Basically the eye becomes the part of the system that moves the mouse
This would be the absolute worst possible way to use the technology for the reasons others have stated. Keep in mind that this thing reported has accuracy in the centimeter range, considering that I routinely click buttons on my 22 inch screen that are millimeters in physical size, this would work out terribly as a mouse replacement.
Where it would be helpful is as an augmentation to provide additional data (something like tooltips being the most obvious and simplistic form) when the users gaze lingers over something. Another great use for it would be to use it to change window focus on your desktop. Also as a fun tool for the DIY/hacker community. There are probably a ton of non-computer related uses for it that people haven't even thought of yet. I'd love to take video of myself gaming (or even driving) and integrate it with eye tracking to see where I spend most of my time looking to find out if there's anything I can do to optimize it.
People that don't want to give any money to a cable company and want to give as little money as possible to the AT&T monopoly, and would rather have their money go to a friendly CLEC. I gave up my 50mbit Comcast cable internet connection for a 14mbit DSL connection because several times a week, packet loss would go through the roof and throughput would slow to a crawl on the Comcast connection, while the DSL provider has been rock solid.
Yeah, there's no way I'd give any money to the local cable companies in my area. I have 6mbps DSL through a CLEC and it's great. Unlike what I've seen on my friends cable connection, there's no traffic shaping or blocking of common ports. Last time I read the contract it basically said I could do whatever I want with the connection as far as running servers is concerned, this in contrast to the cable company (and also AT'Ts high speed option) that explicitly disallows things such as hosting web or gameservers, and will play whack-a-mole with your ports if they notice.
Since most people have several devices on their home network these days, including wireless devices, they'll again need to buy several cabled network cards and at least one wireless network card. You're looking at $100 or more, depending on the type and number of network cards you need to buy.
er, if it's functioning as a router, they just need one interface per network, not one per device as you seem to be implying. Though since most home routers bundle a router and switch (and sometimes modem) into a single package, the confusion is understandable. If additional ports are needed (e.g. for multiple wired devices), then a standard desktop switch can be used to provide them.
Of course, rifle/slug hunters always go for the heart/lung shot, because all they care about is the head. If they were hunting for meat, they'd go for the head shot, where you get either a clean kill or a clean miss.
Headshots aren't "either a clean kill or a clean miss". I recall seeing a very well written blog posting about why not to go for headshots. It involved a picture of a deer trying to graze with its lower jaw shot off. The photographer wanted to put it out of its misery, but it would have been illegal to shoot the deer since he had no hunting permit at the time. As far as he knows, it starved to death.
Headshots are a lot harder to hit due to smaller target area and also because that's the bit of the animal most likely to move. A botched headshot has the potential to damage the eye(s), ears, nose, jaw, and throat while still leaving the animal alive. And with deer at least, anything that results in a crippling headshot would have resulted in a killing lungshot had it been aimed there rather than the head.
Another group trying the exact same thing you'd also disapprove of for the same reasons you disapprove of Mars One?
That's a bit of a non-sequitur, of course we'd all disagree with someone else doing the exact same thing. The idea is for someone who actually plans to go through with the mission to take it up.This is a pure publicity stunt. They'll make bank off the reality show portion of the earth based training while insisting that it's the real thing, then once the launch window gets near (or maybe once their habitat crashes on the martin surface) go "sorry guys, we realized that this was way too ambitious and it would be unethical to actually send anyone".
Surely, this wouldn't harm the credibility of another company with a much larger budget and longer timeline and different method of funding, or a government attempt for that matter.
So if you got an e-mail from a Nigerian prince saying he needed to borrow some money, you gave it to him, then never saw it again, would you loan money to the next one? Surely it's not the same Nigerian, so why should your previous experience with Nigerian princes have any bearing on the new situation?
When a legitimate attempt tries to get off the ground, everyone will remember the mars one scam and be quite hesitant to invest. Depending on how bad mars one goes, lots of engineers and scientists might even be hesitant to work for someone else trying a mars mission (how embarrassing would that be to have the a company that pulled a scam like that listed as a previous employer).
You're like somebody saying a ship will fall off the edge of the world if they sail off beyond the horizon. I'm saying, let's go find out.
You've completely missed the point. Tweaking your analogy to better fit the discussion: you're arguing to go find out using 4 morons in a 20 foot rowboat, while everyone else is saying that that clearly won't work and it would be better to send off a properly planned expedition that at least has a chance of making it.
What I don't understand is the people saying they shouldn't even try. I'm just glad our ancestors didn't think that way.
People say they shouldn't try because they don';t think that it's a credible attempt. We won't learn anything from it that we didn't already know (mainly, that it's not a good idea to base a manned space mission on plans for a reality TV show envisioned by two guys with marketing degrees and no understanding of science), and it'll poison the well for future legitimate attempts ("we already fell for that mars one scam, what makes you think we'll fall for your copycat attempt and sponsor you too?").
Just because you've connected 123.233.266.41 with "Bob Smith", doesn't mean you've actually connected to the right person. We've already seen cases where RIAA supoena's to ISP's have gotten the addresses of grandmothers who can barely use email much less file-sharing... so how do we know there "connections" are accurate.
You don't know for sure, but you can get a high degree of probability by cross referencing other things, like connection time, who was contacted, etc. I have a bit of experience in that regard.
About 10 years ago I used to be part of a server admin community for an FPS game. We published a banlist for confirmed cheaters detected by punkbuster (in its default state it was crap, properly tuned by someone who knows what they're doing it was quite good at catching cheaters) and let people run our banlists and punkbuster configurations in exchange from streaming their server logs to us. We built a database of what basically amounted to phone metadata (player names, unique IDs, what servers they connected to from what IPs and when, and a record of any kicks and/or bans associated with any unique ID). Someone made a search tool for it that grew organically until we could cross reference just about anything. We started using it to background check people who applied for access to the private section of our forum where we developed punkbuster configurations in response to the cheaters updating their various aimbots to avoid our detection scripts in an endless arms race.
The standard method for finding someones alternate accounts was to dump a list of every single IP address they'd connected from (usually somewhat large), then dump a list of every account that had ever connected from those IP addresses at any point in time (usually about the same size as the name table, due to not all IPs being re-used by gamers who happened to play that particular game). At that point it was an extremely circumstantial and tenuous connection between the names at best, and we'd leave it at that if nothing looked suspicious (if none of those names were banned, all of them could be the guys alts for all we cared). However, if one of the accounts had once been banned, we would start looking deeper into it.
The usual way to make a solid link between the two was to check what IP addresses they connected to during what times. If the accounts connected from the same IP in an interlinked fashion (e.g. account1 connects, then account2 connects, then account1 connects again over a period of a few days), we could safely assume they were at least in the same building (or college campus or whatever). We figured that it would be incredibly bad luck for DHCP to cycle like that between two people who played the same game with one of them happening to be a cheater. From there, we'd check what servers they visited regularly, and what times they had a habit of being active at. If account1 visits servers A, B, and C on a regular basis, and then account2 also visits A, B, and C on the same basis, we would be pretty sure of it being the same person.
It wasn't enough that we would ban people over it, but it was enough for us to deny access based on the fact that their computer probably wasn't physically secure from whoever was cheating. We didn't want to have a situation where someones family member was a cheater and started using their brothers credentials to relay our private checks to the hacker sites before they were released or something like that.
Just a thought, but what if they don't have enough time to catch the bad guys because they're too busy going rogue?
Also, phone numbers are trivial to remember and trivial to use public search tools on. There's nothing preventing someone who works with the metadata from remembering a handful of numbers, then going home and doing things with them on their own time.
It depends on who you give it to. If the person you give it to is a gullible idiot, it'll do whatever you tell them it will do within limits of the placebo effect. Otherwise it'll do absolutely nothing.
The reason that homeopaths will tell you that it works goes something as follows:
"symptoms" are generally seen as your bodies natural defense against whatever is messing with it. e.g. if you have the flu, you get a fever as one of the symptoms. The fever is your bodies immune response to fighting the pathogens (iirc certain immune system cells have a significant performance increase at slightly higher than normal body temperature).
It would follow then that if you want to cure something "naturally", you take something that increases the symptom (e.g. bump the fever from 37.5C to 38) and let the immune system do the rest.
That all kind of makes sense in a "yeah, I see how someone could subscribe to that line of thought" kind of way. The part where logic and reason fly straight out the window and it enters flaming retard territory is how they prepare whatever thing it is that they're making. The active ingredient is mixed up in solution, and then a single drop is taken out and placed into 100 drops of plain water. That's shaken up, and then a single drop of that placed in another 100 drops of water, etc. By the time it makes it to the shelf in a health food store, you'll be lucky to find even a single molecule of the original active ingredient in the entire bottle.
The hardcore believers will try to explain to you that water has memory, and basically stores a negative impression (like a plaster mould) of the molecules it was in contact with. The thinking here might be something along the 3rd grade logic of "if this molecule causes a fever, then the negative shape of it must do the opposite".
So the TL;DR of all that is: both answers are equally correct (and equally retarded) depending on what kind of homeopath you talk to.
even if they did dump the stuff in the sea, there's so little of it that it would be diluted so quickly it would be entirely harmless.
Unless you're a homeopath, at which point you can make millions selling mediterranean seawater as an antidote for use in the event of a chemical attack.
I think that's exactly the intent. If no one meets the requirements, they've got an easy out to not hire them for some other reason (e.g. "they had shifty eyes") and wave it off as "not qualified". If they like the person, they can hire anyway and look like they're being generous.
You covered most of what I was going to say except that in my younger days I could almost always hear the flyback whine from any CRT raster scan device be it TV or monitor. I think those generally operated in about the same frequency range as this technique does so many younger people should be able to HEAR the stealth transmissions just fine.
They may hear it, but will they notice it? Intermittent and faint high pitched frequencies are common around electronics, I don't think I'd flag that sound as out of the ordinary under normal circumstances.
I guess I wasn't clear. I was basically making the same argument that gets made about excessive DRM.
A law that requires a one-time test to ensure that you understand the current firearms laws and know some basic safety rules before purchasing a gun should be pretty much acceptable to all but the most irrational or pedantic gun rights advocate. Then the anti-gun people get their hands on said law and tweak it such that it requires a renewal every few years, dumb the test down, and add on a large and arbitrary fee to taking the test. Then the pro-gun people take the law and add exceptions to it until basically all but a small handful of people who are too lazy to jump through more hoops are exempt.
What started out as a reasonable idea gets mutated into an unrecognizable and useless monstrosity by ideologues from both sides. It does nothing to further safety, inconveniences gun owners, is toothless enough that everyone ignores it anyway (unless a cop is having a bad day), and ends up creating more reasons for joe moron to go out and purchase firearms on the black market. What makes it even worse is that it creates a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the pro-gun side to not accept any kind of regulation ever, because there's a clear precedent for any of it becoming a slippery slope of onerous regulation. Then that in turn gives credibility to the talking points of the anti-gun people about how gun owners are a bunch of lunatics who want everyone (including criminals and people who can't be bothered to understand gun safety or where it is or isn't legal to shoot) to own guns.
"It is possible to make background checks and document weapon sales."
This is already done. It's been ineffectual.
"It is possible to impose limitations on the purchaser of such weapons to mitigate the risk their tools pose to the community."
This is already done. It's been ineffectual.
"It is possible to limit the characteristics of privately-owned weapons."
This is already done. It's been ineffectual.
"Rational people can understand that there are multiple, legitimate perspectives on the question, and that allows a dialog capable of finding balance among the opposing views. "
Agreed. However, when what has been done in the past has been ineffectual, how does 'doubling down' on an ineffective policy help move the ball?
Further, we cannot and should not legislate from passion. To pass laws after a "tragedy" inflames the passions of people only serves to enact extreme laws.
Maybe -- just MAYBE we can talk about ANOTHER approach.
The really interesting thing here in my opinion is why all of those things have been ineffectual. It seems to start when the anti-gun lobby proposes a law with the intent of doing nothing other than hassling gun owners (safety is almost always given lip service but never actually intended). Then the pro-gun lobby shows up and strips the teeth out of the law, even if by sheer random chance it happens to make sense. The end result is a mess of really stupid and confusing gun laws that don't actually accomplish anything other than confusing everyone.
I don't really get any kick at all out of extreme physical experiences, or anything material - and I've had lots of opportunity.
Solving a complex mathematical problem is an immense thrill for me, however. Or figuring out a clever algorithm.
I feel exactly the same way when it comes to that sort of stuff. That still didn't stop me from going skydiving with a group of friends when we were given an opportunity.
I definitely don't regret doing it, not so much for the thrill during the jump (I blacked out for a few seconds and had a bit of trouble walking after we landed due to the aftereffects of a terror fueled adrenalin crash), but for the ability to look back on it and say "wow, I did something that most people are completely terrified to do".
It also glosses over what accessing the internet means. If I use a google maps with voice directions, I've accessed the internet.
Yeah, by that definition I'm "accessing the internet" for 95% of the time I drive because I get pandora streaming on my phone before I pull out of my driveway on my way to work and occasionally hit the skip button while on the freeway.
The mental backflips that the story pulls you through to justify those killings is just kind of fluff. It can be extended to the whole humanity vs bug overplot as well. Taken that way, at least Ender feels bad about it in the end.
That's sort of the point though. The killings weren't ever really justified, at least I don't recall the book stating such. Various characters tried to justify it (as others tried to vilify it), but card never jumps in as the narrator and says "yeah, Ender did the right thing". Ender never went into it with the attitude of "I'm mad at this guy for being mean to me so I'm going to kill him", he simply perceived a threat and applied as much force as he thought was necessary to end the threat (and was rather upset to find out that he'd killed the person).
That theme stays throughout the books. It was basically one of the central questions that's debated about amongst the characters but never really answered: how much force is justified for removing a threat, whether it be personal or all of humanity? If you read the later books, they all have a similar dilemma. What to do about the aliens that apparently murdered the scientist (people want to kill them all), what to do about the descolada virus (people want to glass the planet), what to do about Jane, what to do with the new alien race they later find, etc.
Regulations don't create monopolies. People create monopolies. Regulations are just a tool. In the hands of sane, well-trained people, regulations are safe and useful. In the hands of evil morons, regulations can kill.
This is the point most people ignore in the whole capitalism/anti-capitalism debate. It's not some linear scale of "if we pass 6 more regulations than the monopoly will have to break up" or "if we remove 2 more laws than that company will form a monopoly" as it's most often dumbed down to be.
In the case of the US, regulatory laws are often written (or strongly influenced by) lobbiests, and generally end up being written in such a way as to raise barriers to entry, or specifically screw over a competitor (competitor making cheaper cement than you? quick! find something unique to his production process and get it banned!). By the kind of posts I've seen so far, I suspect that it doesn't work this way in a lot of other countries.
The way the system was supposed to work here is that corporations compete freely with each other, with the government stepping in as a referee only to ensure that the competition stays fair and the rules don't change suddenly and without warning. Instead, the players have paid off the referee to penalize the other players while looking the other direction when the payee commits a foul.
3) If the current provider is really "gouging" the customers, it should be no problem for the newcomer to offer a better deal and still be profitable
Maybe more of a problem than you think. If they've been gouging, that means they're rolling in money compared to you. When you show up with a new low price, they can easily undercut you (even to the point of taking losses for a few years) and your selling point dries up overnight.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically the eye becomes the part of the system that moves the mouse
This would be the absolute worst possible way to use the technology for the reasons others have stated. Keep in mind that this thing reported has accuracy in the centimeter range, considering that I routinely click buttons on my 22 inch screen that are millimeters in physical size, this would work out terribly as a mouse replacement.
Where it would be helpful is as an augmentation to provide additional data (something like tooltips being the most obvious and simplistic form) when the users gaze lingers over something. Another great use for it would be to use it to change window focus on your desktop. Also as a fun tool for the DIY/hacker community. There are probably a ton of non-computer related uses for it that people haven't even thought of yet. I'd love to take video of myself gaming (or even driving) and integrate it with eye tracking to see where I spend most of my time looking to find out if there's anything I can do to optimize it.
Who has that anymore?
People that don't want to give any money to a cable company and want to give as little money as possible to the AT&T monopoly, and would rather have their money go to a friendly CLEC. I gave up my 50mbit Comcast cable internet connection for a 14mbit DSL connection because several times a week, packet loss would go through the roof and throughput would slow to a crawl on the Comcast connection, while the DSL provider has been rock solid.
Yeah, there's no way I'd give any money to the local cable companies in my area. I have 6mbps DSL through a CLEC and it's great. Unlike what I've seen on my friends cable connection, there's no traffic shaping or blocking of common ports. Last time I read the contract it basically said I could do whatever I want with the connection as far as running servers is concerned, this in contrast to the cable company (and also AT'Ts high speed option) that explicitly disallows things such as hosting web or gameservers, and will play whack-a-mole with your ports if they notice.
Since most people have several devices on their home network these days, including wireless devices, they'll again need to buy several cabled network cards and at least one wireless network card. You're looking at $100 or more, depending on the type and number of network cards you need to buy.
er, if it's functioning as a router, they just need one interface per network, not one per device as you seem to be implying. Though since most home routers bundle a router and switch (and sometimes modem) into a single package, the confusion is understandable. If additional ports are needed (e.g. for multiple wired devices), then a standard desktop switch can be used to provide them.
Of course, rifle/slug hunters always go for the heart/lung shot, because all they care about is the head. If they were hunting for meat, they'd go for the head shot, where you get either a clean kill or a clean miss.
Headshots aren't "either a clean kill or a clean miss". I recall seeing a very well written blog posting about why not to go for headshots. It involved a picture of a deer trying to graze with its lower jaw shot off. The photographer wanted to put it out of its misery, but it would have been illegal to shoot the deer since he had no hunting permit at the time. As far as he knows, it starved to death.
Headshots are a lot harder to hit due to smaller target area and also because that's the bit of the animal most likely to move. A botched headshot has the potential to damage the eye(s), ears, nose, jaw, and throat while still leaving the animal alive. And with deer at least, anything that results in a crippling headshot would have resulted in a killing lungshot had it been aimed there rather than the head.
How much of the needed protection could be provided on a spacecraft by creating a sufficient magnetic field?
Basically all of it. But have fun getting all the power you need to create a field of sufficient strength.
Another group trying the exact same thing you'd also disapprove of for the same reasons you disapprove of Mars One?
That's a bit of a non-sequitur, of course we'd all disagree with someone else doing the exact same thing. The idea is for someone who actually plans to go through with the mission to take it up.This is a pure publicity stunt. They'll make bank off the reality show portion of the earth based training while insisting that it's the real thing, then once the launch window gets near (or maybe once their habitat crashes on the martin surface) go "sorry guys, we realized that this was way too ambitious and it would be unethical to actually send anyone".
Surely, this wouldn't harm the credibility of another company with a much larger budget and longer timeline and different method of funding, or a government attempt for that matter.
So if you got an e-mail from a Nigerian prince saying he needed to borrow some money, you gave it to him, then never saw it again, would you loan money to the next one? Surely it's not the same Nigerian, so why should your previous experience with Nigerian princes have any bearing on the new situation?
When a legitimate attempt tries to get off the ground, everyone will remember the mars one scam and be quite hesitant to invest. Depending on how bad mars one goes, lots of engineers and scientists might even be hesitant to work for someone else trying a mars mission (how embarrassing would that be to have the a company that pulled a scam like that listed as a previous employer).
You're like somebody saying a ship will fall off the edge of the world if they sail off beyond the horizon. I'm saying, let's go find out.
You've completely missed the point. Tweaking your analogy to better fit the discussion: you're arguing to go find out using 4 morons in a 20 foot rowboat, while everyone else is saying that that clearly won't work and it would be better to send off a properly planned expedition that at least has a chance of making it.
What I don't understand is the people saying they shouldn't even try. I'm just glad our ancestors didn't think that way.
People say they shouldn't try because they don';t think that it's a credible attempt. We won't learn anything from it that we didn't already know (mainly, that it's not a good idea to base a manned space mission on plans for a reality TV show envisioned by two guys with marketing degrees and no understanding of science), and it'll poison the well for future legitimate attempts ("we already fell for that mars one scam, what makes you think we'll fall for your copycat attempt and sponsor you too?").
Just because you've connected 123.233.266.41 with "Bob Smith", doesn't mean you've actually connected to the right person. We've already seen cases where RIAA supoena's to ISP's have gotten the addresses of grandmothers who can barely use email much less file-sharing... so how do we know there "connections" are accurate.
You don't know for sure, but you can get a high degree of probability by cross referencing other things, like connection time, who was contacted, etc. I have a bit of experience in that regard.
About 10 years ago I used to be part of a server admin community for an FPS game. We published a banlist for confirmed cheaters detected by punkbuster (in its default state it was crap, properly tuned by someone who knows what they're doing it was quite good at catching cheaters) and let people run our banlists and punkbuster configurations in exchange from streaming their server logs to us. We built a database of what basically amounted to phone metadata (player names, unique IDs, what servers they connected to from what IPs and when, and a record of any kicks and/or bans associated with any unique ID). Someone made a search tool for it that grew organically until we could cross reference just about anything. We started using it to background check people who applied for access to the private section of our forum where we developed punkbuster configurations in response to the cheaters updating their various aimbots to avoid our detection scripts in an endless arms race.
The standard method for finding someones alternate accounts was to dump a list of every single IP address they'd connected from (usually somewhat large), then dump a list of every account that had ever connected from those IP addresses at any point in time (usually about the same size as the name table, due to not all IPs being re-used by gamers who happened to play that particular game). At that point it was an extremely circumstantial and tenuous connection between the names at best, and we'd leave it at that if nothing looked suspicious (if none of those names were banned, all of them could be the guys alts for all we cared). However, if one of the accounts had once been banned, we would start looking deeper into it.
The usual way to make a solid link between the two was to check what IP addresses they connected to during what times. If the accounts connected from the same IP in an interlinked fashion (e.g. account1 connects, then account2 connects, then account1 connects again over a period of a few days), we could safely assume they were at least in the same building (or college campus or whatever). We figured that it would be incredibly bad luck for DHCP to cycle like that between two people who played the same game with one of them happening to be a cheater. From there, we'd check what servers they visited regularly, and what times they had a habit of being active at. If account1 visits servers A, B, and C on a regular basis, and then account2 also visits A, B, and C on the same basis, we would be pretty sure of it being the same person.
It wasn't enough that we would ban people over it, but it was enough for us to deny access based on the fact that their computer probably wasn't physically secure from whoever was cheating. We didn't want to have a situation where someones family member was a cheater and started using their brothers credentials to relay our private checks to the hacker sites before they were released or something like that.
Just a thought, but what if they don't have enough time to catch the bad guys because they're too busy going rogue?
Also, phone numbers are trivial to remember and trivial to use public search tools on. There's nothing preventing someone who works with the metadata from remembering a handful of numbers, then going home and doing things with them on their own time.
I'm confused, what does it do?
It depends on who you give it to. If the person you give it to is a gullible idiot, it'll do whatever you tell them it will do within limits of the placebo effect. Otherwise it'll do absolutely nothing.
The reason that homeopaths will tell you that it works goes something as follows:
:(
"symptoms" are generally seen as your bodies natural defense against whatever is messing with it. e.g. if you have the flu, you get a fever as one of the symptoms. The fever is your bodies immune response to fighting the pathogens (iirc certain immune system cells have a significant performance increase at slightly higher than normal body temperature).
It would follow then that if you want to cure something "naturally", you take something that increases the symptom (e.g. bump the fever from 37.5C to 38) and let the immune system do the rest.
That all kind of makes sense in a "yeah, I see how someone could subscribe to that line of thought" kind of way. The part where logic and reason fly straight out the window and it enters flaming retard territory is how they prepare whatever thing it is that they're making. The active ingredient is mixed up in solution, and then a single drop is taken out and placed into 100 drops of plain water. That's shaken up, and then a single drop of that placed in another 100 drops of water, etc. By the time it makes it to the shelf in a health food store, you'll be lucky to find even a single molecule of the original active ingredient in the entire bottle.
The hardcore believers will try to explain to you that water has memory, and basically stores a negative impression (like a plaster mould) of the molecules it was in contact with. The thinking here might be something along the 3rd grade logic of "if this molecule causes a fever, then the negative shape of it must do the opposite".
So the TL;DR of all that is: both answers are equally correct (and equally retarded) depending on what kind of homeopath you talk to.
Source: my mother believes in all that stuff.
even if they did dump the stuff in the sea, there's so little of it that it would be diluted so quickly it would be entirely harmless.
Unless you're a homeopath, at which point you can make millions selling mediterranean seawater as an antidote for use in the event of a chemical attack.
I think that's exactly the intent. If no one meets the requirements, they've got an easy out to not hire them for some other reason (e.g. "they had shifty eyes") and wave it off as "not qualified". If they like the person, they can hire anyway and look like they're being generous.
Gee, that sounds efficient. Not.
Yeah, it's only possible to achieve a bit over 95% transmission efficiency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_energy_transfer#Electromagnetic_radiation
You covered most of what I was going to say except that in my younger days I could almost always hear the flyback whine from any CRT raster scan device be it TV or monitor. I think those generally operated in about the same frequency range as this technique does so many younger people should be able to HEAR the stealth transmissions just fine.
They may hear it, but will they notice it? Intermittent and faint high pitched frequencies are common around electronics, I don't think I'd flag that sound as out of the ordinary under normal circumstances.
I am of the belief that it is my job to manage people, and by that I mean shield them from the crap above so that they can do their job.
This is exactly what a managers job is. I've been lucky enough to have worked under several who were like that.
I guess I wasn't clear. I was basically making the same argument that gets made about excessive DRM.
A law that requires a one-time test to ensure that you understand the current firearms laws and know some basic safety rules before purchasing a gun should be pretty much acceptable to all but the most irrational or pedantic gun rights advocate. Then the anti-gun people get their hands on said law and tweak it such that it requires a renewal every few years, dumb the test down, and add on a large and arbitrary fee to taking the test. Then the pro-gun people take the law and add exceptions to it until basically all but a small handful of people who are too lazy to jump through more hoops are exempt.
What started out as a reasonable idea gets mutated into an unrecognizable and useless monstrosity by ideologues from both sides. It does nothing to further safety, inconveniences gun owners, is toothless enough that everyone ignores it anyway (unless a cop is having a bad day), and ends up creating more reasons for joe moron to go out and purchase firearms on the black market. What makes it even worse is that it creates a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the pro-gun side to not accept any kind of regulation ever, because there's a clear precedent for any of it becoming a slippery slope of onerous regulation. Then that in turn gives credibility to the talking points of the anti-gun people about how gun owners are a bunch of lunatics who want everyone (including criminals and people who can't be bothered to understand gun safety or where it is or isn't legal to shoot) to own guns.
"It is possible to make background checks and document weapon sales." This is already done. It's been ineffectual.
"It is possible to impose limitations on the purchaser of such weapons to mitigate the risk their tools pose to the community." This is already done. It's been ineffectual.
"It is possible to limit the characteristics of privately-owned weapons." This is already done. It's been ineffectual.
"Rational people can understand that there are multiple, legitimate perspectives on the question, and that allows a dialog capable of finding balance among the opposing views. " Agreed. However, when what has been done in the past has been ineffectual, how does 'doubling down' on an ineffective policy help move the ball?
Further, we cannot and should not legislate from passion. To pass laws after a "tragedy" inflames the passions of people only serves to enact extreme laws.
Maybe -- just MAYBE we can talk about ANOTHER approach.
The really interesting thing here in my opinion is why all of those things have been ineffectual. It seems to start when the anti-gun lobby proposes a law with the intent of doing nothing other than hassling gun owners (safety is almost always given lip service but never actually intended). Then the pro-gun lobby shows up and strips the teeth out of the law, even if by sheer random chance it happens to make sense. The end result is a mess of really stupid and confusing gun laws that don't actually accomplish anything other than confusing everyone.
I don't really get any kick at all out of extreme physical experiences, or anything material - and I've had lots of opportunity.
Solving a complex mathematical problem is an immense thrill for me, however. Or figuring out a clever algorithm.
I feel exactly the same way when it comes to that sort of stuff. That still didn't stop me from going skydiving with a group of friends when we were given an opportunity.
I definitely don't regret doing it, not so much for the thrill during the jump (I blacked out for a few seconds and had a bit of trouble walking after we landed due to the aftereffects of a terror fueled adrenalin crash), but for the ability to look back on it and say "wow, I did something that most people are completely terrified to do".
It also glosses over what accessing the internet means. If I use a google maps with voice directions, I've accessed the internet.
Yeah, by that definition I'm "accessing the internet" for 95% of the time I drive because I get pandora streaming on my phone before I pull out of my driveway on my way to work and occasionally hit the skip button while on the freeway.
The mental backflips that the story pulls you through to justify those killings is just kind of fluff. It can be extended to the whole humanity vs bug overplot as well. Taken that way, at least Ender feels bad about it in the end.
That's sort of the point though. The killings weren't ever really justified, at least I don't recall the book stating such. Various characters tried to justify it (as others tried to vilify it), but card never jumps in as the narrator and says "yeah, Ender did the right thing". Ender never went into it with the attitude of "I'm mad at this guy for being mean to me so I'm going to kill him", he simply perceived a threat and applied as much force as he thought was necessary to end the threat (and was rather upset to find out that he'd killed the person).
That theme stays throughout the books. It was basically one of the central questions that's debated about amongst the characters but never really answered: how much force is justified for removing a threat, whether it be personal or all of humanity? If you read the later books, they all have a similar dilemma. What to do about the aliens that apparently murdered the scientist (people want to kill them all), what to do about the descolada virus (people want to glass the planet), what to do about Jane, what to do with the new alien race they later find, etc.
Yeah, let's start throwing people out of Hollywood for their membership in a political organization, it worked well last time.... right?
Famous entertainer holds opinions some people disagree with, more news at 11.
Regulations don't create monopolies. People create monopolies. Regulations are just a tool. In the hands of sane, well-trained people, regulations are safe and useful. In the hands of evil morons, regulations can kill.
This is the point most people ignore in the whole capitalism/anti-capitalism debate. It's not some linear scale of "if we pass 6 more regulations than the monopoly will have to break up" or "if we remove 2 more laws than that company will form a monopoly" as it's most often dumbed down to be.
In the case of the US, regulatory laws are often written (or strongly influenced by) lobbiests, and generally end up being written in such a way as to raise barriers to entry, or specifically screw over a competitor (competitor making cheaper cement than you? quick! find something unique to his production process and get it banned!). By the kind of posts I've seen so far, I suspect that it doesn't work this way in a lot of other countries.
The way the system was supposed to work here is that corporations compete freely with each other, with the government stepping in as a referee only to ensure that the competition stays fair and the rules don't change suddenly and without warning. Instead, the players have paid off the referee to penalize the other players while looking the other direction when the payee commits a foul.
3) If the current provider is really "gouging" the customers, it should be no problem for the newcomer to offer a better deal and still be profitable
Maybe more of a problem than you think. If they've been gouging, that means they're rolling in money compared to you. When you show up with a new low price, they can easily undercut you (even to the point of taking losses for a few years) and your selling point dries up overnight.