Try going without car insurance for a while, and see how well that works out for you.
I haven't gotten into a reportable (more than $500 damage or injury) accident in 15 years. As a kid, I totalled
my own (piece of crap) car twice, and an older car I hit for around $5k damage.
In my life, I have paid on the order of $17,000 in auto insurance (and have lived in fairly cheap states for it),
which has in turn paid out less than half that amount.
Now, you will of course respond "but what if someone had gotten seriously injured?" - I hate to break
it to you, but under most auto insurance policies, if you actually cause anything more complicated than a few
scratches and a broken arm, the treatment will most likely exceed your liability cap anyway. I think I have
something like $250k on my policy, which would barely cover a single moderately serious surgery and a
few day's stay in an ICU. Push that out to injuries requiring a few rounds of surgery plus a month stay plus
rehab plus the inevitable "pain and suffering" suit, and you may as well proactively declare bankruptcy,
regardless of your auto insurance.
So yeah, I'd go without insurance in a heartbeat, but whaddya know, the government won't let me.
Mandatory health insurance, like mandatory auto insurance, amounts to nothing but one giant scam benefiting
exactly one interest group - The insurance companies. Notice that their input into the current debate
has had nothing against the "mandatory" part, so much as opposing the "public" option and the limits on
"preexisting condition" clauses.
Well what's the difference really? They could say that the bill is $50 and you have to
pay an extra $1.50 for a paper bill, or they could say the bill is $51.50 and you get a
$1.50 discount for not receiving paper bills. Same thing.
Not the same thing at all.
For one thing, most utilities have either fixed profit margins or fixed rate schedules. They can't
just raise everyone's bill by $1.50 and "offer" to reduce it for playing ball. Whether or not they can
charge more for the "value added" service of sending you a bill remains something of a grey area, however,
at least until enough of them get spanked by their local PUC for trying crap like this.
Second, many monthly services have various taxes associated with the underlying service itsef - So making me
pay more for the service and taking it off after-the-fact means more taxes than paying less for the service
with a "fee" for paper billing (this obviously wouldn't apply in the case of a straight bottom-line sales tax,
but the sort of services this entire topic relates to generally don't pay taxes like that).
Finally - We-the-customers need to take a stand about the nonstop attempts by every
company with whom we (have no choice but to) do business, trying to nickel-and-dime us to death.
I would love to see some sort of regulation like what New York has for retail, where the
company must show the real, actual, final, all-expenses-included price. None of this "39.95 per
month plus taxes and fees and random nondescript lineitems, +/- whatever-we-like based on the
length of your contract and what model of hardware you either own or rented, adjusted for how many
seconds you use it per day per arbitrarily sliding time-windows with different fee structures". Just
tell us the goddamned cost up-front. If you can't (or won't) do that, GTFO and make room for someone
who will. Not a difference so much as a "stop quibbling about the details and grow a pair" - Just
Say No(tm) to one more itsy bitsy fee and tell them where to stick the paper bill they no longer need to
send to you, as an ex-customer.
Why is this a different "sense" organ? Because it uses the sense of "touch"? Is a handheld compass also an "on-body" circuit?
Evolutionarily, we at least have the vestiges of a "sense" of magnetic bearing - our brains contain tiny magnetite
crystals, similar to (though much smaller and fewer) those found in birds, which do function to give them a
sense of absolute direction. So whether or not we can reactivate that sense, we at least (probably) have the underlying
wiring necessary to use it.
As for the cross-modality of this... Judging by TFA and other similar experiements about which
I've read, I would say that we can indeed awaken that sense by providing an alternate means of
inputting the relevant data (in this case, via touch).
But to compare this to looking at a normal compass, the biggest difference, I would say, comes from it
providing constant and passive feedback about the local magnetic environment. Looking at a
compass will indeed tell you which way to call "North", but you don't "experience" it as anything but a name
for the way the needle points. If instead, you always had an accurate sense of North, I would expect
it to affect you much more strongly - Your proprioception would suddenly include an absolute orientation
rather than merely relative positioning.
it also takes place, or adds "noise", to at least a region of our actual existing senses, information
that could have been useful or needed and now become blurred by this artificial input.
While true, we don't really "need" the vast majority of our sense of touch - Aside from letting us know about
injuries (which I would expect to far outweigh the input of a small buzzer), any given point on our
legs, torso, arms, or even most of our heads, really doesn't matter much so far as sensing environmental input
goes. We generally can't even count on those to give meaningful input, because we wear clothes over them
(and thus, automatically block out what little they do tell us).
Incidentally, I recall reading about a similar experiment about a decade ago, by a group of body-modification
fans, where a few people implanted tiny rare-earth magnets in their fingers. While the magnets lasted, they
described it as very much having a new sense. They could locate magnetic north, detect the presence and
frequency of electric and magnetic fields, identify most metals (including non-ferromagnetic)
just by touch, etc. Made me quite jealous, except the part where their bodies eventually broke the magnets
down (with some rather ugly, though localized, surface effects).
But this... Perhaps not quite as "cool", but also not quite as irreversable if something
goes wrong. Time to hit the workshop...
And yet, to finally see a real orbital, not a simulation. Looks like a 1s and a 2p, right there for the looking!
Yeah... That part makes me just a tad suspicious of this image...
First of all, carbon has 2p2 in the ground state - So we should never actually see the s orbitals.
Second, "ground state" amounts to an abstraction rather than a description - Electrons don't really sit around in
the ground state configuration, they constantly bounce around between higher orbitals. And FTA, "They placed a
rigid chain of carbon atoms, just tens of atoms long, in a vacuum chamber". So not only did they get a ground state
configuration, but they managed to get it from a single atom participating in covalent bond? Someone feel free to
correct me, but shouldn't that make one lobe of the 2p orbital smeared out in the direction of its neighbor?
Don't mean to sound like a pessimist, and I'd love this to end up legit, but I have my doubts until someone can
reproduce their methodology and get similar results.
If you never used one, then you really shouldn't be talking about it...
Ah, of course. Because I haven't personally used one, I can't claim that they won't survive the
end of life on this planet and, indeed, the universe itself?
Get over yourself. If the discussion involved feature-set and overall usability, my lack of experience
with the device in question would matter. I feel 100% confident, however, in saying that mankind has
never and will never produce a device that cannot fail.
Now, as for fail-safe over a reasonable time-frame... Someone mentioned that APC makes a number of UPSs with
such a feature. I certainly have worked with UPSs, and high-end APC ones at that. And I feel entirely
comfortable saying that they have their own set of failure modes to contend with. I've seen them panic from
a momentary power flicker that realistically wouldn't even have taken down a single machine with a decent PSU,
but as a result a whole rack voluntarily shuts down and awaits further instruction. I've seen them turn off
despite no power condition problems because they suddenly decide they need a new battery (beep at me
if you must, but damned well don't turn off in the middle of the day just because you can only work at half
capacity in an outage!). I've seen them go into weird power-cycling loops where they turn themselves on and
off a few times per second (never figured this one out 100%, but I hypothesized that the power had dipped to
right at the switchover threshold, such that the UPS on pulls it too low, switch; UPS off lets it drift back
to barely acceptable, switch; rinse, wash, repeat).
They can fail, just like everything else, and I don't need to have used your favorite model to claim that.
The iPhone is no replacement for an iPod touch because it costs thousands of dollars more.
For an iPod touch, no. For an iPod touch, plus a decent GPSr, plus a PDA, plus a digital camera...
And not "thousands" of dollars, don't exaggerate so. A few hundred difference (the very phone from TFA goes
for 619 Euros, bare) will get you a perfectly usable (if offline) iPhone. Now, if you want cell service, you
have to pay someone, whether you use an iPhone or a TracPhone. But don't try to add that to the cost
of the phone.
Now, if you have no use for all those features, we have no disagreement. Personally, I want a phone
that just... makes... phonecalls. No camera, no GPSr, no music playing, not even a battery-killing
backlit color screen, if at all possible (whatever happened to 2x24 LCD displays???). I can't actually
get such a phone, but you get the point. The GP, however, specifically wanted all of those
features, so I pointed out a way he could get them all in one place, at a cost less than the sum of its
parts (as individual devices).
Unnecessarily. I could have meant homebrew games, but don't need to mince words - Either way, it doesn't
change my original point.
Keep in mind this entire topic involves digital music - Would your music library stand up to an RIAA subpoena,
Mr. Bainwol? And you want to quibble over the color of the bits in my ROM collection?
Because any XML structure will be beyond terrible for efficiency. You want to know how to get to point B today, right?
You realize that you can actually extract data from an XML document without implementing a full XML
parser, right? You can ignore recursion and overlapping namespaces and dynamic schemas and just get to the
meat of the file in a linearly-bounded fixed-space manner?
Even in.NET you don't need to walk the namespace, you can just SelectSingleNode()s until you find the one
you really want. On a full PC with oodles of memory and CPU time, I wouldn't recommend that; on a device that
has 4k RAM and spends 97% of its CPU time adjusting signal delays for relativistic effects? Really, I promise, you
can cut a few corners to only deal with the tags that actually have some meaning within the context of your task.
Sad, really, that of the responses to my comment so far, most (and from apparent programmers, at that!) have
complained about the overhead of XML parsing. An embedded device's implementation doesn't need the ability to
100% accurately process an arbitrary XML file - It just needs the ability to find the route or track named "foo"
and get the end-user to the nearest point in that route.
Both GPX (ubiquitous) and KML (Google Earth) support routes, in a nice simple XML grammar, and just
about every GPS-aware application in existence supports both of them. Why, then, should we care
about yet another format to do the same damned thing?
I don't object to diversity of choice, but really... Sometimes you just can't do better than sticking with
the wheel for moving your cart.
It also doesn't have a mortality rate much higher than the average flu.
One of my biggest peeves about the media FUD around swine flu - It has a LOWER mortality rate than your
typical annual flu. Lower. Less than.
As in, if you had to pick between a random flu-season strain or swine flu, you'd want to get swine
flu!
Now, some fearmong^H^H^Hexperts claim that it "could" mutate into a more lethal strain - Which if we seriously
believe that, everyone should do their damnedest to catch it ASAP, thereby exposing their immune systems to
a similar virus and reducing the symptoms from that hypothetical killer version.
Nah... Let's just panic about it. Perhaps enough midly sick people driving like maniacs to their
local hospital can raise the mortality rate to compete with a typical flu, via car accidents.
Besides, the lack of a conventional input system makes some types of games much less attractive.
One word/acronym: "USB".
Not that I would buy any iToys just for gaming, but as a (reasonably fair) comparison, my netbook sucks for
gaming input as well. One $15 USB gamepad later, though, and I have the entire library of emulated SNES games
at my fingertips for some serious wasting of time, without making my shoulders and neck feel like I spent
the last week sleeping in a bookcase.
It actually surprises me that Nintendo and Sony haven't already take the approach of separate display and input devices
for portable gaming... Although a little more awkward to carry, most people don't find it comfortable to put their hands
together, at arms' length, and stare at that same spot for hours on end.
I so much would have liked a GPS Receiver with that. So sad. I do not need another phone but a PDA
The iPhone does all those things - Has a built in GPSr, acts as a PDA, plays multimedia files, and even theoretically
lets you get online (as long as you stand outside, in good weather, with line-of-sight sight of a tower, at 3am, yadda yadda yadda).
And if you jailbreak it, you can even use force AT&T to make good on their false advertising (MMS and tethering come to mind).
So while you may not need a new phone, it sounds like a new phone would solve your problem.
Now me, I loathe both AT&T and Apple. The N900, however - Drool!
Or make the machines all VMs so they can SSH into the "hardware" and reset it
Sometimes, a real live human needs to walk out to the machine and toggle the power. Layer upon layer of
clever hardware abstraction can help (usually at the cost of performance), but at the end of the day,
you still need someone to go flip the switch occasionally.
or get network-connected power buttons and video cards
Network connected video cards rock - Locally. Move beyond the local network segment, though
and I hope you work for Sprint or Tyco or some other company that can afford to drop you an
OC-12 or comparable connection. Network connected power buttons... Honestly never used one of them,
but again, you just add one more layer of abstraction from failure - What happens when the network connected
power button fails?
I don't mean this just to play Devil's Advocate, BTW... Realistically, machines don't just randomly go down
hard for no reason. Some event causes such failures, and whether isolated (does your network power
button let you know that your machine has literally caught on fire?) or shared (Good news: The lightning somehow
miraculously didn't cook your rows upon rows of racks.; Bad news: They now have rain pouring in on them),
your solution needs to have the ability to deal with everything from pressing the reset button to resolving
a worst-case scenario.
Engadget's own pundit focuses on the more predictable problems of format
wars between competing 3D display technologies.
What format wars? If Sony beats everyone else to market by a few
years, Sony wins the next few decades, end of discussion.
Now, if (as has happened so often in Sony's history) someone else
comes to market with a similar product at half the price... Well, BetaMax 3d,
we hardly knew ye...
Y'know, I've always wondered about this one. I have never said to myself,
"Self, those paint chips look pretty yummy, let's try a few!". Kinda makes me wonder
if we don't have a... shall we say "selection bias" in kids who eat lead paint
experiencing neurological problems.
melanine(kills cats)
Do you like your magic erase sponges? 99% Melamine with a surfactant added. Do you have formica countertops?
also mostly melamine, with a resin added to harden it. But not a very good pet food, no.
drywall(poisons houses)
Phosphogypsum only causes problems in modern energy-efficient houses with little outside air
exchange. Gypsum (including Phosphogypsum) occurs as a natural mineral virtually everywhere
in the world, including the US. We make our own drywall domestically, and only post-Katrina
did we have a need to import it. China met that demand, except we got burned for not knowing
that they don't differentiate between the two minerals (physically more-or-less identical,
for their use in drywall). Not a case of fraud byt the manufacturers, so much as the importers
not wanting to ask too many questions.
heparin(kills people dead) and keep them for their own internal market?
Although this amount to outright fraud by the companies involved, the deaths came not from a
specifically unsafe product, but because of allergic reactions to a much cheaper but similar
chemical. Again, no defense whatsoever for selling chemical-P as chemical-Q, but you have to
wonder why our medical establishment would rather use an expensive drug that requires
raising and torturing livestock to produce, rather than a nearly identical drug with no
pigs involved... And the deaths in this situation don't answer that question, because plenty
of people have allergies to heparin itself.
Mostly this boils down to greed, sometimes the fault of manufacturers cutting corners, but always
the fault of us, the end users, willing to look the other way to save a buck at Wallyworld. Take it as
a given that TANSTAAFL... So whenever you can buy a foreign-made (and I mean that to apply anywhere,
not just the US-vs-China) product for less than the same thing locally made, stop and ask yourself: How
they can afford to make and ship something 10k miles and still charge less than your neighbor making the
same thing?
So if you, or any of your friends' computers are compromised, they can "steal" your DPP
protected stuff. And you can never get it back.
With one slight problem to this entire idea - You only need the ability to play it once. After that, whoever wants
"the" key can have it, for all it matters.
Thinking of this in terms of a car sounds nice (and Slashdot luuuuurves car analogies), but it hides the
real problem inherent in all DRM... Instead of a car, think of it in terms of a secret written on a scrap
of paper and sealed in a vault behind 24 layers of locks and a pissed off badger guarding the door. Perhaps
no one can ever practically breach that vault... But as soon as you loan that scrap to a friend, it takes only
a photocopier or cheap camera to make all that security completely pointless.
The same goes for any content, and I don't even mean this to invoke the spooooky "analog hole". If you can
play it once, you have already defeated the DRM and just need a suitable photocopier. All the misdirection
about "secure" drivers and devices just throws more glitter up between you and the "key", when in reality, you
don't even care about the key, just the content.
...Because these all involve "Religious vilification".
Unless we all lost our minds and
considered Scientology as some sort of religion, rather than a group of Heinlein fanboys
who took it waaaaaay too far, none of these would benefit them.
So, nothing to see here, just another Modest Proposal to keep the Kids(tm) safe.
One thing you didn't do was agree to an API, so the other guy who worked on his piece came back with an incompatible part.
Half right, actually, and I do accept my share of the responsibility there... But at the scale of final projects in college courses,
I can implement the API quite nearly as fast as I could come up with one sufficiently detailed to avoid any possible
misinterpretation by other team members. In the working world... Well, that still holds true half the time, and when it doesn't,
suffice it to say that I've learned to write "specs" that actually compile and look more like a fill-in-the-blanks
(with as few blanks as practical) than an English description of functionality.
the rest of the team probably saw you as a black box because you didn't make any effort to become friends with them ...
You're probably not friends with your coworkers
Gen-Y'er, right?
You will meet people in your life that you won't like. You will have to get along with them anyway to get the job done. Sometimes this means a grade, sometimes it means keeping your job or getting a better one, sometimes it means gritting your teeth and saying "yes, your honor" to
a complete moron literally with the power of life and death over you.
If you can't behave in a professional manner regardless of whether or not your coworkers list you as bestest buddies on their Facebook
page, you will fail - The class, the job, at life.
I buy an SUV though. It is -mine- that is I can do whatever the heck I want with it.
True.
I can't stop you from buying an SUV, thereby endangering my life (not to mention your own - The gloss
of "safety" attributed to SUVs doesn't even exist for the occupants) every time you get on the
road. You can choose to waste your money to put twice as many greenhouse gasses per mile into
the air as the average passenger vehicle. You have the "right" to back over your own kids because
SUVs have dangerously poor rear and side blind spots.
But y'know, somehow, I just can't seem to feel all that bad when someone throws a molotov through the
window of your penile compensation at 2am.
But hey, just my opinion. You have every right to do whatever the heck you want with it, and I
look like the asshole here.
Y'know, I can almost respect them for torching SUVs - If the government won't tell people "No, you may not drive
a vehicle that presents a significant danger* to everyone else on the road, without special training for the appropriate
license class", then perhaps fear of having their car burn down one night kept at least a few people driving more
realistic vehicles.
But radio towers? C'mon, analog radio will follow analog TV within the next few years, with or without an FCC mandate
(market forces alone will do the trick, no doubt at all). No need to kick it as it lies gasping on the ground in
its death throes...
* This comes from a study conducted by the NTSB, which they then proceeded to ignore completely.
The point is not to get the best grade in the class.
Nor did I ever deliberately try for that particular goal (though I won't pretend I didn't usually define the top of
the grading curve). Didn't even graduate with a 4.0, primarily because I don't "suffer fools gladly" and don't play
along with the cute little political games.
The point is to learn how to work together with people so that you can accomplish greater things
than any of you could have done by yourself.
In the working world, you can sometimes convince your coworkers to at least put in a bit of effort for the
sake of their future with the company. In academia? When you have one older gentlemen who really does try but has
no clue; one "C is for Credit" point-counter who knows going into the final project that she can blow it off and
still pass the course; one brilliant foreign student who could probably do the project in his sleep but can't speak
a word of English; one frat-boy who trusts that his "bros" have his back and he'll just pull something from
their project archive at the last minute (Hello? Custom project here? Any comprehension at all that you
won't find your part of it ready-made?)...
Okay, I exaggerate a bit, in that I didn't have all those people on a single project at the same time. But
I did have the joy of working with all of them on group projects at various times. Most teammates simply
proved themselves useless in less stereotypical ways, often barely having a grasp of the class prerequisites,
nevermind sufficient understanding to help in the least in a final project.
Then again, in fairness, most of my teams probably considered me as some form of (de facto) "project leader
from hell", trying to meet insanely unreasonable goals (like actually satisfying all the project
requirements) when other groups got by with laughable results. I remember one OO Design class I took,
one of the teams literally did... A web site. A static web site. Perhaps a dozen pages. No server-side
interaction, no client-side scripting, no dynamic backend data store, just... A web site. And... They... PASSED!
Yeah. So, take my ranting as you will.:)
But work on a team project and make a connection, make friends that can help you later, and people you can help later
You know what I learned from "team" projects in college?
Just do the whole damned thing yourself if you want any shot at passing. Because otherwise, come the due date you'll have
your part done, one person with a partially-working-but-incompatible part, and three people with weak excuses.
I learned that "team" really does have a "me" in it, and you can't spell much with "ta". And, after 10 years in the
"real" working world, I haven't found much to change my opinion on that matter.
THAT'S why people spend stupid amounts of money on an Ivy League education. "What you know"
is assumed. "Who you know" is particular and requires access.
One small correction there - In the case of Ivies, "Who you know" counts as a prerequisite for getting in,
not a benefit of going there.
you're going to see people competing for the schools that are desirable enough that they can still charge $30K/year like the Ivies do.
You miss the point. This doesn't mean getting a degree from the University of Phoenix... You take the fluffy liberal arts prereqs of which
most universities require a good two years' worth, then get your actual degree from the Ivy.
And I have no problem with that, as long as they actually uphold some decent academic standards rather than just passing any moron
who can pony up a C note. Personally, I did something not all that dissimilar - I went to a community college for a liberal arts
AA for $800 per semester, then transferred into a decent 4-year as a Junior. Dropped the total cost of my education by about 45%,
and I have the same papers as those who paid the full 4-year tuition.
Slashdot Mirror
Try going without car insurance for a while, and see how well that works out for you.
I haven't gotten into a reportable (more than $500 damage or injury) accident in 15 years. As a kid, I totalled my own (piece of crap) car twice, and an older car I hit for around $5k damage.
In my life, I have paid on the order of $17,000 in auto insurance (and have lived in fairly cheap states for it), which has in turn paid out less than half that amount.
Now, you will of course respond "but what if someone had gotten seriously injured?" - I hate to break it to you, but under most auto insurance policies, if you actually cause anything more complicated than a few scratches and a broken arm, the treatment will most likely exceed your liability cap anyway. I think I have something like $250k on my policy, which would barely cover a single moderately serious surgery and a few day's stay in an ICU. Push that out to injuries requiring a few rounds of surgery plus a month stay plus rehab plus the inevitable "pain and suffering" suit, and you may as well proactively declare bankruptcy, regardless of your auto insurance.
So yeah, I'd go without insurance in a heartbeat, but whaddya know, the government won't let me.
Mandatory health insurance, like mandatory auto insurance, amounts to nothing but one giant scam benefiting exactly one interest group - The insurance companies. Notice that their input into the current debate has had nothing against the "mandatory" part, so much as opposing the "public" option and the limits on "preexisting condition" clauses.
Well what's the difference really? They could say that the bill is $50 and you have to pay an extra $1.50 for a paper bill, or they could say the bill is $51.50 and you get a $1.50 discount for not receiving paper bills. Same thing.
Not the same thing at all.
For one thing, most utilities have either fixed profit margins or fixed rate schedules. They can't just raise everyone's bill by $1.50 and "offer" to reduce it for playing ball. Whether or not they can charge more for the "value added" service of sending you a bill remains something of a grey area, however, at least until enough of them get spanked by their local PUC for trying crap like this.
Second, many monthly services have various taxes associated with the underlying service itsef - So making me pay more for the service and taking it off after-the-fact means more taxes than paying less for the service with a "fee" for paper billing (this obviously wouldn't apply in the case of a straight bottom-line sales tax, but the sort of services this entire topic relates to generally don't pay taxes like that).
Finally - We-the-customers need to take a stand about the nonstop attempts by every company with whom we (have no choice but to) do business, trying to nickel-and-dime us to death. I would love to see some sort of regulation like what New York has for retail, where the company must show the real, actual, final, all-expenses-included price. None of this "39.95 per month plus taxes and fees and random nondescript lineitems, +/- whatever-we-like based on the length of your contract and what model of hardware you either own or rented, adjusted for how many seconds you use it per day per arbitrarily sliding time-windows with different fee structures". Just tell us the goddamned cost up-front. If you can't (or won't) do that, GTFO and make room for someone who will. Not a difference so much as a "stop quibbling about the details and grow a pair" - Just Say No(tm) to one more itsy bitsy fee and tell them where to stick the paper bill they no longer need to send to you, as an ex-customer.
Why is this a different "sense" organ? Because it uses the sense of "touch"? Is a handheld compass also an "on-body" circuit?
Evolutionarily, we at least have the vestiges of a "sense" of magnetic bearing - our brains contain tiny magnetite crystals, similar to (though much smaller and fewer) those found in birds, which do function to give them a sense of absolute direction. So whether or not we can reactivate that sense, we at least (probably) have the underlying wiring necessary to use it.
As for the cross-modality of this... Judging by TFA and other similar experiements about which I've read, I would say that we can indeed awaken that sense by providing an alternate means of inputting the relevant data (in this case, via touch).
But to compare this to looking at a normal compass, the biggest difference, I would say, comes from it providing constant and passive feedback about the local magnetic environment. Looking at a compass will indeed tell you which way to call "North", but you don't "experience" it as anything but a name for the way the needle points. If instead, you always had an accurate sense of North, I would expect it to affect you much more strongly - Your proprioception would suddenly include an absolute orientation rather than merely relative positioning.
it also takes place, or adds "noise", to at least a region of our actual existing senses, information that could have been useful or needed and now become blurred by this artificial input.
.
While true, we don't really "need" the vast majority of our sense of touch - Aside from letting us know about injuries (which I would expect to far outweigh the input of a small buzzer), any given point on our legs, torso, arms, or even most of our heads, really doesn't matter much so far as sensing environmental input goes. We generally can't even count on those to give meaningful input, because we wear clothes over them (and thus, automatically block out what little they do tell us)
Incidentally, I recall reading about a similar experiment about a decade ago, by a group of body-modification fans, where a few people implanted tiny rare-earth magnets in their fingers. While the magnets lasted, they described it as very much having a new sense. They could locate magnetic north, detect the presence and frequency of electric and magnetic fields, identify most metals (including non-ferromagnetic) just by touch, etc. Made me quite jealous, except the part where their bodies eventually broke the magnets down (with some rather ugly, though localized, surface effects).
But this... Perhaps not quite as "cool", but also not quite as irreversable if something goes wrong. Time to hit the workshop...
And yet, to finally see a real orbital, not a simulation. Looks like a 1s and a 2p, right there for the looking!
Yeah... That part makes me just a tad suspicious of this image...
First of all, carbon has 2p2 in the ground state - So we should never actually see the s orbitals.
Second, "ground state" amounts to an abstraction rather than a description - Electrons don't really sit around in the ground state configuration, they constantly bounce around between higher orbitals. And FTA, "They placed a rigid chain of carbon atoms, just tens of atoms long, in a vacuum chamber". So not only did they get a ground state configuration, but they managed to get it from a single atom participating in covalent bond? Someone feel free to correct me, but shouldn't that make one lobe of the 2p orbital smeared out in the direction of its neighbor?
Don't mean to sound like a pessimist, and I'd love this to end up legit, but I have my doubts until someone can reproduce their methodology and get similar results.
If you never used one, then you really shouldn't be talking about it...
Ah, of course. Because I haven't personally used one, I can't claim that they won't survive the end of life on this planet and, indeed, the universe itself?
Get over yourself. If the discussion involved feature-set and overall usability, my lack of experience with the device in question would matter. I feel 100% confident, however, in saying that mankind has never and will never produce a device that cannot fail.
Now, as for fail-safe over a reasonable time-frame... Someone mentioned that APC makes a number of UPSs with such a feature. I certainly have worked with UPSs, and high-end APC ones at that. And I feel entirely comfortable saying that they have their own set of failure modes to contend with. I've seen them panic from a momentary power flicker that realistically wouldn't even have taken down a single machine with a decent PSU, but as a result a whole rack voluntarily shuts down and awaits further instruction. I've seen them turn off despite no power condition problems because they suddenly decide they need a new battery (beep at me if you must, but damned well don't turn off in the middle of the day just because you can only work at half capacity in an outage!). I've seen them go into weird power-cycling loops where they turn themselves on and off a few times per second (never figured this one out 100%, but I hypothesized that the power had dipped to right at the switchover threshold, such that the UPS on pulls it too low, switch; UPS off lets it drift back to barely acceptable, switch; rinse, wash, repeat).
They can fail, just like everything else, and I don't need to have used your favorite model to claim that.
The iPhone is no replacement for an iPod touch because it costs thousands of dollars more.
For an iPod touch, no. For an iPod touch, plus a decent GPSr, plus a PDA, plus a digital camera...
And not "thousands" of dollars, don't exaggerate so. A few hundred difference (the very phone from TFA goes for 619 Euros, bare) will get you a perfectly usable (if offline) iPhone. Now, if you want cell service, you have to pay someone, whether you use an iPhone or a TracPhone. But don't try to add that to the cost of the phone.
Now, if you have no use for all those features, we have no disagreement. Personally, I want a phone that just... makes... phonecalls. No camera, no GPSr, no music playing, not even a battery-killing backlit color screen, if at all possible (whatever happened to 2x24 LCD displays???). I can't actually get such a phone, but you get the point. The GP, however, specifically wanted all of those features, so I pointed out a way he could get them all in one place, at a cost less than the sum of its parts (as individual devices).
Fixed that for you.
Unnecessarily. I could have meant homebrew games, but don't need to mince words - Either way, it doesn't change my original point.
Keep in mind this entire topic involves digital music - Would your music library stand up to an RIAA subpoena, Mr. Bainwol? And you want to quibble over the color of the bits in my ROM collection?
Because any XML structure will be beyond terrible for efficiency. You want to know how to get to point B today, right?
.NET you don't need to walk the namespace, you can just SelectSingleNode()s until you find the one
you really want. On a full PC with oodles of memory and CPU time, I wouldn't recommend that; on a device that
has 4k RAM and spends 97% of its CPU time adjusting signal delays for relativistic effects? Really, I promise, you
can cut a few corners to only deal with the tags that actually have some meaning within the context of your task.
You realize that you can actually extract data from an XML document without implementing a full XML parser, right? You can ignore recursion and overlapping namespaces and dynamic schemas and just get to the meat of the file in a linearly-bounded fixed-space manner?
Even in
Sad, really, that of the responses to my comment so far, most (and from apparent programmers, at that!) have complained about the overhead of XML parsing. An embedded device's implementation doesn't need the ability to 100% accurately process an arbitrary XML file - It just needs the ability to find the route or track named "foo" and get the end-user to the nearest point in that route.
Both GPX (ubiquitous) and KML (Google Earth) support routes, in a nice simple XML grammar, and just about every GPS-aware application in existence supports both of them. Why, then, should we care about yet another format to do the same damned thing?
I don't object to diversity of choice, but really... Sometimes you just can't do better than sticking with the wheel for moving your cart.
It also doesn't have a mortality rate much higher than the average flu.
One of my biggest peeves about the media FUD around swine flu - It has a LOWER mortality rate than your typical annual flu. Lower. Less than.
As in, if you had to pick between a random flu-season strain or swine flu, you'd want to get swine flu!
Now, some fearmong^H^H^Hexperts claim that it "could" mutate into a more lethal strain - Which if we seriously believe that, everyone should do their damnedest to catch it ASAP, thereby exposing their immune systems to a similar virus and reducing the symptoms from that hypothetical killer version.
Nah... Let's just panic about it. Perhaps enough midly sick people driving like maniacs to their local hospital can raise the mortality rate to compete with a typical flu, via car accidents.
Besides, the lack of a conventional input system makes some types of games much less attractive.
One word/acronym: "USB".
Not that I would buy any iToys just for gaming, but as a (reasonably fair) comparison, my netbook sucks for gaming input as well. One $15 USB gamepad later, though, and I have the entire library of emulated SNES games at my fingertips for some serious wasting of time, without making my shoulders and neck feel like I spent the last week sleeping in a bookcase.
It actually surprises me that Nintendo and Sony haven't already take the approach of separate display and input devices for portable gaming... Although a little more awkward to carry, most people don't find it comfortable to put their hands together, at arms' length, and stare at that same spot for hours on end.
I so much would have liked a GPS Receiver with that. So sad. I do not need another phone but a PDA
The iPhone does all those things - Has a built in GPSr, acts as a PDA, plays multimedia files, and even theoretically lets you get online (as long as you stand outside, in good weather, with line-of-sight sight of a tower, at 3am, yadda yadda yadda). And if you jailbreak it, you can even use force AT&T to make good on their false advertising (MMS and tethering come to mind).
So while you may not need a new phone, it sounds like a new phone would solve your problem. Now me, I loathe both AT&T and Apple. The N900, however - Drool!
Or make the machines all VMs so they can SSH into the "hardware" and reset it
Sometimes, a real live human needs to walk out to the machine and toggle the power. Layer upon layer of clever hardware abstraction can help (usually at the cost of performance), but at the end of the day, you still need someone to go flip the switch occasionally.
or get network-connected power buttons and video cards
Network connected video cards rock - Locally. Move beyond the local network segment, though and I hope you work for Sprint or Tyco or some other company that can afford to drop you an OC-12 or comparable connection. Network connected power buttons... Honestly never used one of them, but again, you just add one more layer of abstraction from failure - What happens when the network connected power button fails?
I don't mean this just to play Devil's Advocate, BTW... Realistically, machines don't just randomly go down hard for no reason. Some event causes such failures, and whether isolated (does your network power button let you know that your machine has literally caught on fire?) or shared (Good news: The lightning somehow miraculously didn't cook your rows upon rows of racks.; Bad news: They now have rain pouring in on them), your solution needs to have the ability to deal with everything from pressing the reset button to resolving a worst-case scenario.
Engadget's own pundit focuses on the more predictable problems of format wars between competing 3D display technologies.
What format wars? If Sony beats everyone else to market by a few years, Sony wins the next few decades, end of discussion.
Now, if (as has happened so often in Sony's history) someone else comes to market with a similar product at half the price... Well, BetaMax 3d, we hardly knew ye...
Lead paint(makes kids retarded)
Y'know, I've always wondered about this one. I have never said to myself, "Self, those paint chips look pretty yummy, let's try a few!". Kinda makes me wonder if we don't have a... shall we say "selection bias" in kids who eat lead paint experiencing neurological problems.
melanine(kills cats)
Do you like your magic erase sponges? 99% Melamine with a surfactant added. Do you have formica countertops? also mostly melamine, with a resin added to harden it. But not a very good pet food, no.
drywall(poisons houses)
Phosphogypsum only causes problems in modern energy-efficient houses with little outside air exchange. Gypsum (including Phosphogypsum) occurs as a natural mineral virtually everywhere in the world, including the US. We make our own drywall domestically, and only post-Katrina did we have a need to import it. China met that demand, except we got burned for not knowing that they don't differentiate between the two minerals (physically more-or-less identical, for their use in drywall). Not a case of fraud byt the manufacturers, so much as the importers not wanting to ask too many questions.
heparin(kills people dead) and keep them for their own internal market?
Although this amount to outright fraud by the companies involved, the deaths came not from a specifically unsafe product, but because of allergic reactions to a much cheaper but similar chemical. Again, no defense whatsoever for selling chemical-P as chemical-Q, but you have to wonder why our medical establishment would rather use an expensive drug that requires raising and torturing livestock to produce, rather than a nearly identical drug with no pigs involved... And the deaths in this situation don't answer that question, because plenty of people have allergies to heparin itself.
Mostly this boils down to greed, sometimes the fault of manufacturers cutting corners, but always the fault of us, the end users, willing to look the other way to save a buck at Wallyworld. Take it as a given that TANSTAAFL... So whenever you can buy a foreign-made (and I mean that to apply anywhere, not just the US-vs-China) product for less than the same thing locally made, stop and ask yourself: How they can afford to make and ship something 10k miles and still charge less than your neighbor making the same thing?
Please, they were L Ron Hubbard fanbois, not Heinlein.
D'oh! Stupid error, I accept that.
Thanks for the correction, surprised no one else pointed it out sooner...
So if you, or any of your friends' computers are compromised, they can "steal" your DPP protected stuff. And you can never get it back.
With one slight problem to this entire idea - You only need the ability to play it once. After that, whoever wants "the" key can have it, for all it matters.
Thinking of this in terms of a car sounds nice (and Slashdot luuuuurves car analogies), but it hides the real problem inherent in all DRM... Instead of a car, think of it in terms of a secret written on a scrap of paper and sealed in a vault behind 24 layers of locks and a pissed off badger guarding the door. Perhaps no one can ever practically breach that vault... But as soon as you loan that scrap to a friend, it takes only a photocopier or cheap camera to make all that security completely pointless.
The same goes for any content, and I don't even mean this to invoke the spooooky "analog hole". If you can play it once, you have already defeated the DRM and just need a suitable photocopier. All the misdirection about "secure" drivers and devices just throws more glitter up between you and the "key", when in reality, you don't even care about the key, just the content.
...Because these all involve "Religious vilification".
Unless we all lost our minds and considered Scientology as some sort of religion, rather than a group of Heinlein fanboys who took it waaaaaay too far, none of these would benefit them.
So, nothing to see here, just another Modest Proposal to keep the Kids(tm) safe.
One thing you didn't do was agree to an API, so the other guy who worked on his piece came back with an incompatible part.
...
Half right, actually, and I do accept my share of the responsibility there... But at the scale of final projects in college courses, I can implement the API quite nearly as fast as I could come up with one sufficiently detailed to avoid any possible misinterpretation by other team members. In the working world... Well, that still holds true half the time, and when it doesn't, suffice it to say that I've learned to write "specs" that actually compile and look more like a fill-in-the-blanks (with as few blanks as practical) than an English description of functionality.
the rest of the team probably saw you as a black box because you didn't make any effort to become friends with them
You're probably not friends with your coworkers
Gen-Y'er, right?
You will meet people in your life that you won't like. You will have to get along with them anyway to get the job done. Sometimes this means a grade, sometimes it means keeping your job or getting a better one, sometimes it means gritting your teeth and saying "yes, your honor" to a complete moron literally with the power of life and death over you.
If you can't behave in a professional manner regardless of whether or not your coworkers list you as bestest buddies on their Facebook page, you will fail - The class, the job, at life.
I buy an SUV though. It is -mine- that is I can do whatever the heck I want with it.
True.
I can't stop you from buying an SUV, thereby endangering my life (not to mention your own - The gloss of "safety" attributed to SUVs doesn't even exist for the occupants) every time you get on the road. You can choose to waste your money to put twice as many greenhouse gasses per mile into the air as the average passenger vehicle. You have the "right" to back over your own kids because SUVs have dangerously poor rear and side blind spots.
But y'know, somehow, I just can't seem to feel all that bad when someone throws a molotov through the window of your penile compensation at 2am.
But hey, just my opinion. You have every right to do whatever the heck you want with it, and I look like the asshole here.
Y'know, I can almost respect them for torching SUVs - If the government won't tell people "No, you may not drive a vehicle that presents a significant danger* to everyone else on the road, without special training for the appropriate license class", then perhaps fear of having their car burn down one night kept at least a few people driving more realistic vehicles.
But radio towers? C'mon, analog radio will follow analog TV within the next few years, with or without an FCC mandate (market forces alone will do the trick, no doubt at all). No need to kick it as it lies gasping on the ground in its death throes...
* This comes from a study conducted by the NTSB, which they then proceeded to ignore completely.
The point is not to get the best grade in the class.
:)
Nor did I ever deliberately try for that particular goal (though I won't pretend I didn't usually define the top of the grading curve). Didn't even graduate with a 4.0, primarily because I don't "suffer fools gladly" and don't play along with the cute little political games.
The point is to learn how to work together with people so that you can accomplish greater things than any of you could have done by yourself.
In the working world, you can sometimes convince your coworkers to at least put in a bit of effort for the sake of their future with the company. In academia? When you have one older gentlemen who really does try but has no clue; one "C is for Credit" point-counter who knows going into the final project that she can blow it off and still pass the course; one brilliant foreign student who could probably do the project in his sleep but can't speak a word of English; one frat-boy who trusts that his "bros" have his back and he'll just pull something from their project archive at the last minute (Hello? Custom project here? Any comprehension at all that you won't find your part of it ready-made?)...
Okay, I exaggerate a bit, in that I didn't have all those people on a single project at the same time. But I did have the joy of working with all of them on group projects at various times. Most teammates simply proved themselves useless in less stereotypical ways, often barely having a grasp of the class prerequisites, nevermind sufficient understanding to help in the least in a final project.
Then again, in fairness, most of my teams probably considered me as some form of (de facto) "project leader from hell", trying to meet insanely unreasonable goals (like actually satisfying all the project requirements) when other groups got by with laughable results. I remember one OO Design class I took, one of the teams literally did... A web site. A static web site. Perhaps a dozen pages. No server-side interaction, no client-side scripting, no dynamic backend data store, just... A web site. And... They... PASSED! Yeah. So, take my ranting as you will.
But work on a team project and make a connection, make friends that can help you later, and people you can help later
You know what I learned from "team" projects in college?
Just do the whole damned thing yourself if you want any shot at passing. Because otherwise, come the due date you'll have your part done, one person with a partially-working-but-incompatible part, and three people with weak excuses.
I learned that "team" really does have a "me" in it, and you can't spell much with "ta". And, after 10 years in the "real" working world, I haven't found much to change my opinion on that matter.
THAT'S why people spend stupid amounts of money on an Ivy League education. "What you know" is assumed. "Who you know" is particular and requires access.
One small correction there - In the case of Ivies, "Who you know" counts as a prerequisite for getting in, not a benefit of going there.
you're going to see people competing for the schools that are desirable enough that they can still charge $30K/year like the Ivies do.
You miss the point. This doesn't mean getting a degree from the University of Phoenix... You take the fluffy liberal arts prereqs of which most universities require a good two years' worth, then get your actual degree from the Ivy.
And I have no problem with that, as long as they actually uphold some decent academic standards rather than just passing any moron who can pony up a C note. Personally, I did something not all that dissimilar - I went to a community college for a liberal arts AA for $800 per semester, then transferred into a decent 4-year as a Junior. Dropped the total cost of my education by about 45%, and I have the same papers as those who paid the full 4-year tuition.