We do not know the consequences of our actions. That is why there has been a ban on human cloning.
No, the ban on human cloning has to do with appeasement of the right wing, people mistaking their own scientific illiteracy for something having to do with morality, and a medieval desire to control technological advancement that persists to this day. We never know the consequences of our actions. The Wright brothers certainly didn't forsee the 9/11 attacks- should they have stopped work on the airplane?
However a weather disaster could cause distruction on a much larger scale. Imagine a tornado flying through the streets of New York due to a weather modification mishap.
This strikes me as being much less than persuasive. Don't you think you're being a little alarmist? Wouldn't a tornado flying through New York incite public outrage and demand a massive reform of the budding weather modification industry? Wouldn't the government have already placed controls on the industry already to prevent this from happening in the first place? Can you even provide any credible explanation as to how this could even conceivably occur in any realistic sense? Worrying about forseeable consequences is one thing. Demanding a halt to technological progress because of a bad dream you had is another.
The problem is we are already modifying the weather unintentially. Suv's with their horrible gas consumption and emissions, methane emissions from the cows of huge farms built where rain forests used to stand to supply Mcdonalds with beef. American culture has already thrown the environment out of wack!
I don't like SUVs either (their headlights are always right in my rear view mirror) but how does our unintentional modification of the weather constitute an argument against intentionally modifying the weather? Maybe we can undo some of our unintentional modifications with intentional ones.
Also, modifying the weather would be like playing God, and for that we might be punished in ways I do not want to imagine.
Oh please, spare me from magical thinking! Sorry, you can't have a vaccine, because saving you would be "playing God"! Sorry, you'll have to stay in your wheelchair, because allowing nonreproductive cloning would be "playing God"! All throughout human history, technological progress has been slowed and delayed by superstitious people who worry that others are "playing God".
I'd hate for another world flood...
There never was a world flood, only overrated local floods.
> I bet using JNI to call the C libraries instead of Math.atan2(), etc. would help, too... at least then the comparisons would be fair!
Bad idea.
Math.atan2() calls StrictMath.atan2() which uses JNI to get to a native C method that is available on each platform's JVM implementation. You can roll your own native MyMath.atan2() with JNI yourself, but this only saves you the overhead of a static nonvirtual function call in the Java layer (both methods are static and final) while preserving the much larger JNI overhead. And now you need to distribute a native lib for each platform. You'd get the same (very minor) boost by calling the StrictMath method directly. And why not, if you've determined that's what Math.atan2() does?
The source for java.* classes are usually only one right click away in any good IDE, so you can see instantly if something stupid is happening. (Except for the string concatenation "+" operator. When people talk about "careful programming in Java" they usually mean not relying on + with Strings. That's the biggest sinkhole that people walk into. Use StringBuffers instead and your code will in general be much faster.)
If your app is slow, run a profiler. Math.sin() is likely to be a bottleneck only for the simplest applications (i.e. silly benchmark programs). If you do find that Math.sin() or whatever is slowing your program down, build a cribsheet of sine values at the start and then use that to avoid the repeated JNI overhead (and the native code's trig calculation itself) which is really where your time is being spent. Even C programmers know this trick.
the stuff on the edges of the filter paper I'd laid out in the middle of the garage blew up before the stuff in the middle had dried out, thereby splattering the floor with really tiny droplets of still-wet stuff and fragments of filter paper.
I used filter paper too, until I found a much better substitute- kitty litter! Specifically, that kind of kitty litter that clumps into a tight ball when it gets wet. Dries the stuff out quickly, confines it really well in a tight clump, and transmits shock evenly to all the precipitate at once- so you get huge noisy explosions with a good report- and disgusting iodinated kitty litter flung all over your backyard! None of the snap crackle business you get when the stuff is exposed to the open air. Of course you shouldn't ever do this, ever.
Explosions aside, iodine itself is fun. I dropped a crystal on a counter surface once (this was when I was a chemist at a generic drug lab) and I noticed it a few hours later. So I picked it up. Of course by now there was a stain on the counter around where it had been. I wiped it up, but it came back.
The janitor came in, saw the stain, and wiped it away. Within a minute- the stain was back! So he wiped it again. Scrub scrub scrub. As soon as he turned his back- there it was again! Scrub scrub scrub. It kept coming back- and it was getting darker even as you looked at it! I put a thiosulfate-soaked paper towel on it and told him not to worry about it.
I felt bad for the people who cleaned that place. One of the tablets they made there was phenazopyridine, which is a drug women take for urinary tract infections (it's a urinary tract analgesic). This is one of the azo dyes, which means it has an -N=N- azo bond in it. All these compounds have an intense color. Pure phenazopyridine itself is a dark red powder, but in trace amounts, or when it's been dissolved in alcohol, it turns an intense yellow. (Which is a good thing, since urine is the same color- actually, that's probably why that compound is used for this purpose.)
EVERYTHING in that place was yellow. People would track that stuff all over the place. There was a yellow streak going down the center of the hallway, the chairs and tables had yellow marks everywhere, the books had yellow fingerprints on them, it was a thin film all over everything and everybody. Even things at home started turning yellow. The tiniest crystal would get on you and that was the end of it.
And don't even get me started on my idiot boss at that place, who inadvertently rediscovered the formula for dynamite while trying to come up with an FDA-approvable procedure for a selenium assay on vitamin tablets! What a mess that was! But this post is already getting too long.
Much later I met someone who told me a story about a friend of theirs, who had some leftover phenazopyridine tablets and had noticed the intense color. She actually dyed her hair with the stuff for Halloween!!! Holy crap! Then (surprise, surprise) she couldn't get it out of her hair, so she eventually called the drug manufacturer to ask for advice. They were no help- in fact they couldn't stop laughing at her! (You can actually kill the stain with a solution of sodium dithionite, but this smells so evil we didn't even consider it an option for cleaning the floors. They should have just told her to shave her head and scrub her scalp with lots of rubbing alcohol.) I couldn't believe my ears when I heard that story. Her whole house must still be yellow.
Agreed. If you've never seen the Anarchist's Cookbook, it's rather like a long "Overrated" Slashdot post printed on paper with pictures and a handsome black cover. The guy doesn't really understand most of the things he discusses and is on the firmest ground when he sticks with safe topics (guns and knives). It was written during the Vietnam era by a pissed-off draft age guy. Now he's turned to Jesus and says he wishes he hadn't written the book at all. Another mind lost to religion.
The best explosive recipe in the book is one that the author discounts in passing- nitrogen triiodide, or NI3. (Actually, the structure is NI3-NH3, where the NH3 is bound to the NI3 electrostatically by what resemble hydrogen bonds.) According to the Cookbook a fly landing on it will set it off (which is probably true, although I never succeeded in getting a fly to cooperate). It claims it's too useless for any serious consideration when planning your anarchy. It might not be good for that, but it's great for pranks. I've had so much fun with that stuff. The secret to NI3 is DO NOT MAKE TOO MUCH OF IT. That way you can keep your fingers. A gram is way too much. Just take a few iodine crystals and put them under ammonia, and presto, it turns into this black powder. If you keep it under the ammonia, it's actually quite stable. When not under ammonia (even when under pure water) it might go off at any moment. Pick it up from the ammonia with a plastic eyedropper, and deposit the black sludge on some surface. Once dry it rapidly loses its NH3 adduct and becomes extremely sensitive to shock, decomposing explosively producing N2 and I2. Don't get traces of it on your clothes or skin, or you'll be treated to a continuous snap-crackle-pop of microscopic explosions (quite annoying).
Finding references on it is difficult- it's almost like people don't want to do research on it. It's probably unstable because the iodine atoms are huge compared to the nitrogen. Congestion around the central N forces the molecule into a planar shape, with repulsive interactions among the three iodines, so it's unhappy for steric reasons. One thing I did find out was that the stuff turns bright orange if you leave it under the ammonia for a long time (like a month). This is probably because it picks up additional NH3 adducts.
Actually, we considered ourselves spoiled for not having to get out of the car! Now I live in a state where you pump your own gas and I hate it. Especially when they make you pay first. You have to run in, give them a twenty, go back, pump, then go back in and get your change. Also, there are a lot of people who simply cannot be trusted with gasoline. They want to get to the nearest whole dollar amount, so they keep squeezing the handle over and over to get the pennies up to 00, oblivious to the growing puddle of gasoline at their feet.
Although when people get a job pumping gas in a full service state, they often forget that collecting the money is the last thing you do. That's the unwritten rule that everyone's used to- once you pay, you're free to go. So take the pump handle out of their tank first, then take their money. If you do it in the reverse order bad things happen- I've seen it twice.
Besides the fact you obviously didn't read the article, you also have the wrong concept of a gas tax. The gas tax in most states is designed to pay for highway maintenance, not to mete out environmental justice. Moving to this system is a more *equitable* way of taxing fuel efficient cars.
It's still a stupid idea.
You could implement the same thing without the risk of an Orwellian dystopia. Just implement a gas tax that is adjusted for the known fuel efficiency of the vehicle model and tire type. Say they want to charge you T cents per mile. You pull into the gas station and put G gallons of gas into your car, which has a fuel efficiency of E miles per gallon. So the gas tax is T x G x E. See? No GPS, no need to worry about weird speeding tickets arriving in the mail someday. Of course this complicates things at the pump because E varies from one car to the next. If that's a big deal then they can charge everybody the studded tire, 50 MPG rate at the pump, and the poor overtaxed SUV owners can save their gas receipts for when they do their state taxes in April. Of course people will then say that they drove their SUV everywhere instead of their Geo Metro, but asking for odometer readings would cut down on that a bit. People cheat on their taxes all the time. At some point the state has to drop its surveillance requirements and trust its citizens.
The concern about being taxed for out of state driving is a red herring. Gas bought in Oregon will most likely be burned in Oregon. And unlike the GPS proposal, people driving through Oregon end up paying a gas tax as well. A gas tax is not quite a "fair" way of implementing a per-mile road tax within Oregon, but it's certainly a close enough approximation to fair that GPS should be out of the question entirely. Laying the infrastructure for a future police state is not worth the pennies involved here.
Next thing you know, they're going want cameras in people's bedrooms so they can tax "thingy".
A a citizen of the US, I have the constitutional right to arrest anyone I see fit to arrest. Arrest is not a special right of police officers, but a constitutional right of all citizens.
In most states you can make a valid citizen's arrest if a public offense is committed in your presence or when you have a reasonable belief that the suspect has committed a felony. In that case you are not a state actor. (The exception: if you're a private security guard and flash a badge at the person that you are arresting, or otherwise fool them into thinking that you are a police officer, you are making the arrest under color of law and are considered under those circumstances to be a state actor.)
But you cannot detain the person yourself (except for a "reasonable time" and in a "reasonable manner"). You certainly cannot detain the person for purposes of extracting a confession. At some point you will have to hand them over to the state and restrictions on state actors begin to apply at that point. If you dug through their garbage and found drugs, the evidence might be declared inadmissable, maybe not, depending on the judge.
A case similar to this "garbage" issue was thrown out in the state of Washington in 1991. In that case, a couple was arrested for growing marijuana in their garage after an employee of the electric company alerted the police to their high electricity consumption. The police inspected the records of their electrical usage and obtained a search warrant. The couple were charged and convicted of possession and manufacture of a controlled substance. A lower court dismissed their appeal, holding that the electric company was not a state actor and therefore there was no violation of their protection from illegal search and seizure by the government. This was overturned by the Washington supreme court, which found that: 1. The electrical company was a municipal corporation with a government granted monopoly, and the employee was acting in his official capacity. Therefore state action was involved and the call invoked the protections against illegal search and seizure. 2. The couple had a protected privacy interest in their electric consumption records. Under Oregon law police officers cannot obtain electric consumption records unless they submit a written request containing specific facts of a suspicion of individualized criminal activity and a reasonable argument that the information will help determine the truth of the suspicion. 3. There is no authority for a nosy utility company employee to snitch on customers to the cops. The disclosure had not been done under authority of law. Like phone service and garbage, electrical consumption is a necessary component of modern life. Even though a customer must disclose their identity and power consumption to the power company, the disclosure is for a limited business purpose.
A policeman, on duty, is an arm of the government, not a citizen.
Good post. The actual legal term you're looking for here is "state actor".
It's not entirely accurate to say that "police have *fewer* rights than citizens", since as citizens themselves they have all the rights afforded to citizens. However, one power that citizens do not have is the power to arrest people and throw them in jail. That is reserved for (certain) state actors.
A state actor can (as a citizen) search your trash for crack pipes. But then he is doing it as a citizen, and not a state actor, because state actors are forbidden to do that. If the cop does find anything, he cannot follow through and arrest you any more than I can. However, being a citizen, he can put whatever he found on a web page or in a newspaper. There's certainly nothing wrong with that. Paparazzi take pictures through windows all the time. The Constitution does not protect you from paparazzi. Stuff like that is left up to legislation.
Most civil rights are defined as controls on the power of state actors- not citizens or private organizations. For example, a newspaper editor can fire a reporter for writing something he doesn't agree with. Since the newspaper is not a state actor, no First Amendment violation has taken place. This point seems to sail over the heads of most people when they bitch and moan about their First Amendment freedoms being violated by private citizens or organizations. Unless the cops are involved, the First Amendment issues are usually irrelevant. But this isn't always the case. For example, when a state university fires a professor for his political views, that is a First Amendment violation- because as a public institution the university is a state actor! The same rule wouldn't apply to, say, a Bible College that receives no public funds. It makes sense, but no wonder people are confused.
A cop is perfectly free to search your trash and put up a web site with pictures of everything he found, but if he then tries to prosecute you with what he found, a court will be obliged to throw it out. Unless you live in Portland, where judgeships are apparently being dispensed from Cracker Jack boxes. The article doesn't mention whether any Cracker Jack boxes were actually found in these people's garbage so I cannot speculate any further.
I'm not sure I agree, I kinda like watching those biodegradable packing peanuts disintegrate in water.
Watching styrofoam packing peanuts degrade in acetone is also fun. You'd be surprised how many styrofoam peanuts can be crammed into a cup of acetone. If you have a large quantity of peanuts, it's a good way to shrink them down to a manageable size, even if the resulting glop smells evil, strips the oil off your fingers, and can't be flushed down the toilet. Actually I wish more people would do this instead of leaving them outside in loose trash bags where the wind can blow them all over the neighborhood.
There is no conclusive link between cellphones and brain cancer.
Actually I never said there was. Maybe I didn't make that clear. All I said was that with payphones, it was obvious to everybody that this is not something to worry about at all. So we didn't even have to suffer any debate about it.
Cell phones aren't actually obsolete in a year just because etc. Some people are sheep who will buy anything with a bigger number or cuter design.
I've also had my phone for a long time (since 1999) and it still works fine. Although people with smaller phones make fun of it because it's as big as my fist. Most people I know personally go through one every year.
Yes, payphones ARE the safest option if you're up to no good. So what?
This is actually a variant of: "If you're not doing anything wrong then you have nothing to worry about". Were you asleep when they passed the PATRIOT Act? Do you know what a pen register is? Once payphones are gone, you can't make anonymous phone calls anymore. They're always traceable back to you. From a privacy perspective the disappearance of the payphone is a nontrivial issue.
There are cell phones which can be had with no long-term commitment or credit check. They're not cheap, but they exist.
Payphones still win in this regard. All you need is a couple quarters.
Cell phones don't have to come on vacations either. If you think they do, you need better friends. I like having a cell phone wherever I go for convienience, but it's a choice I make, not an obligation.
It isn't just friends. Many employers will implicitly assume that you're reachable 24/7 if they see you have a cellphone. A lot of people resent their cellphones because they don't like being imposed upon. Some people even take lack of cellphone coverage into account when passive-aggressively planning their vacations. This isn't a problem for me because I make it clear that mine is for emergencies and I don't give out the number. (In fact I tend to forget the number.)
My cellphone has excellent reception. It's better than a lot of people's home land lines. If you've had bad experiences, it's probably because you or your friends are cheap, as mentioned above.
Yes, I see- you've got it all figured out. Poor service is the customer's fault.
I could go on and on too. I swear I could strangle the jackasses who confuse the tools people use with the stupid things they do with the tools. I could also strangle the jackasses who have cellphone envy and try to mask it as some kind of superiority.
Man, what a killjoy you are! The post was facetious. People like to hate cellphones because so many varieties of bad habits tend to crystallize around them. As far as envy- I reserve that for people who have houses. Cellphones... nah, I don't envy cellphones.
I'm tired of anti-cellphone BS. There are no legitimate complaints against the phones themselves, and the complaints about the users have nothing to do with the phones.
Oh quit pretending the devices are perfect. Boneheaded users aside, there are legitimate complaints against the phones themselves. From the cell phone owner's own perspective there are drawbacks associated with cell phones: spotty coverage, poor service, and lack of anonymity. None of these are issues with payphones.
I'm sorry, most of your list I could tolerate, but I do believe it's more convenient to answer my cell phone in my pocket than it is to walk down to a payphone.
Actually people in my family used to do this a lot in the B.C. years (before cellphones) at places like malls and airports. It was a useful trick in a pinch. Until my grandmother (who has no cellphone) managed to get herself stranded at an airport for several hours because she didn't realize that payphones no longer take incoming calls.
Why didn't you? Seriously, you paid 8 or 9 bucks to enjoy the movie and you shouldn't put up with some inconsiderate fucktard yacking on his cell phone.
I couldn't really hear his conversation- I just saw him talking on it. The annoying thing was the stupid ring tone it made. And that makes me realize another great thing about payphones that I forgot:
When payphones do ring, they just ring- they don't make a mockery of the greatest music ever produced by Western civilization.
Anyway, I think picking a fight during Gollum's "schizophrenia" scene would have made me some enemies in the theater. This happened the day of the opening in the middle of Silicon Valley, so you can imagine how completely packed the theater was.
People don't drift into your lane and cut you off because they're yakking into a payphone
Brain cancer isn't even a remote possibility with payphones
Sometimes you find a dime in a payphone's change slot
With a payphone you can call people collect for free
Payphones aren't obsoleted in a year just because they can't take stupid pictures or haven't shrunk in size by a factor of 3
Payphones are the safest option if you're up to no good
Receiving calls at payphones is convenient (or used to be before the drug dealers screwed it up for everybody)
No long term commitment or credit check with a payphone
Payphones don't ever have to come with you on vacations
When the payphone doesn't work, you go to another payphone instead of navigating an automated touch tone maze
No static with a payphone
I could go on and on... it will be sad to see the payphone go. I swear I could strangle the jackass who actually took a call in the theater during the Two Towers last week.
I hate to flame, but this obviously will not work.. this is a very idealistic approach at trying to help a poverty stricken society keep up with the times.. i mean, most of them don't even have a television set probably and here they are.....besides there are many other issues to deal with in India (health wise, primarily) than hoping that every citizen in India will have their own cell phone.
This is really just a variation of another bankrupt argument that never seems to go away despite being refuted over and over again:
"How can we even talk about space exploration while there is so much suffering here on earth?"
Of course, we get to have cellphones in this country because our poor people have TV sets!
How do you know that cellphones won't stimulate India's economy? Should all industries there be suppressed until a large middle class develops? Remember that while India is mostly known for its poor people, the people in its upper classes are filthy rich and would be more than willing to fork over some rupees every month for good cellphone coverage.
(BTW don't take the "freak" icon personally- you must have said something a long time ago that pissed me off but frankly I have no idea what anymore. I also have no idea what I said to get my own collection of fans and freaks. Being able to associate a specific post with a friend/foe assignment would be a nice Slashcode feature.)
I've read this same post many times already in other stories and I'll give you the standard response I've always seen given to it, because I've slyly noticed that this response always gets good mod points:
Quit whining, change your preferences, and leave us alone.
the majority of studies suggesting a link between abortion and cancer
You didn't post any links or references, so I'm curious. Did this "majority of studies" find a link between abortion and breast cancer, or a link between not carrying a pregnancy to term and breast cancer?
My earliest memory was a "full one thousand and twenty four bytes" that came in a ZX-81 kit that I got through mail order from the UK back in 1982 when I was in sixth grade. (You could pay $150 for the whole thing, or pay $100 and order just the parts as a kit.) So my father and I soldered the thing together ourselves. (And we liked it!) Eventually I got the 16K memory pack, but often I didn't use it because it had a bad connector (no gold plating) and would make the computer crash if you even slightly bumped against it. The ZX-81 heat sink was a little prong that stuck up out of the motherboard, and reliability went out the window after an hour or two. I remember putting ice in a Ziploc bag just to cool the thing down when I was typing in programs from magazines. (Hear that you little brats out there? Before there was downloading, you used to have to type programs in yourself!) After the 500th line you were sweating bullets. The ZX-81 had 8 kilobytes of ROM. Of course (IIRC) they bragged about the ROM memory in their ads too- you got EIGHT WHOLE KILOBYTES OF READ-ONLY MEMORY! Even for 1982 it was incredible spin. Actually I'm still impressed even today that they managed to cram the entire system (including BASIC) into 8K. The BASIC implementation was so slow and lousy that if you really wanted to write a program that wasn't just embarrassing, you needed to learn machine code. So I learned Z-80 assembly. (Picking up new skills when you're young is easy!) Although program deployment on the ZX-81 was a bitch, especially with that tape recorder business. The best way to do it with machine code was to type in a huge REM statement:
10 REM AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
The "A"s started at memory address 16514 (with the 16K memory pack)- I still remember that number. You would then proceed to POKE your instructions and operands into memory one byte at a time, and the A's would start turning into pseudo-ASCII garbage:
10 REM !0)@*+&HG#=~b@AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Then, you did something like
RAND USR(16514)
and you were off! After being used to ZX-81 BASIC (which executed at the speed of several lines per second) the speed of Z-80 machine code was just amazing. I remember writing deeply nested loops just to marvel at the speed. And it gave you so many registers! I got spoiled. A, B, C, D, E, H, and L. And you could chain them together to make fake 16-bit registers: BC, DE, HL. There were also the weird registers that you weren't supposed to mess with- I for interrupts, SP for the stack, R for the dynamic memory refresh. So what if the rest of the computer sucked? The CPU was so much fun to play with. When I got a C64 later and saw 6510 programming, I was stunned. You had to do everything with A, X, and Y! Who stole all the registers?
This problem is not difficult to solve. All you need is a "conference" of enraged global villagers marching up the road to Alan Ralsky's house equipped with dynamite, pitchforks, Bayesian filters, and burning torches! We could bring some diplomas from prestigious nonaccredited universities to get the fire going. And afterwards everyone gets Chinese food.
OK, maybe it wouldn't solve the problem, but it would make great reality TV. Wouldn't you rather watch a spammer get lynched than sit through yet another gold digger beauty pageant on FOX?
Oh man! 9/11 has just screwed everything up. (Actually, I was in a county courthouse so things were much more lax.) But how do they expect to get any good jurors now if they make it so hard for intelligent people to keep themselves busy for so long?
I hope I'm never charged with a crime. My future would be decided by people who can entertain themselves for days with crossword puzzles and word searches. Makes a shiver go up your spine, doesn't it?
I've been writing Swing applications for a while, and I love using this toolkit. My programs are all stable, and the run unchanged on any OS supporting JDK 1.2+. They are fast and look good. What is it about using Swing that you think is unstable?
Too many classes loading all at once
Resource consumption
Way too much stalling and unresponsiveness during garbage collects
Text editing portions of Swing are overengineered- documents create way too many objects
Weird threading issues (you have to be careful to make all GUI changes in the event thread)
Complaints from users
I would say that writing complex and high-performance apps with Swing takes some experience, but is not required for many apps. Like all Swing defenders, I'll point to JBuilder as a beautiful Swing-based application that works well. Yes it requires a fairly recent machine.
I use IntelliJ IDEA at work and I love it even though it's Swing based. However everything about the thing is a memory hog (this isn't all Swing's fault). Having used Swing, I'm impressed at how well they did with it. But it's really hard on your computer. And Java developers are more willing than most people to put up with Swing because they're sympathetic to the technology- in sort of the same way that Mozilla users are willing to forgive XUL for looking so weird.
You didn't mention that you also have to manage memory and native resources in your program, which is one of those major gotchas that can cause memory leaks and crashes. Now instead of relying on the garbage collector you have to step way back to the dark ages and tediously manage UI memory. Ugh!
Yep, SWT is a lower level library, there's no doubt about that. To a lesser extent, you have to worry about resources in AWT and Swing too. People forget to call Graphics.dispose() all the time. And it's not like you're completely back in C++. You just have to unload your SWT resources, not every single object you create in the entire program. That's a big difference.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe no one has said this already:
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. - Mark Twain
We do not know the consequences of our actions. That is why there has been a ban on human cloning.
No, the ban on human cloning has to do with appeasement of the right wing, people mistaking their own scientific illiteracy for something having to do with morality, and a medieval desire to control technological advancement that persists to this day. We never know the consequences of our actions. The Wright brothers certainly didn't forsee the 9/11 attacks- should they have stopped work on the airplane?
However a weather disaster could cause distruction on a much larger scale. Imagine a tornado flying through the streets of New York due to a weather modification mishap.
This strikes me as being much less than persuasive. Don't you think you're being a little alarmist? Wouldn't a tornado flying through New York incite public outrage and demand a massive reform of the budding weather modification industry? Wouldn't the government have already placed controls on the industry already to prevent this from happening in the first place? Can you even provide any credible explanation as to how this could even conceivably occur in any realistic sense? Worrying about forseeable consequences is one thing. Demanding a halt to technological progress because of a bad dream you had is another.
The problem is we are already modifying the weather unintentially. Suv's with their horrible gas consumption and emissions, methane emissions from the cows of huge farms built where rain forests used to stand to supply Mcdonalds with beef. American culture has already thrown the environment out of wack!
I don't like SUVs either (their headlights are always right in my rear view mirror) but how does our unintentional modification of the weather constitute an argument against intentionally modifying the weather? Maybe we can undo some of our unintentional modifications with intentional ones.
Also, modifying the weather would be like playing God, and for that we might be punished in ways I do not want to imagine.
Oh please, spare me from magical thinking! Sorry, you can't have a vaccine, because saving you would be "playing God"! Sorry, you'll have to stay in your wheelchair, because allowing nonreproductive cloning would be "playing God"! All throughout human history, technological progress has been slowed and delayed by superstitious people who worry that others are "playing God".
I'd hate for another world flood...
There never was a world flood, only overrated local floods.
> I bet using JNI to call the C libraries instead of Math.atan2(), etc. would help, too... at least then the comparisons would be fair!
Bad idea.
Math.atan2() calls StrictMath.atan2() which uses JNI to get to a native C method that is available on each platform's JVM implementation. You can roll your own native MyMath.atan2() with JNI yourself, but this only saves you the overhead of a static nonvirtual function call in the Java layer (both methods are static and final) while preserving the much larger JNI overhead. And now you need to distribute a native lib for each platform. You'd get the same (very minor) boost by calling the StrictMath method directly. And why not, if you've determined that's what Math.atan2() does?
The source for java.* classes are usually only one right click away in any good IDE, so you can see instantly if something stupid is happening. (Except for the string concatenation "+" operator. When people talk about "careful programming in Java" they usually mean not relying on + with Strings. That's the biggest sinkhole that people walk into. Use StringBuffers instead and your code will in general be much faster.)
If your app is slow, run a profiler. Math.sin() is likely to be a bottleneck only for the simplest applications (i.e. silly benchmark programs). If you do find that Math.sin() or whatever is slowing your program down, build a cribsheet of sine values at the start and then use that to avoid the repeated JNI overhead (and the native code's trig calculation itself) which is really where your time is being spent. Even C programmers know this trick.
the stuff on the edges of the filter paper I'd laid out in the middle of the garage blew up before the stuff in the middle had dried out, thereby splattering the floor with really tiny droplets of still-wet stuff and fragments of filter paper.
I used filter paper too, until I found a much better substitute- kitty litter! Specifically, that kind of kitty litter that clumps into a tight ball when it gets wet. Dries the stuff out quickly, confines it really well in a tight clump, and transmits shock evenly to all the precipitate at once- so you get huge noisy explosions with a good report- and disgusting iodinated kitty litter flung all over your backyard! None of the snap crackle business you get when the stuff is exposed to the open air. Of course you shouldn't ever do this, ever.
Explosions aside, iodine itself is fun. I dropped a crystal on a counter surface once (this was when I was a chemist at a generic drug lab) and I noticed it a few hours later. So I picked it up. Of course by now there was a stain on the counter around where it had been. I wiped it up, but it came back.
The janitor came in, saw the stain, and wiped it away. Within a minute- the stain was back! So he wiped it again. Scrub scrub scrub. As soon as he turned his back- there it was again! Scrub scrub scrub. It kept coming back- and it was getting darker even as you looked at it! I put a thiosulfate-soaked paper towel on it and told him not to worry about it.
I felt bad for the people who cleaned that place. One of the tablets they made there was phenazopyridine, which is a drug women take for urinary tract infections (it's a urinary tract analgesic). This is one of the azo dyes, which means it has an -N=N- azo bond in it. All these compounds have an intense color. Pure phenazopyridine itself is a dark red powder, but in trace amounts, or when it's been dissolved in alcohol, it turns an intense yellow. (Which is a good thing, since urine is the same color- actually, that's probably why that compound is used for this purpose.)
EVERYTHING in that place was yellow. People would track that stuff all over the place. There was a yellow streak going down the center of the hallway, the chairs and tables had yellow marks everywhere, the books had yellow fingerprints on them, it was a thin film all over everything and everybody. Even things at home started turning yellow. The tiniest crystal would get on you and that was the end of it.
And don't even get me started on my idiot boss at that place, who inadvertently rediscovered the formula for dynamite while trying to come up with an FDA-approvable procedure for a selenium assay on vitamin tablets! What a mess that was! But this post is already getting too long.
Much later I met someone who told me a story about a friend of theirs, who had some leftover phenazopyridine tablets and had noticed the intense color. She actually dyed her hair with the stuff for Halloween!!! Holy crap! Then (surprise, surprise) she couldn't get it out of her hair, so she eventually called the drug manufacturer to ask for advice. They were no help- in fact they couldn't stop laughing at her! (You can actually kill the stain with a solution of sodium dithionite, but this smells so evil we didn't even consider it an option for cleaning the floors. They should have just told her to shave her head and scrub her scalp with lots of rubbing alcohol.) I couldn't believe my ears when I heard that story. Her whole house must still be yellow.
Agreed. If you've never seen the Anarchist's Cookbook, it's rather like a long "Overrated" Slashdot post printed on paper with pictures and a handsome black cover. The guy doesn't really understand most of the things he discusses and is on the firmest ground when he sticks with safe topics (guns and knives). It was written during the Vietnam era by a pissed-off draft age guy. Now he's turned to Jesus and says he wishes he hadn't written the book at all. Another mind lost to religion.
The best explosive recipe in the book is one that the author discounts in passing- nitrogen triiodide, or NI3. (Actually, the structure is NI3-NH3, where the NH3 is bound to the NI3 electrostatically by what resemble hydrogen bonds.) According to the Cookbook a fly landing on it will set it off (which is probably true, although I never succeeded in getting a fly to cooperate). It claims it's too useless for any serious consideration when planning your anarchy. It might not be good for that, but it's great for pranks. I've had so much fun with that stuff. The secret to NI3 is DO NOT MAKE TOO MUCH OF IT. That way you can keep your fingers. A gram is way too much. Just take a few iodine crystals and put them under ammonia, and presto, it turns into this black powder. If you keep it under the ammonia, it's actually quite stable. When not under ammonia (even when under pure water) it might go off at any moment. Pick it up from the ammonia with a plastic eyedropper, and deposit the black sludge on some surface. Once dry it rapidly loses its NH3 adduct and becomes extremely sensitive to shock, decomposing explosively producing N2 and I2. Don't get traces of it on your clothes or skin, or you'll be treated to a continuous snap-crackle-pop of microscopic explosions (quite annoying).
Finding references on it is difficult- it's almost like people don't want to do research on it. It's probably unstable because the iodine atoms are huge compared to the nitrogen. Congestion around the central N forces the molecule into a planar shape, with repulsive interactions among the three iodines, so it's unhappy for steric reasons. One thing I did find out was that the stuff turns bright orange if you leave it under the ammonia for a long time (like a month). This is probably because it picks up additional NH3 adducts.
Actually, we considered ourselves spoiled for not having to get out of the car! Now I live in a state where you pump your own gas and I hate it. Especially when they make you pay first. You have to run in, give them a twenty, go back, pump, then go back in and get your change. Also, there are a lot of people who simply cannot be trusted with gasoline. They want to get to the nearest whole dollar amount, so they keep squeezing the handle over and over to get the pennies up to 00, oblivious to the growing puddle of gasoline at their feet.
Although when people get a job pumping gas in a full service state, they often forget that collecting the money is the last thing you do. That's the unwritten rule that everyone's used to- once you pay, you're free to go. So take the pump handle out of their tank first, then take their money. If you do it in the reverse order bad things happen- I've seen it twice.
Besides the fact you obviously didn't read the article, you also have the wrong concept of a gas tax. The gas tax in most states is designed to pay for highway maintenance, not to mete out environmental justice. Moving to this system is a more *equitable* way of taxing fuel efficient cars.
It's still a stupid idea.
You could implement the same thing without the risk of an Orwellian dystopia. Just implement a gas tax that is adjusted for the known fuel efficiency of the vehicle model and tire type. Say they want to charge you T cents per mile. You pull into the gas station and put G gallons of gas into your car, which has a fuel efficiency of E miles per gallon. So the gas tax is T x G x E. See? No GPS, no need to worry about weird speeding tickets arriving in the mail someday. Of course this complicates things at the pump because E varies from one car to the next. If that's a big deal then they can charge everybody the studded tire, 50 MPG rate at the pump, and the poor overtaxed SUV owners can save their gas receipts for when they do their state taxes in April. Of course people will then say that they drove their SUV everywhere instead of their Geo Metro, but asking for odometer readings would cut down on that a bit. People cheat on their taxes all the time. At some point the state has to drop its surveillance requirements and trust its citizens.
The concern about being taxed for out of state driving is a red herring. Gas bought in Oregon will most likely be burned in Oregon. And unlike the GPS proposal, people driving through Oregon end up paying a gas tax as well. A gas tax is not quite a "fair" way of implementing a per-mile road tax within Oregon, but it's certainly a close enough approximation to fair that GPS should be out of the question entirely. Laying the infrastructure for a future police state is not worth the pennies involved here.
Next thing you know, they're going want cameras in people's bedrooms so they can tax "thingy".
Under Oregon law
^^^^^^
Damn, I meant Washington, not Oregon. Didn't hit "Preview".
A a citizen of the US, I have the constitutional right to arrest anyone I see fit to arrest. Arrest is not a special right of police officers, but a constitutional right of all citizens.
In most states you can make a valid citizen's arrest if a public offense is committed in your presence or when you have a reasonable belief that the suspect has committed a felony. In that case you are not a state actor. (The exception: if you're a private security guard and flash a badge at the person that you are arresting, or otherwise fool them into thinking that you are a police officer, you are making the arrest under color of law and are considered under those circumstances to be a state actor.)
But you cannot detain the person yourself (except for a "reasonable time" and in a "reasonable manner"). You certainly cannot detain the person for purposes of extracting a confession. At some point you will have to hand them over to the state and restrictions on state actors begin to apply at that point. If you dug through their garbage and found drugs, the evidence might be declared inadmissable, maybe not, depending on the judge.
A case similar to this "garbage" issue was thrown out in the state of Washington in 1991. In that case, a couple was arrested for growing marijuana in their garage after an employee of the electric company alerted the police to their high electricity consumption. The police inspected the records of their electrical usage and obtained a search warrant. The couple were charged and convicted of possession and manufacture of a controlled substance. A lower court dismissed their appeal, holding that the electric company was not a state actor and therefore there was no violation of their protection from illegal search and seizure by the government. This was overturned by the Washington supreme court, which found that:
1. The electrical company was a municipal corporation with a government granted monopoly, and the employee was acting in his official capacity. Therefore state action was involved and the call invoked the protections against illegal search and seizure.
2. The couple had a protected privacy interest in their electric consumption records. Under Oregon law police officers cannot obtain electric consumption records unless they submit a written request containing specific facts of a suspicion of individualized criminal activity and a reasonable argument that the information will help determine the truth of the suspicion.
3. There is no authority for a nosy utility company employee to snitch on customers to the cops. The disclosure had not been done under authority of law. Like phone service and garbage, electrical consumption is a necessary component of modern life. Even though a customer must disclose their identity and power consumption to the power company, the disclosure is for a limited business purpose.
A policeman, on duty, is an arm of the government, not a citizen.
Good post. The actual legal term you're looking for here is "state actor".
It's not entirely accurate to say that "police have *fewer* rights than citizens", since as citizens themselves they have all the rights afforded to citizens. However, one power that citizens do not have is the power to arrest people and throw them in jail. That is reserved for (certain) state actors.
A state actor can (as a citizen) search your trash for crack pipes. But then he is doing it as a citizen, and not a state actor, because state actors are forbidden to do that. If the cop does find anything, he cannot follow through and arrest you any more than I can. However, being a citizen, he can put whatever he found on a web page or in a newspaper. There's certainly nothing wrong with that. Paparazzi take pictures through windows all the time. The Constitution does not protect you from paparazzi. Stuff like that is left up to legislation.
Most civil rights are defined as controls on the power of state actors- not citizens or private organizations. For example, a newspaper editor can fire a reporter for writing something he doesn't agree with. Since the newspaper is not a state actor, no First Amendment violation has taken place. This point seems to sail over the heads of most people when they bitch and moan about their First Amendment freedoms being violated by private citizens or organizations. Unless the cops are involved, the First Amendment issues are usually irrelevant. But this isn't always the case. For example, when a state university fires a professor for his political views, that is a First Amendment violation- because as a public institution the university is a state actor! The same rule wouldn't apply to, say, a Bible College that receives no public funds. It makes sense, but no wonder people are confused.
A cop is perfectly free to search your trash and put up a web site with pictures of everything he found, but if he then tries to prosecute you with what he found, a court will be obliged to throw it out. Unless you live in Portland, where judgeships are apparently being dispensed from Cracker Jack boxes. The article doesn't mention whether any Cracker Jack boxes were actually found in these people's garbage so I cannot speculate any further.
I'm not sure I agree, I kinda like watching those biodegradable packing peanuts disintegrate in water.
Watching styrofoam packing peanuts degrade in acetone is also fun. You'd be surprised how many styrofoam peanuts can be crammed into a cup of acetone. If you have a large quantity of peanuts, it's a good way to shrink them down to a manageable size, even if the resulting glop smells evil, strips the oil off your fingers, and can't be flushed down the toilet. Actually I wish more people would do this instead of leaving them outside in loose trash bags where the wind can blow them all over the neighborhood.
There is no conclusive link between cellphones and brain cancer.
Actually I never said there was. Maybe I didn't make that clear. All I said was that with payphones, it was obvious to everybody that this is not something to worry about at all. So we didn't even have to suffer any debate about it.
Cell phones aren't actually obsolete in a year just because etc. Some people are sheep who will buy anything with a bigger number or cuter design.
I've also had my phone for a long time (since 1999) and it still works fine. Although people with smaller phones make fun of it because it's as big as my fist. Most people I know personally go through one every year.
Yes, payphones ARE the safest option if you're up to no good. So what?
This is actually a variant of: "If you're not doing anything wrong then you have nothing to worry about". Were you asleep when they passed the PATRIOT Act? Do you know what a pen register is? Once payphones are gone, you can't make anonymous phone calls anymore. They're always traceable back to you. From a privacy perspective the disappearance of the payphone is a nontrivial issue.
There are cell phones which can be had with no long-term commitment or credit check. They're not cheap, but they exist.
Payphones still win in this regard. All you need is a couple quarters.
Cell phones don't have to come on vacations either. If you think they do, you need better friends. I like having a cell phone wherever I go for convienience, but it's a choice I make, not an obligation.
It isn't just friends. Many employers will implicitly assume that you're reachable 24/7 if they see you have a cellphone. A lot of people resent their cellphones because they don't like being imposed upon. Some people even take lack of cellphone coverage into account when passive-aggressively planning their vacations. This isn't a problem for me because I make it clear that mine is for emergencies and I don't give out the number. (In fact I tend to forget the number.)
My cellphone has excellent reception. It's better than a lot of people's home land lines. If you've had bad experiences, it's probably because you or your friends are cheap, as mentioned above.
Yes, I see- you've got it all figured out. Poor service is the customer's fault.
I could go on and on too. I swear I could strangle the jackasses who confuse the tools people use with the stupid things they do with the tools. I could also strangle the jackasses who have cellphone envy and try to mask it as some kind of superiority.
Man, what a killjoy you are! The post was facetious. People like to hate cellphones because so many varieties of bad habits tend to crystallize around them. As far as envy- I reserve that for people who have houses. Cellphones... nah, I don't envy cellphones.
I'm tired of anti-cellphone BS. There are no legitimate complaints against the phones themselves, and the complaints about the users have nothing to do with the phones.
Oh quit pretending the devices are perfect. Boneheaded users aside, there are legitimate complaints against the phones themselves. From the cell phone owner's own perspective there are drawbacks associated with cell phones: spotty coverage, poor service, and lack of anonymity. None of these are issues with payphones.
I'm sorry, most of your list I could tolerate, but I do believe it's more convenient to answer my cell phone in my pocket than it is to walk down to a payphone.
Actually people in my family used to do this a lot in the B.C. years (before cellphones) at places like malls and airports. It was a useful trick in a pinch. Until my grandmother (who has no cellphone) managed to get herself stranded at an airport for several hours because she didn't realize that payphones no longer take incoming calls.
I couldn't really hear his conversation- I just saw him talking on it. The annoying thing was the stupid ring tone it made. And that makes me realize another great thing about payphones that I forgot:
Anyway, I think picking a fight during Gollum's "schizophrenia" scene would have made me some enemies in the theater. This happened the day of the opening in the middle of Silicon Valley, so you can imagine how completely packed the theater was.
You forgot "You can't untraceably dial a spammer's 800 number from a cell phone."
:)
A spammer who emails an 800 number shouldn't be in the business.
I could go on and on... it will be sad to see the payphone go. I swear I could strangle the jackass who actually took a call in the theater during the Two Towers last week.
I hate to flame, but this obviously will not work.. this is a very idealistic approach at trying to help a poverty stricken society keep up with the times.. i mean, most of them don't even have a television set probably and here they are.....besides there are many other issues to deal with in India (health wise, primarily) than hoping that every citizen in India will have their own cell phone.
This is really just a variation of another bankrupt argument that never seems to go away despite being refuted over and over again:
"How can we even talk about space exploration while there is so much suffering here on earth?"
Of course, we get to have cellphones in this country because our poor people have TV sets!
How do you know that cellphones won't stimulate India's economy? Should all industries there be suppressed until a large middle class develops? Remember that while India is mostly known for its poor people, the people in its upper classes are filthy rich and would be more than willing to fork over some rupees every month for good cellphone coverage.
(BTW don't take the "freak" icon personally- you must have said something a long time ago that pissed me off but frankly I have no idea what anymore. I also have no idea what I said to get my own collection of fans and freaks. Being able to associate a specific post with a friend/foe assignment would be a nice Slashcode feature.)
Nah, what you've done there is detect an earthquake, not prevent one.
How is this "news for nerds"???
I've read this same post many times already in other stories and I'll give you the standard response I've always seen given to it, because I've slyly noticed that this response always gets good mod points:
Quit whining, change your preferences, and leave us alone.
the majority of studies suggesting a link between abortion and cancer
You didn't post any links or references, so I'm curious. Did this "majority of studies" find a link between abortion and breast cancer, or a link between not carrying a pregnancy to term and breast cancer?
Tell me again how a sheep's bladder may be used to prevent earthquakes!
The ZX-81 had 8 kilobytes of ROM. Of course (IIRC) they bragged about the ROM memory in their ads too- you got EIGHT WHOLE KILOBYTES OF READ-ONLY MEMORY! Even for 1982 it was incredible spin. Actually I'm still impressed even today that they managed to cram the entire system (including BASIC) into 8K. The BASIC implementation was so slow and lousy that if you really wanted to write a program that wasn't just embarrassing, you needed to learn machine code. So I learned Z-80 assembly. (Picking up new skills when you're young is easy!) Although program deployment on the ZX-81 was a bitch, especially with that tape recorder business. The best way to do it with machine code was to type in a huge REM statement:The "A"s started at memory address 16514 (with the 16K memory pack)- I still remember that number. You would then proceed to POKE your instructions and operands into memory one byte at a time, and the A's would start turning into pseudo-ASCII garbage:Then, you did something likeand you were off! After being used to ZX-81 BASIC (which executed at the speed of several lines per second) the speed of Z-80 machine code was just amazing. I remember writing deeply nested loops just to marvel at the speed. And it gave you so many registers! I got spoiled. A, B, C, D, E, H, and L. And you could chain them together to make fake 16-bit registers: BC, DE, HL. There were also the weird registers that you weren't supposed to mess with- I for interrupts, SP for the stack, R for the dynamic memory refresh. So what if the rest of the computer sucked? The CPU was so much fun to play with. When I got a C64 later and saw 6510 programming, I was stunned. You had to do everything with A, X, and Y! Who stole all the registers?
This problem is not difficult to solve. All you need is a "conference" of enraged global villagers marching up the road to Alan Ralsky's house equipped with dynamite, pitchforks, Bayesian filters, and burning torches! We could bring some diplomas from prestigious nonaccredited universities to get the fire going. And afterwards everyone gets Chinese food.
OK, maybe it wouldn't solve the problem, but it would make great reality TV. Wouldn't you rather watch a spammer get lynched than sit through yet another gold digger beauty pageant on FOX?
Oh man! 9/11 has just screwed everything up. (Actually, I was in a county courthouse so things were much more lax.) But how do they expect to get any good jurors now if they make it so hard for intelligent people to keep themselves busy for so long?
I hope I'm never charged with a crime. My future would be decided by people who can entertain themselves for days with crossword puzzles and word searches. Makes a shiver go up your spine, doesn't it?
I would say that writing complex and high-performance apps with Swing takes some experience, but is not required for many apps. Like all Swing defenders, I'll point to JBuilder as a beautiful Swing-based application that works well. Yes it requires a fairly recent machine.
I use IntelliJ IDEA at work and I love it even though it's Swing based. However everything about the thing is a memory hog (this isn't all Swing's fault). Having used Swing, I'm impressed at how well they did with it. But it's really hard on your computer. And Java developers are more willing than most people to put up with Swing because they're sympathetic to the technology- in sort of the same way that Mozilla users are willing to forgive XUL for looking so weird.
You didn't mention that you also have to manage memory and native resources in your program, which is one of those major gotchas that can cause memory leaks and crashes. Now instead of relying on the garbage collector you have to step way back to the dark ages and tediously manage UI memory. Ugh!
Yep, SWT is a lower level library, there's no doubt about that. To a lesser extent, you have to worry about resources in AWT and Swing too. People forget to call Graphics.dispose() all the time. And it's not like you're completely back in C++. You just have to unload your SWT resources, not every single object you create in the entire program. That's a big difference.