My wife has a $100 color HP printer; each ink refill costs $60 but she's become attached to it. The printer won't print unless it's a "genuine HP cartridge" with DoD level 5 DRM and ink that costs more than Zafrio Anejo tequila laced with polonium 210. It should be spraying powdered rubies, emeralds, and sapphire, not marked-up food coloring. And when their overpriced black cartridge runs out, they trick you into wasting all your remaining cartridges by combining all three to make black.
I ended up pulling my ten year old laser printer out of the closet (tucked next to a ten year old Win XP laptop), got a third party drum cartridge for $15, and now I can print things without having to decide whether it's worth the ink.
Carly Fiorina left HP's reputation lying in pieces on a seafloor before she switched to a more appropriate career. Now we have Satya Nadella who is synergistically pumping Microsoft's reputation down a fracking well. After Microsoft fully transitions its business model from software to cable compary fuckery,, he'll change careers and become a Senator.
Stars that are too big have lifetimes of only several million years, not billions. The Earth itself was still pretty messed up when it was only a million years old.
Ok, I understand that, but isn't it possible for an ice bearing comet (or several) to impact the planet at some later time when the sun was cooler? Surely those planetary systems have their own equivalent of oort clouds?
The whole reason that a red dwarf is so dangerous to live around is its low gravity. It can hurl flares from its surface that ascend far out into space and reach its tight little "habitable zone", and its planets will occasionally orbit through a flare and get zapped. The flares are channeled and accelerated by electromagnetic turbulence that originates from deep inside the star. Even after the surface temperature of its photosphere finally declines, the star will continue to flare until it shrinks down to a white dwarf (which has no habitable zone at all, since its starlight is extreme ultraviolet radiation that can easily blast water molecules apart). Since M-class stars typically have expected lifetimes of trillions of years, you'd have to wait a long time to see it happen.
Air is 5 ppm helium and 15 ppm neon. Neon lifts balloons too, but we don't use it because it's too expensive to recover from the air, and recovering helium is even more inefficient.
We'll never run out on any timescale that matters, the loss to outer space is only concern over geological time spans.
NOTHING is a concern over geological time periods! The Sun will eventually swallow the Earth- but nobody seems to care too much. Helium depletion on Earth will be a blip on a geological time scale, but during that blip helium will be just a memory to several thousand generations.
Helium is for sissies anyway. I don't care if Donald Trump commutes to work in a blimp refilled with freshly scented helium-3 every morning. MY airship has a pedal-powered generator to pump current through a electrolysis chamber. Hydrogen works so much better than helium anyway... it really gets you high.
I don't think Obama needs to worry about the veto hurting the Democrats in 2016. His veto count so far is 2, a lower count than any president since James Garfield in 1881. (In comparison GWB vetoed 12 bills, Clinton 39, GHWB 29, Reagan 39.) This is mostly a consequence of the filibuster used to cut off the flow of legislation that reaches him- which effectively raised the required vote count from 50 to 60 during his term. But now, more stuff is now going to percolate through Congress and reach his desk, including some unpopular, corrupt shit that will scare the public. Before, he simply hadn't been given many bills to veto; now he's going to be tested. Even if he only vetoes one bill in the next Congress, that's going to be enough to elicit nuclear head explosions on Fox, so he might as well add a few dozen without having to worry about any additional meaningful repercussions. Hopefully he won't cave as usual.
Seriously, a regulatory board just changing law or the implimentation of it with absolutely no constitutional process at all or involving any elected official.
Just four fucking million public comments sent by American citizens to the FCC- but they're not corrupt politicians, so screw 'em.
Why is it flamebait? (It got modded as flamebait but went back up to a 5). This video is two years old, but that's the new guy who's now going to head the Environment and Public Works Committee in 2015. He's already bragging that his staff is been poring over NSF studies to compile a list of "wasteful studies" to be targeted in 2015, and says that one of his "top three priorities" for that committee is going to be âoeshining a lightâ on wasteful funding of climate scientists.
I cannot believe that one-sided, war-mongering, short-sighted propaganda piece is called 'News'.
I used to work for a guy who founded a software company in Sunnyvale. After Bush got reelected, he decided to sell the company to Agilent for a couple million bucks, went back to Australia, and formed a new company there. He comes back to visit sometimes, and says that he now gets a lot of questions from people in Australia- "What happened over there? Americans used to be smart!" His standard answer: "No, it's not that they're stupid, but the news they get in the U.S. is really bad."
He is working hard to earn that money if he is thinking about leaving it as a legacy for his children to enjoy that should be his choice. What difference does it matter if its $5 or $5 million, or hell $5 billion.
The "difference" is math. You don't pay estate taxes on $5 or $5 million. It doesn't apply to the first $5.3 million dollars of inheritance.
If someone wants to leave an inheritance as a legacy to his children to enjoy, it IS his choice. A tax on a huge inheritance won't prevent anybody from doing that.
If someone leaves $5 million to their kids, it's usually not because they worked 100 times as hard as a school bus driver leaving $50K. In fact, the driver paid a percentage of income in tax that is roughly double what the millionaire paid.
School bus drivers who make $30K per year are not going to leave behind a $5.3 million dollar fortune of hard-earned money. But all the cable news shows this guy is willing to trust have got him and his redneck friends at church panicked about the "death tax".
People don't seem to understand this anymore, but it's the government's job to collect taxes on income. It doesn't matter if you have $5 or $5 million or $5 billion. If you want electricity going to traffic lights, you have to pay your fair share. Just because you're rich doesn't mean you get special rights to stuff your mattress. My friend worked hard and brought kids to school. If you want to see the hard work billionaires do, just run your kitchen faucet and light a match.
You sound bitter from losing. We you involved in the last election?
Yeah, I voted with the majority (of the popular vote)- guilty as charged.
I don't really care if two brothers pooled together or not. It is their choice not mine or yours and definitely not the US government's.
It's "not the US government's anymore, only because some people now are so rich they can afford to legalize their activities. (The Mafia, OTOH, was never really good at infiltrating politics.)
It simply said that some forms of speech costs money and that people can pool together in order to afford that costs.
Yes, two brothers were free at last to "pool together" donating 0.05% of their wealth through shady corporations to politicians who thump people with Bibles and propose policies from bad science fiction novels. And it's a good thing, too- this was the most expensive American election in history and now we need the help of billionaires if we want to win!
Your friend is is a different guy, if he's the inheritor. The guy I was talking about is afraid that his kids are going to have to pay taxes on his life savings from driving a school bus.
You need to listen to someone other than Ted Cruz.
The Supreme Court ripped the First Amendment a new asshole in 2012 with their new concept that every dollar suddenly has free speech. "Going after the First Amendment" is a bullshit talking point made by people who directly benefit from corporate donations.
You should look into wolf-PAC. They're gathering petitions to state legislatures to allow votes on a Constitutional Amendment to reinstate laws on political donations that the Supreme Court entirely threw out the window with that Citizens United 5-4 decision.
"While voters do express high levels of disgust about the state of campaign finance and the level of corruption in Washington, they tend to actually cast votes more on bread-and-butter economic issues."
But voters are easily convinced that if their freedom to form a corporate monopoly is central to their own economic future. I know a guy who drives a school bus and is worried sick about the estate tax.
Don't get your hopes up. I wrote "Javacup" on a coffee mug and Oracle is still refusing to pay up even though Sun illegally reproduced part of my work when they named their compiler. They plagiarized the first five letters right off the cup!
public static void main(String[] args) {...} Copyright (c) Orale Corporation. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
Yep. Microscopic processes are affected by quantum fluctuation, in both neurons and transistors. Macroscopically, a transistor behaves reliably, like a switch. Humans are less predictable- but their thoughts are more deterministic than they realize.
Sure; we have artificial neural network algorithms. Check out this letter-recognition (backpropagation) network using 80 neurons that I wrote in JavaScript during a boring Christmas vacation with my parents. (And it sucks- not because it's JavaScript, but it makes embarrassing mistakes, which are the fault of the huge string literal of neuron weights at the end of the code).
Biologically, the process with a real neuronal cell body reaching a certain (unpredictable) voltage and firing is extremely complex. The firing mechanism is an analogue process, unstable and unreliable (which is how it works). It produces a digital signal which has an unpredictable time lag (the axon length and density of boundaries between glial cells affect this) before it reaches synapses (cesspools of quantum indeterminism) and tickles dendrites of other cells. The development and positioning of cell processes (axons, dendrites, synaptic junctions) is a necessary consequence of learning, but these are affected by gene expression and are extremely hard to predict.
Still, given this entire messy system, people's thoughts, free will, and reactions to stimuli are much more deterministic than they realize. But I suspect that if you wanted to make a robot that acts like a person does, you would at the very least need a prolific stream of very high quality random numbers. Maybe you can simulate the brain of Stephen Hawking with a PRNG; I haven't tried. (I sure as hell wouldn't use JavaScript!)
Slashdot Mirror
It becomes a much deeply recursive movie once you realize Eldon Tyrell was a replicant.
"Two chimps in a wicker basket, you think that's really clever, don't you boy?"
Rimshot!
My wife has a $100 color HP printer; each ink refill costs $60 but she's become attached to it. The printer won't print unless it's a "genuine HP cartridge" with DoD level 5 DRM and ink that costs more than Zafrio Anejo tequila laced with polonium 210. It should be spraying powdered rubies, emeralds, and sapphire, not marked-up food coloring. And when their overpriced black cartridge runs out, they trick you into wasting all your remaining cartridges by combining all three to make black.
I ended up pulling my ten year old laser printer out of the closet (tucked next to a ten year old Win XP laptop), got a third party drum cartridge for $15, and now I can print things without having to decide whether it's worth the ink.
Carly Fiorina left HP's reputation lying in pieces on a seafloor before she switched to a more appropriate career. Now we have Satya Nadella who is synergistically pumping Microsoft's reputation down a fracking well. After Microsoft fully transitions its business model from software to cable compary fuckery,, he'll change careers and become a Senator.
Stars that are too big have lifetimes of only several million years, not billions. The Earth itself was still pretty messed up when it was only a million years old.
Ok, I understand that, but isn't it possible for an ice bearing comet (or several) to impact the planet at some later time when the sun was cooler? Surely those planetary systems have their own equivalent of oort clouds?
The whole reason that a red dwarf is so dangerous to live around is its low gravity. It can hurl flares from its surface that ascend far out into space and reach its tight little "habitable zone", and its planets will occasionally orbit through a flare and get zapped. The flares are channeled and accelerated by electromagnetic turbulence that originates from deep inside the star. Even after the surface temperature of its photosphere finally declines, the star will continue to flare until it shrinks down to a white dwarf (which has no habitable zone at all, since its starlight is extreme ultraviolet radiation that can easily blast water molecules apart). Since M-class stars typically have expected lifetimes of trillions of years, you'd have to wait a long time to see it happen.
We'll never run out on any timescale that matters, the loss to outer space is only concern over geological time spans.
NOTHING is a concern over geological time periods! The Sun will eventually swallow the Earth- but nobody seems to care too much. Helium depletion on Earth will be a blip on a geological time scale, but during that blip helium will be just a memory to several thousand generations.
Helium is for sissies anyway. I don't care if Donald Trump commutes to work in a blimp refilled with freshly scented helium-3 every morning. MY airship has a pedal-powered generator to pump current through a electrolysis chamber. Hydrogen works so much better than helium anyway... it really gets you high.
Would Verizon really get in trouble for a DMCA violation? I think the the users with compromised emails have more to fear from the DMCA.
I don't think Obama needs to worry about the veto hurting the Democrats in 2016. His veto count so far is 2, a lower count than any president since James Garfield in 1881. (In comparison GWB vetoed 12 bills, Clinton 39, GHWB 29, Reagan 39.) This is mostly a consequence of the filibuster used to cut off the flow of legislation that reaches him- which effectively raised the required vote count from 50 to 60 during his term. But now, more stuff is now going to percolate through Congress and reach his desk, including some unpopular, corrupt shit that will scare the public. Before, he simply hadn't been given many bills to veto; now he's going to be tested. Even if he only vetoes one bill in the next Congress, that's going to be enough to elicit nuclear head explosions on Fox, so he might as well add a few dozen without having to worry about any additional meaningful repercussions. Hopefully he won't cave as usual.
Seriously, a regulatory board just changing law or the implimentation of it with absolutely no constitutional process at all or involving any elected official.
Just four fucking million public comments sent by American citizens to the FCC- but they're not corrupt politicians, so screw 'em.
Why is it flamebait? (It got modded as flamebait but went back up to a 5). This video is two years old, but that's the new guy who's now going to head the Environment and Public Works Committee in 2015. He's already bragging that his staff is been poring over NSF studies to compile a list of "wasteful studies" to be targeted in 2015, and says that one of his "top three priorities" for that committee is going to be âoeshining a lightâ on wasteful funding of climate scientists.
I cannot believe that one-sided, war-mongering, short-sighted propaganda piece is called 'News'.
I used to work for a guy who founded a software company in Sunnyvale. After Bush got reelected, he decided to sell the company to Agilent for a couple million bucks, went back to Australia, and formed a new company there. He comes back to visit sometimes, and says that he now gets a lot of questions from people in Australia- "What happened over there? Americans used to be smart!" His standard answer: "No, it's not that they're stupid, but the news they get in the U.S. is really bad."
Not having to file or pay taxes on a large sum of money is likely good cause
Ooops, this is where I stopped reading.
He is working hard to earn that money if he is thinking about leaving it as a legacy for his children to enjoy that should be his choice. What difference does it matter if its $5 or $5 million, or hell $5 billion.
You sound bitter from losing. We you involved in the last election?
Yeah, I voted with the majority (of the popular vote)- guilty as charged.
I don't really care if two brothers pooled together or not. It is their choice not mine or yours and definitely not the US government's.
It's "not the US government's anymore, only because some people now are so rich they can afford to legalize their activities. (The Mafia, OTOH, was never really good at infiltrating politics.)
It simply said that some forms of speech costs money and that people can pool together in order to afford that costs.
Yes, two brothers were free at last to "pool together" donating 0.05% of their wealth through shady corporations to politicians who thump people with Bibles and propose policies from bad science fiction novels. And it's a good thing, too- this was the most expensive American election in history and now we need the help of billionaires if we want to win!
Why are we spending so much money on satellites? We could have bought a couple Cold War fighter jets that will never be used and that explode on liftoff!
Your friend is is a different guy, if he's the inheritor. The guy I was talking about is afraid that his kids are going to have to pay taxes on his life savings from driving a school bus.
So they are going after the First Amendment.
You need to listen to someone other than Ted Cruz.
The Supreme Court ripped the First Amendment a new asshole in 2012 with their new concept that every dollar suddenly has free speech. "Going after the First Amendment" is a bullshit talking point made by people who directly benefit from corporate donations.
You should look into wolf-PAC. They're gathering petitions to state legislatures to allow votes on a Constitutional Amendment to reinstate laws on political donations that the Supreme Court entirely threw out the window with that Citizens United 5-4 decision.
"While voters do express high levels of disgust about the state of campaign finance and the level of corruption in Washington, they tend to actually cast votes more on bread-and-butter economic issues."
But voters are easily convinced that if their freedom to form a corporate monopoly is central to their own economic future. I know a guy who drives a school bus and is worried sick about the estate tax.
Don't get your hopes up. I wrote "Javacup" on a coffee mug and Oracle is still refusing to pay up even though Sun illegally reproduced part of my work when they named their compiler. They plagiarized the first five letters right off the cup!
public static void main(String[] args) {...} Copyright (c) Orale Corporation. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
Yep. Microscopic processes are affected by quantum fluctuation, in both neurons and transistors. Macroscopically, a transistor behaves reliably, like a switch. Humans are less predictable- but their thoughts are more deterministic than they realize.
Sure; we have artificial neural network algorithms. Check out this letter-recognition (backpropagation) network using 80 neurons that I wrote in JavaScript during a boring Christmas vacation with my parents. (And it sucks- not because it's JavaScript, but it makes embarrassing mistakes, which are the fault of the huge string literal of neuron weights at the end of the code).
Biologically, the process with a real neuronal cell body reaching a certain (unpredictable) voltage and firing is extremely complex. The firing mechanism is an analogue process, unstable and unreliable (which is how it works). It produces a digital signal which has an unpredictable time lag (the axon length and density of boundaries between glial cells affect this) before it reaches synapses (cesspools of quantum indeterminism) and tickles dendrites of other cells. The development and positioning of cell processes (axons, dendrites, synaptic junctions) is a necessary consequence of learning, but these are affected by gene expression and are extremely hard to predict.
Still, given this entire messy system, people's thoughts, free will, and reactions to stimuli are much more deterministic than they realize. But I suspect that if you wanted to make a robot that acts like a person does, you would at the very least need a prolific stream of very high quality random numbers. Maybe you can simulate the brain of Stephen Hawking with a PRNG; I haven't tried. (I sure as hell wouldn't use JavaScript!)