There is nothing stopping them from amassing it in a database under the 4th Amendment. Something that wasn't a search to begin with doesn't magically become a search because it is entered it in to a database....and this is where we disagree. At least, to a point: I think that it becomes unreseasonable search when you pull that info out.
It really comes down to what makes it unreasonable. To me, there must be a line that's not physical, but rather in how intimate the detail is - how much you can learn about me. Knowing that I was at a specific spot at a specific time is one thing. Knowing where I go, and what I do for many instances of time is something else because it tells you, IMHO, an unreasonable amount about me.
No, but it will be necessary to have it run in 32 bit mode in order to support the thirty-or-so years worth of binaries written with a 32-bit instruction set in mind.
It should also be noted that the jump from 16 bit to 32 bit is much more important than the jump to 32 bit.
16 bits wasn't enough to represent the common tasks that a computer does given the available peripherals that a human uses, and they had to do lots of tricks to make things smaller. 32 bits pretty much is. Adding more to that means making extra special instructions that are only good for very specific circumstances.
The second sentence in the second paragraph is missing an article: Articles are merely clarifying adjectives. In other words, not having it arguably makes the sentence unclear, and occasionally completely changes the meaning, but it isn't wrong. Sometimes you want to be unclear - when you want to distract people from a real mistake, for example.
The third paragraph begins with a coordinating conjunction. This is generally considered poor form. See the above point.
It lacks a verb This could be so. But "the problem shown in bold" is as valid an independent phrase as, "the sun shown in the sky." It's confusing how that bold text, which didn't exist before I wrote it managed to shine in the past, but a valid sentence with a confusing meaning is still a valid sentence. I was of mixed feelings on putting this one in there - on whether I could count it as a faux-mistake like the others.
It also has a semicolon where it should have a comma. That's the only one that is necessarily a real grammar error. There isn't any way that the two phrase comprising that sentence are two independent phrases. A comma would also have been wrong, however, because there is no conjunction joining the two phrases. A colon or dash would have been appropriate.
All programmers should be good parsers of English before they start working on other things.
From the GP I get this:
I understandCOMMA but come onDASH it changes the meaningCOMMA and more importantly makes it difficult to read. Do a quick proof read next timeCOMMA please. Changes are marked in bold and spelled out rather than using the hard-to-see punctuation. GP's not really in a position to be asking for corrections by my estimation.
And from the parent's sig; the problem shown in bold:
Winning an arguement is simple. Just make everyone you argue with think they're wrong. Was that a Persian flaw, or a genuine mistake? Either way, nobody's perfect. Can you spot the flaw in my comment?
1) virtual multichannel soundboard (each slider and knob is represented on the screen; slide as many as you want as simultaneously as you want). Works for lighting boards too. The advantage? You can have a multiscreen soundboard and group according to instrument groups/etc. and be able to be at an optimum listening spot with your 1lb tablet rather than way in the back listening from behind a noisy immovable board. Actually, any time you have multiple interfaces to manipulate in a time-critical fashion you can use this tech. Also good, therefore, for telerobotics and remote control vehicles.
2) Virtual collectible card game table - lay cards down, pick them up, etc. using multiple tablets using natural dragging gestures. Ultimately, *anywhere* that you've got a bunch of real world objects that you want to make virtual versions of that you can manipulate as a group or not this is useful. Heck, RTS games would benefit because instead of grouping you can just put your fingertips on all the little guys you want to send over to the enemy base.
3) Speeds in gesture recognition is greatly enhanced by actually having multiple gestures. Isn't that pretty much why we're using keyboards for typing rather than mice? Even without changing anything about current functionality, a lot of improvements can be made this way.
In either case, the important question to be answered after having encountered the finest example of something we've never seen before is, "Will it Blend?"
*Note: I am not in any way affiliated with that site. I just want to see more crap go into blenders and be filmed.
is that they do the same sort of thing the brain is doing... of course this is all just interesting supposition
Wavelet works better than jpeg because it flat-out produces less error than jpeg compression for the same level of compression. DWT is just a more clever algorithm than DCT. We're at the stage, though, that these really shouldn't be used as a baseline.
DWT has been out and in use for a long time in jpeg2000, MrSid, and a lot of others.
The point of both, though, is that high and low-frequencies (either in Wavelet space or Cosine space, or even Fourier space or pretty much any other frequency space) in images aren't really observed much by humans. This is easy to verify (and has been) by studying the visual receptors and nerve endings in the eyes. It's not supposition, as you mention. We know that's how it works.
This is just the beginning, though. There's a lot more clever things in the jpeg algorithm (and its ancestors) besides encoding in frequency space and eliminating the unseen frequencies.
The first poster on this topic had a good explanation - it seems like an AI problem, but not why.
Compression is about recognizing patterns. Once you have a pattern, you can substitute that pattern with a smaller pattern and a lookup table. Pattern recognition is a primary branch of AI, and is something that actual intelligences are currently much better at.
We can generally show this is true by applying the "grad student algorithm" to compression - i.e., lock a grad student in a room for a week and tell him he can't come out until he gets optimum compression on some data (with breaks for pizza and bathroom), and present the resulting compressed data at the end. So far this beats out compression produced by a compression program because people are exceedingly clever at finding patterns.
Of course, while this is somewhat interesting in text, it's a lot more interesting in images, and more interesting still in video. You can do a lot better with those by actually having some concept of objects - with a model of the world, essentially, than you can without. With text you can cheat - exploiting patterns that come up because of the nature of the language rather than because of the semantics of the situation. In other words, your text compressor can be quite "stupid" in the way it finds patterns and still get a result rivaling a human.
This is all based upon taking a rather more limited view of God than is strictly necessary, isn't it?
First, the premise that God is separate from his creations implies that God is finite.
Before I address this, I need to clarify it, since obviously this is not a conclusion that would be reached by any modern logic (since, as mentioned there can be multiple infinite things). If, however, you assume that God has volume and takes up space, and "infinite" equals "encompassing all that exists" (which appears to be the kind of conclusion that a lot of early theologians seem to reach), then this is a lot more interesting a claim.
However, I see no real problem here. God could be present in every single atom and watching over every single particle interaction, but choosing not to participate in some - letting creation do its own thing, so to speak. In essence, creation would be made up of part of God, who chooses not to exert control over that part of himself, and instead let it work on its own. The major religions you speak of have no trouble with the idea that God can incarnate - how is this much different?
I don't see at all how the rest of the arguments follow the first one, but having addressed that first claim, we can move on.
Any change in the state of a perfect thing would render it imperfect, or imply that the original state was not perfect to begin with.
Or that you're definition of "state" is wrong. Time and space are one thing. If God is omnipresent, then he should be omnitemporal as well. All of the "states" of time could be one state - the perfect state in which God exists.
Thus, God cannot love anything, or want anything for his creations. He cannot think, feel, reason, or want, because all of these things imply mutability.
Obviously the argument is for immutability, not perfection. It is taken as a given that perfection implies immutability.
This is a much better thought out argument, but still, ignores the omnitemporality of God. The *change* in those things implies change. Over the course of all time and space (which as I have said, could encompasses one "instant" of existance for God), there would be just one state. One set of thoughts, one set of emotions, one desire for the creation - in essence, one picture of all that is, was or will be. Of course, I can't really picture what exactly that means for an omnitemporal being, so I can't say how it works, other than that your definition of perfection can hold.
Indeed, perfection and omnipotence are incompatible, because action implies change! I think I've pretty well established the flaw in this part.
It's very hard to logically reconcile these concepts while still believing that God sent his son to die for our sins, because he wants humanity to be saved. I don't see a problem...I can draw in two dimensions, though I am three dimensional, and perceive a single point in a fourth dimension. The effect I can exert on a dimensionality less than my own shows a very different aspect than one would see if they could observe me in full. So in our religions, we see a God who cares about us in a specific moment - which is perhaps a limited aspect of reality.
It can be correct from the limited point of view that is available, though not enough to show a complete picture.
But it allows for problems with the network that get fixed without demanding payment from third party people.
I don't know how I stand on this, as it does pose that interesting problem. Maybe just restrict proveably malicious behaviour.
Your solution doesn't work, though, because it fails on these two points: 1) You have to trace the money It would be easy, for instance, to have a separate agency that does the actually traffic shaping. These "internet optimizers" could supposedly be independent agencies that just watch traffic and try to maximize the bandwidth of everybody by restricting flow certain services/websites intelligently - maybe, for example, under the guise of stopping spam. Of course, there are plenty of ways that such an agency could be slipped money under the table to support one specific service over others. That kind of thing happens all the time now on a different kind of traffic system - the US highway system. Traffic flow analysis is an art - and displaying the data in a way that supports the claim that your "client" needs priority is all too easy.
2) Define what "internet" means Cable modem companies currently send a large stream of data through their pipes exclusively used for broadcasting television signals, and nobody else gets that. What would happen to that? It gets an exemption? Then what's to stop people from formatting other parts of their service similarly? This is really fuzzy. In addition, what are the implications of such a definition? Will it, for instance, stop people from using TCP/IP for their infrastructure (in ATMs, cell phone networks, etc.) for fear of being considered part of the internet and therefore subject to net neutrality regulation? I don't want to see us go back to dozens of proprietary packet technologies over an issue like regulation.
I really want to see this work. But I don't know how it can, and I've not heard any ideas clever enough to make it happen.
I use subclipse for version control. It's available from the same place you get subversion.:)
The other one is packaged by MyEclipse, for which I pay $50 a year (and well worth not having to worry about the details of plugin solidarity and to contribute to the future advancement of the IDE). I've no idea which packages they've combined to generate their RDBMS, but no doubt that they took it from somewhere.
Everything written by the band "Presidents of the United States of America" (including the three songs that got a lot of play on the pop stations).
Everything written by They Might Be Giants - including Istanbul and Particle Man, both of which were pretty big in the charts.
More recently "Walkin' On the Sun" by Smashmouth (which, if you can't read between the lines, is about the commercialization and lack of positive influence from musical movements since the sixties).
Music is like every other form of media: insightful stuff is in limited supply; most people stick to the basics of human experience because connecting to the piece requires less imagination. Read, watch TV, play video games, etc. It's all the same. Quality is hard to come by, but you can find it if you look.
You just have to wade through a sea of crap to get to it.
I personally use Eclipse for everything except.Net. That's about the only thing it doesn't do - it's truly a comprehensive IDE.
To be more specific, I'm using it to debug Java, Perl, php, ruby, and NSIS (Windows installers). It's also my database front-end (currently used with Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server), and subversion client (with the best 3-way merging interface I've ever found), and trac (bug management) interface.
I don't use it for any other languages because that's all the ones I really use, but from dabbling I can see that there is pretty good support for python and C++ available for it.
It's almost an operating system in an IDE (kind of like Emacs is...only more graphical, and more focused around programming languages). Everything that languages have in common - mostly in how debugging can be done the same way for all of them.
I can't figure out why this monster isn't considered a universal IDE. Why is it still thought of as Java only?
Probably not an issue. From the various sites on the subject, the thickness of the surface that you shine LEDs into needs to be around 10mm (.4 inches) thick. That's not enough to have appreciable parallax issues between the display and the image.
Also, the acrylic is the light diffracting medium. There are lots of scratch resistant coatings that can go on top of it. Scratching isn't really an issue unless they neglect that.
Well, because of the botnet thing...yes, if the prosecutors are any good. Invading other people's computers for nefarious purpose is more serious than just sending spam.
The literary reader reads and re-reads for the joy of immersion in the world of the book, for the language of the descriptions and to meet again the characters, and mulls over the book afterwards.
But...that means that Robert Jordan's never ending wheel of time series is a great literary work because while never advances very much, you get to know the characters & world very well. Same for Dragon Ball Z. While I like CS Lewis a lot, and usually agree with him, this time I think I'm going to have to say that he's simplified too far (or you've simplified his point too much). I may not know everything that has great literary value, but I think that few would say that either one of those series do.
So...along the lines of good literary design, your sentence here seems to be asking for parallel construction (thing while other thing, thing while other thing) that it is currently lacking:
a novel can be deeply deeply entertaining while having shallow, flat characters and saying nothing beyond a reaffirmation of the author's political biases (most Tom Clancy novels) or a novel can be a deep and insightful exploration of the human condition, capturing strong and sophisticated characters (most of Dickens' work) while using such verbose and uninteresting prose as to be mind-numbingly boring.
I think an important point to make here is that to me, this means that Clancy is the better writer. Of course, I'd even more prefer a writer whose got something to say and keeps me entertained - like Terry Pratchett, for instance, but a writer who can't be entertaining isn't a good fiction writer. He's just someone with good ideas who has expressed them in that format rather than as an essay, or how-to book, or something.
Huh...I always thought of radiation as meaning "electromagnetic radiation." But I can see by the definition that it also encompasses nuclear particles.
Except, you know...the nuclear radiation that is RF radiation...which is all of it.
the critical difference is that nuclear radiation is ionizing, that is to say that it can not only vibrate molecules a bit, but it has enough energy to alter them.
What about UV? That causes mutations too. Does that have as much energy as gamma (the answer: not if the amplitude is the same)? This is just crap. Any kind of radiation can have three effects on cells: 1) It gets absorbed and dissipated before coming into contact with living cells 2) It gets absorbed by cells and damages them 3) It gets abosrbed by cells and destroys them
The more energy, the more likely to get #3. However, there are agents in the skin to absorb most of the energy in most of the RF spectrum. Any part of the spectrum can cause mutations if you can get it to do step #2 and not step #3. There are other mutagens besides just the radiation in nuclear stuff though - there's the emission of particles that also do serious damage.
I worked at a company that built RF power amplifiers for cell towers (30-45W average power output), and many of my coworkers had been working with microwave RF amps since the very first cell system Motorola deployed.
Your story aside, that much power could easily burn someone to cinders if they happened to be sitting on the focal point of a microwave dish. They don't actually get 45W of microwave energy hitting them ever, so it's not a problem.
The recidivism rate is computed by taking the number of people who, after their release, are found guilty of another crime within a certain time period (3 years for these data, IIRC) and dividing by the number of people released from prison. So, even if most offenders are never released, all this does is drive down the total size of the population. The variance will increase, but the recidivism rate can still be calculated.
You don't seem to be reaching the logical conclusion here.
Rs1 = repeat offenders released Ro1 = nonrepeat offenders released
Recidivism = Rs/(Ro+Rs)
If most of those who would be repeat offenders are not released while the rest of the released population is still released, then the recidivism rate goes down. I.e., if the change in Rs>the change in Ro even by a single person by not releasing what is considered the most heinous criminals versus releasing them, then the recidivism rate goes down.
Part of what made Palm successful was the ability to write applications and expand it.
And that's essentially what's holding the current version back. You must have missed it.
For the past five years or so, Windows Mobile development has been easier, device compatibility has been much greater, and with a greater number of chips available on which the software would run.
Oh, and it's multithreaded, so the main CPU can do things like, for example, run a radio chip (wifi/bluetooth) while letting you do other things without doing really funky things with interrupts.
I haven't been following the market closely enough, but the little I've seen is companies putting linux on phones as a replacement for another embedded OS, but without the ability to expand what's there.
I would say you haven't! Or at all, judging by that comment. If companies make it so that you can't expand what's there, it's because they don't want software on there that doesn't come from them. They're putting artificial locks in place - like maybe not including a real filesystem on the device, or no support for new binaries compiled in, or not allowing certain kinds of peripherals, etc. Linux has been ported to a huge number of things. Of course, for the trivial stuff like you're talking about, you can just compile things using a cross-compiling toolchain. Instead of being limited to only what you specifically write for the specific chip on the specific embedded OS, you can use virtually anything written for GCC. Even the linux kernel modules are up for use, so you may not have to do the expensive task of writing drivers.
The important thing, though, is that it's all about the hardware with small devices. Peripherals, ability to connect things, etc, is much harder than software stuff.
These statistics are pretty close to meaningless in this context.
Is there more than one type of murder? Is there more than one type of sexual offense?
There are no murderers that are tracked? Why do you suppose most of them aren't?
It occurs to me that the ones that the fact that there isn't a lot of repeat crimes for rapists and murderers is because most of them aren't released. Especially for premeditated or serial murder, the debt to society is beyond the possibility of rehabilitation.
As for repeat sexual crimes...some of them - such as pedophilia, for example, are thought to be a lot more likely to be repeating than others. Others, like public lewdness, are likely a lot less likely to happen again. Just getting caught prevents it. Any study needs to be a lot more specific to show real conclusive reasons why the current system makes no sense.
This notion that it's ok to monitor this one group of people for the remainder of their lives seems unconstitutional. They were convicted, sentenced and then served their time. But that's just the beginning... now they will be watched and monitored till they die. Do we do the same for a convicted murderer or armed robber?
People who are molested at an early age tend to do it to other people when they get older. It's like CFCs for society. Murderers don't cause their victims to murder, armed robbers don't cause their victims to rob.
I have never seen any homicidal watch lists. Aren't murderers and robbers as well as those convicted of DUI also likely to reoffend? Why don't we watch these people.
They do have lists for these things, and you do lose privileges when you commit certain types of crimes. Get dangerous enough on the road, for example, and no more driving for you. They aren't nearly as likely to reoffend, though. A lot of people who do crimes like these are just being stupid. They don't think through the consequences of their actions or how they affect other people. It's not the same with sexual crimes. You can stop being stupid a lot easier than you can change your sexual nature.
And when we start seeing the constitution ignored for the sake of going after something that sickens and terrifies us, what good is that document? For over time, we will allow more and more "bending of the rules" and "blind eyes" to be turned in the name of the children or terrorism.
Yeah...and what's with this not letting children work thing? Next thing you know, nobody will be allowed to work! Why is this a slippery slope? Terrorism does seem to be - I can point to a lot of things that have been done in the name of terrorism that have nothing to do with it, and can ask "when will it end?" This isn't that kind of thing.
I think its been pretty clear from the beginning of the US that children lack most rights that everyone else gets (like privacy and free speech) and in exchange some rights can be taken away from other people (the same rights, but only as they relate to children) for their benefit. Obviously, this ends when there's no benefit to children. It won't go further than that, because children have no almost no political power even by proxy.
I have no problem with this exception.
Your other points are quite valid. There is, however, the problem of "guilty until proven innocent" with the current laws that I can't abide (i.e. even if not convicted, you're on the list). Also, the issue that the list doesn't distinguish between kinds of crimes in any way. Public indecency, rape, child molestation, psycho-girlfriend got mad and filed a police report...whatever. It's all the same on the list.
Practically speaking, that makes it very difficult to actually make use of the list. How can you tell if you've got a sexual predator in your neighborhood that you have to be careful of if they put so many mostly harmless people on it?
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing stopping them from amassing it in a database under the 4th Amendment. Something that wasn't a search to begin with doesn't magically become a search because it is entered it in to a database. ...and this is where we disagree. At least, to a point: I think that it becomes unreseasonable search when you pull that info out.
It really comes down to what makes it unreasonable. To me, there must be a line that's not physical, but rather in how intimate the detail is - how much you can learn about me. Knowing that I was at a specific spot at a specific time is one thing. Knowing where I go, and what I do for many instances of time is something else because it tells you, IMHO, an unreasonable amount about me.
No, but it will be necessary to have it run in 32 bit mode in order to support the thirty-or-so years worth of binaries written with a 32-bit instruction set in mind.
It should also be noted that the jump from 16 bit to 32 bit is much more important than the jump to 32 bit.
16 bits wasn't enough to represent the common tasks that a computer does given the available peripherals that a human uses, and they had to do lots of tricks to make things smaller. 32 bits pretty much is. Adding more to that means making extra special instructions that are only good for very specific circumstances.
The added cost of that *may* not be worth it.
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
A colon or dash would have been appropriate.
All programmers should be good parsers of English before they start working on other things.
Is it possible to be more off-topic?
And from the parent's sig; the problem shown in bold: Winning an arguement is simple. Just make everyone you argue with think they're wrong. Was that a Persian flaw, or a genuine mistake? Either way, nobody's perfect. Can you spot the flaw in my comment?
1) virtual multichannel soundboard (each slider and knob is represented on the screen; slide as many as you want as simultaneously as you want). Works for lighting boards too. The advantage? You can have a multiscreen soundboard and group according to instrument groups/etc. and be able to be at an optimum listening spot with your 1lb tablet rather than way in the back listening from behind a noisy immovable board. Actually, any time you have multiple interfaces to manipulate in a time-critical fashion you can use this tech. Also good, therefore, for telerobotics and remote control vehicles.
2) Virtual collectible card game table - lay cards down, pick them up, etc. using multiple tablets using natural dragging gestures. Ultimately, *anywhere* that you've got a bunch of real world objects that you want to make virtual versions of that you can manipulate as a group or not this is useful. Heck, RTS games would benefit because instead of grouping you can just put your fingertips on all the little guys you want to send over to the enemy base.
3) Speeds in gesture recognition is greatly enhanced by actually having multiple gestures. Isn't that pretty much why we're using keyboards for typing rather than mice? Even without changing anything about current functionality, a lot of improvements can be made this way.
In either case, the important question to be answered after having encountered the finest example of something we've never seen before is, "Will it Blend?"
*Note: I am not in any way affiliated with that site. I just want to see more crap go into blenders and be filmed.
is that they do the same sort of thing the brain is doing... of course this is all just interesting supposition
Wavelet works better than jpeg because it flat-out produces less error than jpeg compression for the same level of compression. DWT is just a more clever algorithm than DCT. We're at the stage, though, that these really shouldn't be used as a baseline.
DWT has been out and in use for a long time in jpeg2000, MrSid, and a lot of others.
The point of both, though, is that high and low-frequencies (either in Wavelet space or Cosine space, or even Fourier space or pretty much any other frequency space) in images aren't really observed much by humans. This is easy to verify (and has been) by studying the visual receptors and nerve endings in the eyes. It's not supposition, as you mention. We know that's how it works.
This is just the beginning, though. There's a lot more clever things in the jpeg algorithm (and its ancestors) besides encoding in frequency space and eliminating the unseen frequencies.
The first poster on this topic had a good explanation - it seems like an AI problem, but not why.
Compression is about recognizing patterns. Once you have a pattern, you can substitute that pattern with a smaller pattern and a lookup table. Pattern recognition is a primary branch of AI, and is something that actual intelligences are currently much better at.
We can generally show this is true by applying the "grad student algorithm" to compression - i.e., lock a grad student in a room for a week and tell him he can't come out until he gets optimum compression on some data (with breaks for pizza and bathroom), and present the resulting compressed data at the end.
So far this beats out compression produced by a compression program because people are exceedingly clever at finding patterns.
Of course, while this is somewhat interesting in text, it's a lot more interesting in images, and more interesting still in video. You can do a lot better with those by actually having some concept of objects - with a model of the world, essentially, than you can without. With text you can cheat - exploiting patterns that come up because of the nature of the language rather than because of the semantics of the situation. In other words, your text compressor can be quite "stupid" in the way it finds patterns and still get a result rivaling a human.
This is all based upon taking a rather more limited view of God than is strictly necessary, isn't it?
First, the premise that God is separate from his creations implies that God is finite.
Before I address this, I need to clarify it, since obviously this is not a conclusion that would be reached by any modern logic (since, as mentioned there can be multiple infinite things). If, however, you assume that God has volume and takes up space, and "infinite" equals "encompassing all that exists" (which appears to be the kind of conclusion that a lot of early theologians seem to reach), then this is a lot more interesting a claim.
However, I see no real problem here. God could be present in every single atom and watching over every single particle interaction, but choosing not to participate in some - letting creation do its own thing, so to speak. In essence, creation would be made up of part of God, who chooses not to exert control over that part of himself, and instead let it work on its own. The major religions you speak of have no trouble with the idea that God can incarnate - how is this much different?
I don't see at all how the rest of the arguments follow the first one, but having addressed that first claim, we can move on.
Any change in the state of a perfect thing would render it imperfect, or imply that the original state was not perfect to begin with.
Or that you're definition of "state" is wrong. Time and space are one thing. If God is omnipresent, then he should be omnitemporal as well. All of the "states" of time could be one state - the perfect state in which God exists.
Thus, God cannot love anything, or want anything for his creations. He cannot think, feel, reason, or want, because all of these things imply mutability.
Obviously the argument is for immutability, not perfection. It is taken as a given that perfection implies immutability.
This is a much better thought out argument, but still, ignores the omnitemporality of God. The *change* in those things implies change. Over the course of all time and space (which as I have said, could encompasses one "instant" of existance for God), there would be just one state. One set of thoughts, one set of emotions, one desire for the creation - in essence, one picture of all that is, was or will be. Of course, I can't really picture what exactly that means for an omnitemporal being, so I can't say how it works, other than that your definition of perfection can hold.
Indeed, perfection and omnipotence are incompatible, because action implies change!
I think I've pretty well established the flaw in this part.
It's very hard to logically reconcile these concepts while still believing that God sent his son to die for our sins, because he wants humanity to be saved.
I don't see a problem...I can draw in two dimensions, though I am three dimensional, and perceive a single point in a fourth dimension. The effect I can exert on a dimensionality less than my own shows a very different aspect than one would see if they could observe me in full. So in our religions, we see a God who cares about us in a specific moment - which is perhaps a limited aspect of reality.
It can be correct from the limited point of view that is available, though not enough to show a complete picture.
But it allows for problems with the network that get fixed without demanding payment from third party people.
I don't know how I stand on this, as it does pose that interesting problem. Maybe just restrict proveably malicious behaviour.
Your solution doesn't work, though, because it fails on these two points:
1) You have to trace the money
It would be easy, for instance, to have a separate agency that does the actually traffic shaping. These "internet optimizers" could supposedly be independent agencies that just watch traffic and try to maximize the bandwidth of everybody by restricting flow certain services/websites intelligently - maybe, for example, under the guise of stopping spam. Of course, there are plenty of ways that such an agency could be slipped money under the table to support one specific service over others. That kind of thing happens all the time now on a different kind of traffic system - the US highway system. Traffic flow analysis is an art - and displaying the data in a way that supports the claim that your "client" needs priority is all too easy.
2) Define what "internet" means
Cable modem companies currently send a large stream of data through their pipes exclusively used for broadcasting television signals, and nobody else gets that. What would happen to that? It gets an exemption? Then what's to stop people from formatting other parts of their service similarly? This is really fuzzy.
In addition, what are the implications of such a definition? Will it, for instance, stop people from using TCP/IP for their infrastructure (in ATMs, cell phone networks, etc.) for fear of being considered part of the internet and therefore subject to net neutrality regulation? I don't want to see us go back to dozens of proprietary packet technologies over an issue like regulation.
I really want to see this work. But I don't know how it can, and I've not heard any ideas clever enough to make it happen.
I use subclipse for version control. It's available from the same place you get subversion. :)
The other one is packaged by MyEclipse, for which I pay $50 a year (and well worth not having to worry about the details of plugin solidarity and to contribute to the future advancement of the IDE). I've no idea which packages they've combined to generate their RDBMS, but no doubt that they took it from somewhere.
If you name one I will give you a cookie
"Flood" by Jars of Clay.
Everything written by the band "Presidents of the United States of America" (including the three songs that got a lot of play on the pop stations).
Everything written by They Might Be Giants - including Istanbul and Particle Man, both of which were pretty big in the charts.
More recently "Walkin' On the Sun" by Smashmouth (which, if you can't read between the lines, is about the commercialization and lack of positive influence from musical movements since the sixties).
Music is like every other form of media: insightful stuff is in limited supply; most people stick to the basics of human experience because connecting to the piece requires less imagination. Read, watch TV, play video games, etc. It's all the same. Quality is hard to come by, but you can find it if you look.
You just have to wade through a sea of crap to get to it.
I personally use Eclipse for everything except .Net. That's about the only thing it doesn't do - it's truly a comprehensive IDE.
To be more specific, I'm using it to debug Java, Perl, php, ruby, and NSIS (Windows installers). It's also my database front-end (currently used with Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server), and subversion client (with the best 3-way merging interface I've ever found), and trac (bug management) interface.
I don't use it for any other languages because that's all the ones I really use, but from dabbling I can see that there is pretty good support for python and C++ available for it.
It's almost an operating system in an IDE (kind of like Emacs is...only more graphical, and more focused around programming languages). Everything that languages have in common - mostly in how debugging can be done the same way for all of them.
I can't figure out why this monster isn't considered a universal IDE. Why is it still thought of as Java only?
Probably not an issue. From the various sites on the subject, the thickness of the surface that you shine LEDs into needs to be around 10mm (.4 inches) thick. That's not enough to have appreciable parallax issues between the display and the image.
Also, the acrylic is the light diffracting medium. There are lots of scratch resistant coatings that can go on top of it. Scratching isn't really an issue unless they neglect that.
Well, because of the botnet thing...yes, if the prosecutors are any good. Invading other people's computers for nefarious purpose is more serious than just sending spam.
But...that means that Robert Jordan's never ending wheel of time series is a great literary work because while never advances very much, you get to know the characters & world very well. Same for Dragon Ball Z. While I like CS Lewis a lot, and usually agree with him, this time I think I'm going to have to say that he's simplified too far (or you've simplified his point too much). I may not know everything that has great literary value, but I think that few would say that either one of those series do.
So...along the lines of good literary design, your sentence here seems to be asking for parallel construction (thing while other thing, thing while other thing) that it is currently lacking:
a novel can be deeply deeply entertaining while having shallow, flat characters and saying nothing beyond a reaffirmation of the author's political biases (most Tom Clancy novels) or a novel can be a deep and insightful exploration of the human condition, capturing strong and sophisticated characters (most of Dickens' work) while using such verbose and uninteresting prose as to be mind-numbingly boring.
I think an important point to make here is that to me, this means that Clancy is the better writer. Of course, I'd even more prefer a writer whose got something to say and keeps me entertained - like Terry Pratchett, for instance, but a writer who can't be entertaining isn't a good fiction writer. He's just someone with good ideas who has expressed them in that format rather than as an essay, or how-to book, or something.
My worry is something like that.
I worry that Sony will patent the technology and then make some more useless-via-DRM-and-proprietary-addons like the Minidisc, Librie, and PS3.
So many innovations...that nobody gets to use.
All they really have to do is sell this at a reasonable rate to PDA and phone manufacturers.
But I think they'll probably just screw it up again.
Huh...I always thought of radiation as meaning "electromagnetic radiation." But I can see by the definition that it also encompasses nuclear particles.
shrug.
this does become dangerous as the heat basically cooks you from the inside (just like a microwave oven)
That doesn't happen. You're right about heat dissipation, though.
RF radiation is nothing like nuclear radiation
Except, you know...the nuclear radiation that is RF radiation...which is all of it.
the critical difference is that nuclear radiation is ionizing, that is to say that it can not only vibrate molecules a bit, but it has enough energy to alter them.
What about UV? That causes mutations too. Does that have as much energy as gamma (the answer: not if the amplitude is the same)? This is just crap. Any kind of radiation can have three effects on cells:
1) It gets absorbed and dissipated before coming into contact with living cells
2) It gets absorbed by cells and damages them
3) It gets abosrbed by cells and destroys them
The more energy, the more likely to get #3. However, there are agents in the skin to absorb most of the energy in most of the RF spectrum. Any part of the spectrum can cause mutations if you can get it to do step #2 and not step #3. There are other mutagens besides just the radiation in nuclear stuff though - there's the emission of particles that also do serious damage.
I worked at a company that built RF power amplifiers for cell towers (30-45W average power output), and many of my coworkers had been working with microwave RF amps since the very first cell system Motorola deployed.
Your story aside, that much power could easily burn someone to cinders if they happened to be sitting on the focal point of a microwave dish. They don't actually get 45W of microwave energy hitting them ever, so it's not a problem.
The recidivism rate is computed by taking the number of people who, after their release, are found guilty of another crime within a certain time period (3 years for these data, IIRC) and dividing by the number of people released from prison. So, even if most offenders are never released, all this does is drive down the total size of the population. The variance will increase, but the recidivism rate can still be calculated.
You don't seem to be reaching the logical conclusion here.
Rs1 = repeat offenders released
Ro1 = nonrepeat offenders released
Recidivism = Rs/(Ro+Rs)
If most of those who would be repeat offenders are not released while the rest of the released population is still released, then the recidivism rate goes down. I.e., if the change in Rs>the change in Ro even by a single person by not releasing what is considered the most heinous criminals versus releasing them, then the recidivism rate goes down.
Part of what made Palm successful was the ability to write applications and expand it.
And that's essentially what's holding the current version back. You must have missed it.
For the past five years or so, Windows Mobile development has been easier, device compatibility has been much greater, and with a greater number of chips available on which the software would run.
Oh, and it's multithreaded, so the main CPU can do things like, for example, run a radio chip (wifi/bluetooth) while letting you do other things without doing really funky things with interrupts.
I haven't been following the market closely enough, but the little I've seen is companies putting linux on phones as a replacement for another embedded OS, but without the ability to expand what's there.
I would say you haven't! Or at all, judging by that comment. If companies make it so that you can't expand what's there, it's because they don't want software on there that doesn't come from them. They're putting artificial locks in place - like maybe not including a real filesystem on the device, or no support for new binaries compiled in, or not allowing certain kinds of peripherals, etc. Linux has been ported to a huge number of things. Of course, for the trivial stuff like you're talking about, you can just compile things using a cross-compiling toolchain. Instead of being limited to only what you specifically write for the specific chip on the specific embedded OS, you can use virtually anything written for GCC. Even the linux kernel modules are up for use, so you may not have to do the expensive task of writing drivers.
The important thing, though, is that it's all about the hardware with small devices. Peripherals, ability to connect things, etc, is much harder than software stuff.
These statistics are pretty close to meaningless in this context.
Is there more than one type of murder? Is there more than one type of sexual offense?
There are no murderers that are tracked? Why do you suppose most of them aren't?
It occurs to me that the ones that the fact that there isn't a lot of repeat crimes for rapists and murderers is because most of them aren't released. Especially for premeditated or serial murder, the debt to society is beyond the possibility of rehabilitation.
As for repeat sexual crimes...some of them - such as pedophilia, for example, are thought to be a lot more likely to be repeating than others. Others, like public lewdness, are likely a lot less likely to happen again. Just getting caught prevents it. Any study needs to be a lot more specific to show real conclusive reasons why the current system makes no sense.
I have some issues with some of your points.
This notion that it's ok to monitor this one group of people for the remainder of their lives seems unconstitutional.
They were convicted, sentenced and then served their time. But that's just the beginning... now they will be watched and monitored till they die.
Do we do the same for a convicted murderer or armed robber?
People who are molested at an early age tend to do it to other people when they get older. It's like CFCs for society. Murderers don't cause their victims to murder, armed robbers don't cause their victims to rob.
I have never seen any homicidal watch lists.
Aren't murderers and robbers as well as those convicted of DUI also likely to reoffend?
Why don't we watch these people.
They do have lists for these things, and you do lose privileges when you commit certain types of crimes. Get dangerous enough on the road, for example, and no more driving for you. They aren't nearly as likely to reoffend, though. A lot of people who do crimes like these are just being stupid. They don't think through the consequences of their actions or how they affect other people. It's not the same with sexual crimes. You can stop being stupid a lot easier than you can change your sexual nature.
And when we start seeing the constitution ignored for the sake of going after something that sickens and terrifies us, what good is that document? For over time, we will allow more and more "bending of the rules" and "blind eyes" to be turned in the name of the children or terrorism.
Yeah...and what's with this not letting children work thing? Next thing you know, nobody will be allowed to work! Why is this a slippery slope? Terrorism does seem to be - I can point to a lot of things that have been done in the name of terrorism that have nothing to do with it, and can ask "when will it end?" This isn't that kind of thing.
I think its been pretty clear from the beginning of the US that children lack most rights that everyone else gets (like privacy and free speech) and in exchange some rights can be taken away from other people (the same rights, but only as they relate to children) for their benefit. Obviously, this ends when there's no benefit to children. It won't go further than that, because children have no almost no political power even by proxy.
I have no problem with this exception.
Your other points are quite valid. There is, however, the problem of "guilty until proven innocent" with the current laws that I can't abide (i.e. even if not convicted, you're on the list). Also, the issue that the list doesn't distinguish between kinds of crimes in any way.
Public indecency, rape, child molestation, psycho-girlfriend got mad and filed a police report...whatever. It's all the same on the list.
Practically speaking, that makes it very difficult to actually make use of the list. How can you tell if you've got a sexual predator in your neighborhood that you have to be careful of if they put so many mostly harmless people on it?