Since the term "organ" means "tool". Literally. Also, since Wikipedia defines it as "a collection of tissues joined in structural unit to serve a common function." So, yes, an arm or a leg is an organ, most definitely, just not the kind of organ most people think of as "organs."
This is my impression as well. Even if you don't try to cheat, the Wii controller just isn't all that much of an exercise (at most, it involves moving your arms around a bit), while even relatively sedentary Kinect games require you to be at least standing and usually involves moving your whole body, if only to make sure the sensor actually detects the motion. And the more active Kinect games are a huge workout.
Of course, I'll take my keyboard and mouse or joystick (or hell, even a controller in a few games) over either one when it comes to actually playing a game, which is supposed to be enjoyable and requires precision if it is any kind of challenging. Kinect and Wii just don't provide that.
Make it magnetic, maybe? The device fails, you stick a moderately powerful magnet near its location, it's attracted to the magnet and doesn't shift to the lungs or brains. Or perhaps you make it small enough that it won't even get stuck at all (I'm not a doctor or biologist, so I'm not sure how small it would have to be and/or if that is at all practical). Worst case scenario, you design it so it will block bloodflow and not move freely if it fails: a few minutes of a lack of bloodflow to most parts of the body is not very dangerous (basically, so long as it isn't the lungs, heart, or brain). Or you could make it have a latching mechanism (imagine some kind of spikes that shoot out and grab the insides of the veins if it loses power) that triggers automatically if it fails. It won't block bloodflow, and it won't move (again, not sure if practical, just an idea).
The story is only about a method for powering the device, there are a ton of practical problems to solve before you make such a device in actuality.
Given that the device will be capable of self-propulsion with the external power source, it should be relatively easy to guide the unit to a specific location for easy extraction. Or have it burrow into the body in a location such that it doesn't move (if the device needs to be reused later on or simply cannot be removed), as creepy as that thought is. I imagine approval for medical usage will require a demonstration of such capability prior to use, as well as a demonstration that the device won't accidentally cause a stroke or other damage during operation. You could possibly even make the device degradable, so it would harmlessly disintegrate into trace (non-dangerous) elements in the bloodstream after a few hours.
Can anybody name a single good thing that came out of all this enormous data collection effort? What is better for the consumer today than it was twenty years ago when there was no internet and no tracking?
Gigabytes of free online data storage, Youtube, Hulu, Slashdot, Google Maps (and similar), and Google itself (by extension also Firefox). Oh and most of the Internet. Besides that, not much.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google dropped NPAPI support and left every Chromium user in the same situation.
If they do that (and I'm not sure why they would, but I suppose it is possible) nothing stops people from forking Chromium and keeping NPAPI support. A few forks already exist of it, like SRWare Iron. You might be right about the licensing issues, though. Not that that licensing issues would stop people from doing it, it would just stop official support.
They track everyone by IP, signed in or not, and there is nothing you can do to change that (it's just part of Google's business model: the price of free services). However, without a sign-in they cannot point to an individual, only an IP, and IPs change and are often shared.
Use two separate browsers. You might even be able to find an extension for Firefox that allows you to sign into Youtube but doesn't have the other tabs be signed in when visiting Google (at least, I think this is possible). Privacy mode I know works like that in Opera ( so I could sign in under a private tab in Youtube and use Google under a normal tab and wouldn't be signed in), not tried it under Firefox.
TFA is incredibly light on details, but it seems the main reason you won't be able to use Flash in Firefox is that Firefox won't have the Pepper API. Chromium will. So even if you can't download it directly from Adobe, it should be trivially easy to make it work with Chromium (should be plug-and-play), so people should be able to repackage it and download it using the package-manager of choice. Whether this will be "legal", IDK, it seems like it should. Oh and Adobe says they will continue providing non-Pepper installs on Linux security updates for 5 years, so everyone can just use the current version of Flash in any case.
The PPAPI Adobe will be using is common to both the Chromium and Chrome browser (they are both based on the same source code), so this will have zero impact on Chromium users.
The new DHS budget should include no money for the TSA, period. The whole organization is an ineffective, Constitutional-rights breaking embarrassment and a waste of money.
Depends. In this scenario, am I the contractor chosen to make the passport, the government agency that has to justify asking for a budget increase next year, or a Senator from a district with an RFID manufacturer in it?
What's wrong with rich people giving money to an already privatised school system? The US is the most capitalistic (large) economy in the world. You guys chose to have this system. You chose to have privatised schools
No, the US has a public school system, very much so. It just sucks, quite badly, so people who want their kids to have a decent education are forced to found and fund private schools so their (and other) kids can graduate high school knowing how to write and do basic math.
Not true. The students end up in detention (probably a couple of hours long) in addition to the fine, or in the behavior class (during the summer) they have to pay for if they get too many demerits. The lesson there seems to be "even if you have money, you are still going to sit in detention."
We've got enough problems in the US with the systems currently under corporate influence. Why give them another?
Yeah and look at how great a job the government has done running those public schools! Some of the students might even be able to read by the time they graduate!
I was thinking you could build a rail gun that used nuclear shells. Accelerate the round to reasonably fast, then you detonate a second or so before you get near the enemy ship, and the high-speed fireball vaporizes anything in a cone in front of it (like a nuclear shotgun blast). Makes point defenses absolutely worthless. If you made it into a disposable robotic launcher, you wouldn't even have to worry about the recoil.
About 100 teraflops, according to what I could dig up on Google. By comparison, the highest end single GPUs can do about 2.5 teraflops (and at raw computation they destroy general purpose CPUs), and those generally consume a few hundred watts. Obviously supercomputers are a lot faster, but by input energy, the human brain is much faster than a computer. Our minds just aren't designed to handle numerical calculations, but they certainly could outperform a computer. Granted, someone whose brain was wired to do that would probably be completely non-functional, since we need so much power for our other activities, but it is certainly possible. There just isn't any evolutionary advantage for humans to develop that capability, and there never will be, computers being as widespread as they are.
This is DARPA. They don't even raise the question of "practicality" when they do projects like this, they just ask "can it be done at all?" These are the same people who build flying tanks. Is it practical? Almost certainly no. Is it cool and possibly practical in the future? Maybe, but we won't know until we try.
If Chrome is able to do things you did not intend on your systems then you have much more serious problems and your systems are incompetently configured and managed.
Just keep drinking the Koolaid...
It's amazing to me that - even despite the story we're responding to - it doesn't even enter your mind that maybe, just maybe, Google knows about a nice little unpublicized exploit that lets them work around the standard Windows corporate lockdown setup.
You know, I was about to point out that the idea of a major company using an exploit to install software was ridiculous. Then I remembered Sony-BMG. I still think the idea of Google using an exploit to install Chrome (knowing it is an exploit and not reporting it) is ridiculous, but I can't really make fun of you for thinking it is possible.
Think for a moment...if we appoint adjudicators of what content is and isn't free speech, we've already lost it.
Have you heard of the "courts?" They've been doing exactly that for hundreds of years. CP, for example, is not free speech. Saying a politician murdered a prostitute? Not free speech. Saying you think a politician's opinion is wrong and stupid and you would like to see him die? 100% protected free speech (yes, even the "want to see him die" part, so long as you don't encourage someone to kill him or say you are going to do it yourself).
Sorry if that complicates the "Noble Farmer vs. Evil Corporation" black-and-white narrative.
No, it just turns it into a slightly-scummy underdog versus one of the greatest hives of evil in the world. Monsanto has claimed it literally does not matter how their seed ends up in a farm, or if it is being used in any way whatsoever, they will still sue for patent infringement merely by it being present without being purchased. Lookup Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser if you don't believe me. For comparison, this would be like (not just kind of similar, but almost exactly the same as) suing someone for copyright infringement after finding a copy of your virus on their system, which they did not put there, and then winning.
Well, there is the fact that when a coal reactor overheats, you simply stop adding coal. When a nuclear reactor overheats, you can get Chernobyl. TFA seems a little... sensationalist, though, like this claim:
None of the water withdrawn from the Green River will ever be returned to the river.
If you mean deliberately, sure, it isn't dumped back into the river. But it isn't like the reactor destroys the water. It evaporates and then falls back as rain, a lot of which ends up back in the river again.
It isn't about revenue, either. The government has... lots of money.
It's about spending. I.e. the government having absolutely no self-control over it. Spending went up 16% from 2008 to 2009, and in recent years has been nearly a quarter (~24.4% of the US GDP), compared to closed to a fifth over the preeceding 40-odd years (~20%). A government that spends 3.5 trillion doesn't have a revenue problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the term "organ" means "tool". Literally. Also, since Wikipedia defines it as "a collection of tissues joined in structural unit to serve a common function." So, yes, an arm or a leg is an organ, most definitely, just not the kind of organ most people think of as "organs."
This is my impression as well. Even if you don't try to cheat, the Wii controller just isn't all that much of an exercise (at most, it involves moving your arms around a bit), while even relatively sedentary Kinect games require you to be at least standing and usually involves moving your whole body, if only to make sure the sensor actually detects the motion. And the more active Kinect games are a huge workout.
Of course, I'll take my keyboard and mouse or joystick (or hell, even a controller in a few games) over either one when it comes to actually playing a game, which is supposed to be enjoyable and requires precision if it is any kind of challenging. Kinect and Wii just don't provide that.
Make it magnetic, maybe? The device fails, you stick a moderately powerful magnet near its location, it's attracted to the magnet and doesn't shift to the lungs or brains. Or perhaps you make it small enough that it won't even get stuck at all (I'm not a doctor or biologist, so I'm not sure how small it would have to be and/or if that is at all practical). Worst case scenario, you design it so it will block bloodflow and not move freely if it fails: a few minutes of a lack of bloodflow to most parts of the body is not very dangerous (basically, so long as it isn't the lungs, heart, or brain). Or you could make it have a latching mechanism (imagine some kind of spikes that shoot out and grab the insides of the veins if it loses power) that triggers automatically if it fails. It won't block bloodflow, and it won't move (again, not sure if practical, just an idea).
The story is only about a method for powering the device, there are a ton of practical problems to solve before you make such a device in actuality.
Given that the device will be capable of self-propulsion with the external power source, it should be relatively easy to guide the unit to a specific location for easy extraction. Or have it burrow into the body in a location such that it doesn't move (if the device needs to be reused later on or simply cannot be removed), as creepy as that thought is. I imagine approval for medical usage will require a demonstration of such capability prior to use, as well as a demonstration that the device won't accidentally cause a stroke or other damage during operation. You could possibly even make the device degradable, so it would harmlessly disintegrate into trace (non-dangerous) elements in the bloodstream after a few hours.
Can anybody name a single good thing that came out of all this enormous data collection effort? What is better for the consumer today than it was twenty years ago when there was no internet and no tracking?
Gigabytes of free online data storage, Youtube, Hulu, Slashdot, Google Maps (and similar), and Google itself (by extension also Firefox). Oh and most of the Internet. Besides that, not much.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google dropped NPAPI support and left every Chromium user in the same situation.
If they do that (and I'm not sure why they would, but I suppose it is possible) nothing stops people from forking Chromium and keeping NPAPI support. A few forks already exist of it, like SRWare Iron. You might be right about the licensing issues, though. Not that that licensing issues would stop people from doing it, it would just stop official support.
They track everyone by IP, signed in or not, and there is nothing you can do to change that (it's just part of Google's business model: the price of free services). However, without a sign-in they cannot point to an individual, only an IP, and IPs change and are often shared.
Use two separate browsers. You might even be able to find an extension for Firefox that allows you to sign into Youtube but doesn't have the other tabs be signed in when visiting Google (at least, I think this is possible). Privacy mode I know works like that in Opera ( so I could sign in under a private tab in Youtube and use Google under a normal tab and wouldn't be signed in), not tried it under Firefox.
They're just making it easier for when they dupe this story next week. They won't even have to change the summary at all!
TFA is incredibly light on details, but it seems the main reason you won't be able to use Flash in Firefox is that Firefox won't have the Pepper API. Chromium will. So even if you can't download it directly from Adobe, it should be trivially easy to make it work with Chromium (should be plug-and-play), so people should be able to repackage it and download it using the package-manager of choice. Whether this will be "legal", IDK, it seems like it should. Oh and Adobe says they will continue providing non-Pepper installs on Linux security updates for 5 years, so everyone can just use the current version of Flash in any case.
The PPAPI Adobe will be using is common to both the Chromium and Chrome browser (they are both based on the same source code), so this will have zero impact on Chromium users.
The new DHS budget should include no money for the TSA, period. The whole organization is an ineffective, Constitutional-rights breaking embarrassment and a waste of money.
Just watch out for any solar flares
Depends. In this scenario, am I the contractor chosen to make the passport, the government agency that has to justify asking for a budget increase next year, or a Senator from a district with an RFID manufacturer in it?
What's wrong with rich people giving money to an already privatised school system? The US is the most capitalistic (large) economy in the world. You guys chose to have this system. You chose to have privatised schools
No, the US has a public school system, very much so. It just sucks, quite badly, so people who want their kids to have a decent education are forced to found and fund private schools so their (and other) kids can graduate high school knowing how to write and do basic math.
Not true. The students end up in detention (probably a couple of hours long) in addition to the fine, or in the behavior class (during the summer) they have to pay for if they get too many demerits. The lesson there seems to be "even if you have money, you are still going to sit in detention."
We've got enough problems in the US with the systems currently under corporate influence. Why give them another?
Yeah and look at how great a job the government has done running those public schools! Some of the students might even be able to read by the time they graduate!
/sarcasm
I was thinking you could build a rail gun that used nuclear shells. Accelerate the round to reasonably fast, then you detonate a second or so before you get near the enemy ship, and the high-speed fireball vaporizes anything in a cone in front of it (like a nuclear shotgun blast). Makes point defenses absolutely worthless. If you made it into a disposable robotic launcher, you wouldn't even have to worry about the recoil.
In any case: nothing like in a movie.
About 100 teraflops, according to what I could dig up on Google. By comparison, the highest end single GPUs can do about 2.5 teraflops (and at raw computation they destroy general purpose CPUs), and those generally consume a few hundred watts. Obviously supercomputers are a lot faster, but by input energy, the human brain is much faster than a computer. Our minds just aren't designed to handle numerical calculations, but they certainly could outperform a computer. Granted, someone whose brain was wired to do that would probably be completely non-functional, since we need so much power for our other activities, but it is certainly possible. There just isn't any evolutionary advantage for humans to develop that capability, and there never will be, computers being as widespread as they are.
This is DARPA. They don't even raise the question of "practicality" when they do projects like this, they just ask "can it be done at all?" These are the same people who build flying tanks. Is it practical? Almost certainly no. Is it cool and possibly practical in the future? Maybe, but we won't know until we try.
If Chrome is able to do things you did not intend on your systems then you have much more serious problems and your systems are incompetently configured and managed.
Just keep drinking the Koolaid...
It's amazing to me that - even despite the story we're responding to - it doesn't even enter your mind that maybe, just maybe, Google knows about a nice little unpublicized exploit that lets them work around the standard Windows corporate lockdown setup.
You know, I was about to point out that the idea of a major company using an exploit to install software was ridiculous. Then I remembered Sony-BMG. I still think the idea of Google using an exploit to install Chrome (knowing it is an exploit and not reporting it) is ridiculous, but I can't really make fun of you for thinking it is possible.
Think for a moment...if we appoint adjudicators of what content is and isn't free speech, we've already lost it.
Have you heard of the "courts?" They've been doing exactly that for hundreds of years. CP, for example, is not free speech. Saying a politician murdered a prostitute? Not free speech. Saying you think a politician's opinion is wrong and stupid and you would like to see him die? 100% protected free speech (yes, even the "want to see him die" part, so long as you don't encourage someone to kill him or say you are going to do it yourself).
Sorry if that complicates the "Noble Farmer vs. Evil Corporation" black-and-white narrative.
No, it just turns it into a slightly-scummy underdog versus one of the greatest hives of evil in the world. Monsanto has claimed it literally does not matter how their seed ends up in a farm, or if it is being used in any way whatsoever, they will still sue for patent infringement merely by it being present without being purchased. Lookup Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser if you don't believe me. For comparison, this would be like (not just kind of similar, but almost exactly the same as) suing someone for copyright infringement after finding a copy of your virus on their system, which they did not put there, and then winning.
None of the water withdrawn from the Green River will ever be returned to the river.
If you mean deliberately, sure, it isn't dumped back into the river. But it isn't like the reactor destroys the water. It evaporates and then falls back as rain, a lot of which ends up back in the river again.
It isn't about revenue, either. The government has... lots of money.
It's about spending. I.e. the government having absolutely no self-control over it. Spending went up 16% from 2008 to 2009, and in recent years has been nearly a quarter (~24.4% of the US GDP), compared to closed to a fifth over the preeceding 40-odd years (~20%). A government that spends 3.5 trillion doesn't have a revenue problem.