Ah, but that means every single citizen will be able to afford a predator drone of their own!
This, in a nutshell, is the serious problem society faces today. Our technology is advancing to the point where individuals can gain power one reserved for nation states. The feared "doomsday weapon" isn't going to be deployed by some trigger happy Cold War general or military accident, it's going to be deployed by someone extremist in his garage.
It seems this pendulum is swinging farther in either direction instead of slowing down to a centrist point so that our leaders can agree on some things and make our society progress.
This demonstrates the weakness of our two party system. When people are dissatisfied with both parties, they really have nowhere else to turn. So they simply turn against whichever of the two has pissed them off most recently. In communist nations, you can vote, but there's only one party to vote for. In America, there's two which really aren't that far apart on most things, despite their efforts to play up and play on each other's minor differences, making us only slightly more democratic...
The video mentioned several times that this laser is "too powerful to be used as a gun-sight". I'm not a shooter, so I honestly don't know why... Couldn't having a potentially eye-frying, laser-pointer-of-the-gods be a handy thing to attach to a tool that you intend to utilize for inflicting grievous bodily harm or death?
You're seriously underestimating how bright these are. It would impede your ability to shoot someone, since you wouldn't be able to look at them while trying to shoot them -- they'd have a spot on them so bright that it would hurt your eyes, which would make it very hard to aim.
That your newspaper's front page does not report a new shooting accident each day in no way proves that people are not "dumb" enough to have shooting accidents, much less laser-pointer accidents.
Indeed. There are two reasons why things aren't in the news. One is that they don't happen. The other is that they happen often enough that it's not "news". Had a friend from LA once laugh at my local TV news because they reported a murder, with nothing particularly spectacular about it. Hey, it doesn't happen every day here!
That said, Vermont is, well, Vermont... it probably doesn't happen too often there, simply because nothing much ever happens there. Given that nobody lives there, there aren't too many people having gun accidents.
I'll believe the danger when it makes it into the top 1000 causes of injury or death. Like higher than toothpicks. If the aircraft threat is real cockpits need to harden pilot visual capability immediately, because weakly regulating retail availability of lasers will do nothing to stop terrorists.
My local police department has never done anything to stop terrorists, and indeed has very little capability to do so if it ever even came up. We should eliminate them as well./eyeroll
Personally I believe there are far more common dangers to concern one's self with than lasers. For instance anybody with a credit card in hand can go fill a can with gasoline and honestly gasoline has for more destructive potential than any laser current on the market.
The difference is, most people are more aware of the destructive potential of a can of gasoline and/or a match. Yes, stupid people will do stupid things, but a great deal of it can be prevented just by making clear how serious something really is. It won't stop everyone, but nothing ever stops everyone. The fact that measures are never 100% effective is not a good argument for having none. If it was, we'd simply eliminate police from the city budget, since why waste all that money when they don't stop all crime? Not a good argument.
At last we have irrefutable proof that the Apollo landings weren't faked! Now my idiot brother-in-law will finally have to shut up.
Oh, wait, who released the photos? Never mind...
Wouldn't matter in any case. No amount of proof will convince flat Earthers, creationists, moon landing hoaxers, global warming deniers, birthers, etc. Whatever evidence you may have is irrelevant...
You can't put a price on knowledge gained from exploration. Who knows what new inventions or ideas will come about from what we learned of the moon.
This misses the point. What we learned from the Apollo program was a tiny fraction of what we learned from the (still ongoing) Voyager missions. We could have explored and learned so much more by not wasting so much money on Apollo and the Shuttle and other such hugely expensive and comparatively uninformative programs. Not saying we didn't learn anything, but in terms of "knowledge gained from exploration", it gave is comparatively very little bang for the buck.
Yeah, then I think it's been 40 years and we've achieved precious little else...
Correction: Since then, we've done a lot of important and useful work instead of wasting time on spectacular Cold War PR missions.
NASA has achieved a lot more every year since then than they did on the Apollo missions. Sorry if it wasn't sexy enough for you, but the real work rarely is...
Is this a new definition of the word "implication" that I'm unfamiliar with, or do you for some reason think that if something is not installed on a device as shipped from the vendor, it really does imply it cannot be installed at all? Am I missing some tidbit that would make this a logical implication rather than completely unsupported speculation out straight out of left field?
Community: How many programmers are already using it and what are its prospects for the future? GNU even further splintered the notoriously fragmented Scheme community when they chose to make their own scheme implementation instead of using one of the many very functional pre-existing Scheme implementations, several of which were explicitly designed as extension languages.
That's a bit bogus. Anyone using any of those Scheme implementations will have no trouble developing in any other, so the "how any programmers" question would have the same answer regardless.
One of the wonderful things about free software, you can keep using it after others have written it off as dead or useless. And you still using it doesn't interfere with their moving on, and their moving on really shouldn't cause you to freak out.
No, but it does prove them to be dead wrong. As long as anyone is still using it, it ain't dead yet.
If GNU wanted a scheme-like embeddable extension language, then it should have stuck with Scheme.
They did. Because they named their compiler Guile, you were under the mistaken impression the language it compiled wasn't Scheme? It's R5RS, in fact, although not complete R6RS yet...
"not designed to be" is not the same as "incapable of being"
True, but an example of being deliberately obtuse, since it's well understood that things that aren't designed for some use, while often capable of being used that way anyhow, are usually not nearly as good for that use as something that was.
Guile is an interpreter and compiler for the Scheme programming language, a clean and elegant dialect of Lisp.
OK, if I see a bunch of Lisps walking down the street, I'll be able the recognize Guile as the one wearing spats and carrying a walking stick.
Would somebody please tell me why we keep resorting to these ridiculously nondescript descriptions.
Because if you see a bunch of Lisps walking down the street, it will, in fact, be extremely difficult to tell them apart without extremely close and detailed examination. A one sentence description cannot possibly be descript enough if that's your criteria. The point of the sentence you're quoting is not to allow you to spot Guile in the crowd of Lisps, it's supposed to let you know, if you were unfamiliar with what Guile was to begin with (which is the target audience for such an opening sentence), that if you saw it in a crowd of Lisps, you wouldn't be able to easily pick it out. For it to somehow highlight a distinction would run counter to the whole point the sentence is attempting to convey.
I believe they previously didn't. That is to say, they didn't really know how far away it was prior to taking this measurement, but in the absence of the measurement, expected that when they did measure the distance, they'd find it was a more typical, brighter red dwarf, further away. That when they measured it and it turned out to be this close was surprising, but they didn't really have a distance number they thought prior to getting this result.
I agree that if you lock yourself in a room and never have sex with anyone and never need a transfusion or organ transplant or share a dirty needle or are born from an infected mother, then it's pretty much impossible for you to get the disease. Now who lives like this?
Most people, assuming you exclude the "lock yourself in a room" part, which is not essential but just a bit of ridiculous hyperbole you threw in because your statement is obviously absurd without it, and insert the word "infected" after "anyone".
It's only a matter of time before we are all infected.
...
Most people cheat but don't admit it to anyone. Therefore we go back to my previous point: math.
If you don't understand the difference between "most" and "all", I'm afraid you're not very good at math, as the difference is kind of essential in set theory.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah well, you meant pounds? Not kilograms?
Well, since he actually said "pounds", it's a safe assumption that he meant pounds.
Ah, but that means every single citizen will be able to afford a predator drone of their own!
This, in a nutshell, is the serious problem society faces today. Our technology is advancing to the point where individuals can gain power one reserved for nation states. The feared "doomsday weapon" isn't going to be deployed by some trigger happy Cold War general or military accident, it's going to be deployed by someone extremist in his garage.
It seems this pendulum is swinging farther in either direction instead of slowing down to a centrist point so that our leaders can agree on some things and make our society progress.
This demonstrates the weakness of our two party system. When people are dissatisfied with both parties, they really have nowhere else to turn. So they simply turn against whichever of the two has pissed them off most recently. In communist nations, you can vote, but there's only one party to vote for. In America, there's two which really aren't that far apart on most things, despite their efforts to play up and play on each other's minor differences, making us only slightly more democratic...
...assuming it hasn't happened already. No point in taking extraordinary efforts to prevent the inevitable.
The video mentioned several times that this laser is "too powerful to be used as a gun-sight". I'm not a shooter, so I honestly don't know why... Couldn't having a potentially eye-frying, laser-pointer-of-the-gods be a handy thing to attach to a tool that you intend to utilize for inflicting grievous bodily harm or death?
You're seriously underestimating how bright these are. It would impede your ability to shoot someone, since you wouldn't be able to look at them while trying to shoot them -- they'd have a spot on them so bright that it would hurt your eyes, which would make it very hard to aim.
That your newspaper's front page does not report a new shooting accident each day in no way proves that people are not "dumb" enough to have shooting accidents, much less laser-pointer accidents.
Indeed. There are two reasons why things aren't in the news. One is that they don't happen. The other is that they happen often enough that it's not "news". Had a friend from LA once laugh at my local TV news because they reported a murder, with nothing particularly spectacular about it. Hey, it doesn't happen every day here!
That said, Vermont is, well, Vermont... it probably doesn't happen too often there, simply because nothing much ever happens there. Given that nobody lives there, there aren't too many people having gun accidents.
I'll believe the danger when it makes it into the top 1000 causes of injury or death. Like higher than toothpicks. If the aircraft threat is real cockpits need to harden pilot visual capability immediately, because weakly regulating retail availability of lasers will do nothing to stop terrorists.
My local police department has never done anything to stop terrorists, and indeed has very little capability to do so if it ever even came up. We should eliminate them as well. /eyeroll
Personally I believe there are far more common dangers to concern one's self with than lasers. For instance anybody with a credit card in hand can go fill a can with gasoline and honestly gasoline has for more destructive potential than any laser current on the market.
The difference is, most people are more aware of the destructive potential of a can of gasoline and/or a match. Yes, stupid people will do stupid things, but a great deal of it can be prevented just by making clear how serious something really is. It won't stop everyone, but nothing ever stops everyone. The fact that measures are never 100% effective is not a good argument for having none. If it was, we'd simply eliminate police from the city budget, since why waste all that money when they don't stop all crime? Not a good argument.
Still better than a giant Pepsi logo, I suppose :)
I'm waiting for the giant smiley face on South America. :)
At last we have irrefutable proof that the Apollo landings weren't faked! Now my idiot brother-in-law will finally have to shut up. Oh, wait, who released the photos? Never mind...
Wouldn't matter in any case. No amount of proof will convince flat Earthers, creationists, moon landing hoaxers, global warming deniers, birthers, etc. Whatever evidence you may have is irrelevant...
You can't put a price on knowledge gained from exploration. Who knows what new inventions or ideas will come about from what we learned of the moon.
This misses the point. What we learned from the Apollo program was a tiny fraction of what we learned from the (still ongoing) Voyager missions. We could have explored and learned so much more by not wasting so much money on Apollo and the Shuttle and other such hugely expensive and comparatively uninformative programs. Not saying we didn't learn anything, but in terms of "knowledge gained from exploration", it gave is comparatively very little bang for the buck.
Yeah, then I think it's been 40 years and we've achieved precious little else...
Correction: Since then, we've done a lot of important and useful work instead of wasting time on spectacular Cold War PR missions.
NASA has achieved a lot more every year since then than they did on the Apollo missions. Sorry if it wasn't sexy enough for you, but the real work rarely is...
Is this a new definition of the word "implication" that I'm unfamiliar with, or do you for some reason think that if something is not installed on a device as shipped from the vendor, it really does imply it cannot be installed at all? Am I missing some tidbit that would make this a logical implication rather than completely unsupported speculation out straight out of left field?
they already know that governments are full of lying sacks of shit.
Yes, true, but in many circumstances, it's important to know the specifics.
No sarcasm meant, does this issue matter to more than a handful of people?
Welcome to Slashdot!
Community: How many programmers are already using it and what are its prospects for the future? GNU even further splintered the notoriously fragmented Scheme community when they chose to make their own scheme implementation instead of using one of the many very functional pre-existing Scheme implementations, several of which were explicitly designed as extension languages.
That's a bit bogus. Anyone using any of those Scheme implementations will have no trouble developing in any other, so the "how any programmers" question would have the same answer regardless.
That said, everything else you said is true...
One of the wonderful things about free software, you can keep using it after others have written it off as dead or useless. And you still using it doesn't interfere with their moving on, and their moving on really shouldn't cause you to freak out.
No, but it does prove them to be dead wrong. As long as anyone is still using it, it ain't dead yet.
If GNU wanted a scheme-like embeddable extension language, then it should have stuck with Scheme.
They did. Because they named their compiler Guile, you were under the mistaken impression the language it compiled wasn't Scheme? It's R5RS, in fact, although not complete R6RS yet...
"not designed to be" is not the same as "incapable of being"
True, but an example of being deliberately obtuse, since it's well understood that things that aren't designed for some use, while often capable of being used that way anyhow, are usually not nearly as good for that use as something that was.
From the Guile webpage:
Guile is an interpreter and compiler for the Scheme programming language, a clean and elegant dialect of Lisp.
OK, if I see a bunch of Lisps walking down the street, I'll be able the recognize Guile as the one wearing spats and carrying a walking stick.
Would somebody please tell me why we keep resorting to these ridiculously nondescript descriptions.
Because if you see a bunch of Lisps walking down the street, it will, in fact, be extremely difficult to tell them apart without extremely close and detailed examination. A one sentence description cannot possibly be descript enough if that's your criteria. The point of the sentence you're quoting is not to allow you to spot Guile in the crowd of Lisps, it's supposed to let you know, if you were unfamiliar with what Guile was to begin with (which is the target audience for such an opening sentence), that if you saw it in a crowd of Lisps, you wouldn't be able to easily pick it out. For it to somehow highlight a distinction would run counter to the whole point the sentence is attempting to convey.
more obvious" really? equally obvious maybe, but not more obvious.
No, definitely much more obvious and readable. You're not entirely wrong about the rest of what you wrote, but you're way off base here.
Tell me about it. I had two of them, alas both long since worn out. Neither Logitech nor anyone else has made a trackball nearly as good since...
I believe they previously didn't. That is to say, they didn't really know how far away it was prior to taking this measurement, but in the absence of the measurement, expected that when they did measure the distance, they'd find it was a more typical, brighter red dwarf, further away. That when they measured it and it turned out to be this close was surprising, but they didn't really have a distance number they thought prior to getting this result.
I agree that if you lock yourself in a room and never have sex with anyone and never need a transfusion or organ transplant or share a dirty needle or are born from an infected mother, then it's pretty much impossible for you to get the disease. Now who lives like this?
Most people, assuming you exclude the "lock yourself in a room" part, which is not essential but just a bit of ridiculous hyperbole you threw in because your statement is obviously absurd without it, and insert the word "infected" after "anyone".
It's only a matter of time before we are all infected.
...
Most people cheat but don't admit it to anyone. Therefore we go back to my previous point: math.
If you don't understand the difference between "most" and "all", I'm afraid you're not very good at math, as the difference is kind of essential in set theory.