort of effort would have destoried the entire Middle East if we could get rid of our oil need.
My cousin was even taught at school that Sally Ride was the first woman into space when this is patently untrue. Why the revisionism? is it just for the sake of a good first few paragraphs or is it something worse?
As far as I'm aware of, the Russians bet us in every space race contest. If we really wanted to be honest in our history books, we'd have the names of Russians as the First Humans doing X in space. A text book like that wouldn't sell in the US. It might sell in Europe, India, China, or Japan. I'd honestly think that India or China might be more honest about the history of human space flight. Of course, Chinese text books can always say something along the lines of X was the first Chinese citizen to do Y in space and be perfectly correct.
This is obviously what Nintendo is banking on with the Wii. They can run anything the xbox360 or ps3 can, and probably at a level of detail where consumers can't even tell the difference, especially not on most people's little 25" tube tvs.
You also forgot to mention that I'm not buying a hi-def tv just to play games on. Heck, at the price that they want for a hi-def tv I'm not going to be buying one for 5-7 years or until the price drops to the $300-$500 for the hi-def tvs. I think that I'm not the only one that could care less about "the future of TV" just for the sake of what I'd consider small resolution enhancments.
The things that make or break consoles, and are intimately tied together, are:
1) ease of development
2) third party support
3) fun games
4) price
The Saturn and Nintendo64 both failed due to #1 and #4, which both led to a failure in #2. The only reason either console "survived" is due to great first party games.
The Wii looks ready to dominate in all four categories. Processing power hasn't mattered in a long time, and will do nothing for the xbox360 or ps3 if they're missing those 4 things that are actually important.
I'm of mixed opinion on if processing really matters for the console market. I've been keeping tabs on the hardware acclerated physics card. I'm of mixed opinion if that'll take of in the short term for the PC. It's too late for that tech to get into this round of consoles, but I could easily see the next series of consoles including hardware acclerated physics.
The PS3 in particular looks ready to fail in all of these categories. It sounds like they've got really crazy and bad hardware, that will be extremely difficult to take advantage of. They've got a ridiculous price, which will make it very hard to gain any market share. Because of those reasons, they will have a lot of trouble getting third party games, and thus will be stuck much like the Saturn and Nintendo64, relying almost entirely on first party games and exclusives to sell the console.
I'll agree with you. I think that Sony or MS should buy Sega if at all possible for some first party titles.
Nintendo will need to do something really stupid to screw up their shot at the title this generation.
If Nintendo loses this battle, it will because of some third party not able to supply them in manufacturing the Wii. Everything that I've seen on the Wii looks like it is ready to regain their number 1 stop like back in the NES/SNES days. The good news for us is that neither MS or Sony will stop making consoles even if both of their present next generation systems both are total market failures, they'd both be able to build new next generation systems and throw money at 3rd party developers to make sure that they have games. I don't think this battle will be very interesting. I think in 6-7 years when the new MS/Sony systems come out the real interesting battle will happen.
I think Sony's approach with the PS3 takes their eyes off the prize. Since they already had market domination with the PS2, they started to look elsewhere instead of trying to figure out how to hang onto their dominance. Because of this, I think it is likely that the PS3 will not be the #1 console.
I think from what little that I've seen this time around Nintendo will come out on top in this round. I've been a historical Nintendo customer until the PS2. I bought the PS2 mainly for all the FF games that were for the PS1 that I could buy cheap and make the heck out of. I've been looking at following that same strategy after the new consoles launch by purchasing a used Game Cube and atleast the Zelda, Final Fintasy game, and Metorid Game for GC. If anything those should all be solid fun games that would cost vastly less than either Sony's or MS's offerring. I've not heard of a price for the Wii. I don't want to pay the early price penalty for any of the new products. I'm actually disappointed in very disappointed in Sony for this round. I thought that the PS2 would be the corner stone of Sony's long term plans of being the entertainment media box for every home. My long term idea of what Sony wanted the PS series to become would be a single box that was a gaming system/DVR/video/audio player/internet contented and downloading video/audio/games through the online Sony PS store and playing online games selling for the same price point as the PS2. Sony/MS could sell more downloadable content through their gaming systems than Apple sells if they set it up right. I'm disappointed because I envisioned that endpoint for maybe the PS4-PS5 with each system getting closer to the goal. The PS3 looks ill thought out compared to my dreams of what the PS series could have been.
As someone who has now worked as an IT consultant to two insurance companies, I can say that there are things that happen in this business that concern me: unusual/difficult reimbursement and claims adjudication practices, extremely high levels of fraud from patients and doctors in certain parts of the US (cough, California, cough), etc.
Ideally, health insurance companies would be neither the "good guys" or the "bad guys." They would act more as an efficient, low-operational-cost vehicle for spreading risk across a population. It is within the collective best interest for an insurance company to remain solvent, while providing significant benefit to the policyholder.
Well, that's my point about them being "good guys" in the abstract. They arent' doing it for your benefit; they would be doing it to lower their long term costs. The problem is the handful of insurance companies that don't play by the rules and don't want to make any payments reguardless of fraud. I would consider an insurance company that was running by you last statement a very "good guy" company. The problem is that a hand ful of "bad guys" can screw up the whole system for the rest of us.
His solution to the hack that destroys a section of your profile is not that he will fix the site, but that you should install Flash 9.
You gotta love laziness! You know the weird thing is that is most likely the best thing that he could have done to "fix" his problem. I'm on several security mailing lists and get notices of all the holes in nearly everything. Do you want to know the real dirty secret? That process is worthless to me unless they happen to be announcing a patch to the product that fixes the problem. There is little to nothing he could have done if his problem was in a piece of software that he runs but doesn't write himself. About the only thing that, he could do to speed up develop of a patch is pray. Suggesting to users to update their flash players after a flash hack sounds like it should be a valid solution if the problem was in the vast majority of user's outdated flash players.
Well, it surely wasn't Intelligent Design that did it...
Are you sure Darwinism isn't the method for weeding out mistakes?