Honestly, this sounds like playing laser tag or paint ball without the realism and the workout. If you're going to bother driving over to some big warehouse to play with a bunch of other people, do you really want to sit at a computer and look at a monitor the whole time? Why sit down while "playing" when you could really be running around?
Obviously, I'm not big into gaming. I like computer games because they offer convenient entertainment... doesn't matter where I am or what time it is, a computer or game box is always ready and willing to go a few rounds. And with the advent of multi-player, net-based games, I can (sort of) interact with other people who I may or may not know even though I'm nowhere near them. This warehouse thing seems like the opposite of that to me. It's *not* convenient in that I have to drive to get there (and I'm not all that far from this first one), and it's likely not going to be open all the time. There's a reason that video game arcades all died out when powerful home computers and game machines came along.
Obviously, not all games can be translated into meatspace. I don't think SimCity, for example, could work as anything but a computer game. But I'll bet that these game warehouses will run few games other than first person shooters, and those translate more or less directly into laser tag or paint ball.
Dont be fooled into thinking that a non-contractor position is any safer than being a contractor.
The market is still brutal and there is no loyalty anymore between corporations and their employees. I would take the position in a heartbeat.
Perhaps, but it's much easier for a company to eliminate a contractor than to lay off or fire an employee, and that's one big reason that companies use contractors. Large companies, for example, often like to use contractors on limited-term projects. It gives them the flexibility to terminate a project at a moment's notice without having to find new work for the people working on it.
On the flip side, of course, is the fact that when a company changes course and ends your project, it's likely that a new project or two will start up. If you do a good job for your customer, they'll likely want you back.
Without huge problems in the study, they couldn't have come up with such disparate results.
Not at all. The study (or studies) may be perfectly valid, and the problem may be that you're trying to draw a conclusion that's so simple it doesn't reflect the truth. Or different people interpret the results of the study differently.
Taking the egg example, it's pretty clear that eggs are good for you and eggs are bad for you. They're a rich source of protein, but they're high in cholesterol and fat. Same study, same data, two different interpretations of "good."
You don't need to be "inherently distrustful" of scientific studies, particularly if they really are scientific. A better place for your distrust is in the oversimplified interpretations we get from the media, which likes to boil things down to a third grade reading level, and from people and corporations with a vested interest in the interpretation who twist data to suit their own agendas.
Cars have lots of extra metal to save passengers when that happens, and that metal is heavy.
Weight does help protect passengers, but it's not the only way to go. Deformation, as in the crumple zones you mention, is a great way to absorb energy and cushion passengers against the full force of impact. Crumple zones do exactly that. Motorcycle helmets also work through deformation. The foam liner deforms when your head smacks against it inside the helmet, absorbing energy. Also, the hard shell on many helmets is made up of layers which delaminate on impact, absorbing a tremendous amount of energy.
There's no reason that body panels and even chasses couldn't be made from lightweight composites that would deform in different ways to protect passengers.
Also, electric vehicles do tend to be heavy due to the batteries that they have to carry around. The Eliica, for example, weighs about two and a half tons.
Of course, we should all be suspicious of those pepole who say: "I have a revolutionary idea that will transform the automobile industry -- but General Motors is trying to suppress me!!" Venture capital would chase you to the ends of the earth, if you had a real revolutionary idea. The difficulty is: some people overrate the importance of their ideas, and attribute their failure to a conspiracy to ignore them.
Why? Huge industries by their very nature do not deal well with revolutionary change, and automobile manufacturing is the epiome of a huge industry. You can bet your ass that when an idea comes along that threatens to revolutionize the automobile industry, the automobile industry will do it's level best to at least slow it down.
Yes, it's true that most inventors are probably not exactly objective when it comes to stating the importance of their inventions. At the same time, inventors are often more willing to think outside the box and envision a future different from the one that most people imagine. If they're smart and competent, they should at least be listened to.
There are many conspiracy theories relating to the automobile industry. Some of them are true.
...and note that EA has a formal policy of hiring young, naive people who are willing to work long hours for low pay...
I've worked at companies like this in the past, though none that ever insisted I routinely work 80 hour weeks. Some managers feel that it's better to hire young programmers exclusively because "they're cheaper" and because "we can train them our way."
The thing is, younger programmers generally aren't cheaper, and the training never happens. Experienced programmers may draw larger salaries, but they're usually more productive because they solve problems quicker, make fewer mistakes, and don't rush into implementation before they've got a handle on requirements and design. Proper training is an expensive proposition, and in my experience the kinds of companies that try to save money by hiring less experience staff are not the kinds of companies that would ever consider spending that kind of money on training their staff.
EA and companies like them would be well advised to spend some time and money improving their development process. Companies that do software development well do not work in a constant crunch mode.
The thing that annoys me about Safeway is, the checker says your name out loud "Thank you mister fishbowl", and I really hate that.
You're damn right. What I really don't like about it is that they're trying to put on this appearance that they know you, that it's your friendly neighborhood mom and pop grocery store where everyone knows you. And that phoniness completely overshadows the genuine personal relationships with, for example, the super-helpful produce guy who doesn't know my name but does know that I like fresh salad greens and always offers to get me some nice ones from the back if the greens on display look tired. My name isn't all that difficult to pronounce, but it's unusual, and after five or so years of Safeway checkers (most of whom know my face) furrowing their brow just prior to killing my name yet again, I've pretty much had it with that stupid policy.
Whole Foods does it much better. They provide nice produce and other products, and they seem to treat their workers well enough that everyone there is generally smiling and helpful. The folks there don't necessarily know my name (though some do because they've asked me and made an effort to remember), but even if they've never seen me before they generally treat me like they value my business. For that kind of service, I'll happily pay a premium.
What Safeway management doesn't seem to get is that reading my name off the receipt just as I'm leaving isn't nearly enough to create a personal relationship, and if there is a personal relationship, there's no need to read my name off the receipt.
Oh, and Whole Foods doesn't pester me with a frequent shopper discount card. I like that.
While this may sound like cheating to some people, this may be a large benefit to hunters with disabilities.
What, exactly, is the large benefit to hunters with disabilities?
They can now "hunt" without having to deal with the non-ADA-compliant forest? I always thought that being in the forest was half the appeal of hunting in the first place.
They can once again kill something? I don't regard the thrill of victory as a valid reason for hunting.
They can once again kill something for food using a robotic weapon and, presumably, getting someone else to drag their prey home and butcher it? Might as well order up a Deluxe Pack from Omaha Steaks.
I've been known from time to time to swap grocery store cards with friends, or else to give phony name and address information when obtaining one. The result is that I get discounts without totally giving up privacy, and the supermarket gets reliable data about a real person's short term shopping habits. The one thing the store loses is the ability to correctly map the shopping habits to a particular person. (You must pay with cash, of course, to make that work.)
I very much doubt that any country that institutes a national ID card system would let citizens swap cards.
Not just offensive, but harmful. A friend of mine pointed out that recent research indicates that kids become "brand aware" at an astoundingly young age. That cannot be a good thing, at least for the kids. (It's plenty good for the brands, of course.)
I understand that the legislation probably intends to prevent the automatic skipping of commercials, but that's a pretty vague notion. What's automatic? Is using the TiVo hack that lets you advance in 30-second increments automatic? To what degree is it more automatic than fast forwarding through commercials? If I hire someone to sit there and zap commercials, is that automatic? Is it "technology"?
Seems like this lame duck congress is just trying to pass something vague to appease corporate sponsors.
Somebody ought to mod parent up, as it's way more lucid than the actual article. I consider that my reading comprehension is at least on par with that of the neighborhood schnauzer, but TFA was cryptic to say the least.
To draw a parallel, your writings suggest that you would let your neighbor be raped by a thug in the street. After all, maybe she's into that faux rape thing that you see on "your favorite port site".
Hopefully that's not the case. Hopefully you'd take some action above and beyond going home, calling 911, and waiting 15 minutes or more for the police to arrive.
Yes, of course I'd intercede if someone were in direct physical danger. I'd also take action if I saw someone about to reply to a phishing scam.
However, if I saw someone who looked like a thug walking around the neighborhood, I don't believe I'd be justified in organizing a dozen of my friends and beating the crap out of him.
This isn't vigilante justice. A web site that is up, running, and is a financial danger to grandmas everywhere MUST be taken down. A web site that is up, running, and compromised MUST be taken down.
So, who decides which web sites MUST be taken down, and which may be allowed to remain? You? Oh, I see. And this differs from vigilante justice exactly how? Let's take a look:
a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law appear inadequate); broadly : a self-appointed doer of justice
Mmm, yeah, just as I thought. It differs not a bit.
Look, Anonymous Coward, if you condone taking any web site out based on nothing more than your own opinion, you open us all up to the same sort of action from others. Someone will shut down your favorite porn site because goodness, think of the children! Infidels.org will be taken down by a DDoS from Christians Without Reason. Shortly after that, coke.com will be taken down by PepsiCo. Nothing will be safe.
Let me be clear: Encouraging a DDoS is vigilantism. There are other ways to deal with the problem. Dissatisfaction with the other options is not an excuse for descending to vigilantism.
So you're advocating a distributed denial of service attack on somebody's server?
An actual phisher would undeniably deserve such a treatment and much more, but that doesn't make it okay. But what if you make a (gasp!) mistake? You could be asking thousands of Slashdotters to participate in a DDoS attack against someone who might be completely innocent, or whose only 'crime' is that their own server was compromised and used by the real phisher.
What you're talking about is vigilante justice. It's illegal, and reasonable people don't engage in it.
If you want to do something about phishing, make a stink about it with your elected officials, government agencies, your ISP, your bank, etc. If you don't have time to do all that, just do some. The issue won't gain traction until enough people start talking about it.
As is so often the case when reading academic articles, it's hard to determine whether I agree or disagree with the author. I do, however, disagree with the notion that the concentration of economic power in cities is some sort of new or increasing phenomenon. Cities have always been, essentially, points of concentration of economic power. Concentrated economic power might even be the defining characteristic of cities.
Many years ago, access to and control of natural resources such as salt or fish or arable land or water was the reason a city might develop. Today, access to man-made resources such as communications infrastructure, various markets, or even tax policies may be more important than natural ones. But the fact remains that different localities provide different operating environments, some of which are more advantageous to a given business than others. Place, therefore, still matters.
The primary defence against phishing is critical thinking skills, not technology.
Sure, but it'd be awfully nice if the technology we use didn't automatically give away my personal information before I even get a chance to employ said critical thinking skills.
There are enough gullible people in this world that social engineering-type scams will likely always be with us. Still, you could vastly decrease the number of security problems on the net if you could wipe the twin scourges Internet Explorer and Outlook from the face of the Earth.
Doesn't the above imply that a supercomputer should really be just a single computer, and not a network or cluster of many computers ?
So what, exactly, is a "single computer"? Most supercomputers that I can think of use multiple processors. The characteristics of each machine come largely from answers to questions like "How big is each individual processor?" and "How many processors does the machine have?" and "How are the processors connected to each other?" One one end of the scale you've got small numbers of very large, powerful processors, like the IBM 3090 vector processors. The one I knew had six processors, I think, and it filled a huge room. At the other end of the spectrum, you've got the Connection Machine with 65,536 processors connected in a hypercube architecture. I never saw one, but from the picture a CM-2 looks to require only about 30 square feet.
I'm sure you'd agree that an individual Xserve is a "single computer," but the Xserve itself has two G5 processors. And if you want to break it down further, each G5 processor contains multiple execution units, so you could almost argue that even a single processor is not a "single computer." It gets even worse with multi-core CPU's.
What, really, is the difference between a CM-2 and the Virginia Tech cluster? Just the number of processors (the CM-2 had about 30x more), the power of each processor (the 64-bit G5 clearly beats the CM-2's 1-bit processors), and the connection architecture. That, and the fact that the VT machine is more modular, and doesn't look nearly as pretty.
Ahh yes. Word processing, better get a top of the line box for that.
Nah, he's probably just a Microsoft user. MS Word has so much ridiculous crap built in that you probably need a fast machine just to get it to run acceptably.
On the other hand, judging by his use of language (e.g. "in today's day in age [sic]"), he may very well be a CompUSA employee.
Sadly, this is the first/. article that I can comment on using my experience designing porcelain furnaces.
Perhaps, but it need not be the last. Indeed, I'd be interested in reading an article on designing and building a furnace or kiln, especially if it's something that I could do in my backyard if I somehow found a whole bunch of energy and time. There are a bunch of web sites that describe building small forges... a design for a high temperature kiln would be really interesting.
The RFID tags are embedded in the _cast_ made of the teeth, in the manufacturing process, not in the actual fake teeth/toothwork itself! RTFA RTFS RTFAnything! Jeez.
Read the fine summary yourself. This part, in particular:
The company is also studying the idea to put directly the tag inside the prosthesis.
I don't know about you, but I see just the mere suggestion of implanting what amount to tracking devices in dental implants as terribly damaging to our society. People have been worried for decades about dental implants being used to track them. Sometimes they think the implants might be installed by the government, other times by aliens. These thoughts are generally paranoid delusions due perhaps to mental illness or conspiracy theories and poor education. But someday soon it might actually be a legitimate concern.
Is there some reason that they can't just slap a bar coded sticker on the mold?
Maybe a way to deal with RFID is to take a page from Microsoft's playbook. We should "embrace and extend" RFID.
Embrace it. Cover yourself in so many RFID devices that a scanner simply can't read them all reliably. I have no sense of how many that might be, but it would seem technically difficult to scan several thousand devices all at once. At a nickle per, you're really only talking about a couple hundred bucks even if you have to buy the devices yourself. With stores like Walmart essentially giving them away, you might not even have to do that. Sew them into your jacket or something so that when someone scans you, they're greeted by a cacophony of garbage signals.
Extend it. It won't be long before someone figures out how to either a) make their own RFID devices or b) modify existing ones. And there will be a window of opportunity before Congress makes doing so illegal. If you can make a chip that matches another, you can appear to be someone else. Or to be in two places at once. Or to teleport across a store or a country in a heartbeat.
Now, I certainly wouldn't suggest tampering with a device in a passport, of course, but the possibilities at Walmart are pretty interesting.
Even if you just buy legit devices from existing manufacturers, RFID can and will be used to consumers' benefit. RFID chips could be hidden by investigative journalists in products returned to stores and then used to prove that the store turns around and sells the item as "new" again. Not a big deal for a book, perhaps, but interesting when the item is, say, a car or a mattress or a rump roast.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, this sounds like playing laser tag or paint ball without the realism and the workout. If you're going to bother driving over to some big warehouse to play with a bunch of other people, do you really want to sit at a computer and look at a monitor the whole time? Why sit down while "playing" when you could really be running around?
Obviously, I'm not big into gaming. I like computer games because they offer convenient entertainment... doesn't matter where I am or what time it is, a computer or game box is always ready and willing to go a few rounds. And with the advent of multi-player, net-based games, I can (sort of) interact with other people who I may or may not know even though I'm nowhere near them. This warehouse thing seems like the opposite of that to me. It's *not* convenient in that I have to drive to get there (and I'm not all that far from this first one), and it's likely not going to be open all the time. There's a reason that video game arcades all died out when powerful home computers and game machines came along.
Obviously, not all games can be translated into meatspace. I don't think SimCity, for example, could work as anything but a computer game. But I'll bet that these game warehouses will run few games other than first person shooters, and those translate more or less directly into laser tag or paint ball.
Dont be fooled into thinking that a non-contractor position is any safer than being a contractor.
The market is still brutal and there is no loyalty anymore between corporations and their employees. I would take the position in a heartbeat.
Perhaps, but it's much easier for a company to eliminate a contractor than to lay off or fire an employee, and that's one big reason that companies use contractors. Large companies, for example, often like to use contractors on limited-term projects. It gives them the flexibility to terminate a project at a moment's notice without having to find new work for the people working on it.
On the flip side, of course, is the fact that when a company changes course and ends your project, it's likely that a new project or two will start up. If you do a good job for your customer, they'll likely want you back.
Without huge problems in the study, they couldn't have come up with such disparate results.
Not at all. The study (or studies) may be perfectly valid, and the problem may be that you're trying to draw a conclusion that's so simple it doesn't reflect the truth. Or different people interpret the results of the study differently.
Taking the egg example, it's pretty clear that eggs are good for you and eggs are bad for you. They're a rich source of protein, but they're high in cholesterol and fat. Same study, same data, two different interpretations of "good."
You don't need to be "inherently distrustful" of scientific studies, particularly if they really are scientific. A better place for your distrust is in the oversimplified interpretations we get from the media, which likes to boil things down to a third grade reading level, and from people and corporations with a vested interest in the interpretation who twist data to suit their own agendas.
Cars have lots of extra metal to save passengers when that happens, and that metal is heavy.
Weight does help protect passengers, but it's not the only way to go. Deformation, as in the crumple zones you mention, is a great way to absorb energy and cushion passengers against the full force of impact. Crumple zones do exactly that. Motorcycle helmets also work through deformation. The foam liner deforms when your head smacks against it inside the helmet, absorbing energy. Also, the hard shell on many helmets is made up of layers which delaminate on impact, absorbing a tremendous amount of energy.
There's no reason that body panels and even chasses couldn't be made from lightweight composites that would deform in different ways to protect passengers.
Also, electric vehicles do tend to be heavy due to the batteries that they have to carry around. The Eliica, for example, weighs about two and a half tons.
Of course, we should all be suspicious of those pepole who say: "I have a revolutionary idea that will transform the automobile industry -- but General Motors is trying to suppress me!!" Venture capital would chase you to the ends of the earth, if you had a real revolutionary idea. The difficulty is: some people overrate the importance of their ideas, and attribute their failure to a conspiracy to ignore them.
Why? Huge industries by their very nature do not deal well with revolutionary change, and automobile manufacturing is the epiome of a huge industry. You can bet your ass that when an idea comes along that threatens to revolutionize the automobile industry, the automobile industry will do it's level best to at least slow it down.
Yes, it's true that most inventors are probably not exactly objective when it comes to stating the importance of their inventions. At the same time, inventors are often more willing to think outside the box and envision a future different from the one that most people imagine. If they're smart and competent, they should at least be listened to.
There are many conspiracy theories relating to the automobile industry. Some of them are true.
...and note that EA has a formal policy of hiring young, naive people who are willing to work long hours for low pay...
I've worked at companies like this in the past, though none that ever insisted I routinely work 80 hour weeks. Some managers feel that it's better to hire young programmers exclusively because "they're cheaper" and because "we can train them our way."
The thing is, younger programmers generally aren't cheaper, and the training never happens. Experienced programmers may draw larger salaries, but they're usually more productive because they solve problems quicker, make fewer mistakes, and don't rush into implementation before they've got a handle on requirements and design. Proper training is an expensive proposition, and in my experience the kinds of companies that try to save money by hiring less experience staff are not the kinds of companies that would ever consider spending that kind of money on training their staff.
EA and companies like them would be well advised to spend some time and money improving their development process. Companies that do software development well do not work in a constant crunch mode.
The thing that annoys me about Safeway is, the checker says your name out loud "Thank you mister fishbowl", and I really hate that.
You're damn right. What I really don't like about it is that they're trying to put on this appearance that they know you, that it's your friendly neighborhood mom and pop grocery store where everyone knows you. And that phoniness completely overshadows the genuine personal relationships with, for example, the super-helpful produce guy who doesn't know my name but does know that I like fresh salad greens and always offers to get me some nice ones from the back if the greens on display look tired. My name isn't all that difficult to pronounce, but it's unusual, and after five or so years of Safeway checkers (most of whom know my face) furrowing their brow just prior to killing my name yet again, I've pretty much had it with that stupid policy.
Whole Foods does it much better. They provide nice produce and other products, and they seem to treat their workers well enough that everyone there is generally smiling and helpful. The folks there don't necessarily know my name (though some do because they've asked me and made an effort to remember), but even if they've never seen me before they generally treat me like they value my business. For that kind of service, I'll happily pay a premium.
What Safeway management doesn't seem to get is that reading my name off the receipt just as I'm leaving isn't nearly enough to create a personal relationship, and if there is a personal relationship, there's no need to read my name off the receipt.
Oh, and Whole Foods doesn't pester me with a frequent shopper discount card. I like that.
While this may sound like cheating to some people, this may be a large benefit to hunters with disabilities.
What, exactly, is the large benefit to hunters with disabilities?
They can now "hunt" without having to deal with the non-ADA-compliant forest? I always thought that being in the forest was half the appeal of hunting in the first place.
They can once again kill something? I don't regard the thrill of victory as a valid reason for hunting.
They can once again kill something for food using a robotic weapon and, presumably, getting someone else to drag their prey home and butcher it? Might as well order up a Deluxe Pack from Omaha Steaks.
Can someone explain what this "large" benefit is?
I've been known from time to time to swap grocery store cards with friends, or else to give phony name and address information when obtaining one. The result is that I get discounts without totally giving up privacy, and the supermarket gets reliable data about a real person's short term shopping habits. The one thing the store loses is the ability to correctly map the shopping habits to a particular person. (You must pay with cash, of course, to make that work.)
I very much doubt that any country that institutes a national ID card system would let citizens swap cards.
Many commercials could be considered offensive.
Not just offensive, but harmful. A friend of mine pointed out that recent research indicates that kids become "brand aware" at an astoundingly young age. That cannot be a good thing, at least for the kids. (It's plenty good for the brands, of course.)
I understand that the legislation probably intends to prevent the automatic skipping of commercials, but that's a pretty vague notion. What's automatic? Is using the TiVo hack that lets you advance in 30-second increments automatic? To what degree is it more automatic than fast forwarding through commercials? If I hire someone to sit there and zap commercials, is that automatic? Is it "technology"?
Seems like this lame duck congress is just trying to pass something vague to appease corporate sponsors.
The best place to look for programs that read the many different medical imaging file formats is idoimaging.com.
You'll find a ton of programs and libraries for reading DICOM files there on any major platform.
Somebody ought to mod parent up, as it's way more lucid than the actual article. I consider that my reading comprehension is at least on par with that of the neighborhood schnauzer, but TFA was cryptic to say the least.
Thanks for the explanation.
To draw a parallel, your writings suggest that you would let your neighbor be raped by a thug in the street. After all, maybe she's into that faux rape thing that you see on "your favorite port site".
Hopefully that's not the case. Hopefully you'd take some action above and beyond going home, calling 911, and waiting 15 minutes or more for the police to arrive.
Yes, of course I'd intercede if someone were in direct physical danger. I'd also take action if I saw someone about to reply to a phishing scam.
However, if I saw someone who looked like a thug walking around the neighborhood, I don't believe I'd be justified in organizing a dozen of my friends and beating the crap out of him.
This isn't vigilante justice. A web site that is up, running, and is a financial danger to grandmas everywhere MUST be taken down. A web site that is up, running, and compromised MUST be taken down.
So, who decides which web sites MUST be taken down, and which may be allowed to remain? You? Oh, I see. And this differs from vigilante justice exactly how? Let's take a look:
a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law appear inadequate); broadly : a self-appointed doer of justice
Mmm, yeah, just as I thought. It differs not a bit.
Look, Anonymous Coward, if you condone taking any web site out based on nothing more than your own opinion, you open us all up to the same sort of action from others. Someone will shut down your favorite porn site because goodness, think of the children! Infidels.org will be taken down by a DDoS from Christians Without Reason. Shortly after that, coke.com will be taken down by PepsiCo. Nothing will be safe.
Let me be clear: Encouraging a DDoS is vigilantism. There are other ways to deal with the problem. Dissatisfaction with the other options is not an excuse for descending to vigilantism.
All my posts have the "sarcasm" volume turned up to high. Read as "this is a joke".
OK, not a joke. Let me restate: despite significant evidence to the contrary, I continue to think that I am clever.
Pick a phisher /spammer and: /. them
So you're advocating a distributed denial of service attack on somebody's server?
An actual phisher would undeniably deserve such a treatment and much more, but that doesn't make it okay. But what if you make a (gasp!) mistake? You could be asking thousands of Slashdotters to participate in a DDoS attack against someone who might be completely innocent, or whose only 'crime' is that their own server was compromised and used by the real phisher.
What you're talking about is vigilante justice. It's illegal, and reasonable people don't engage in it.
If you want to do something about phishing, make a stink about it with your elected officials, government agencies, your ISP, your bank, etc. If you don't have time to do all that, just do some. The issue won't gain traction until enough people start talking about it.
As is so often the case when reading academic articles, it's hard to determine whether I agree or disagree with the author. I do, however, disagree with the notion that the concentration of economic power in cities is some sort of new or increasing phenomenon. Cities have always been, essentially, points of concentration of economic power. Concentrated economic power might even be the defining characteristic of cities.
Many years ago, access to and control of natural resources such as salt or fish or arable land or water was the reason a city might develop. Today, access to man-made resources such as communications infrastructure, various markets, or even tax policies may be more important than natural ones. But the fact remains that different localities provide different operating environments, some of which are more advantageous to a given business than others. Place, therefore, still matters.
The quote at the bottom of the page goes, "Cheer Up! Things are getting worse at a slower rate."
Clearly, that quote was written before the 2004 election.
When I was younger, I used to write little batch files that would mess up my friends autoexec.bat file.
Ha ha ha, that's so incredibly funny! My, you were a precocious little one, weren't you?
Did you ever wonder why nobody seemed to want to be your friend?
The primary defence against phishing is critical thinking skills, not technology.
Sure, but it'd be awfully nice if the technology we use didn't automatically give away my personal information before I even get a chance to employ said critical thinking skills.
There are enough gullible people in this world that social engineering-type scams will likely always be with us. Still, you could vastly decrease the number of security problems on the net if you could wipe the twin scourges Internet Explorer and Outlook from the face of the Earth.
Doesn't the above imply that a supercomputer should really be just a single computer, and not a network or cluster of many computers ?
So what, exactly, is a "single computer"? Most supercomputers that I can think of use multiple processors. The characteristics of each machine come largely from answers to questions like "How big is each individual processor?" and "How many processors does the machine have?" and "How are the processors connected to each other?" One one end of the scale you've got small numbers of very large, powerful processors, like the IBM 3090 vector processors. The one I knew had six processors, I think, and it filled a huge room. At the other end of the spectrum, you've got the Connection Machine with 65,536 processors connected in a hypercube architecture. I never saw one, but from the picture a CM-2 looks to require only about 30 square feet.
I'm sure you'd agree that an individual Xserve is a "single computer," but the Xserve itself has two G5 processors. And if you want to break it down further, each G5 processor contains multiple execution units, so you could almost argue that even a single processor is not a "single computer." It gets even worse with multi-core CPU's.
What, really, is the difference between a CM-2 and the Virginia Tech cluster? Just the number of processors (the CM-2 had about 30x more), the power of each processor (the 64-bit G5 clearly beats the CM-2's 1-bit processors), and the connection architecture. That, and the fact that the VT machine is more modular, and doesn't look nearly as pretty.
Ahh yes. Word processing, better get a top of the line box for that.
Nah, he's probably just a Microsoft user. MS Word has so much ridiculous crap built in that you probably need a fast machine just to get it to run acceptably.
On the other hand, judging by his use of language (e.g. "in today's day in age [sic]"), he may very well be a CompUSA employee.
Sadly, this is the first /. article that I can comment on using my experience designing porcelain furnaces.
Perhaps, but it need not be the last. Indeed, I'd be interested in reading an article on designing and building a furnace or kiln, especially if it's something that I could do in my backyard if I somehow found a whole bunch of energy and time. There are a bunch of web sites that describe building small forges... a design for a high temperature kiln would be really interesting.
The RFID tags are embedded in the _cast_ made of the teeth, in the manufacturing process, not in the actual fake teeth/toothwork itself! RTFA RTFS RTFAnything! Jeez.
Read the fine summary yourself. This part, in particular:
The company is also studying the idea to put directly the tag inside the prosthesis.
I don't know about you, but I see just the mere suggestion of implanting what amount to tracking devices in dental implants as terribly damaging to our society. People have been worried for decades about dental implants being used to track them. Sometimes they think the implants might be installed by the government, other times by aliens. These thoughts are generally paranoid delusions due perhaps to mental illness or conspiracy theories and poor education. But someday soon it might actually be a legitimate concern.
Is there some reason that they can't just slap a bar coded sticker on the mold?
Maybe a way to deal with RFID is to take a page from Microsoft's playbook. We should "embrace and extend" RFID.
Embrace it. Cover yourself in so many RFID devices that a scanner simply can't read them all reliably. I have no sense of how many that might be, but it would seem technically difficult to scan several thousand devices all at once. At a nickle per, you're really only talking about a couple hundred bucks even if you have to buy the devices yourself. With stores like Walmart essentially giving them away, you might not even have to do that. Sew them into your jacket or something so that when someone scans you, they're greeted by a cacophony of garbage signals.
Extend it. It won't be long before someone figures out how to either a) make their own RFID devices or b) modify existing ones. And there will be a window of opportunity before Congress makes doing so illegal. If you can make a chip that matches another, you can appear to be someone else. Or to be in two places at once. Or to teleport across a store or a country in a heartbeat.
Now, I certainly wouldn't suggest tampering with a device in a passport, of course, but the possibilities at Walmart are pretty interesting.
Even if you just buy legit devices from existing manufacturers, RFID can and will be used to consumers' benefit. RFID chips could be hidden by investigative journalists in products returned to stores and then used to prove that the store turns around and sells the item as "new" again. Not a big deal for a book, perhaps, but interesting when the item is, say, a car or a mattress or a rump roast.