And based on my experience and the experience of those I live and work around, developmental psychologists are the LAST people you ever want your child to be around.
It's amazing how people will defend pretty much any sin that allows them to pursue their own greed. Give up the extra income and one of you stay home. You'll never regret it. Trust me.
(I suggest the truly radical idea (for/.) of reading the Book of Proverbs for timeless and proven practical advice for raising children - guaranteed to kick the snot out of anything the developmental psychologists can tell you.)
(And please don't think that I think abortion is a good idea; it does devalue life and encourage people not to take responsibility for their actions, but to ban it outright is to ignore the fact that it will happen no matter what the policy.)
So you agree it's morally wrong, but think that government should do nothing about that? What the heck is government for if not to uphold the right and punish wrongs? Besides, abortion is far less defensible today than slavery was in the 1860's, in both cases, it's the Democrats ignoring injustices to the voiceless oppressed.
But, Clinton is Presidential. Not only did he clearly have fun in office (and some of that was even *without* Ms. Lewinsky), he was also a professional in all matters of foreign affairs. And, he was a thoroughly likeable individual for the world to see as the American leader.
I see. This would explain the incresed stature of the US during the Clinton years (yeah, right.) Clinton has never been remotely presidential - foreign leaders laugh at him, and he has made our nation and the office of the presidency a joke in the international community.
Bush, however, is that amiable guy sitting over there at the end of the bar, spinning yarns; he's interesting and exciting. If you met him - probably in a dimly-lit sports bar in the backwoods of Texas - you'd think he was a tractor salesman. He will command the respect of the world not through dignity, but only through sheer power. This is not the best way to influence international or domestic diplomacy. Bush is *no* statesman.
As Linda Bowles put it so well in a recent column: "Although Gore flunked out of divinity school, dropped out of law school, and had lower college grades than Bush, when comparisons are made, it is Bush who is routinely underestimated. His humility and his plain talk are viewed by the liberal elite as evidence of mental limitations when in fact they are evidence of a refreshing lack of intellectual snobbery. Underneath Bush's folksy, disarming ways is a degree at Yale University and a masters degree at Harvard." Having seen Bush handle the international issues that arise in a border state such as Texas, I'd say he's a FAR better statesman than Gore ever could be.
They may, but more because the Clinton/Gore/Reno administrationhas totally botched what should have been a lead pipe cinch of a case. Note that the Finding of Fact inexplicably left out almost all of the real offenses which would have meant serious Sherman act violations, while keeping a weaker few that were wanted by competiors like Sun and Netscape. The laws are intended to protect consumers, and the DoJ carefully crafted its case to avoid showing any significant impact on consumers, despite the fact that there was ample evidence (DR/Caldera, anyone?) that this did indeed happen.
Bush may toss the case, but more because it's pointless now after Reno's bungling than because he's in Bill's pocket. It was Clinton/Gore/Reno that let him off. Oh, and remember, this is the same crew that brought you UCITA and the DMCA. Viva Bush!
Anyone concerned about privacy and stoping government intervention in cyberspace should be voting for Bush, not Gore.
Go look at their records, and remember, it was the Clinton/Gore administration that brought you UCITA and DMCA! There will be more to come if Gore gets in...
Clinton is, as usual, not at all interested in the rights of anyone but himself. The biggest reason he vetoed this was that it would have further criminalized his administration's very deliberate leaks of secret military technologies to the Chinese (missiles, nuclear, etc.) and Russians (stealth tech, etc.), all of which are quite well-documented now...
Don't ever believe this man does anything for other than his own interest...
So you're saying that because of mobile support, every packet has to get about 40 bytes larger, thereby raising traffic on the backbones, LANs and everybody else's networks? Hardly a good idea!
No, that's not what I said at all. I do think IPv6 is the only right way to do mobilty, but IPv6 was painstakingly designed to be 100% backward compatible and interworkable with IPv4 and not to require any significantly difficult switchover logistics such as "flag days" where everyone would have to change at once. Only the mobile packets will have to get bigger (I expect v4 will rule the roost for fixed use for some time yet), but that's a small price to pay for true location transparency. The increased packet size is inconsequential for most everything but telnet and the like, which are an irrelevant percentage of all inet traffic.
Good point about the rest of the Class A space, though - that slipped my mind - are you sure none of the upper range was ever issued?
Wow, I finally get to disagree with Russ on technical grounds...:-)
I think we do need IPv6 for one crucial reason: mobile support. This is something that's cooked into IPv6, and it's the only right way to solve the problem. With v6 mobility, nodes essentially have two IP addresses - one static, the other dynamic. The advantage of this is that most of the world only has to know the static one to talk to you - your nomadic device is responsible for letting the static server know what your current mobile IP addr is. This keeps the Inernet routing tables from ever having to deal with any of the routes to a particular device - it just points to your static IP (which would be part of a routable superblock), and the local network (or wireless carrier, etc.) handles it from there.
I agree that NAT and superblocks have allowed us to be lazy for a few years too long, but it's critical to recognize that the move to IPv6 will be driven by mobility, not a lack of v4 addresses. This in turn won't happen until people start developing and embedding lean, fast v6 stacks into high-volume mobile consumer devices like cellphones, laptops, and PDAs. As much as I hate to say it, Microsoft may be the only one that can get us kicked off-center here.
Oh, and if you've ever done a massive IP address change for a large corporation (I have), you'll know why it's easier to pull shark's teeth than get those addresses back. Note that even mandating NAT at border routers (which seems reasonable on the surface) still requires all IP addresses to be changed to the "martian networks" (net 10, etc.) to avoid the possibility of collisions with the reclaimed addresses. The costs of this re-addressing are simply too high to expect that IANA could reasonably force any recalamation of IP addresses.
We need IPv6, but not because we're running out of v4 address space...
If you really want ubiquitous access to your bookmarks, you should be using something like webroamer.
Storing your bookmarks online makes a lot of sense - if you're running a web browser, the chances are you have net access.:-) The only downside is that so far as I know, only Netscape is advanced enough to be able to support roaming profiles for the browser, and the last time I checked, roaming still wasn't in Netscape 6.0/Mozilla...
There's really no ned to do it formally, as was hinted at above, it's been done informally for years. "Broken English" is spoken pretty much wolrdwide, and one of the reasons why I, like most other Americans, never learned another language - it's really just not all that necessary.
Whether you like it or not, the informal subset of English often called broken English is indeed the current lingua franca in most parts of the world...
No, I don't work for Amazon, and although I am a happy customer, I have no particular allegiance to them, I'm just calling this one like I see it.
Amazon's mail to Ironfist isn't spam, because it's really not unsolicited. IMO, Ironfist is not taking proper responsibility for delegating the use of his account to his wife. Remember, the prior business relationship was between Amazon and his wife. He had NO standing to modify her account settings in any way. Also, note that Ironfist says Amazon complied right away once they were able to confirm that his wife wanted the mail stopped.
I think this is a boundary condition case caused by the sharing of e-mail accounts and a ridiculous oversensitivity to what appears to be Amazon's correct protection of thier customer's rights and privacy. I wonder if Ironfist would also whine to Slashdot if Amazon were to allow *anyone* claiming to own the account modify his wife's settings? Amazon was right not to act too quickly here, since that could have hurt one of their customers.
I understand Ironfist's frustration, but the situation was at least indirectly of his own making, and as an objective observer, I can't fault Amazon's actions in this case in any way.
Ya know, I get a kick out of how easy some of you make this stuff sound. I've got a strong background in robotics and we can only barely (and not terribly reliably) keep a two-armed robot from running into *itself* yet. (And of course, multiple robots working in the same space is even more problematic...)
This is a much harder problem than anyone here seems to realize. God is one awesome engineer, and our best efforts at mimickry are pitiful subsitutes for what we see in nature...
Ironfist.cmg is whining without thinking, and Slashdot has no discernably legitimate reason to post this story:
Making a long story, shorter: it wasn't that simple. It should have been, but it turned out to be much worse.
In my experience, most things on Amazon are much easier and more straightforward. Create and cancel an order on Amazon - *very* easy. Now try the same thing with buy.com, outpost.com, or others - and good luck, because you simply can't do it through their web interfaces. The convenience of one-click (which I personally love) requires Amazon to be a bit more sure of who you are before sending out a password - passwords are for security after all, and your inability to manage your authentication credentials is hardly their fault.
It was at this point that principle kicked in. It's MY e-mail account.
Perhaps you should have considered this before letting someone else use your account. You hardly have cause to gripe here, as the situation is entirely of your own making...
This brings up a new twist on spam, privacy, and recourse to be taken. It is in fact my e-mail account, paid for by me, and Amazon tells me I have no control over what I may receive via it.
Again, you let your wife use it, and she, who was Amazon's customer, not you, selected the "let me know about things at Amazon" option. If this ticks you off, it's something you should discuss with your wife, not Amazon, as you aren't even a customer...
And the never-ending problem of spam continues...
Not really, your own post makes it clear that this was resolved with Amazon over the phone. This entire piece seems to be just an excuse to accuse Amazon of spamming, which they're clearly not doing here.
You may not like getting this mail, but what you've described is NOT spam. Not by a long shot.
And if the problem is resolved, just what was you motive for this posting? (and Slashdot's motive for selecting it for publication?) This whole thing looks like a very badly disguised attempt to villify Amazon on unjust grounds...
O.K., so you've more or less postulated that it should be possible to control the car under static conditions. What does your computer do when it's entering the corkscrew at Laguna Seca and suddenly realizes another car is sideways on the track ahead? Seriously, folks, the ability to look ahead and simultaneously integrate that many complex inputs *in real time* is a *long* way off. Not to mention it will probably never be smart enough to know when the fuel gage is feeding it a load of BS.
I've just gotta say, wow, Slashdot has changed - two years ago, you could hardly find any motorheads here and now look at us talk about complex F1 traction control and engine management systems. I love it!
As someone who originally trained as a robotics engineer and has spent enough time on the track to judge the difficulty of the problem, my money is on the "meat puppets" for the next 50 years or so... (That's 30 years for procedural AI to finally die and 20 years to actually solve the problem.) But no computer will ever be likely to drive like Nuvolari, Fangio, or Foyt, as that kind of performance is beyond technical and requires soul.
And I'm sure Bernie Eccelstone would be trying to figure out how to get a cut of the robot's salary:)
I'm starting to think the "robots" would really be a bunch of little Bernie androids, which would replace not only the drivers, but the engineers, designers, crew chiefs, pit crew, etc. This would finally give Bernie the absolutely total control he's wanted over F1 all along...:-)
Yeah, but can the computer climb out of the car and push the disabled vehicle across the finish line a la Nigel Mansell in the 1984 Dallas Grand Prix? (It was brutally hot, about 125 degrees on the track, and Mansell did pass out afterwards...)
Phillips is right as usual, of course. I desperately want to vote for the man, as it's obvious he's the only candidate running willing to pay any attention at all to what the Constitution actually says, but sadly, I have recently decided to cast my vote for GwB, since I just can't in good conscience vote until the man succeeds in getting on the ballot in all 50 states.
It was only after listening to Marvin Olasky speak on the issue of elections recently that I decided supporting Bush is indeed the right thing to do, even though there's no question that Phillips is right. There's too much at stake in this election - but I'll be working to help the Constitution party next time around...
I've done a lot of healthcare consulting, and to be honest, the original poster's attitude seems whiny and selfish to me.
Remember, this is healthcare: people will get sick and injured on distressingly inconvenient schedules. Also, the folks doing the real work (docs and nurses) are highly paid professionals that don't think twice about having to get up and do thier job at 3 AM two hours after pulling a long shift. (That's a legitimate reason, I think, why docs and nurses are entitled to big bucks. Lawyers are a mystery.)
In short, recognize that the work simply must be done, and if you are not up to it, your administration can and should find someone that is. I hate to say it, but if your management hired me to give an opinion on the circumstances as I understand them from your posting, my advice would be that their core business is healthcare, and the entire IT staff is hired help, and should understand that they either play with the team or "get traded."
Finally, like it or not, healthcare IT has never paid well and will never pay well compared to other industries, but it offers one of the most interesting and rewarding working environments in the world. (The average hospital has an IT complexity equivalent to a very large corporation.) If you're just after the bucks, you're certainly in the wrong place.
Copyright is an *intentional* monopoly, and the best reason that I can see for abolishing it is that it would once and for all eliminate the viral nature of the GPL...:-)
If you want to know how dangerous cell phones are (RF wise), you need to look at the population of ham radio operators and various professionals who use UHF radios on a regaular basis.
As I pointed out in post #204 here, this is a completely invalid comparison due to the differences in modulation methods. The evidence is still coming in, but you can make a fairly strong case that a few milliwatts of GSM/TDMA is far more damaging to biological systems than 1) kilowatts of AM or FM, or 2)possibly megawatts of CDMA. Those are some pretty large spreads. This issue is not as simple or cut and dried as it appears, since wireless phones differ so much in their basic physics...
Much has been made in this election about the costs of prescription drugs. Almost nothing haas been said about the reason prescription drugs cost an order of magnitude more than the same drugs cost in other countries: the hideously expensive and complex FDA approval process. (FDA approvals now routinely cost *hundreds* of millions of dollars, and the agency is arguably faring far worse at "protecting" Americans from unsafe drugs.)
Since the FDA and its policies are the root cause of the high prescription drug prices that everyone seems to agree are a problem, what would you do to attack the root cause of the problem rather than simply throw money away by having the government (insted of the people) pay 100x too much for drugs?
Even those of us that are adamantly opposed to any government health system are still burdened with health care systems that are to a large degree, shaped and controlled by the federal government.
The vast majority of us pay hundreds of dollars every month to purchase a lot of coverage we niether want nor need, like routine doctors visits and every prescription we'll ever encounter.
Would you support regulations or the lack thereof that would promote the availability of catastophic healthcare coverage only, which would dramatically reduce the cost of health care to the end consumer?
This is bunk. First of all, there's much outright falsehood in your post.
If anything, atheism is now the official statre religion of the US, since the only legally acceptable religion in public has become no religion. It seems pretty childish to complain of discrimination against your revolt against reason when your form of disbelief is being enshrined as the only acceptable position.
Finally, your ignorance on the issues is showing, too: the most active and vociferous opponents of school vouchers are those intimately involved in the classical Christian school movement, as I am. The reason is simply summed up by Doug Wilson: He who takes the King's coin is the King's man. The one taking the money may not know this - the one giving it always does... It is in fact that we would be forced to adopt atheistic policies and practices that drives us to oppose vouchers, which are a bad idea no matter how you look at them. (A tax credit, on the other hand would serve the intended purpose well, as it would not allow the state to forcibly coerce schools, since the parents would control the money, as they should.
I was following the development of the Internet fairly closely at the time, and I can tell you this is total bunk. Gore no more had a hand in creating hte Internet than he accompanied Witt to Texas to commiserate with the victims of hte Parker county fires. The man will simply say whatever he thinks people want to hear. This is not a good presidential trait. (But it does seem to be a Democratic one - even Lloyd Bentsen's snappy comeback to Dan Quayle in thier debate has been proven false: the Kennedy archives have no evidence the men ever even met...)
Absolutely. That's exactly what the "Adelaide study" did. I think by now we can be pretty sure heating is not the mechanism, but there does appear to be some mechanism that does indeed produce change. Even DNA changes have been observed in some laboratory tests. The exact mechanism for these and other changes may not be known for some time to come.
See post #207 for some links to sites that have more info on this. There is indeed a lot we don't know yet, but then hubris has always been a problem, hasn't it?
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And based on my experience and the experience of those I live and work around, developmental psychologists are the LAST people you ever want your child to be around.
/.) of reading the Book of Proverbs for timeless and proven practical advice for raising children - guaranteed to kick the snot out of anything the developmental psychologists can tell you.)
It's amazing how people will defend pretty much any sin that allows them to pursue their own greed. Give up the extra income and one of you stay home. You'll never regret it. Trust me.
(I suggest the truly radical idea (for
(And please don't think that I think abortion is a good idea; it does devalue life and encourage people not to take responsibility for their actions, but to ban it outright is to ignore the fact that it will happen no matter what the policy.)
So you agree it's morally wrong, but think that government should do nothing about that? What the heck is government for if not to uphold the right and punish wrongs? Besides, abortion is far less defensible today than slavery was in the 1860's, in both cases, it's the Democrats ignoring injustices to the voiceless oppressed.
But, Clinton is Presidential. Not only did he clearly have fun in office (and some of that was even *without* Ms. Lewinsky), he was also a professional in all matters of foreign affairs. And, he was a thoroughly likeable individual for the world to see as the American leader.
I see. This would explain the incresed stature of the US during the Clinton years (yeah, right.) Clinton has never been remotely presidential - foreign leaders laugh at him, and he has made our nation and the office of the presidency a joke in the international community.
Bush, however, is that amiable guy sitting over there at the end of the bar, spinning yarns; he's interesting and exciting. If you met him - probably in a dimly-lit sports bar in the backwoods of Texas - you'd think he was a tractor salesman. He will command the respect of the world not through dignity, but only through sheer power. This is not the best way to influence international or domestic diplomacy. Bush is *no* statesman.
As Linda Bowles put it so well in a recent column: "Although Gore flunked out of divinity school, dropped out of law school, and had lower college grades than Bush, when comparisons are made, it is Bush who is routinely underestimated. His humility and his plain talk are viewed by the liberal elite as evidence of mental limitations when in fact they are evidence of a refreshing lack of intellectual snobbery. Underneath Bush's folksy, disarming ways is a degree at Yale University and a masters degree at Harvard." Having seen Bush handle the international issues that arise in a border state such as Texas, I'd say he's a FAR better statesman than Gore ever could be.
They may, but more because the Clinton/Gore/Reno administrationhas totally botched what should have been a lead pipe cinch of a case. Note that the Finding of Fact inexplicably left out almost all of the real offenses which would have meant serious Sherman act violations, while keeping a weaker few that were wanted by competiors like Sun and Netscape. The laws are intended to protect consumers, and the DoJ carefully crafted its case to avoid showing any significant impact on consumers, despite the fact that there was ample evidence (DR/Caldera, anyone?) that this did indeed happen.
Bush may toss the case, but more because it's pointless now after Reno's bungling than because he's in Bill's pocket. It was Clinton/Gore/Reno that let him off. Oh, and remember, this is the same crew that brought you UCITA and the DMCA. Viva Bush!
Anyone concerned about privacy and stoping government intervention in cyberspace should be voting for Bush, not Gore.
Go look at their records, and remember, it was the Clinton/Gore administration that brought you UCITA and DMCA! There will be more to come if Gore gets in...
Clinton is, as usual, not at all interested in the rights of anyone but himself. The biggest reason he vetoed this was that it would have further criminalized his administration's very deliberate leaks of secret military technologies to the Chinese (missiles, nuclear, etc.) and Russians (stealth tech, etc.), all of which are quite well-documented now...
Don't ever believe this man does anything for other than his own interest...
So you're saying that because of mobile support, every packet has to get about 40 bytes larger, thereby raising traffic on the backbones, LANs and everybody else's networks? Hardly a good idea!
No, that's not what I said at all. I do think IPv6 is the only right way to do mobilty, but IPv6 was painstakingly designed to be 100% backward compatible and interworkable with IPv4 and not to require any significantly difficult switchover logistics such as "flag days" where everyone would have to change at once. Only the mobile packets will have to get bigger (I expect v4 will rule the roost for fixed use for some time yet), but that's a small price to pay for true location transparency. The increased packet size is inconsequential for most everything but telnet and the like, which are an irrelevant percentage of all inet traffic.
Good point about the rest of the Class A space, though - that slipped my mind - are you sure none of the upper range was ever issued?
Wow, I finally get to disagree with Russ on technical grounds... :-)
I think we do need IPv6 for one crucial reason: mobile support. This is something that's cooked into IPv6, and it's the only right way to solve the problem. With v6 mobility, nodes essentially have two IP addresses - one static, the other dynamic. The advantage of this is that most of the world only has to know the static one to talk to you - your nomadic device is responsible for letting the static server know what your current mobile IP addr is. This keeps the Inernet routing tables from ever having to deal with any of the routes to a particular device - it just points to your static IP (which would be part of a routable superblock), and the local network (or wireless carrier, etc.) handles it from there.
I agree that NAT and superblocks have allowed us to be lazy for a few years too long, but it's critical to recognize that the move to IPv6 will be driven by mobility, not a lack of v4 addresses. This in turn won't happen until people start developing and embedding lean, fast v6 stacks into high-volume mobile consumer devices like cellphones, laptops, and PDAs. As much as I hate to say it, Microsoft may be the only one that can get us kicked off-center here.
Oh, and if you've ever done a massive IP address change for a large corporation (I have), you'll know why it's easier to pull shark's teeth than get those addresses back. Note that even mandating NAT at border routers (which seems reasonable on the surface) still requires all IP addresses to be changed to the "martian networks" (net 10, etc.) to avoid the possibility of collisions with the reclaimed addresses. The costs of this re-addressing are simply too high to expect that IANA could reasonably force any recalamation of IP addresses.
We need IPv6, but not because we're running out of v4 address space...
If you really want ubiquitous access to your bookmarks, you should be using something like webroamer.
:-) The only downside is that so far as I know, only Netscape is advanced enough to be able to support roaming profiles for the browser, and the last time I checked, roaming still wasn't in Netscape 6.0/Mozilla...
Storing your bookmarks online makes a lot of sense - if you're running a web browser, the chances are you have net access.
There's really no ned to do it formally, as was hinted at above, it's been done informally for years. "Broken English" is spoken pretty much wolrdwide, and one of the reasons why I, like most other Americans, never learned another language - it's really just not all that necessary.
Whether you like it or not, the informal subset of English often called broken English is indeed the current lingua franca in most parts of the world...
No, I don't work for Amazon, and although I am a happy customer, I have no particular allegiance to them, I'm just calling this one like I see it.
Amazon's mail to Ironfist isn't spam, because it's really not unsolicited. IMO, Ironfist is not taking proper responsibility for delegating the use of his account to his wife. Remember, the prior business relationship was between Amazon and his wife. He had NO standing to modify her account settings in any way. Also, note that Ironfist says Amazon complied right away once they were able to confirm that his wife wanted the mail stopped.
I think this is a boundary condition case caused by the sharing of e-mail accounts and a ridiculous oversensitivity to what appears to be Amazon's correct protection of thier customer's rights and privacy. I wonder if Ironfist would also whine to Slashdot if Amazon were to allow *anyone* claiming to own the account modify his wife's settings? Amazon was right not to act too quickly here, since that could have hurt one of their customers.
I understand Ironfist's frustration, but the situation was at least indirectly of his own making, and as an objective observer, I can't fault Amazon's actions in this case in any way.
Ya know, I get a kick out of how easy some of you make this stuff sound. I've got a strong background in robotics and we can only barely (and not terribly reliably) keep a two-armed robot from running into *itself* yet. (And of course, multiple robots working in the same space is even more problematic...)
This is a much harder problem than anyone here seems to realize. God is one awesome engineer, and our best efforts at mimickry are pitiful subsitutes for what we see in nature...
Ironfist.cmg is whining without thinking, and Slashdot has no discernably legitimate reason to post this story:
Making a long story, shorter: it wasn't that simple. It should have been, but it turned out to be much worse.
In my experience, most things on Amazon are much easier and more straightforward. Create and cancel an order on Amazon - *very* easy. Now try the same thing with buy.com, outpost.com, or others - and good luck, because you simply can't do it through their web interfaces. The convenience of one-click (which I personally love) requires Amazon to be a bit more sure of who you are before sending out a password - passwords are for security after all, and your inability to manage your authentication credentials is hardly their fault.
It was at this point that principle kicked in. It's MY e-mail account.
Perhaps you should have considered this before letting someone else use your account. You hardly have cause to gripe here, as the situation is entirely of your own making...
This brings up a new twist on spam, privacy, and recourse to be taken. It is in fact my e-mail account, paid for by me, and Amazon tells me I have no control over what I may receive via it.
Again, you let your wife use it, and she, who was Amazon's customer, not you, selected the "let me know about things at Amazon" option. If this ticks you off, it's something you should discuss with your wife, not Amazon, as you aren't even a customer...
And the never-ending problem of spam continues...
Not really, your own post makes it clear that this was resolved with Amazon over the phone. This entire piece seems to be just an excuse to accuse Amazon of spamming, which they're clearly not doing here.
You may not like getting this mail, but what you've described is NOT spam. Not by a long shot.
And if the problem is resolved, just what was you motive for this posting? (and Slashdot's motive for selecting it for publication?) This whole thing looks like a very badly disguised attempt to villify Amazon on unjust grounds...
O.K., so you've more or less postulated that it should be possible to control the car under static conditions. What does your computer do when it's entering the corkscrew at Laguna Seca and suddenly realizes another car is sideways on the track ahead? Seriously, folks, the ability to look ahead and simultaneously integrate that many complex inputs *in real time* is a *long* way off. Not to mention it will probably never be smart enough to know when the fuel gage is feeding it a load of BS.
I've just gotta say, wow, Slashdot has changed - two years ago, you could hardly find any motorheads here and now look at us talk about complex F1 traction control and engine management systems. I love it!
As someone who originally trained as a robotics engineer and has spent enough time on the track to judge the difficulty of the problem, my money is on the "meat puppets" for the next 50 years or so... (That's 30 years for procedural AI to finally die and 20 years to actually solve the problem.) But no computer will ever be likely to drive like Nuvolari, Fangio, or Foyt, as that kind of performance is beyond technical and requires soul.
And I'm sure Bernie Eccelstone would be trying to figure out how to get a cut of the robot's salary :)
:-)
I'm starting to think the "robots" would really be a bunch of little Bernie androids, which would replace not only the drivers, but the engineers, designers, crew chiefs, pit crew, etc. This would finally give Bernie the absolutely total control he's wanted over F1 all along...
Yeah, but can the computer climb out of the car and push the disabled vehicle across the finish line a la Nigel Mansell in the 1984 Dallas Grand Prix? (It was brutally hot, about 125 degrees on the track, and Mansell did pass out afterwards...)
Phillips is right as usual, of course. I desperately want to vote for the man, as it's obvious he's the only candidate running willing to pay any attention at all to what the Constitution actually says, but sadly, I have recently decided to cast my vote for GwB, since I just can't in good conscience vote until the man succeeds in getting on the ballot in all 50 states.
It was only after listening to Marvin Olasky speak on the issue of elections recently that I decided supporting Bush is indeed the right thing to do, even though there's no question that Phillips is right. There's too much at stake in this election - but I'll be working to help the Constitution party next time around...
I've done a lot of healthcare consulting, and to be honest, the original poster's attitude seems whiny and selfish to me.
Remember, this is healthcare: people will get sick and injured on distressingly inconvenient schedules. Also, the folks doing the real work (docs and nurses) are highly paid professionals that don't think twice about having to get up and do thier job at 3 AM two hours after pulling a long shift. (That's a legitimate reason, I think, why docs and nurses are entitled to big bucks. Lawyers are a mystery.)
In short, recognize that the work simply must be done, and if you are not up to it, your administration can and should find someone that is. I hate to say it, but if your management hired me to give an opinion on the circumstances as I understand them from your posting, my advice would be that their core business is healthcare, and the entire IT staff is hired help, and should understand that they either play with the team or "get traded."
Finally, like it or not, healthcare IT has never paid well and will never pay well compared to other industries, but it offers one of the most interesting and rewarding working environments in the world. (The average hospital has an IT complexity equivalent to a very large corporation.) If you're just after the bucks, you're certainly in the wrong place.
Oh, and remember: There is no indispensable man.
Copyright is an *intentional* monopoly, and the best reason that I can see for abolishing it is that it would once and for all eliminate the viral nature of the GPL... :-)
If you want to know how dangerous cell phones are (RF wise), you need to look at the population of ham radio operators and various professionals who use UHF radios on a regaular basis.
As I pointed out in post #204 here, this is a completely invalid comparison due to the differences in modulation methods. The evidence is still coming in, but you can make a fairly strong case that a few milliwatts of GSM/TDMA is far more damaging to biological systems than 1) kilowatts of AM or FM, or 2)possibly megawatts of CDMA. Those are some pretty large spreads. This issue is not as simple or cut and dried as it appears, since wireless phones differ so much in their basic physics...
Much has been made in this election about the costs of prescription drugs. Almost nothing haas been said about the reason prescription drugs cost an order of magnitude more than the same drugs cost in other countries: the hideously expensive and complex FDA approval process. (FDA approvals now routinely cost *hundreds* of millions of dollars, and the agency is arguably faring far worse at "protecting" Americans from unsafe drugs.)
Since the FDA and its policies are the root cause of the high prescription drug prices that everyone seems to agree are a problem, what would you do to attack the root cause of the problem rather than simply throw money away by having the government (insted of the people) pay 100x too much for drugs?
Even those of us that are adamantly opposed to any government health system are still burdened with health care systems that are to a large degree, shaped and controlled by the federal government.
The vast majority of us pay hundreds of dollars every month to purchase a lot of coverage we niether want nor need, like routine doctors visits and every prescription we'll ever encounter.
Would you support regulations or the lack thereof that would promote the availability of catastophic healthcare coverage only, which would dramatically reduce the cost of health care to the end consumer?
This is bunk. First of all, there's much outright falsehood in your post.
If anything, atheism is now the official statre religion of the US, since the only legally acceptable religion in public has become no religion. It seems pretty childish to complain of discrimination against your revolt against reason when your form of disbelief is being enshrined as the only acceptable position.
Finally, your ignorance on the issues is showing, too: the most active and vociferous opponents of school vouchers are those intimately involved in the classical Christian school movement, as I am. The reason is simply summed up by Doug Wilson: He who takes the King's coin is the King's man. The one taking the money may not know this - the one giving it always does... It is in fact that we would be forced to adopt atheistic policies and practices that drives us to oppose vouchers, which are a bad idea no matter how you look at them. (A tax credit, on the other hand would serve the intended purpose well, as it would not allow the state to forcibly coerce schools, since the parents would control the money, as they should.
By the way: Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet.
e sident.2000/transcript.gore/
Oh really? For someone so obviously indoctrinated as to not recognize that Gore is an even more pathological liar than his boss, here's a link to an actual transcript of the CNN program where Gore claimed to have created the Internet: htt p://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/09/pr
I was following the development of the Internet fairly closely at the time, and I can tell you this is total bunk. Gore no more had a hand in creating hte Internet than he accompanied Witt to Texas to commiserate with the victims of hte Parker county fires. The man will simply say whatever he thinks people want to hear. This is not a good presidential trait. (But it does seem to be a Democratic one - even Lloyd Bentsen's snappy comeback to Dan Quayle in thier debate has been proven false: the Kennedy archives have no evidence the men ever even met...)
GORE LIES LIKE A RUG. PERIOD.
Absolutely. That's exactly what the "Adelaide study" did. I think by now we can be pretty sure heating is not the mechanism, but there does appear to be some mechanism that does indeed produce change. Even DNA changes have been observed in some laboratory tests. The exact mechanism for these and other changes may not be known for some time to come.
See post #207 for some links to sites that have more info on this. There is indeed a lot we don't know yet, but then hubris has always been a problem, hasn't it?