It's called a Moped (your's is just a high-tech, buzzword moped), and the first accident involving an 18-wheeler will crush you like a fly. Seriously, I want a LOT OF STEEL around me when I'm whizzing down the highway at 75 mph. I don't see 18-wheelers getting smaller or going away.
I agree with you. This isn't about banning these toys or anything, it's just a list of toys that parents may want to be wary of.
IMO, watching/playing violence/porno/horror has a desensitizing effect on anybody, regardless of their age. As you get older, sure you can compartmentalize things better than a six-year-old, but for anyone to think that they can watch/participate-in violence or porno and be completely uneffected by it is foolhardy.
Sure there is. We have some customized software, written by an outside source, running in a lab. When they need to send an update, they email it to us. Sure, there are other ways to do it, but saying there isn't any compelling reason for people to distribute software via email attachments is sort of like saying there isn't any compelling reason for people to send email at all. I mean, after all, there are other ways to communicate!
Honestly, that's a little lame. Guns, I'm sure, were designed with food in mind as much as keeping bandits away. Yes, a lot of guns get used for killing people, but that doesn't make guns bad, just the people using them. Baseball bats don't kill people, people kill people. Ban baseball!!!
Yeah, I'd say the only way humans would ever live on Mars is in domes with suits for going outside. Now, why would we do this (go live on Mars)? Because we humans are an adventurous bunch and we like to do things like that. Not all of us, of course. Then again, I could be wrong... we don't have domed colonies on Antarctica or the moon yet, and they're a lot closer than Mars. Oh well.
He didn't say the pads were 8' deep. He said they were 8ft landing pads, meaning diameter. Kind of like big snow shoes. They expected a lot more dust than they found. The reasoning was that they thought they knew how much dust settles on the moon each year and they thought they knew how long the moon has been there, so they did some math and figured out that there should be a lot of dust, hence the big pads so the lander would settle onto the top of the dust rather than sinking. Turns out that the dust was only a 1/2 inch thick or so, meaning either that it doesn't accumulate as fast as they thought, or that the moon is on the order of only several thousand years old. Bottom line is that we discovered something different than we expected, which, I'm sure, has caused people to rethink a few things about the moon.
The Newsforge article states that Novell dropped plans for DOS, which is funny, 'cause I have a copy of Novell DOS 7. Features above MS-DOS 6.22 included built-in Novell Netware support (I tried it once... plug in an NE2000 compatible NIC, turn on one setting in the configuration tool, reboot, log in) and multitasking including multiple consoles (not just task-switching). My memory is failing to come up with anything else. I tried the networking part and it worked great. IIRC, the multitasking stuff could even multi-task Win3.1. Not that my 40-Mhz 386 back then could do that very well. Just for the record, I used DR-DOS 6 before Novell DOS 7. DR-DOS 6 was also light-years ahead of MS-DOS 6. (Novell bought DR-DOS, I think.)
There are plenty of ways to make a VTOL aircar that could take off and land in a space the size of your garage. Just imagine garage doors on the top, not the front. Obviously, for so many reasons, everybody can't be flying 40-year old Cessena 172's around. Aircars will eventually be a reality. There's simply too much money to be made for someone not to perfect the idea.
Perhaps we should just make the aircars a little smarter. I think those little things called computers could easily calculate the distance from point A to point B and tell the passenger (as everyone would be passengers, not drivers) that there isn't enough gas in the tank to get to that destination. The computer could recommend getting the spare gas can out of the garage or suggest a layover at a gas station. Also, I expect that a radar system or some other automated means could prevent aircars from coliding. As far as the bad brakes, bad engines, etc., the computer could monitor such things and simply refuse to fly if things don't look safe. Obviously not failsafe, but anyway. Probably require routine mandantory aircar inspections, too.
I think some of these things would have to be done, because you are correct that if we put everybody up in Cessna 172's, we'd be in a mess.
obviously you live in or near a city. Rail, taxies, car rentals, bicycle zones all work great in high concentrations of people, but most of the land-mass of the USA and probably half the population don't live in highly populated areas. Trains and subways everywhere work great in Tokyo, Chicago, NY, London, etc., but not so well in the middle of Kansas, Texas or Tennessee. What would be the cost of putting train stops within walking distance of everyone in New York or New Jersey vs putting train stops withing walking distance of everyone in Kansas? This is why we will always have personal transportation in the USA, at least. Now, safe personal (automated?) air travel? That'd be great! I could make it to work in 5 minutes instead of the 30 minutes that it currently takes me to wind down the mountain and get to work. I certainly won't be waiting for the train to take me to work in my lifetime.
Computers in schools don't help teach reading, writing, math, science, history, etc, which is what is lacking in nearly any school these days. I've never seen computers in schools being used for anything more than babysitters. Not that computers are "bad" for schools, but they're certainly not going to do any good until the teachers AND students are motivated.
As far as this being any kind of "penalty" to Microsoft, what a joke! Microsoft gets to write off as donations (probably) a bunch of used equipment. None of this $1.1B deal comes out of Bill's bank account. He just gets to free up some warehouse space or avoid paying to have the old junk hauled off or something. Hardly any kind of penalty.
Please don't equate fundamental Islam with fundamental Christianity. Christian fundamentalists believe in the fundamentals of Christianity, and Islamic fundamentalists believe in the fundamentals of Islam, but that in no way makes them equal. For instance, Christians are compelled to witness to others, but the choice to follow Christ is left to the unbeliever. Muslims are compelled to witness, too, and kill the unbeliever if they don't convert. Obviously, there are a great many other differences. Equating fundamental Christians to fundamental Muslims only shows your ignorance of the issue.
Also, and this has nothing to do with your post, it really bothers me when people, who by their actions show that they know nothing of what it is to be a Christian, do terrible things "in the name of God" or somesuch. For instance, people who bomb abortion clinics. There is no way that they can claim any Biblical basis for their actions. The Christian community as a whole does not support their actions, and yet it reflects on us like "see what those fundamentalist Christians do". As a Christian, I am appalled by abortion, but I am just as appalled by killing abortion doctors. Anyway, that was completely off topic, but I hope it makes my point.
Anyway, other than the unnecessary and ignorant slam of Christians, I agreed with your post.
God bless you. (see Romans 12:14 sometime.)
Terrorism doesn't have to hit a "big target". If this was terrorism, it was most likely sabotage, which would seem possible, given accounts of smoke trailing from the engine prior to the apparent explosion. Someone on the ground could have tampered with it to pretty much guarantee that it would fall out of the sky, but not know when or where. The other possible terrorism angle is a missle, like a stinger. It would seem likely that someone would have noticed this. I've actually heard an "eye-witness report" of someone who saw something sticking out of a truck. How's that for rumor material? Anyway, the point is that terrorism doesn't have to be precise or hit big targets, like it was on 9/11, in order to be effective.
This is obviously a tragic accident? I'm sorry, but I didn't think the investigation was over yet. Yes, hopefully this turns out to be some type of mechanical failure or something, but until then, statements like "this is obviously a tragic accident" are just as erroneous and speculative as "this was obviously taken down by a stinger missile". Even if the investigation concludes that it was an "accident", that's not completely satisfactory. A good sabotage would look like an accident.
I remember reading about this a while back. (couple of years ago?) Back then they were just talking about how this might be possible. Neat to see it in the testing stages. The linked article doesn't say what kind of cells are enclosed in the nano-armor, but when I read about this before, they were planning to use pig insulin cells. It really amazes me that we can manufacture things on this scale. I know it happens everyday with microchips, but to move to the realm of physical structures, making little cages to hold living cells... that's amazing.
Are we presuming that there will be action most of the time in all 1000+ cameras? If not, then why store the images where there is no action? I'm doing a similar digital surveillance thing, albeit much smaller. (7 cameras, 1 fps, only at night [when there's not much action anyway]) My images all go to jpeg's and I wrote a little C program to throw away all the "similar" images. My algorithm is somewhat conveluded, but more-or-less only keeps the images if they differ by more than a certain amount. I'm sure video compression schemes like mpeg would pretty much take care of this if you're storing to video format. Storing to jpegs has the benefit of being able to easily pick out any time stamp, but I can't watch them like a video.
A simpler solution might be to put a motion detector on each camera and have them only record when there is motion. Using your 100:1 image compression, you estimate 8 terabytes/day. I would expect you could get (warning: pulled from thin air) 1/10th of that by ignoring anything that isn't moving.
But then you have a quandry: was there really no motion at camera #469 at 12:30am, or was something just broken?
God is just. God cannot be un-just, just like me, being white, cannot be un-white (unless I go play in the mud, but that's not the same, is it). God created mankind with a freewill, because he wants us to choose him, not to simply be hardwired so. Freewill gives the possibility that we will choose to not do the right thing, thus evil is a possibility. The penalty of breaking any law of God is death. Nothing quite so nice a black-and-white choices, is there? However, there can be a substitution for your death. Beginning in the garden of Eden, God killed a animal and brought the skin to Adam and Eve to cover their nakedness. The sacrificial system of ancient Israel was set up to cover the people's sins. The Judaic laws were to show that people could not on their own be "good enough", thus needing a sacrifice in place of their own death. This, of course, was all done to show that mankind needed something more. God came to earth in physical form, and offered himself as the very sacrifice required. Remember, this sacrifice isn't required just because God made some rule that says so. The sacrifice is required because God is who he is. In fact, that is the very first way that God describes himself to Moses when asking Moses to go talk to the Pharoh of Egypt. God says to tell the Israelites, "I am who I am". God is just, so justice is required. Christ dying for our sins isn't a glaring inconsistency, it is the ultimate of consistency. God can't just wave his hand and make justice disappear. Justice is part-and-parcel of who God is.
If I understand Mormonism correctly, you are right. I think that they believe that they will each go on to become "gods" of their own worlds (universes?) some day.
Only FIVE TIMES more expensive than a real cat? Man, I should have let that female cat I had keep having kittens! At $306 for each REAL cat, I'd be rich by now!
Really, $1530 for a fake cat? I thought the Japanese economy has been in recession for more than a decade... Maybe now we know why... they're spending all their money on artificial pets rather than, say, anything important.
In Tennessee, at least, there is a state-run no call list. You can sign up over the web or the phone. It's ILLEGAL for any business to call you unless you have recently done business with them. In other words, Sprint could legally call me, since I use their long distance, but AT&T can't.
The only thing I miss is getting to pick on the poor telemarketers. Oh well.
Believe it or not, there are some people in this world who still prefer to watch their movies on their 35" TV's, not their 3.5" PDAs, so I'm not sure why one would need to store movies on their handheld computer. And I doubt your iPaq has the several gigabyte capacity of a DVD, either.
How many things does the average human do at one time? Okay, walking AND chewing gum, that's two. I can't imagine why PalmOS needs multitasking. On WinCE, each app has to "load" into memory (from where? other memory?). Too many apps "open" and it'll crash. Why? PalmOS runs them from where they are, and each app is left in it's current state when you switch to something else. What's the problem here? I'm not planning to run SETI in the background.
"tacked-on as an afterthought" and "handle wireless network protocols natively". By that logic, memory over 640k is an "afterthought" for Windows. WinCE is forked from Windows, which is descended from DOS, so I don't see how wireless protocols are any more native here.
I hope that Palm and Handspring continue to develop along the lines that made them popular. There are some things that a PDA needs to do well, and all the flashy stuff is, IMO, just for impressing your friends.
Maybe, just maybe, he's using bottled oxygen for a couple of reasons. First, if you're getting hydrogen from electrolysis, you've got oxygen, too. You just have to collect it. Now, given the choice of burning your hydrogen in a pure oxygen environment, or an 80% nitrogen environment, which do you think would get more power? Sure, oxygen is freely available in the air, but it's also mostly freely available from the electrolysis, and at considerably better concentration.
I also read an article somewhere (sorry, don't remember where) that someone had devised a way to turn used tires back into crude oil. Has anybody else heard of this?
Slashdot Mirror
It's called a Moped (your's is just a high-tech, buzzword moped), and the first accident involving an 18-wheeler will crush you like a fly. Seriously, I want a LOT OF STEEL around me when I'm whizzing down the highway at 75 mph. I don't see 18-wheelers getting smaller or going away.
I agree with you. This isn't about banning these toys or anything, it's just a list of toys that parents may want to be wary of.
IMO, watching/playing violence/porno/horror has a desensitizing effect on anybody, regardless of their age. As you get older, sure you can compartmentalize things better than a six-year-old, but for anyone to think that they can watch/participate-in violence or porno and be completely uneffected by it is foolhardy.
Sure there is. We have some customized software, written by an outside source, running in a lab. When they need to send an update, they email it to us. Sure, there are other ways to do it, but saying there isn't any compelling reason for people to distribute software via email attachments is sort of like saying there isn't any compelling reason for people to send email at all. I mean, after all, there are other ways to communicate!
Honestly, that's a little lame. Guns, I'm sure, were designed with food in mind as much as keeping bandits away. Yes, a lot of guns get used for killing people, but that doesn't make guns bad, just the people using them. Baseball bats don't kill people, people kill people. Ban baseball!!!
Yeah, I'd say the only way humans would ever live on Mars is in domes with suits for going outside. Now, why would we do this (go live on Mars)? Because we humans are an adventurous bunch and we like to do things like that. Not all of us, of course. Then again, I could be wrong... we don't have domed colonies on Antarctica or the moon yet, and they're a lot closer than Mars. Oh well.
No, if this was the first draft of magic lantern, I'm sure it would have been mgclntrn.scr! :)
He didn't say the pads were 8' deep. He said they were 8ft landing pads, meaning diameter. Kind of like big snow shoes. They expected a lot more dust than they found. The reasoning was that they thought they knew how much dust settles on the moon each year and they thought they knew how long the moon has been there, so they did some math and figured out that there should be a lot of dust, hence the big pads so the lander would settle onto the top of the dust rather than sinking. Turns out that the dust was only a 1/2 inch thick or so, meaning either that it doesn't accumulate as fast as they thought, or that the moon is on the order of only several thousand years old. Bottom line is that we discovered something different than we expected, which, I'm sure, has caused people to rethink a few things about the moon.
The Newsforge article states that Novell dropped plans for DOS, which is funny, 'cause I have a copy of Novell DOS 7. Features above MS-DOS 6.22 included built-in Novell Netware support (I tried it once... plug in an NE2000 compatible NIC, turn on one setting in the configuration tool, reboot, log in) and multitasking including multiple consoles (not just task-switching). My memory is failing to come up with anything else. I tried the networking part and it worked great. IIRC, the multitasking stuff could even multi-task Win3.1. Not that my 40-Mhz 386 back then could do that very well. Just for the record, I used DR-DOS 6 before Novell DOS 7. DR-DOS 6 was also light-years ahead of MS-DOS 6. (Novell bought DR-DOS, I think.)
There are plenty of ways to make a VTOL aircar that could take off and land in a space the size of your garage. Just imagine garage doors on the top, not the front. Obviously, for so many reasons, everybody can't be flying 40-year old Cessena 172's around. Aircars will eventually be a reality. There's simply too much money to be made for someone not to perfect the idea.
Toys for the rich? So were automobiles.
Perhaps we should just make the aircars a little smarter. I think those little things called computers could easily calculate the distance from point A to point B and tell the passenger (as everyone would be passengers, not drivers) that there isn't enough gas in the tank to get to that destination. The computer could recommend getting the spare gas can out of the garage or suggest a layover at a gas station. Also, I expect that a radar system or some other automated means could prevent aircars from coliding. As far as the bad brakes, bad engines, etc., the computer could monitor such things and simply refuse to fly if things don't look safe. Obviously not failsafe, but anyway. Probably require routine mandantory aircar inspections, too.
I think some of these things would have to be done, because you are correct that if we put everybody up in Cessna 172's, we'd be in a mess.
obviously you live in or near a city. Rail, taxies, car rentals, bicycle zones all work great in high concentrations of people, but most of the land-mass of the USA and probably half the population don't live in highly populated areas. Trains and subways everywhere work great in Tokyo, Chicago, NY, London, etc., but not so well in the middle of Kansas, Texas or Tennessee. What would be the cost of putting train stops within walking distance of everyone in New York or New Jersey vs putting train stops withing walking distance of everyone in Kansas? This is why we will always have personal transportation in the USA, at least. Now, safe personal (automated?) air travel? That'd be great! I could make it to work in 5 minutes instead of the 30 minutes that it currently takes me to wind down the mountain and get to work. I certainly won't be waiting for the train to take me to work in my lifetime.
right-click on the tab, select "close tab". This will close the tab without switching to it, albeit with two clicks, not one.
Computers in schools don't help teach reading, writing, math, science, history, etc, which is what is lacking in nearly any school these days. I've never seen computers in schools being used for anything more than babysitters. Not that computers are "bad" for schools, but they're certainly not going to do any good until the teachers AND students are motivated.
As far as this being any kind of "penalty" to Microsoft, what a joke! Microsoft gets to write off as donations (probably) a bunch of used equipment. None of this $1.1B deal comes out of Bill's bank account. He just gets to free up some warehouse space or avoid paying to have the old junk hauled off or something. Hardly any kind of penalty.
Funny world we live in.
Please don't equate fundamental Islam with fundamental Christianity. Christian fundamentalists believe in the fundamentals of Christianity, and Islamic fundamentalists believe in the fundamentals of Islam, but that in no way makes them equal. For instance, Christians are compelled to witness to others, but the choice to follow Christ is left to the unbeliever. Muslims are compelled to witness, too, and kill the unbeliever if they don't convert. Obviously, there are a great many other differences. Equating fundamental Christians to fundamental Muslims only shows your ignorance of the issue.
Also, and this has nothing to do with your post, it really bothers me when people, who by their actions show that they know nothing of what it is to be a Christian, do terrible things "in the name of God" or somesuch. For instance, people who bomb abortion clinics. There is no way that they can claim any Biblical basis for their actions. The Christian community as a whole does not support their actions, and yet it reflects on us like "see what those fundamentalist Christians do". As a Christian, I am appalled by abortion, but I am just as appalled by killing abortion doctors. Anyway, that was completely off topic, but I hope it makes my point.
Anyway, other than the unnecessary and ignorant slam of Christians, I agreed with your post.
God bless you. (see Romans 12:14 sometime.)
Terrorism doesn't have to hit a "big target". If this was terrorism, it was most likely sabotage, which would seem possible, given accounts of smoke trailing from the engine prior to the apparent explosion. Someone on the ground could have tampered with it to pretty much guarantee that it would fall out of the sky, but not know when or where. The other possible terrorism angle is a missle, like a stinger. It would seem likely that someone would have noticed this. I've actually heard an "eye-witness report" of someone who saw something sticking out of a truck. How's that for rumor material? Anyway, the point is that terrorism doesn't have to be precise or hit big targets, like it was on 9/11, in order to be effective.
This is obviously a tragic accident? I'm sorry, but I didn't think the investigation was over yet. Yes, hopefully this turns out to be some type of mechanical failure or something, but until then, statements like "this is obviously a tragic accident" are just as erroneous and speculative as "this was obviously taken down by a stinger missile". Even if the investigation concludes that it was an "accident", that's not completely satisfactory. A good sabotage would look like an accident.
I remember reading about this a while back. (couple of years ago?) Back then they were just talking about how this might be possible. Neat to see it in the testing stages. The linked article doesn't say what kind of cells are enclosed in the nano-armor, but when I read about this before, they were planning to use pig insulin cells. It really amazes me that we can manufacture things on this scale. I know it happens everyday with microchips, but to move to the realm of physical structures, making little cages to hold living cells... that's amazing.
Are we presuming that there will be action most of the time in all 1000+ cameras? If not, then why store the images where there is no action? I'm doing a similar digital surveillance thing, albeit much smaller. (7 cameras, 1 fps, only at night [when there's not much action anyway]) My images all go to jpeg's and I wrote a little C program to throw away all the "similar" images. My algorithm is somewhat conveluded, but more-or-less only keeps the images if they differ by more than a certain amount. I'm sure video compression schemes like mpeg would pretty much take care of this if you're storing to video format. Storing to jpegs has the benefit of being able to easily pick out any time stamp, but I can't watch them like a video.
A simpler solution might be to put a motion detector on each camera and have them only record when there is motion. Using your 100:1 image compression, you estimate 8 terabytes/day. I would expect you could get (warning: pulled from thin air) 1/10th of that by ignoring anything that isn't moving.
But then you have a quandry: was there really no motion at camera #469 at 12:30am, or was something just broken?
God is just. God cannot be un-just, just like me, being white, cannot be un-white (unless I go play in the mud, but that's not the same, is it). God created mankind with a freewill, because he wants us to choose him, not to simply be hardwired so. Freewill gives the possibility that we will choose to not do the right thing, thus evil is a possibility. The penalty of breaking any law of God is death. Nothing quite so nice a black-and-white choices, is there? However, there can be a substitution for your death. Beginning in the garden of Eden, God killed a animal and brought the skin to Adam and Eve to cover their nakedness. The sacrificial system of ancient Israel was set up to cover the people's sins. The Judaic laws were to show that people could not on their own be "good enough", thus needing a sacrifice in place of their own death. This, of course, was all done to show that mankind needed something more. God came to earth in physical form, and offered himself as the very sacrifice required. Remember, this sacrifice isn't required just because God made some rule that says so. The sacrifice is required because God is who he is. In fact, that is the very first way that God describes himself to Moses when asking Moses to go talk to the Pharoh of Egypt. God says to tell the Israelites, "I am who I am". God is just, so justice is required. Christ dying for our sins isn't a glaring inconsistency, it is the ultimate of consistency. God can't just wave his hand and make justice disappear. Justice is part-and-parcel of who God is.
If I understand Mormonism correctly, you are right. I think that they believe that they will each go on to become "gods" of their own worlds (universes?) some day.
Only FIVE TIMES more expensive than a real cat? Man, I should have let that female cat I had keep having kittens! At $306 for each REAL cat, I'd be rich by now!
Really, $1530 for a fake cat? I thought the Japanese economy has been in recession for more than a decade... Maybe now we know why... they're spending all their money on artificial pets rather than, say, anything important.
The only thing I miss is getting to pick on the poor telemarketers. Oh well.
Believe it or not, there are some people in this world who still prefer to watch their movies on their 35" TV's, not their 3.5" PDAs, so I'm not sure why one would need to store movies on their handheld computer. And I doubt your iPaq has the several gigabyte capacity of a DVD, either.
How many things does the average human do at one time? Okay, walking AND chewing gum, that's two. I can't imagine why PalmOS needs multitasking. On WinCE, each app has to "load" into memory (from where? other memory?). Too many apps "open" and it'll crash. Why? PalmOS runs them from where they are, and each app is left in it's current state when you switch to something else. What's the problem here? I'm not planning to run SETI in the background.
"tacked-on as an afterthought" and "handle wireless network protocols natively". By that logic, memory over 640k is an "afterthought" for Windows. WinCE is forked from Windows, which is descended from DOS, so I don't see how wireless protocols are any more native here.
I hope that Palm and Handspring continue to develop along the lines that made them popular. There are some things that a PDA needs to do well, and all the flashy stuff is, IMO, just for impressing your friends.
Maybe, just maybe, he's using bottled oxygen for a couple of reasons. First, if you're getting hydrogen from electrolysis, you've got oxygen, too. You just have to collect it. Now, given the choice of burning your hydrogen in a pure oxygen environment, or an 80% nitrogen environment, which do you think would get more power? Sure, oxygen is freely available in the air, but it's also mostly freely available from the electrolysis, and at considerably better concentration.
Doesn't sound like a quack to me.
I also read an article somewhere (sorry, don't remember where) that someone had devised a way to turn used tires back into crude oil. Has anybody else heard of this?