You can wire them up just as if they were more red cones; so a hot newspaper looks pink. However, at that rate, the person would have a lot of trouble making any sense of what he or she saw.
But I think you could. They aren't impulse filters. If you wired up the near-IR sensors as red you would be able to distinguish "very red" IR from regular red. Frequencies that are red still have some green response, IR will have much
less if any green response. You could plant
nIR-R-O-G-Y-B-UV
\ |/\|/\ | /
R - G - B
Something IR or Red has only a red response
Orange has a Red & Green response, etc.
You could also do this
fIR-nIR-R-G-B-UV
\ / \|/ \|/
R - G - B
This might make you red-green colorblind, but maybe just less sensitive to the transition.
After a little combining in the eye you have basically the same inputs to the brain. I don't think this would be needed really, the brain learns to see, if it got a different set of initial inputs it would probably adjust. Just look at the color blind, most don't know they are until they take some test for it. I think the really hard stuff is making IR and UV receptors that work in a mammal.
I agree that we know very little about how the brain actually processes vision. The parts we do know like the edge detecting filters don't need color.
Furthermore, the nervous system requirements to process the additional information simply are not there (infrared = red and your superspy can't see normal colors? Ooh, sign me up today.)
I agree with you're other points, but not this one. I've read reports of some women having extra green receptors. They don't have extra resolution in their retina, just two sets of green receptors sensitive at different frequencies. This may explain why color blindness is less prevalent in women, if they start out with two and lose one they still can see color about as well as a man.
If you managed to engineer new color receptors that weren't baked by UV and were sensitive from infrared to UV you could have the three RGB's and a UV and infrared. You would have a harder time finding the edge between a green and blue surface at the same brightness but it wouldn't be a handycap since we already have much lower color resolution than brightness res, just look at how JPEG and TV signals are encoded.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is someone out there that can already see well in UV and infrared, there isn't much of an advantage so it won't wipe out our simple RGB eyes in the gene pool. I only discovered I was more sensitive to IR than average because I was getting blinded by the bright IR LEDs that others would only admit to seeing in a dark room. Not much of an advantage in our modern world, and with no extra 'regular red' sensitivity I couldn't really distinguish it from a bright red (it is really red, prolly cuz it's completely undetected by the blue & green receptors.)
Still your other points hold, it's far off. If we can replace a blind newborn's eyes in 20 years with normal eyes that would be fantastic in and of itself.
I'd really love to have 1024 individual sensors for a in-eye spectroscope though. "Johny is that a diamond or cubic zirconia on Sally's finger?" or better yet, "Cmdr. Checkov is that planet M-Class?"
If you happen to be looking at some GPL'd source for hints on how to do something, and you see that optimal code, then you are left with a big problem: if you use the code you will have copied it (or at least you will have no way of proving that you didn't) and if you don't use the code you are putting suboptimal code in your product.
I have never seen code that couldn't be rewritten to be either faster or cleaner. Even if the programmer spent 2 weeks on 5 lines of code another pair of eyes often sees something that wasn't obvious to the first coder. And most code isn't highly polished, it just takes some inputs and creates some outputs in a fairly simple way.
This probably seems obvious to any seasoned programmer, but I remember the dismay from my novice days of seeing some really simple rutine and thinking that's exacly how I'd write it. Then you think about it for a day and something comes to you.
"clean room development" is a legal manuever, it's very unprodctive to disconnect your programmers from the internet.
Prison Sentences are a reasonable response
on
Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's like the Nazi's who said they were just following orders. If your boss asks you to sweep a toxic chemical into the drain and you do it... you're just as guilty.
I think if these criminals get prison terms for the rest of their natural lives I think we might get a few whistle blowers among our friends working on GM foods...
Cynic inside me {
Of course that's about as likely as getting the president that won the election (No I didn't vote for him, but I can tell an election from an appointment.) }
Remember those things from the 60's?
They'd be 3 times as efficient on Mars!
Seriously, it just doesn't make sense to fly on mars like it does on earth, It's like trying to push a boat down the highway. The martians will either have to thicken the atmosphere or just put down some tracks for the high speed trains.
I could imagine 6000 MPH trains on mars, less gravity no pesky animals and hicks to run into, long flat stretches, _very_ little atmospheric drag.... At that speed would you really miss the airplane?
I was offered a spanking new Dell to replace my 1 y.o. IntelliStation a few months ago.. I was very adamant in telling them where to go. It's been years since I've had a machine that never has hardware failures. If they can't make money off the desktop line they just aren't advertising enough. I bought a Vaio laptop this summer but I'll try to get an IBM box when I need a new desktop..
A) Really start punishing corporations as individuals. Bring back the death penalty: if a corporation is found guilty of murder, then kill the corporation. Naturally, the unemployment of tens of thousands of employees may be an issue in this case!
That's best idea I've seen on slashdot in a while. Of course there would have to be some kind of insurance for the unemployed, we could call it, ummm Unemployment Insurance (to pay their wages for 4-6 mos.) Pensions could be shored up with the sale of the company's assets, and if the investors wanted a piece of the pie they would be denied rights to the company's assets but allowed to sue the management that f-cked up for their personal gain from while employed at said criminal enterprise. Any non-sue clauses should be nullified in law.
Actually I think this should be a last resort, but punitive damages and fines should be set at 1000 times an actual damages and if in the case of something like Bohpal where the damages would be 8,000,000x200x1001 > 1.6 trillion, well then you liquidate. The important thing is that the investors risk ALL their capital after severe mismanagement, THEN we'll get some activist investors and responsive leadership when potential problems crop up or the corporate reports seem a little thin.
You're being a troll, every government abridges some basic human right. I don't think your felons should have their voting right taken away, but as a pragmatist I don't think taking away someone's basic right of movement after they kill my grocer is so horrible.
And well changes in the US constitution don't require a popular vote, they require a vote by congress and a majority of states. The states are also required to have some sort of limited democracy, that's it. Read your constitution carefully.
If this had been anything but a password cracker I doubt Intel would have gotten it's panties in a bunch. I've worked for some of these big companies and when I felt the need or inclination to do anything that could compromise the security of the organization I've talked to the sysadmin.
I've never had one say no. I've been told to please close it when you're done, report back, etc. you know reasonable stuff.
It's not as if he installed IE where he might not have known he was opening a hole. He knew it.
I think a slap on the wrist, 60 hours of community service say would have been enough to have him think, 'darn I did something stupid' and of course it should be a misdemenor (it was right?), he didn't hit anyone over the head no need to take away his voting rights.
Floaters are normal. Well if your retina could be flacking off but seeing floaters isn't so surprising in a 33 yo. or 25 yo. for that matter.
But even those LED's they are using will hurt your eyes if you stare at them for a few minutes. IR is nasty, it dries your contacts while looking like a not so bright red LED...
I've been using this library the last couple years, and it reduces CPU demand. I was doing pupil tracking using it only for image capture, and I needed two PIII-860Mhz with 400Mhz RAMBUS memory. Using it for some of the basic image processing reduced demand so it almost ran on a single Athelon, I think the memory was too slow on those boxen, but I left the project at that point. Fast enough was 30 fps, and it was difficult even with the library. (We needed the 3D position of the eyes reliably at video rates for a stereo display and didn't want the user to have to wear anything.)
They have pretty decent MMX algorithms which work out of the box. I'd have to say those that do write in C unless they absolutely can't avoid it. I was happy to squeeze an extra two cycles out of the inner loop of my MMX code, but I'd really rather have Intel do it since it's not the core of my work.
Computers are slow and always will be, I'm a graphics person so 6 hours to render a frame is really slow, to real vision people processing an image for depth overnight is fast. We invent ways to use the CPU much well ahead of Moore's law. In another 50 years we'll be able to emulate dog vision! maybe... just run it overnight;)
(I'm speaking of the general library, this press release is just another algorithm added. They basically add common algorithms to the library, slowly.)
why can't the military rebuild and upgrade those like they are doing to the B-52
Think laptop, fighters pack a lot more equipment into a much smaller area. An upgradable fighter would need mountings for the different components. This might make them easier to maintain, but the pilot would rather have an extra 30 mins in fuel.
Of course, if the fighters were engineered and not designed by committee KISS would be observed. But the military has grown fat from the cold war and is just now getting whipped back into shape by smaller budgets. (They had the money and time to ask for unreasonable things.)
When I hear reporting like this I really start to wonder if all the whole newspaper is this inaccurate. I'm sure almost everyone here has at one point used something that could be considered warez. Are we all part of this group? Where is my share of the profits? etc.
The New York Times has always had remarkably bad technology coverage. They never point out that the BSA is a Microsoft shell corp. Whenever some worm takes advantage of a horrible bug in Microsoft software it's never pointed out. They even gave Microsoft credit for inventing the optical mouse a couple years ago.
They had a couple good reporters in the early days but I don't think that advertising section has ever had a tech literate editor to fire the idjits.
Their news coverage is considerably better, though FAR from perfect.
The world has changed since the US Senate passed the internet censorship bill 99-1. Many legislators have touched a computer and many more have been told about them by their interns. Now while legislative interns are usually the prisiest section of our world's populace, they aren't the stupidest.
Curb cuts make it easier for wheelchair users, but harder for the blind to detect curbs. Wheelchair toliets are higher, making bowel movements more difficult, especially for the elderly.
I heard the same thing about curb cuts, but I heard it as an explanation for why there are ridges in the curb cut (In most major cities, I've seen places where this is overlooked). The ridges are also great for not slipping and falling into the street in winter that may be the intended reason (I've seen them in warmer climes though.) -- As for the high toilets, as a tall male I LOVE those high toilets where you don't have to worry about any part of your body getting wet. Of course, when I have to flush 5 or 6 times on a #2 I get a bit annoyed.
I have to admit I rarely make any software accessible. I've never found a nice library that worked in all the languages I use so I haven't bothered with it except for on a few limited devices (pda, cell phone.)
BTW Curb cuts are great for strollers, kids on bikes, delivery men, moving computers/laundry, anything on wheels really.
Let's say we're protesting the mayor's policy of releasing the home addresses of voters without letting people know who is looking at the address. I think that protest should be at the mayor's house, you may disagree(, but you're wrong.;)
Grrr. If this gives my laptop an extra hour of use it is certainly not pointless. This is like saying that getting those solar cells from 30% effeciency to 60% is pointless. But that would change energy policy.
(Conventional (cheaper) solar cells are only at 10-15%, which is less efficient than plants at converting energy.)
But from what I read this is twice as efficient as the old technology, while computers have been doubling in power every year most of the world isn't like that and most people would be happy if their income doubled. This is still not as efficient as a turbine, but this can be added at the end of the cycle just before the steam is shipped off to office buildings, especially in summer.
(a) You cannot out anybody. If you give out a name or location, that post gets edited or deleted. People who post that sort of thing are often warned about it, and have the option to fix it themselves within the 30-minute "edit window" for a post.
This is the one thing about the "either you censor everything or nothing" idea that bothers me. If someone posted the home address of someone that wasn't a public figure tagged with some hate it could actually endanger someone, even if it was mod'ed to -1. I can see how in a public square you could say it and you could even make a 1000 copies and paste it all over town, but there are controls there. People could take them down off the telephone posts and we should have the same ability in cyberspace without opening ourselves up to litigation. It shouldn't be required, I can see how posting the same private address for a public protest would be ligit, but it should be safe to take it down.
Britney Spears, N-Sync, or Creed albums. These guys are most likely living from month to month and cannot afford to throw the sales that those records would bring out of the window.
In my experience local stores wouldn't carry that crap anyway. I tend to be liberal on these things, if they put that stuff and the copy protected cd's in a case that clearly states that they will think you're a stupid fuck if you buy it, I'll leave them alone. Of course, they should also charge a 20-30% bad taste surcharge, but I won't even insist on that.
The constitution itself says congress has the right to protect IP for a limited time with patents and copyright as long as it encourages more innovation. When two parts of the constitution are in conflict like this there is no rule until the Supreme Court issues it's opinion.
Re:northern (and southern) lights do this too...
on
Listening to Leonids
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· Score: 1
You know I have always had memories of having heard the northern lights. I grew up hugging the arctic circle so they were common enough to be indistinct memories. I tried to hear them whenever I was far from the city and failed (Where I thought it would be easier, but it may in fact have been impossible there). Now I feel a little less silly.
The northern lights seem much calmer. But the fact that you can see them move, and they are far away and huge means there could be a lot of crackling going on up there.
BTW The I'm pretty sure the voices in MY head aren't explained by this. THEY know me too well.;)
We hunted those things to extinction fair and square. We did it on purpose, and with good reason: They were screwing with our food production.
I agree. While today we'd probably manage a pest population, back then our cost benefit analysis didn't contain all we now know.
But even if we didn't know all we know now about genetic diversity and ecosystems, we no longer need all those farms. We have to subsidize farmers the world over because they've been overproducing since the invention of the tractor. We can now afford to return a large portion of that land to nature. Returning predators makes the management a lot easier. It won't be the same nature we plowed over, but I'm sure it will still be a fantastic medicinal resource to mine when some virus wipes out a third of our population again.
The founder effect, which is the sharp reduction in the genetic variety of a population when it arises from a very small group of individuals (Iceland is an excellent example), has a great potential to be a problem here.
I agree that this would be the biggest problem. Well after someone figures out how to reasseble the DNA which I can't believe is pristine. We could borrow the mitochondrial DNA from an existing animal, and the 'we got just one clone' problem could be solved by some creative slicing with another cat.
But Iceland could be an example here, you've got these raiders who decide to settle on this huge forrested isle. So the first thing they do is find some English & Irish slaves to do the dishes, chop down the trees, and mind the livestock.. Well somehow the two gene lines get mixed. On the other hand they never mix with the monks who were living on the island when they got there, but they do become the first literate population since the Romans in Europe. Then there are the Turkish raiders, all those trading ships. Iceland may be relatively 'pure' genetically but relative to the African population, even America has that problem.
While the first Tigers would be in a very precarious situation in 5 or 6 generations we could greatly reduce the risk. The real problem is there are people farming on their land. It would be expensive to move them forcibly and it will be years before we change back from income taxes to resource use taxes (land, oil, minerals, polution).
On further investigation it was found the one copy of the family licence produced for projected demand was infact lost and not sold. The licence will be delivered to Bill this afternoon.
In other news Ziff-Davis is planning on a six issue story on the repeated depletion of family licence packs at Microsoft and the need, nay desperate need to increase Microsoft OS prices to help the struggling Redmond company keep up with Amazing! Earth Shattering! Unbelievable! demand!
God damn! A million dollars in recording costs? Half a million in marketing? Quarter of a million advance, most of which goes to management, lawyers and recording studios?
I really don't think this is so shocking. I'm amazed that they can make Brity Spear sound good, it's a marvel of modern technology. It's also pointed out that the Union Man, the songwriter, sits in first class while the scabs sit in Coach.
What they don't mention is that that same expensive technology and marketing engine fails on non-pop bands. Girls vs. Boys was a great punk band, but their major record label CDs sounded like pop, and bombed. Ani DiFranco had to create her own label because the record labels couldn't figure out which shelf her music went on. Pee Shy was a eclectic Florida/NY band that died after their second CD because they were forgotten during one of the music industry mergers. I read about a music store that couldn't figure out whether Patty Smith should go in Folk or Punk, and decided it wasn't worth it to stock.
The industry is broken, and it isn't just because technology has reduced their natural use to promoters and financiers. They've merged to the point where they don't have enough heads to deal with all the music out there and so are forced to deal with the mass appeal stuff like nSync, Madonna, Spear, etc. Technology is just a catalist, eventually someone would have figured out that better bands don't need as much handholding but still need risk capital and figured out a better business process with lower costs.
The economy of scale needed for records, cd's, and glossy 4 color prints to make money made the publishers too big to make money for smaller bands (That is where most of money is to be made). Book publishers will have the same problem in a few years when someone figures out how to print a single nicely bound books on the cheap. They were more recently merged so they may be able to undo the problem. I have little hope that most of the record companies will survive however, their only hope is another copyright extension by congress, but at some point the Supreme Court will have to strike that down. (Monopolies can only be granted for limited times under the US constitution. I don't know if Europe has the same restrictions on their governments, but they have fewer lobbyists asking them to hobble their intellect.)
Slashdot Mirror
You can wire them up just as if they were more red cones; so a hot newspaper looks pink. However, at that rate, the person would have a lot of trouble making any sense of what he or she saw.
But I think you could. They aren't impulse filters. If you wired up the near-IR sensors as red you would be able to distinguish "very red" IR from regular red. Frequencies that are red still have some green response, IR will have much
less if any green response. You could plant
nIR-R-O-G-Y-B-UV
\ |
R - G - B
Something IR or Red has only a red response
Orange has a Red & Green response, etc.
You could also do this
fIR-nIR-R-G-B-UV
\ / \|/ \|/
R - G - B
This might make you red-green colorblind, but maybe just less sensitive to the transition.
After a little combining in the eye you have basically the same inputs to the brain. I don't think this would be needed really, the brain learns to see, if it got a different set of initial inputs it would probably adjust. Just look at the color blind, most don't know they are until they take some test for it. I think the really hard stuff is making IR and UV receptors that work in a mammal.
I agree that we know very little about how the brain actually processes vision. The parts we do know like the edge detecting filters don't need color.
Furthermore, the nervous system requirements to process the additional information simply are not there (infrared = red and your superspy can't see normal colors? Ooh, sign me up today.)
I agree with you're other points, but not this one. I've read reports of some women having extra green receptors. They don't have extra resolution in their retina, just two sets of green receptors sensitive at different frequencies. This may explain why color blindness is less prevalent in women, if they start out with two and lose one they still can see color about as well as a man.
If you managed to engineer new color receptors that weren't baked by UV and were sensitive from infrared to UV you could have the three RGB's and a UV and infrared. You would have a harder time finding the edge between a green and blue surface at the same brightness but it wouldn't be a handycap since we already have much lower color resolution than brightness res, just look at how JPEG and TV signals are encoded.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is someone out there that can already see well in UV and infrared, there isn't much of an advantage so it won't wipe out our simple RGB eyes in the gene pool. I only discovered I was more sensitive to IR than average because I was getting blinded by the bright IR LEDs that others would only admit to seeing in a dark room. Not much of an advantage in our modern world, and with no extra 'regular red' sensitivity I couldn't really distinguish it from a bright red (it is really red, prolly cuz it's completely undetected by the blue & green receptors.)
Still your other points hold, it's far off. If we can replace a blind newborn's eyes in 20 years with normal eyes that would be fantastic in and of itself.
I'd really love to have 1024 individual sensors for a in-eye spectroscope though. "Johny is that a diamond or cubic zirconia on Sally's finger?" or better yet, "Cmdr. Checkov is that planet M-Class?"
If you happen to be looking at some GPL'd source for hints on how to do something, and you see that optimal code, then you are left with a big problem: if you use the code you will have copied it (or at least you will have no way of proving that you didn't) and if you don't use the code you are putting suboptimal code in your product.
I have never seen code that couldn't be rewritten to be either faster or cleaner. Even if the programmer spent 2 weeks on 5 lines of code another pair of eyes often sees something that wasn't obvious to the first coder. And most code isn't highly polished, it just takes some inputs and creates some outputs in a fairly simple way.
This probably seems obvious to any seasoned programmer, but I remember the dismay from my novice days of seeing some really simple rutine and thinking that's exacly how I'd write it. Then you think about it for a day and something comes to you.
"clean room development" is a legal manuever, it's very unprodctive to disconnect your programmers from the internet.
It's like the Nazi's who said they were just following orders. If your boss asks you to sweep a toxic chemical into the drain and you do it... you're just as guilty.
I think if these criminals get prison terms for the rest of their natural lives I think we might get a few whistle blowers among our friends working on GM foods...
Cynic inside me {
Of course that's about as likely as getting the president that won the election (No I didn't vote for him, but I can tell an election from an appointment.) }
No, no, no. All we need is jet-packs.
Remember those things from the 60's?
They'd be 3 times as efficient on Mars!
Seriously, it just doesn't make sense to fly on mars like it does on earth, It's like trying to push a boat down the highway. The martians will either have to thicken the atmosphere or just put down some tracks for the high speed trains.
I could imagine 6000 MPH trains on mars, less gravity no pesky animals and hicks to run into, long flat stretches, _very_ little atmospheric drag.... At that speed would you really miss the airplane?
I was offered a spanking new Dell to replace my 1 y.o. IntelliStation a few months ago.. I was very adamant in telling them where to go. It's been years since I've had a machine that never has hardware failures. If they can't make money off the desktop line they just aren't advertising enough. I bought a Vaio laptop this summer but I'll try to get an IBM box when I need a new desktop..
A) Really start punishing corporations as individuals. Bring back the death penalty: if a corporation is found guilty of murder, then kill the corporation. Naturally, the unemployment of tens of thousands of employees may be an issue in this case!
That's best idea I've seen on slashdot in a while. Of course there would have to be some kind of insurance for the unemployed, we could call it, ummm Unemployment Insurance (to pay their wages for 4-6 mos.) Pensions could be shored up with the sale of the company's assets, and if the investors wanted a piece of the pie they would be denied rights to the company's assets but allowed to sue the management that f-cked up for their personal gain from while employed at said criminal enterprise. Any non-sue clauses should be nullified in law.
Actually I think this should be a last resort, but punitive damages and fines should be set at 1000 times an actual damages and if in the case of something like Bohpal where the damages would be 8,000,000x200x1001 > 1.6 trillion, well then you liquidate. The important thing is that the investors risk ALL their capital after severe mismanagement, THEN we'll get some activist investors and responsive leadership when potential problems crop up or the corporate reports seem a little thin.
You're being a troll, every government abridges some basic human right. I don't think your felons should have their voting right taken away, but as a pragmatist I don't think taking away someone's basic right of movement after they kill my grocer is so horrible.
And well changes in the US constitution don't require a popular vote, they require a vote by congress and a majority of states. The states are also required to have some sort of limited democracy, that's it. Read your constitution carefully.
If this had been anything but a password cracker I doubt Intel would have gotten it's panties in a bunch. I've worked for some of these big companies and when I felt the need or inclination to do anything that could compromise the security of the organization I've talked to the sysadmin.
I've never had one say no. I've been told to please close it when you're done, report back, etc. you know reasonable stuff.
It's not as if he installed IE where he might not have known he was opening a hole. He knew it.
I think a slap on the wrist, 60 hours of community service say would have been enough to have him think, 'darn I did something stupid' and of course it should be a misdemenor (it was right?), he didn't hit anyone over the head no need to take away his voting rights.
Floaters are normal. Well if your retina could be flacking off but seeing floaters isn't so surprising in a 33 yo. or 25 yo. for that matter.
But even those LED's they are using will hurt your eyes if you stare at them for a few minutes. IR is nasty, it dries your contacts while looking like a not so bright red LED...
Umm, no.
;)
I've been using this library the last couple years, and it reduces CPU demand. I was doing pupil tracking using it only for image capture, and I needed two PIII-860Mhz with 400Mhz RAMBUS memory. Using it for some of the basic image processing reduced demand so it almost ran on a single Athelon, I think the memory was too slow on those boxen, but I left the project at that point. Fast enough was 30 fps, and it was difficult even with the library. (We needed the 3D position of the eyes reliably at video rates for a stereo display and didn't want the user to have to wear anything.)
They have pretty decent MMX algorithms which work out of the box. I'd have to say those that do write in C unless they absolutely can't avoid it. I was happy to squeeze an extra two cycles out of the inner loop of my MMX code, but I'd really rather have Intel do it since it's not the core of my work.
Computers are slow and always will be, I'm a graphics person so 6 hours to render a frame is really slow, to real vision people processing an image for depth overnight is fast. We invent ways to use the CPU much well ahead of Moore's law. In another 50 years we'll be able to emulate dog vision! maybe... just run it overnight
(I'm speaking of the general library, this press release is just another algorithm added. They basically add common algorithms to the library, slowly.)
why can't the military rebuild and upgrade those like they are doing to the B-52
Think laptop, fighters pack a lot more equipment into a much smaller area. An upgradable fighter would need mountings for the different components. This might make them easier to maintain, but the pilot would rather have an extra 30 mins in fuel.
Of course, if the fighters were engineered and not designed by committee KISS would be observed. But the military has grown fat from the cold war and is just now getting whipped back into shape by smaller budgets. (They had the money and time to ask for unreasonable things.)
When I hear reporting like this I really start to wonder if all the whole newspaper is this inaccurate. I'm sure almost everyone here has at one point used something that could be considered warez. Are we all part of this group? Where is my share of the profits? etc.
The New York Times has always had remarkably bad technology coverage. They never point out that the BSA is a Microsoft shell corp. Whenever some worm takes advantage of a horrible bug in Microsoft software it's never pointed out. They even gave Microsoft credit for inventing the optical mouse a couple years ago.
They had a couple good reporters in the early days but I don't think that advertising section has ever had a tech literate editor to fire the idjits.
Their news coverage is considerably better, though FAR from perfect.
So there is someone in Germany who's an idiot.
So?
Has this thing passed? No
Will it pass? Not likely
The world has changed since the US Senate passed the internet censorship bill 99-1. Many legislators have touched a computer and many more have been told about them by their interns. Now while legislative interns are usually the prisiest section of our world's populace, they aren't the stupidest.
Curb cuts make it easier for wheelchair users, but harder for the blind to detect curbs. Wheelchair toliets are higher, making bowel movements more difficult, especially for the elderly.
I heard the same thing about curb cuts, but I heard it as an explanation for why there are ridges in the curb cut (In most major cities, I've seen places where this is overlooked). The ridges are also great for not slipping and falling into the street in winter that may be the intended reason (I've seen them in warmer climes though.) -- As for the high toilets, as a tall male I LOVE those high toilets where you don't have to worry about any part of your body getting wet. Of course, when I have to flush 5 or 6 times on a #2 I get a bit annoyed.
I have to admit I rarely make any software accessible. I've never found a nice library that worked in all the languages I use so I haven't bothered with it except for on a few limited devices (pda, cell phone.)
BTW Curb cuts are great for strollers, kids on bikes, delivery men, moving computers/laundry, anything on wheels really.
When is someone's address ever relevant?
;)
Let's say we're protesting the mayor's policy of releasing the home addresses of voters without letting people know who is looking at the address. I think that protest should be at the mayor's house, you may disagree(, but you're wrong.
Very pointless in fighting entropy.
Grrr. If this gives my laptop an extra hour of use it is certainly not pointless. This is like saying that getting those solar cells from 30% effeciency to 60% is pointless. But that would change energy policy.
(Conventional (cheaper) solar cells are only at 10-15%, which is less efficient than plants at converting energy.)
But from what I read this is twice as efficient as the old technology, while computers have been doubling in power every year most of the world isn't like that and most people would be happy if their income doubled. This is still not as efficient as a turbine, but this can be added at the end of the cycle just before the steam is shipped off to office buildings, especially in summer.
(a) You cannot out anybody. If you give out a name or location, that post gets edited or deleted. People who post that sort of thing are often warned about it, and have the option to fix it themselves within the 30-minute "edit window" for a post.
This is the one thing about the "either you censor everything or nothing" idea that bothers me. If someone posted the home address of someone that wasn't a public figure tagged with some hate it could actually endanger someone, even if it was mod'ed to -1. I can see how in a public square you could say it and you could even make a 1000 copies and paste it all over town, but there are controls there. People could take them down off the telephone posts and we should have the same ability in cyberspace without opening ourselves up to litigation. It shouldn't be required, I can see how posting the same private address for a public protest would be ligit, but it should be safe to take it down.
Britney Spears, N-Sync, or Creed albums. These guys are most likely living from month to month and cannot afford to throw the sales that those records would bring out of the window.
In my experience local stores wouldn't carry that crap anyway. I tend to be liberal on these things, if they put that stuff and the copy protected cd's in a case that clearly states that they will think you're a stupid fuck if you buy it, I'll leave them alone. Of course, they should also charge a 20-30% bad taste surcharge, but I won't even insist on that.
The constitution itself says congress has the right to protect IP for a limited time with patents and copyright as long as it encourages more innovation. When two parts of the constitution are in conflict like this there is no rule until the Supreme Court issues it's opinion.
You know I have always had memories of having heard the northern lights. I grew up hugging the arctic circle so they were common enough to be indistinct memories. I tried to hear them whenever I was far from the city and failed (Where I thought it would be easier, but it may in fact have been impossible there). Now I feel a little less silly.
;)
The northern lights seem much calmer. But the fact that you can see them move, and they are far away and huge means there could be a lot of crackling going on up there.
BTW The I'm pretty sure the voices in MY head aren't explained by this. THEY know me too well.
We hunted those things to extinction fair and square. We did it on purpose, and with good reason: They were screwing with our food production.
I agree. While today we'd probably manage a pest population, back then our cost benefit analysis didn't contain all we now know.
But even if we didn't know all we know now about genetic diversity and ecosystems, we no longer need all those farms. We have to subsidize farmers the world over because they've been overproducing since the invention of the tractor. We can now afford to return a large portion of that land to nature. Returning predators makes the management a lot easier. It won't be the same nature we plowed over, but I'm sure it will still be a fantastic medicinal resource to mine when some virus wipes out a third of our population again.
The founder effect, which is the sharp reduction in the genetic variety of a population when it arises from a very small group of individuals (Iceland is an excellent example), has a great potential to be a problem here.
I agree that this would be the biggest problem. Well after someone figures out how to reasseble the DNA which I can't believe is pristine. We could borrow the mitochondrial DNA from an existing animal, and the 'we got just one clone' problem could be solved by some creative slicing with another cat.
But Iceland could be an example here, you've got these raiders who decide to settle on this huge forrested isle. So the first thing they do is find some English & Irish slaves to do the dishes, chop down the trees, and mind the livestock.. Well somehow the two gene lines get mixed. On the other hand they never mix with the monks who were living on the island when they got there, but they do become the first literate population since the Romans in Europe. Then there are the Turkish raiders, all those trading ships. Iceland may be relatively 'pure' genetically but relative to the African population, even America has that problem.
While the first Tigers would be in a very precarious situation in 5 or 6 generations we could greatly reduce the risk. The real problem is there are people farming on their land. It would be expensive to move them forcibly and it will be years before we change back from income taxes to resource use taxes (land, oil, minerals, polution).
On further investigation it was found the one copy of the family licence produced for projected demand was infact lost and not sold. The licence will be delivered to Bill this afternoon.
In other news Ziff-Davis is planning on a six issue story on the repeated depletion of family licence packs at Microsoft and the need, nay desperate need to increase Microsoft OS prices to help the struggling Redmond company keep up with Amazing! Earth Shattering! Unbelievable! demand!
God damn! A million dollars in recording costs? Half a million in marketing? Quarter of a million advance, most of which goes to management, lawyers and recording studios?
I really don't think this is so shocking. I'm amazed that they can make Brity Spear sound good, it's a marvel of modern technology. It's also pointed out that the Union Man, the songwriter, sits in first class while the scabs sit in Coach.
What they don't mention is that that same expensive technology and marketing engine fails on non-pop bands. Girls vs. Boys was a great punk band, but their major record label CDs sounded like pop, and bombed. Ani DiFranco had to create her own label because the record labels couldn't figure out which shelf her music went on. Pee Shy was a eclectic Florida/NY band that died after their second CD because they were forgotten during one of the music industry mergers. I read about a music store that couldn't figure out whether Patty Smith should go in Folk or Punk, and decided it wasn't worth it to stock.
The industry is broken, and it isn't just because technology has reduced their natural use to promoters and financiers. They've merged to the point where they don't have enough heads to deal with all the music out there and so are forced to deal with the mass appeal stuff like nSync, Madonna, Spear, etc. Technology is just a catalist, eventually someone would have figured out that better bands don't need as much handholding but still need risk capital and figured out a better business process with lower costs.
The economy of scale needed for records, cd's, and glossy 4 color prints to make money made the publishers too big to make money for smaller bands (That is where most of money is to be made). Book publishers will have the same problem in a few years when someone figures out how to print a single nicely bound books on the cheap. They were more recently merged so they may be able to undo the problem. I have little hope that most of the record companies will survive however, their only hope is another copyright extension by congress, but at some point the Supreme Court will have to strike that down. (Monopolies can only be granted for limited times under the US constitution. I don't know if Europe has the same restrictions on their governments, but they have fewer lobbyists asking them to hobble their intellect.)