Why not put it in his foot/lower leg and put the reader under the mat? If you made the reading antenna mat-sized he'd be sure to stand on it to get in.
Then again, maybe you thought of that and I'm missing something obvious.
You don't get to choose where the vet puts the RFID tag. They always put them in the same place so animal shelter employees can actually find them if the pet is lost.
I guess that's why the article's referred to as humourous.
No, that'd only be true if the guy was using intentionally incorrect numbers to be funny. Unfortunately, the inaccuracies are due to ignorance, and have nothing to do with the intended joke. Despite what those who say "it's only a joke" would have you believe, humor isn't a free pass to just spew random shit. Humor has to be rooted in truth in order to actually be funny. Good humor is actually harder to write than simple informative text.
What's elitist about expecting a technical article on a technical subject to be technically correct?
My thoughts exactly. There do seem to be some out there who think that full credit should be awarded merely for effort, even if the results are completely lacking; or that anything done in jest is free to be wildly inaccurate in any way, failing to understand that humor (exaggerative humor especially) must be firmly rooted on a bed of truth.
I would strongly disagree. Yes, firefights still occur, but for the love of god, just look at the American casualties versus those of any country with whom we've had a military conflict since Vietnam. Hell, even Vietnam, for that matter. That tech means that, while there is infantry action, there is at most 1/100 as much as there would have been in a similar conflict before the jet fighter, nuclear-powered warship, and cruise missile came in to being
Oh, indeed! My main objection is with the all-too-common claim that "technology X will make the infantry obsolete". WW1 was the beginning of the end for infantry as the end-all be-all of warfare, but despite a number of inventions over the last century that would supposedly render the rifleman obsolete, the only truly effective way to fight men on the ground is with other men on the ground-- particularly in a non-linear guerilla conflict in (say) an urban setting. Until we get some kind of fancy futuristic "war robot" (and I'm not holding my breath on that), there'll be a need for reg'lar boot-monkeys to stomp through the streets or trudge up the valleys to draw out whoever the current enemy is.
Actually, the tech is quite right. There's a reason RAID-0 is considered an extremely bad idea... your overall failure rate goes up because you are now relying on 0 failures amongst n drives instead of just 1.
Well yeah, it's the old case of "twin engine planes have twice as many engine problems as single engine". The relevant question does indeed become "can your plane fly with one less engine?" In the specific case I was referring to, they had two load balanced web servers, an email server, a database server, and a file server (also keeping backups for email web and database). They did indeed need to do some serious hardware upgrading and consolidation. The point I was trying to make was with regard to the in-house guy's assertion that, if you replace your server hardware before it reaches the specified MTBF, you can guarantee never having a hardware problem. I forgot to mention the truly choice quote from him (in response to my questioning folding in the backup server) that really punctuates it:
"We won't need to make backups because we'll be continuously replacing the server before it fails".
I dunno..I hate the single point of failure here. 1 box goes down...every application, every database gone till another can come up.
I prefer to have separate boxes...each can be tweaked for max performance, and if one goes down...the others carry on just fine...you only have one application down...otherwise business carries on as usual.
I once had an in-house tech where I was contracting try to convince me that a single monolithic server would be better because it'd be more reliable than the several servers they were currently using. "If a server has 1 failure in 100,000 hours of operation," he explained, "then 100 servers will have a failure every 1000 hours. If everything's on one server and we buy a new one every five years, it'll never run long enough to even get close to failing." Try as I might, he never did grok how statistics are only statistical, and you can't use them as hard limits. Sure, I'm down with the notion of simplifying by putting all your eggs in one basket, but it better be a pretty damn good basket. If you have eight servers with redundancy between them and regular backups, any failure is a trivial annoyance.
But given the prevalence of higher-res lcd screens these days, what games really need is an option for "here's the native resolution I want to use; figure out what you have to adjust in order to run smoothly on it".
That's no good. The preference for polygon count vs. texture detail vs. bell vs. whistle is totally subjective. That's why they give you all those sliders.
For everything after Vietnam, the tech is just too advanced for it to be much fun. For most wars, the game would consist of lots of missions with objectives like, "secure the area around the already-bombed target. Don't worry, everyone's probably dead, we just want you to check", and, "accept the surrender of some surviving tank crewmen. We blew up all their tanks from 50 miles away, and they're waving white flags, just go put 'em in zip ties and get 'em back to the POW camp".
That's pretty much just a description of Desert Storm. You think we have 2000+ dead in Iraq sitting around waiting to clean up after the Air Force drops a 2000lb bomb on a hut? When it gets right down to brass tacks, all that modern tech really doesn't mean diddley. Fighting in the streets of Mosul is not all that different from fighting in the streets of Bastogne. It's rifles and grenades. The only real differences are that the enemy isn't wearing a uniform, and we soldiers* have body armor now so we tend to merely get maimed instead of killed.
Also, I have to wonder when the last time you saw someone using food stamps was. Nowadays it's all done with debit cards. The paper coupons were discontinued in 2004.
Let me guess:
2 years ago?
Heh. Good enough for a guess. Paper coupons are still valid, though, so you might still see old ones in use occasionally even now. They just don't issue them on paper anymore. Easier to track a debit card, and you can't buy a ten cent stick of gum and get 90 cents REAL MONEY in change (lather, rinse, repeat until you have enough change for booze/cigarettes).
Example. Have you ever looked at the people in the supermarkets that use food stamps. A lot of them, but not all, have their nails done, their hair professionaly styled, name brand clothing/atire, more makeup on their face than they really need, a brand new gas guzzling SUV every year or two, etc
Bit of a tangent, but the food stamp program starts to make more sense once you know that it's real purpose in 1939 wasn't so much "food for the poor", but "farm subsidy"-- Exhibit A: food stamps say across the top "Department of Agriculture", rather than "Health and Human Services". Nowadays they present it as wholly a "feed the hungry" program, but that's somewhat misleading. Food stamps are intended to artificially increase demand for food-grade agricultural products, thus keeping the price up. That they might also feed the hungry because the market segment that's "underspendin" on food is by definition probably hungry, well, that's icing on the cake. The threshold of poverty for getting food stamps is not nearly as stringent as programs that hand out actual money.
Also, I have to wonder when the last time you saw someone using food stamps was. Nowadays it's all done with debit cards. The paper coupons were discontinued in 2004.
I spent a few months not so long ago tracking down a cracker who had compromised a mail server for an ISP.... He was from Romania... I called the FBI and they referred me to some web page...I submitted what I could. I didn't even gt a "thank you" email.... My opinion of the dept of Homeland Security as well as the FBI sank immeasurabily as a result.
You do know that FBI is part of the DOJ, not the DHS, right? Surely you also realize that some dork in Romania compromising an ISP mail server is not a crime that merits more than an entry in a database. It's the equivalent of some teenagers throwing beer bottles on your lawn. Both are such banal occurances that there's almost no point in recording their existence, much less spending any man-hours trying to "get" the perpetrators. Face facts man, in the Federal scheme of things, your little hax0r incident is inconsequential. I deal with shit like that for client half a dozen times a year. It's just the cost of doing business. Quit bugging the FBI about it and just secure your servers like the rest of us.
Re:How much editorial oversight is enough?
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When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 2, Funny
Noone cares about a rare species of marmont so it's very likely that information about the marmont will be accurate
I hear the last significant Marmont went extinct in 1852. Preservation proved dificult after the fall of the French Monarchy.
Marmots, on the other hand, are plentiful.
As far as accuracy, even the stuff "no one cares about" has occasional minor annoying errors. They just don't get corrected. The trouble is that the general population is, on average, only of average intelligence and education. The errors I find are, in fact, more likely to be errors not so much in factual minutiae, but in pure logic, and are correctable by anyone with the ability to reason. For example, I don't have to be an air conditioning system expert to know that, in a particular Volkswagen AC system where the condenser is in the front by the radiator and the compressor is in the back on the engine, relocation of the evaporator (which sits in the refrigerant circuit between the condenser and compressor) does not make the refrigerant circuit longer or shorter.
On the otherhand, I was very unimpressed with certain issues concerning lack of professionalism in the lecture. As one example, though this is only an impression, it seemed that he felt he could just get away with wearing jeans and a Google t-shirt for the few days that he was with us because he worked at the ever prestigious Google. It seemed a bit arrogant.
Shock. Horror. The man was dressed comfortably in clean, casual clothes. That's your only complaint? Where are you from, Victorian England? Come join the rest of us in the 21st century. Arrogant? Arrogance would be whipping his thingy out and pissing on the front row. For casual dress to be arrogance it would be necessary for him to believe that a suit and tie is the only appropriate dress for such an occasion, and then intentionally not wear them as an insult. I doubt this was the case. Sounds to me more like the problem's with you and your slavish adherence to an increasingly outdated dress code.
Funny thing that the M61 is a GE product and the most famous slogan is "we bring good things to life"
Indeed. I always enjoyed the irony of their slogan and the fact that they made nuclear warhead components also. But that's just life in the big city, ya know? For all the groups advocating boycott all those years that claimed victory when GE finally pulled out of the nuclear weapons business in '92, I think it's worth noting that by '92 the nuke industry was winding down from its cold war heyday. Sounds to me like it was more a case of the projected profits finally falling to a point where the PR from dropping out entirely was worth more $.
I think the real problem is that people will buy stuff from ads that randomly pop-up on their computer. And worse, those ads are the most effective kind?? I mean, if we could get people to wise up and not purchase sketchy stuff from spam or adware, then evil companies would stop making it.
You know, lately I've come to wonder whether any of that is really all that true. Sure, given a large enough pool you will eventually find some number of people who will respond to spam. But is it really profitable? Are there really enough idiots out there willing to buy "v1Agra"? Who is it that claims the returns are large enough to be worthwhile? Spammers, for the most part, who are trying to sell their services. I suspect that the only people actually profiting from spam are the spammers themselves, and that advertisers are just pouring money down the rathole. Sure the advertisers might only try for a month or two before realizing that it isn't working, but it doesn't take but a few fresh suckers a month to keep the ball rolling. This being the case, it doesn't matter if we can convince everyone to ignore spam, so long as the spammers can still convince shady advertisers that it works.
Capturing the printscreen output is subject to output colour adjustments and the quality of your decoder. Beyond that, however, it's perfect digital output in full resolution.
Which you'd have to re-encode with something lossy to make it manageable.
Who says? Maybe it'll stay as one multi-gigbyte file passed around via P2P. And for that matter, what's to keep one from compressing it using the same thing they use for HD-DVD/Blu-Ray? It's not like the original was compressed with a magic codec that vastly surpasses what we "mundanes" have access to.
I believe the intention is to elminate the ability to transfer -any- license, even the one you have when you agree to MS's EULA. Thereby increasing consumption of new OS licenses.
This is the logical step forward in a society that fully embraces capitalism. Microsoft/RIAA corporations own the content and allows you to use it temporarily and that's it.
It's really a stretch to call this "capitalism" at work. True capitalists want less government regulation. Copyright exists only because of government regulation. The courts tightening the screws and giving corps even more power by virtue of copyright is an increase in regulation. I think you need to expand your horizons beyond the dominant economic memes of the 20th century (capitalism vs socialism vs communism) and discover that there are many economic theories, and that this ruling has more in common with Mercantilism than anything else.
How? Does the image you're capturing somehow become less than what's on the screen?
It just wouldn't be worth it. Firstly, it would probably take a week.
24fps movie, even capping only 1fps will take a mere 48hrs. I'm sure you are aware of the myriad of little programs you can find that will "push the printscreen button" automatically. Did you really think anyone was suggesting you do it by hand?
Secondly, Sound synchronization would prove to be hard to say the least
The frames are assembled at 24 fps. Sound is recorded realtime separately. Synchronization is as easy as finding a scene with a sharp, percussive noise (e.g. slamming door) and lining up the sound with the picture. Now the whole movie is in sync. That's how they do it in real life editing film.
and finally, NOONE would want to do this. The 'time-spent: money-gained ratio' would be horrible.
You did think they were suggesting someone might do this by hand! HAHAHAHAHA!
But how long would it take to create a program that does it and syncs the audio as well?
Syncing audio is trivial. You know that clapper thing they use in filming that has the scene, shot, and movie name? The actual clapper bit is traditionally used to sync the audio with the picture (though digital filming has largely rendered the clapper obsolete). For a finished movie where they've (obviously) edited out the lead-in where some PA snaps the clapper, you need only find a scene where someone is slamming a door, hitting a table, or otherwise making a real (not foleyed in, like a gunshot) sharp, percussive noise. Line up the noise with the motion and the whole movie will be in sync.
Monopoly laws exist so that they may be applied when consumers have no other choice.
Incorrect. Anti-trust law only requires that you have no significant competition to be considered a "de facto monopoly". When Standard Oil was broken up it only controlled 64% of the US refining capacity. The problem was that the other 36% was spread out over a hundred or so competitors.
I'm sure you're aware that according to law, the police, etc. are NOT sworn to protect you from harm and in most cases you can't sue them if a loved one is killed or injured due to negligence, action or inaction on their part. It's true. "To Protect and Serve" is just an illusion. Most states even have statutes that clearly illustrate this attitude.
Well, yeah, I think that was exactly his point. When you get right down to it, they can't really do squat and we're on our own. Their job is basically to make it more difficult for people to do bad things too many times, and to hose the blood off the sidewalk when they do it anyway.
Most biometric spoofing problems can be addressed by putting the reader in a public space or under the eye of a security guard who can say "excuse me, sir, why are you holding a photograph up to the iris reader?".
So everyone has to go down to the central eye scanner at the guard station when they want to log into their desktop? Yeah, that'd work.
Enron used offshore shell corporations to hide its debts via shady accounting. The half-assed energy market deregulation was just one of many places they were playing three-card monte. This is less an example of what happens in a free market than it is an example of what happens when you are allowed to bribe the government to look the other way when in an normally regulated situation. It was more an Arthur Andersen LLP scandal than anything else. See also Worldcom.
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"We won't need to make backups because we'll be continuously replacing the server before it fails".
Check out America's Army for a modern-day FPS.
* I wasn't in Iraq, but I spent nearly 2 years in Afghanistan, and let me tell you, they weren't waving any white flags there.
Also, I have to wonder when the last time you saw someone using food stamps was. Nowadays it's all done with debit cards. The paper coupons were discontinued in 2004.
Marmots, on the other hand, are plentiful.
As far as accuracy, even the stuff "no one cares about" has occasional minor annoying errors. They just don't get corrected. The trouble is that the general population is, on average, only of average intelligence and education. The errors I find are, in fact, more likely to be errors not so much in factual minutiae, but in pure logic, and are correctable by anyone with the ability to reason. For example, I don't have to be an air conditioning system expert to know that, in a particular Volkswagen AC system where the condenser is in the front by the radiator and the compressor is in the back on the engine, relocation of the evaporator (which sits in the refrigerant circuit between the condenser and compressor) does not make the refrigerant circuit longer or shorter.
So everyone has to go down to the central eye scanner at the guard station when they want to log into their desktop? Yeah, that'd work.
Enron used offshore shell corporations to hide its debts via shady accounting. The half-assed energy market deregulation was just one of many places they were playing three-card monte. This is less an example of what happens in a free market than it is an example of what happens when you are allowed to bribe the government to look the other way when in an normally regulated situation. It was more an Arthur Andersen LLP scandal than anything else. See also Worldcom.