Re:The un-PC point of view in re: Google IPO
on
Google IPO Swami
·
· Score: 1
Martin Hutchinson is the author of "Great Conservatives" (Academica Press, June 2004) -- details can be found on the Web site greatconservatives.com
I think that a man with these stellar conservative qualifications couldn't possibly be a thief-apologist. I'm certain that his objections to the dutch-auction system are entirely altruistic in nature, and that he is solely concerned with the protection of un-educated investors.
Ahh, but radioactive patio furniture is a significantly lower-level source, isn't intentionally lethal, and emits continuously... making it a lot harder to hide and a lot easier to find even if someone doesn't want you to, especially with the growing spread of radiation detectors all over the place.
On the other hand, radiation therapy accelerators are capable of delivering lethal doses in an astonishingly short time while remaining inert the rest of the time-- do a google search on "Therac-25 Accidents" and you'll be pretty terrified.
The incidents in question concerned ionizing radiation doses high enough that the radiation therapy subjects felt a severe burning sensation from the beta radiation flux during a fraction of a second of exposure.
Needless to say, none of them lived more than a month, recieving doses in the >1000rem range.
1000rem in under a second due to mechanical failure. Bad bad bad news.
I don't know how far the electron beam could remain coherent, but a lot of people could die before anyone figured out what was going on if someone hooked a good-sized accelerator up behind a tarp in a public place and fried passersby.
Pfft, anyone could have guessed that this would have been a success. Everyone knows that a laser can shoot anything! Oh, unless the laser is being held by, or possibly just anywhere near a stormtrooper, in which case it can and will shoot everything except what it is being aimed at.
Oh dear. By that argument, Ashcroft's stormtroopers really are a threat to national security. I should never have doubted... we're all gonna die!
...and I can see in your vision, that electric car welding itself to another electric car, then colliding with a nuclear reactor, and mutating into a Voltron.
The sooner we're all driving electric cars, the better the chance that some day we will have Voltrons to protect us from the forces of evil.
Keeping in mind the recent Slashdot story about a Hafnium bomb, more security measures are needed, and fast
Talk about going off-topic. Isotope bombs, which are not even feasible at this point and require a pretty massive technological base to even think about playing with, really aren't what we should be worried about regarding storage of nuclear research materials. In fact, I'd say the nuclear materials and research inside the US are probably better locked-down than just about anywhere else.
Hell, the most-likely nuclear terrorism scenario in my estimation is someone purchasing a radiation-therapy machine and randomly zapping people with lethal doses from inside a truck-mounted setup. Given a cool million to purchase some used medical equipment, you don't even need to try to steal nuclear material from federal facilities.
He says that this is technically illegal under the DMCA, but God has agreed that he won't sue if the researchers send in signed confessions and promise not to do it again.
Personally, I was hoping that a message from God would be more personally enlightening and personally relevant, but what can you do?
The problem with potholes... is that they cause wheels with diameter approaching zero to approach asymptotically the meta-location of socks which have been lost in the dryer.
*CLUNK* "Blasted potholes, where'd my wheels go this time?"
What you can't forget in all this is SPEEDING KILLS. I remember when I lived near downtown Jacksonville all the business types with their midlife crisis cars weaving in and out of traffic going 20 over the limit because their being late for something was more important than everyone else's safety.
You mean reckless driving kills. "Speeding" is exceeding an arbitrary and unchanging limit which has no allowance for road conditions.
Usually the limit is set at a threshold that remains safe for >90% of the time during normal fluctuations in driving conditions and driver ability.
During extreme conditions, traveling at the posted speed *is* unsafe. During good conditions, the posted speed is often substantially lower than the maximum safe speed.
I don't drive faster than what I consider to be a safe speed for current conditions. You should do the same, and forget about speed limits.
If Valve is excited about this technology in terms of combining the power of PCs and consoles... I'll bet that Gabe Newell is looking forward to using XNA to get Steam into the broadband-enabled console market, as well as *anything else* with enough bandwidth and power to run content.
Whether or not it works, the concept has a lot of promise for any group working on next-gen content delivery by expanding the markets they can target.
Maybe it's 6MB of L2 or other on-CPU high-speed cache. An odd number, but it makes a lot more sense than any other explanation I can think of.
I'm betting it's another marketroid amalgamation... something along the lines of:
"1MB of L1 cache and 2MB of L2 cache per processor, for a total of 6MB per machine!"
Just like those old '64 bit!' console advertisements. Uhh, yeah, 16 bits pipeline times three pipelines plus two extra 8-bit memory thingamajiggies may add up to 64 bits, but it for damn sure isn't a 64-bit machine.
Already has. Try about 16% of GDP spent on health care in the USA, with public assistance for healthcare declining in effectiveness.
Individuals are welcome to finance their own health care as much as they want, but for public health purposes it is unethical to allocate resources on any basis other than efficiency and cost/benefit, working for the greatest collective good.
Quality of life, cost, and expected return should all be involved in making decisions about medical treatment.
It's not a moral question, it's a social question. Can society justify expending X resources to save the life of one individual? Can those resources be more efficiently spent in other applications which may benefit/extend the lives of a greater number of individuals? In this case, the answer appears obvious to me.
Withholding extreme medical care is not the same as killing someone, morally, ethically, or physically, and the primary criteria for the greater good of society is the collective good of its members. If you wish to personally fund extreme medical intervention on this scale, feel free... but don't insinuate that it is just or rational for society to compel other individuals to support it.
Does your definition of "Playing God" include forcing other people to spend their lives doing what you think is right? Think about it.
The games will come if/when a larger proportion of their target market runs Linux.
Right now, very few games are developed for Linux, because relatively few game buyers run Linux. Most game developers don't have the time or resources to port their products, because the margins are razor thin and time is critically important. Windows development toolkits like DirectX are widespread and proven effective.
Until linux is percieved as a major market and has the level of (hardware) vendor support that Windows-based stuff does, it will continue to be an afterthought in game development.
Ahh, but then it's just soldiers getting killed.
on
Can Software Kill?
·
· Score: 1
When was the last time you saw a military contractor face any penalties for incompetence/waste/negligence?
The US Military effectively has complete immunity from lawsuits related to loss of life or injury sustained by serving soldiers, and this gives a blanket shield to military contractors as well.
The military procurement system is so screwed-up that deaths from equipment failure don't even register... because nobody involved has to take responsibility for them. V-22 Osprey, anyone?
Technically, the WTC was designed to take the impact of a Boeing 707, the largest passenger airplane in wide use at the time they were designed. Reasonable, considering the bar for plane-building interactions had previously been set by the crash of a USAAF B-25 bomber into the Empire State building in 1945.
Also, note that the WTC *did* withstand the impact quite well. The final structural failure (significantly after impact) resulted from weakening in the main steel girders due the massive fires.
Compare that with a reinforced-concrete-with-six-inches-of-steel reactor vessel, designed to contain internal overpressures and temperatures that make an airplane crash look like a cream-pie impact, and you'll see why I'm not that worried about the possibility.
The car should be programmed to discover any problems under the bonnet, then send a message to the garage to let them know.
The mechanics would then contact the women directly to invite them over.
Sounds like this car is only designed for women on the surface. The real beneficiaries of this system would be the mechanics.
"Ooh, look at that hottie in the volvo. Quick, get it to report an engine fault so we can get her phone number."
I mean, really, think about it. Although I suppose this could be win/win for the ladies too... although they'd probably end up lobbying for higher standards when hiring mechanics. Tall, dark and handsome perhaps?
My assertions? If you'll look closely, I didn't make any. Apparently, you're unable to RTFA, so I'll have to summarize:
The articles I posted provide information which supports my point of view. From these sources, I personally conclude that there were electoral irregularities.
Perhaps you feel that having thousands of eligible voters removed from the voting rosters without notification or appeal is an everyday feature of American politics that we should not be concerned about. Or at least, that we should not be concerned about it if the voters who are disenfranchised are mostly minority, mostly lower-income, and share a name with a list of known felons.
Which of us is wearing the tinfoil hat, exactly? Dumbass...
The official responsible for overseeing voting records and other similar issues is the Florida Secretary of State. At the time of most of the voter roll purges before the 2000 election, the Secretary was Katharine Harris, who also happened to end up as the head of the Bush campaign in Florida. Hint: Not a democrat.
Fortunately, she's no longer the Secretary of State for Florida.
Unfortunately, that came about as a side effect of her election to the US House of Representatives in the 13th Congressional District of Florida.
Slashdot Mirror
Martin Hutchinson is the author of "Great Conservatives" (Academica Press, June 2004) -- details can be found on the Web site greatconservatives.com
I think that a man with these stellar conservative qualifications couldn't possibly be a thief-apologist. I'm certain that his objections to the dutch-auction system are entirely altruistic in nature, and that he is solely concerned with the protection of un-educated investors.
Ahh, but radioactive patio furniture is a significantly lower-level source, isn't intentionally lethal, and emits continuously... making it a lot harder to hide and a lot easier to find even if someone doesn't want you to, especially with the growing spread of radiation detectors all over the place.
On the other hand, radiation therapy accelerators are capable of delivering lethal doses in an astonishingly short time while remaining inert the rest of the time-- do a google search on "Therac-25 Accidents" and you'll be pretty terrified.
The incidents in question concerned ionizing radiation doses high enough that the radiation therapy subjects felt a severe burning sensation from the beta radiation flux during a fraction of a second of exposure.
Needless to say, none of them lived more than a month, recieving doses in the >1000rem range.
1000rem in under a second due to mechanical failure. Bad bad bad news.
I don't know how far the electron beam could remain coherent, but a lot of people could die before anyone figured out what was going on if someone hooked a good-sized accelerator up behind a tarp in a public place and fried passersby.
Pfft, anyone could have guessed that this would have been a success. Everyone knows that a laser can shoot anything! Oh, unless the laser is being held by, or possibly just anywhere near a stormtrooper, in which case it can and will shoot everything except what it is being aimed at.
Oh dear. By that argument, Ashcroft's stormtroopers really are a threat to national security. I should never have doubted... we're all gonna die!
...and I can see in your vision, that electric car welding itself to another electric car, then colliding with a nuclear reactor, and mutating into a Voltron.
The sooner we're all driving electric cars, the better the chance that some day we will have Voltrons to protect us from the forces of evil.
Keeping in mind the recent Slashdot story about a Hafnium bomb, more security measures are needed, and fast
Talk about going off-topic. Isotope bombs, which are not even feasible at this point and require a pretty massive technological base to even think about playing with, really aren't what we should be worried about regarding storage of nuclear research materials. In fact, I'd say the nuclear materials and research inside the US are probably better locked-down than just about anywhere else.
Hell, the most-likely nuclear terrorism scenario in my estimation is someone purchasing a radiation-therapy machine and randomly zapping people with lethal doses from inside a truck-mounted setup. Given a cool million to purchase some used medical equipment, you don't even need to try to steal nuclear material from federal facilities.
The movies *were* even better than the books.
Yes God just spoke to me about it.
He says that this is technically illegal under the DMCA, but God has agreed that he won't sue if the researchers send in signed confessions and promise not to do it again.
Personally, I was hoping that a message from God would be more personally enlightening and personally relevant, but what can you do?
The problem with potholes... is that they cause wheels with diameter approaching zero to approach asymptotically the meta-location of socks which have been lost in the dryer.
*CLUNK* "Blasted potholes, where'd my wheels go this time?"
What you can't forget in all this is SPEEDING KILLS. I remember when I lived near downtown Jacksonville all the business types with their midlife crisis cars weaving in and out of traffic going 20 over the limit because their being late for something was more important than everyone else's safety.
You mean reckless driving kills. "Speeding" is exceeding an arbitrary and unchanging limit which has no allowance for road conditions.
Usually the limit is set at a threshold that remains safe for >90% of the time during normal fluctuations in driving conditions and driver ability.
During extreme conditions, traveling at the posted speed *is* unsafe. During good conditions, the posted speed is often substantially lower than the maximum safe speed.
I don't drive faster than what I consider to be a safe speed for current conditions. You should do the same, and forget about speed limits.
I vote for the smartwheels with zillions of radar-guided extending foot-spokes, a'la Hiro's motorcycle or Y.T's skateboard in Snow Crash.
I'd say being able to skateboard smoothly down stairs would probably give you the upper hand in the simpler conditions of municipal roadway battles.
...and here I thought you wanted your girlfriend to have a smaller waist...
Never mind, I suppose.
...and here I thought that a more sought-after activity would be j.Lo.Jack.
Oh well. This is Slashdot, after all...
We've had fusion weapons since the '50s... they're called thermonuclear bombs.
At this point, research into fusion *power* probably isn't going to increase their effectiveness much more.
Right now, the big areas of superweapon research are biotech and nanotech. Mmmm, grey goo.
If Valve is excited about this technology in terms of combining the power of PCs and consoles... I'll bet that Gabe Newell is looking forward to using XNA to get Steam into the broadband-enabled console market, as well as *anything else* with enough bandwidth and power to run content. Whether or not it works, the concept has a lot of promise for any group working on next-gen content delivery by expanding the markets they can target.
Maybe it's 6MB of L2 or other on-CPU high-speed cache. An odd number, but it makes a lot more sense than any other explanation I can think of.
I'm betting it's another marketroid amalgamation... something along the lines of:
"1MB of L1 cache and 2MB of L2 cache per processor, for a total of 6MB per machine!"
Just like those old '64 bit!' console advertisements. Uhh, yeah, 16 bits pipeline times three pipelines plus two extra 8-bit memory thingamajiggies may add up to 64 bits, but it for damn sure isn't a 64-bit machine.
if the public health $$ starts running out
Already has. Try about 16% of GDP spent on health care in the USA, with public assistance for healthcare declining in effectiveness.
Individuals are welcome to finance their own health care as much as they want, but for public health purposes it is unethical to allocate resources on any basis other than efficiency and cost/benefit, working for the greatest collective good.
Quality of life, cost, and expected return should all be involved in making decisions about medical treatment.
It's not a moral question, it's a social question. Can society justify expending X resources to save the life of one individual? Can those resources be more efficiently spent in other applications which may benefit/extend the lives of a greater number of individuals? In this case, the answer appears obvious to me.
Withholding extreme medical care is not the same as killing someone, morally, ethically, or physically, and the primary criteria for the greater good of society is the collective good of its members. If you wish to personally fund extreme medical intervention on this scale, feel free... but don't insinuate that it is just or rational for society to compel other individuals to support it.
Does your definition of "Playing God" include forcing other people to spend their lives doing what you think is right? Think about it.
Two Words: Market share.
The games will come if/when a larger proportion of their target market runs Linux.
Right now, very few games are developed for Linux, because relatively few game buyers run Linux. Most game developers don't have the time or resources to port their products, because the margins are razor thin and time is critically important. Windows development toolkits like DirectX are widespread and proven effective.
Until linux is percieved as a major market and has the level of (hardware) vendor support that Windows-based stuff does, it will continue to be an afterthought in game development.
When was the last time you saw a military contractor face any penalties for incompetence/waste/negligence?
The US Military effectively has complete immunity from lawsuits related to loss of life or injury sustained by serving soldiers, and this gives a blanket shield to military contractors as well.
The military procurement system is so screwed-up that deaths from equipment failure don't even register... because nobody involved has to take responsibility for them. V-22 Osprey, anyone?
Technically, the WTC was designed to take the impact of a Boeing 707, the largest passenger airplane in wide use at the time they were designed. Reasonable, considering the bar for plane-building interactions had previously been set by the crash of a USAAF B-25 bomber into the Empire State building in 1945.
Also, note that the WTC *did* withstand the impact quite well. The final structural failure (significantly after impact) resulted from weakening in the main steel girders due the massive fires.
Compare that with a reinforced-concrete-with-six-inches-of-steel reactor vessel, designed to contain internal overpressures and temperatures that make an airplane crash look like a cream-pie impact, and you'll see why I'm not that worried about the possibility.
[i]The bottom line is: nuclear power is NOT a harmless thing, and the only mistake is not that people don't know it's harmless.[/i]
Estimating conservatively, pollutants released from coal-fired powerplants cause tens of thousands of deaths in the US alone every year.
Nuclear power scares people because few people understand it.
Coal power scares me because most people think they do understand it.
ps. don't attack my city
Shouldn't that be 'please don't attack my city'?
I'd certainly be polite to the 400-foot monster under those circumstances. Or any circumstances, really.
The car should be programmed to discover any problems under the bonnet, then send a message to the garage to let them know.
The mechanics would then contact the women directly to invite them over.
Sounds like this car is only designed for women on the surface. The real beneficiaries of this system would be the mechanics.
"Ooh, look at that hottie in the volvo. Quick, get it to report an engine fault so we can get her phone number."
I mean, really, think about it. Although I suppose this could be win/win for the ladies too... although they'd probably end up lobbying for higher standards when hiring mechanics. Tall, dark and handsome perhaps?
My assertions? If you'll look closely, I didn't make any. Apparently, you're unable to RTFA, so I'll have to summarize:
The articles I posted provide information which supports my point of view. From these sources, I personally conclude that there were electoral irregularities.
Perhaps you feel that having thousands of eligible voters removed from the voting rosters without notification or appeal is an everyday feature of American politics that we should not be concerned about. Or at least, that we should not be concerned about it if the voters who are disenfranchised are mostly minority, mostly lower-income, and share a name with a list of known felons.
Which of us is wearing the tinfoil hat, exactly? Dumbass...
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0527-03.ht m
y /0 ,2763,501882,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/US_election_race/Stor
The official responsible for overseeing voting records and other similar issues is the Florida Secretary of State. At the time of most of the voter roll purges before the 2000 election, the Secretary was Katharine Harris, who also happened to end up as the head of the Bush campaign in Florida. Hint: Not a democrat.
Fortunately, she's no longer the Secretary of State for Florida.
Unfortunately, that came about as a side effect of her election to the US House of Representatives in the 13th Congressional District of Florida.