[For the record, I support Hydrogen so we can tell the Arabs and Environmentists to go jump in a lake and quit bugging me.]
I'd love to tell them to go jump in a lake too, but hydorgen ain't gonna do it. Hydrogen isn't an energy source, it's a delivery system. Where, pray tell, will the hydrogen come from?
Wouldn't it be interesting to see how much bio material is needed to give a person energy to pedal a bicycle for a mile. Methinks that it would be in the order of grams rather than tons.
Of course, if you were going to do it that way you'd have to take into account all the energy conversions that lead to those "grams", going back to the original plant cycle. 100g of protein, the delivery and production of which requires X amount of fossil fuel, Y amount of animal feed, Z amount of chemical fertilizer, etc. Humans, on their own, may be more efficient than cars, but there's no amount of fairy magic that will turn a person on a bike in a major US city into an equation that stands on its own. The system we live within is too big.
So it has been shown that subliminal messages work now? I thought it was proven they don't.
No, all that was actually proven was that James Vicary, the guy who claimed to have improved popcorn and coke sales with subliminal images at a movie theater, was a liar. In reality, a "subliminal image" of a bag of popcorn on a movie screen has a very minimal effect on your desire for popcorn compared to the sight and smell of actual popcorn when you walk through the lobby. The notion was that the "subliminal image" had a disproportionately greater effect on your desire for the product than the magnitude of the stimulus could account for. This notion was a crock of shit.
Now these glasses, on the other hand, aren't trying to sell you popcorn. They're passing off information our brains are already looking for, which does work to some degree. The debunking of subliminal messages never addressed whether or not we could see and register the images, only that they had no effect on our desire to buy the product.
There's a slang term that everyone who lives or works around Irvine has learned: "Irvine lights". Our brand new intersections will stop 50 cars to let one go. It can take you ten minutes to go a mile on wide, uncrowded streets if you have to pass through five traffic lights. I personally think that if the lights were coordinated properly, the perception of traffic in this area would be reduced by half.
Yeah, the Irvine lights are a nightmare. Of course, then there's places like West Los Angeles where no amount of sensors and synchronization will ever solve the problem. My boss complains all the time about it. He says "we had synchronized lights in Milwaukee in the 70's; why can't they do it here?" To which I always reply "Milwaukee in 1972 probably had a 10 by 12 block area with 10,000 cars to control. Los Angeles has a 100 by 300 block area with 1.5 million cars. It doesn't scale."
Not snake oil. They use magnetic loop detectors to trigger the lights. I've installed these same types of loops for parking garage gate controllers and we actually have one of those magnet devices for setting loop sensitivity. I'm sure there are some versions out there that are just repackaged fridge magnets, but there are some that do work.
Sounds nice, but doesn't the DMCA try stop one from doing this? A guy would have to reverse engineer the patented device in order to replicate it. Maybe I'm wrong.
You are. Those DMCA prohibitions are about "devices" designed to circumvent copyright protection methods (such as encryption). It has nothing to do with reverse engineering or duplicating a physical device.
Please tell me that my tax dollars are not being used to ship sand around the world. Especially to Iraq.
Dunno about Iraq, but the sandbags we had in Saudi/Kuwait had to be filled with imported sand. Much of the "sand" in the middle east is more like fine dust. It's nasty. It gets everywhere. It leaks right out through the mesh of MilSpec sandbags like water through a sieve. We had truckloads of sand coming in from Who Knows Where when I was there in '91.
As a mildly funny example, I'm pretty tired of the wholemeal pitta bread running out every day several hours before the white variety in our local supermarket. It's been happening for years, despite the perpetual roving hoards of clerks running up and down the isles with their little scanning machines. You'd think that better stock control would be used to help increase sales by ordering optimal amounts.
I bet you've all seen your own versions of this lack of a guiding intelligence in places, despite deployment of the latest technologies.
All I want is frozen concentrated fruit punch. There's three bins FULL of FC orange juice that nobody likes, but the single bin of fruit punch disappears as soon as they put it out. I've watched it happen. Complaints to management do nothing. They still only order 24 cans of FC fruit punch a week. If I'm lucky, I can get there within hours of the randomly selected time for restocking the bin-- which means fruit punch every couple months, if I'm lucky. Exterminate the brutes!
No need. Just find a transmitter near the camp entrance and put up a purely passive reciever. The 'official' transmitter will activate the tags. All you have to do is read their responses.
I seriously doubt they'll be doing RFID tracking right at the front gate, if for no other reason than the very one you mention.
Well to change the flash on any device, it should reqiure a certain combination of bytes to be sent over, a combination that cannot be sent by chance or a bad distro. That combination would only be known to the firmware developers at that company.
Any combination can be sent by accident, so no matter what they pick, their chance of screwage remains the same. And if they keep it secret, folks working at the hardware level can't exercise extra caution around that sequence because they don't know it! Really, secrecy is the WORST kind of security.
Better yet put an internal jumper in the device so the user has to unscrew the device in the unlikely event of updating firmware
That's a really good solution, if you ask me. And cheap to implement, too. ALL flashable chips have a write-protect pin, so it's just a matter of running a trace on the board to the back edge and putting a jumper to ground there.
pencils would be dead weight until you landed and probably still more troublesome to use and maintain than a pen.
Plus, is it better to bring pencils and have a rule stating "no pencils indoors", or simply not bring pencils at all? The pencilos themselves may be simpler, but pens are a simpler solution to the overall set of problems. People are funny, aren't they?
Closer - When using a tablet I feel as though I'm interacting directly with the machine rather than trying to command it through an intermediary.
That's pretty much just a personal feeling, there. I feel like I'm using an intermediary when I'm not using a text based interface (and I'd be right, too). I don't expect computer devices to work like pen and paper because they AREN'T pen and paper. Forcing them into that role puts them at a disadvantage.
Faster - I believe I spend less time trying to position items using a tablet than I do using a mouse, particularly when performing novel tasks.
I believe a mouse/touchpad is faster for positioning because your hand doesn't get in the way and you can SEE what your playing with. The "disconnectedness" of a non-touch-screen pointing device goes away quickly with minimal practice.
Easier to learn - Have you ever watched someone (particularly an older person) use a mouse for the first time? Have you ever watched someone (particularly an older person) use a tablet computer for the first time? The difference is remarkable. Again, I think this is because the tablet models interacting with a piece of paper, in that, the feedback occurs directy underneath the input device, rather than at a separate location.
Again, the difficulty in learning to use a mouse is so minimal that the minor advantage of familiarity doesn't outweigh the relatively major disadvantages. Most portable computer use is about text, so the lack of a keyboard for data entry is a severe limitation on its utility. Graphic designers, video editors, music makers, etc. don't generally ply their craft on the run, so tablets aren't for them. The only natural advantage they have is that you can hold it in one hand and draw on it with the other, which leaves the tablet PC with an audience consisting of those who need to draw while standing. Not a very big market.
Tablet PCs are nearly useless and no one wants them!
in other news:
Most dot com companies went bankrupt after having no sellable product
Long lines are expected at the Department of Motor Vehicles
A man lost a poker hand drawing to an inside straight
As I understand it, the ball point pen was developed for early pilots, who couldn't use a quill or fountain pen, because they didn't write well, or the ink leaked too often. I think Bic developed them, and got a nice prize from the government at that time.
Yep, it's pretty much impossible to fly over europe for 14 hours at 30,000ft in a B-17 and expect a quill pen to work. Cold as a freezer that high. The ink would freeze unless you kept the pen next to your body.
Oh well then you write with a pen inside the shuttle and when you have landed on the moon write with a pencil. Its not as if a broken pencil lead...
Pencils in spacecraft are a safety hazard for the very reason you state above. Not the lunar goats, but the broken lead. Graphite is conductive. Little bits of conductive material floating about in zero-G in a spacecraft full of electronic doodads is a catastrophic short circuit waiting to happen. Yeah, they shield the critical circuits, and yeah, it'd be better if every square centimeter of a spacecraft was checked for "graphite vulnerability", but the best solution is still to have a "no pencils" rule. Solves the problem nicely.
The number of items you can keep in your short-term memory is a very finite number. Through a great deal of mental training you can up the number to around 10 or 11, there are people that have gotten upwards of 15, but that's a lot of work.
The fact is, most people can only remember from 3 -> 5 items in short-term memory. You can test this by having someone list off numbers, start with 1 and work your way up. They should be random, and then see if you can repeat them back after 10 seconds.
You will find out through this experiment that you will tend to handle this short-coming. You'll group numbers together, much like when people say phone numbers, you'll hear certain groups of numbers flow-together. This is how they "extend" the number of items they can hold, but reducing them to bigger numbers.
I read an intereseting illustration of this memory principle once. I twent something like this:
Look at the following letter groups and try to remember them: "CI-AK-GB-IB-MF-BI". It's hard to remember 12 letters. But now try to remember the same sequence grouped slightly differently: "CIA-KGB-IBM-FBI". Easier, eh? The second set encodes as 4 pieces of information rather than 12, which our brains can handle easily.
Shut up you fucking retard. I'm sick of hearing your bullshit Dun Malg turd eater.
Then mark me a foe and score me down so you don't see me. But oh, I see, you're an AC. You're too stupid to figure out how to set up an account and/or remember to log in. Never mind.
We'll start fighting wars over water when we moved to the eco-paradise of a fully hydrogen-based economy. Hydrogen fuel cells can be configured to use hydrogen as fuel (which is extracted from water using electricity) or methane-based fuels. If the US southwest currently has hardly enough water to spare for big-flush toilets, can you imagine what will happen when we start running all of our cars with hydrogen pulled from water...?
You don't need to start with fresh water to get hydrogen. Salt water is just fine.
Telephone numbers are almost as long as numeric IP addresses. Why not get rid of DNS and key in the addresses? And issue paper "Internet books" where we could look up the IP addresses of sites we wanted to access?
If we ever move to IPv6, those addresses are going to get a LOT longer. Besides, one of the purposes of lookup tools-- be they transparent like DNS or interactive like Google-- is to get AWAY from fixed, paper directories.
There are lot of (more or less potential violent) wars over water.
You make a very important point. Heck, look at how we fight over water in the US. We don't generally have "shootin' wars" over it anymore, but there's certainly a lot of acrimony. The various states arguing over how much water they can keep behind the dams and how much they can take out for irrigation on the Colorado river, for example. The California aqueduct taking most of the water in the Owens valley area and piping it down to Los Angeles caused a fair amount of strife too. I was driving around northern Nevada once about 10 years ago and I saw signs in store windows that said "Don't let Las Vegas take our water". Access to fresh water has been a central issue to civilization for eons. Heck, the first thing those monkey dudes in the beginning of "2001: A Space Oddessey" did after seeing the monolith and "gettin' wise" was grab bludgeons and chase off those other monkey dudes from the watering hole. Just a movie, but it makes an important point.
You know, I'm getting a little tired of the ever-increasing "miracle pill" culture that has taken over much of modern medicine. We just keep getting more and more pills, all of them focused on treating narrower groups of symptoms, but rarely addressing the actual problem. For example: in college I was diagnosed as being severely depressed. About all they had then was Lithium-- which is more of a mood poisoner than a mood stabilizer-- and that helped, even if it did kind of zombify me. I eventually felt better and stopped taking the nasty crap and had no serious problems. That is, not until 10 years later when I became depressed again. This time they put me on Zoloft. It worked more subtly than Lithium, but the side effects were almost as bad. I tried that crap for a while, but it didn't feel like it was really solving the problem. SO I kept my eyes open for other treatment paths. I finally went to see a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner who examined me for five minutes and solved the problem. He told me to quit taking the Zoloft, 'cause I wasn't depressed, I was just tired. As it turns out I have a narrowed nasal cavity that causes sleep apnea and I'd never had a good night's sleep in my life. It explained everything. After some minor nasal surgery I sleep fine and I'm no longer "depressed". It just pisses me off that in 20-odd years of going to doctors for depression, they all reached straight for their Rx pad and didn't notice that I couldn't breathe through my nose!
Mind you, I'm not one of those nuts who thinks all pills are bad. They have their applications. I'm just sick of doctors looking at every problem as something to be medicated. It's understandable, what with the big PharmaCorps out there pushing their particular products, but it leads to the classic single-solution problem: when all you have is a hammer, all problems start to look like nails.
Why is it that in america its absolutely fine for people to own high-power rapid fire chain guns, but not afew lines of code?
We can have the "few lines of code". The prohibition is against the export of cryptographic stuff. You see, they reworded ITAR such that publication of source code was considered just as bad as selling actual encryption devices to [China|Russia|N.Korea]. Subsequently, the state department (or is it commerce now?) claimed that under the new definition of "export", all books containing info on strong cryptography had to be approved by them before publication. The court basically called bullshit on that line of reasoning on 1st Amd grounds.
Man, somebody mod the parent post up. If I hear one more nincompoop here prattling about how "coporations are persons", I'm gonna...well I don't know, scream or something. Corporations aren't people, nor are they given the same status as people. Rather, the government has passed laws allowing a corporations to act as if it was a person. A corp is, in effect, a person-by-proxy, or a consensual communal entity. A corp can't be thrown in jail, can't legally vote, can't be elected to public office, etc.-- something actual people can do.
Somepeople here gotta get it through their heads. Corporation != person, much in the way copyright != property. Our system is full of expedient legal fictions like these.We just have to remember that they are contrivances meant for specific ends.
Height is largely genetic and has absolutely nothing, whatsoever, to do with diet apart from extreme outlier cases (severe malnourishment)
Then explain Japan, a nation that's certainly not suffering from "severe malnourishment" where the average height is well under 5'6", but the children of Japanese parents who move to western countries grow to heights consistent with their european counterparts, which is closer to 6'0". Studies* show clearly that there is a relationship between height and intake of protein and calcium during formative years. You claim it's a myth, but cite nothing, stating everything as if it's as plain on the nose on your face. It's not. Just because it makes sense to you doesn't make it necessarily true.
* Wang, M-C. et al. Diet in midpuberty and sedentary activity in prepuberty predict peak bone mass. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2003; 77:495-503.
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I'd love to tell them to go jump in a lake too, but hydorgen ain't gonna do it. Hydrogen isn't an energy source, it's a delivery system. Where, pray tell, will the hydrogen come from?
Of course, if you were going to do it that way you'd have to take into account all the energy conversions that lead to those "grams", going back to the original plant cycle. 100g of protein, the delivery and production of which requires X amount of fossil fuel, Y amount of animal feed, Z amount of chemical fertilizer, etc. Humans, on their own, may be more efficient than cars, but there's no amount of fairy magic that will turn a person on a bike in a major US city into an equation that stands on its own. The system we live within is too big.
No, all that was actually proven was that James Vicary, the guy who claimed to have improved popcorn and coke sales with subliminal images at a movie theater, was a liar. In reality, a "subliminal image" of a bag of popcorn on a movie screen has a very minimal effect on your desire for popcorn compared to the sight and smell of actual popcorn when you walk through the lobby. The notion was that the "subliminal image" had a disproportionately greater effect on your desire for the product than the magnitude of the stimulus could account for. This notion was a crock of shit.
Now these glasses, on the other hand, aren't trying to sell you popcorn. They're passing off information our brains are already looking for, which does work to some degree. The debunking of subliminal messages never addressed whether or not we could see and register the images, only that they had no effect on our desire to buy the product.
Yeah, the Irvine lights are a nightmare. Of course, then there's places like West Los Angeles where no amount of sensors and synchronization will ever solve the problem. My boss complains all the time about it. He says "we had synchronized lights in Milwaukee in the 70's; why can't they do it here?" To which I always reply "Milwaukee in 1972 probably had a 10 by 12 block area with 10,000 cars to control. Los Angeles has a 100 by 300 block area with 1.5 million cars. It doesn't scale."
Not snake oil. They use magnetic loop detectors to trigger the lights. I've installed these same types of loops for parking garage gate controllers and we actually have one of those magnet devices for setting loop sensitivity. I'm sure there are some versions out there that are just repackaged fridge magnets, but there are some that do work.
You are. Those DMCA prohibitions are about "devices" designed to circumvent copyright protection methods (such as encryption). It has nothing to do with reverse engineering or duplicating a physical device.
Dunno about Iraq, but the sandbags we had in Saudi/Kuwait had to be filled with imported sand. Much of the "sand" in the middle east is more like fine dust. It's nasty. It gets everywhere. It leaks right out through the mesh of MilSpec sandbags like water through a sieve. We had truckloads of sand coming in from Who Knows Where when I was there in '91.
All I want is frozen concentrated fruit punch. There's three bins FULL of FC orange juice that nobody likes, but the single bin of fruit punch disappears as soon as they put it out. I've watched it happen. Complaints to management do nothing. They still only order 24 cans of FC fruit punch a week. If I'm lucky, I can get there within hours of the randomly selected time for restocking the bin-- which means fruit punch every couple months, if I'm lucky. Exterminate the brutes!
I seriously doubt they'll be doing RFID tracking right at the front gate, if for no other reason than the very one you mention.
Any combination can be sent by accident, so no matter what they pick, their chance of screwage remains the same. And if they keep it secret, folks working at the hardware level can't exercise extra caution around that sequence because they don't know it! Really, secrecy is the WORST kind of security.
Better yet put an internal jumper in the device so the user has to unscrew the device in the unlikely event of updating firmware
That's a really good solution, if you ask me. And cheap to implement, too. ALL flashable chips have a write-protect pin, so it's just a matter of running a trace on the board to the back edge and putting a jumper to ground there.
Plus, is it better to bring pencils and have a rule stating "no pencils indoors", or simply not bring pencils at all? The pencilos themselves may be simpler, but pens are a simpler solution to the overall set of problems. People are funny, aren't they?
Closer - When using a tablet I feel as though I'm interacting directly with the machine rather than trying to command it through an intermediary.
That's pretty much just a personal feeling, there. I feel like I'm using an intermediary when I'm not using a text based interface (and I'd be right, too). I don't expect computer devices to work like pen and paper because they AREN'T pen and paper. Forcing them into that role puts them at a disadvantage.
Faster - I believe I spend less time trying to position items using a tablet than I do using a mouse, particularly when performing novel tasks.
I believe a mouse/touchpad is faster for positioning because your hand doesn't get in the way and you can SEE what your playing with. The "disconnectedness" of a non-touch-screen pointing device goes away quickly with minimal practice.
Easier to learn - Have you ever watched someone (particularly an older person) use a mouse for the first time? Have you ever watched someone (particularly an older person) use a tablet computer for the first time? The difference is remarkable. Again, I think this is because the tablet models interacting with a piece of paper, in that, the feedback occurs directy underneath the input device, rather than at a separate location.
Again, the difficulty in learning to use a mouse is so minimal that the minor advantage of familiarity doesn't outweigh the relatively major disadvantages. Most portable computer use is about text, so the lack of a keyboard for data entry is a severe limitation on its utility. Graphic designers, video editors, music makers, etc. don't generally ply their craft on the run, so tablets aren't for them. The only natural advantage they have is that you can hold it in one hand and draw on it with the other, which leaves the tablet PC with an audience consisting of those who need to draw while standing. Not a very big market.
in other news:
Most dot com companies went bankrupt after having no sellable product
Long lines are expected at the Department of Motor Vehicles
A man lost a poker hand drawing to an inside straight
Yep, it's pretty much impossible to fly over europe for 14 hours at 30,000ft in a B-17 and expect a quill pen to work. Cold as a freezer that high. The ink would freeze unless you kept the pen next to your body.
Pencils in spacecraft are a safety hazard for the very reason you state above. Not the lunar goats, but the broken lead. Graphite is conductive. Little bits of conductive material floating about in zero-G in a spacecraft full of electronic doodads is a catastrophic short circuit waiting to happen. Yeah, they shield the critical circuits, and yeah, it'd be better if every square centimeter of a spacecraft was checked for "graphite vulnerability", but the best solution is still to have a "no pencils" rule. Solves the problem nicely.
I read an intereseting illustration of this memory principle once. I twent something like this:
Look at the following letter groups and try to remember them: "CI-AK-GB-IB-MF-BI". It's hard to remember 12 letters. But now try to remember the same sequence grouped slightly differently: "CIA-KGB-IBM-FBI". Easier, eh? The second set encodes as 4 pieces of information rather than 12, which our brains can handle easily.
Then mark me a foe and score me down so you don't see me. But oh, I see, you're an AC. You're too stupid to figure out how to set up an account and/or remember to log in. Never mind.
You don't need to start with fresh water to get hydrogen. Salt water is just fine.
If we ever move to IPv6, those addresses are going to get a LOT longer. Besides, one of the purposes of lookup tools-- be they transparent like DNS or interactive like Google-- is to get AWAY from fixed, paper directories.
You make a very important point. Heck, look at how we fight over water in the US. We don't generally have "shootin' wars" over it anymore, but there's certainly a lot of acrimony. The various states arguing over how much water they can keep behind the dams and how much they can take out for irrigation on the Colorado river, for example. The California aqueduct taking most of the water in the Owens valley area and piping it down to Los Angeles caused a fair amount of strife too. I was driving around northern Nevada once about 10 years ago and I saw signs in store windows that said "Don't let Las Vegas take our water". Access to fresh water has been a central issue to civilization for eons. Heck, the first thing those monkey dudes in the beginning of "2001: A Space Oddessey" did after seeing the monolith and "gettin' wise" was grab bludgeons and chase off those other monkey dudes from the watering hole. Just a movie, but it makes an important point.
Mind you, I'm not one of those nuts who thinks all pills are bad. They have their applications. I'm just sick of doctors looking at every problem as something to be medicated. It's understandable, what with the big PharmaCorps out there pushing their particular products, but it leads to the classic single-solution problem: when all you have is a hammer, all problems start to look like nails.
We can have the "few lines of code". The prohibition is against the export of cryptographic stuff. You see, they reworded ITAR such that publication of source code was considered just as bad as selling actual encryption devices to [China|Russia|N.Korea]. Subsequently, the state department (or is it commerce now?) claimed that under the new definition of "export", all books containing info on strong cryptography had to be approved by them before publication. The court basically called bullshit on that line of reasoning on 1st Amd grounds.
Somepeople here gotta get it through their heads. Corporation != person, much in the way copyright != property. Our system is full of expedient legal fictions like these.We just have to remember that they are contrivances meant for specific ends.
Dude, I'm 6'2" and a mixed German/Turkish/Mongol mutt.
Then explain Japan, a nation that's certainly not suffering from "severe malnourishment" where the average height is well under 5'6", but the children of Japanese parents who move to western countries grow to heights consistent with their european counterparts, which is closer to 6'0". Studies* show clearly that there is a relationship between height and intake of protein and calcium during formative years. You claim it's a myth, but cite nothing, stating everything as if it's as plain on the nose on your face. It's not. Just because it makes sense to you doesn't make it necessarily true.
* Wang, M-C. et al. Diet in midpuberty and sedentary activity in prepuberty predict peak bone mass. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2003; 77:495-503.