It's too late to attempt something like this, but micro controllers are very low cost (a few bucks each) and can drive LEDs right from the GPIOs. You can code in assembly or C and the sky's the limit as far as anything you want to do flashing LEDs. Main downside is you need a $20ish programmer to flash the microcontroller with your software. It's just fascinating to me to have an entire computer in a single DIP package that costs so little. I usually work with PIC microcontrollers.
It's ridiculous to count "plants". The number of people employed total is the key factor. A plant could employ 250 people, or 2,500.
There are certainly other factors involved besides healthcare as to why Toyota built plants in Canada. Tax breaks are a huge incentive, and I'm sure Canada is willing to offer much better breaks than the USA (which has its own auto industry to protect).
First off, New Horizons is travelling at 35,000 MPH, not kph. Second, those escape velocities would be at the surface of the body for unpowered bodies. Escape velocity decreases with distance from the body. It's possible to simply accelerate directly away from an object and never reach speeds anywhere close to escape velocity, until you are far enough away that you have simply exceeded (that now much lower) escape velocity threshold. So I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
I'm not talking about healthcare. I'm talking about EMR and other software involved in healthcare. By other countries do you mean like the UK's multibillion pound fiasco where they attempted to create a single centralized EMR system for the country? They started that 7 years ago and are basically giving up on it at this point.
I commented about insurance and liability a couple days ago when another autonomous vehicle story was posted. This answered my question:
a new dashboard display that his group has developed to help people understand what an autonomous car is doing and when they might want to take over
Well there you have it. As long as a human has the ability to take over, and it's a decision they have to make, then the liability goes from Google to the person sitting in the driver's seat. Subtle but clear as day. Google wants to transfer liability off of their system onto a person in the vehicle. I can see it in court now "Our dashboard clearly indicated to the driver 5 seconds before the accident that it could no longer maintain control of the vehicle given the circumstances involved and that the driver was to disengage the system and take over control."
After doing software development in the healthcare field for over a decade, I finally made the wise decision to never work in that industry again. Government is even worse, because the rules the software have to follow change on the whim of elections and the rug is constantly being pulled out from under you. Now this mess? Well it's healthcare taken to the bureaucratic power (h^b). Sounds like a good way to shave 10 years off your life in stress.
First of all, by "internet" they mean social networks like Facebook and Twitter and the interpersonal communication between people. Second, they have created a simulation, but it's not clear how it actually correlates to the real world. The key thing is they have the concept of "exhausting" sources, so once a person has communicated something, they won't receive or communicate that information again. Obviously that's not the case in the real world, because some people are more interested in certain pieces of information and will continue propagating them much longer than others, potentially seeding enough to compensate for the "exhaustion" of other average users.
Further, social networks all have a backlog where previous posts can be viewed (particularly true with FB), thus a person still "transmits" a given piece of information indefinitely as other people view their wall going back far in time. Thus it is always possible for a "dark corner" of the "internet" to always catch up by seeing a piece of information in that way instead of only real-time.
Self driving cars do not cause accidents, therefore insurance isn't necessary
That's ridiculous. Things will happen to autonomous vehicles that will result in deaths and destruction of property, even if 100% of vehicles are autonomous. Insurance will not go away because the stakes are too high both with liability and the cost of the hardware involved.
This topic has been discussed here several times now, but one thing I haven't seen brought up is insurance. If my vehicle is driving itself and causes an accident, then what driver is to blame? The person sitting behind the wheel? Why would my insurance company want to pay for an accident caused by a piece of software when they can go after the company that produced the software? Or what if they will only insure Ford cars and not Chrysler because statistics show that one auto-driving system performs better than the other? If my car's autonomous system just flat out runs over a little girl playing in the street and kills her, could I be charged with manslaughter because I was behind the wheel reading the newspaper?
Think back a few years to the Toyota "auto acceleration" issue, and the lawsuits and government testing, etc, etc that was going on over that one issue. And that was possible hiccup in a single system that merely relayed user input to the engine. It wasn't even remotely as complex as a vehicle actually driving itself.
There's going to be a whole lot to figure out in the legal, insurance and liability areas that makes the technical challenge and development look like child's play.
I think it's all about the form factor, and Google has gotten it wrong with Google Glass. IMO, the best possible form factor for wearable computing is that of a wrist watch. Even in that regard, companies like Samsung have still gotten it wrong, and for the exact opposite reason that Google has gone wrong.
Glasses are essentially a display device. They should be an I/O type peripheral, but Google made them the heart of the system. They can't be anything but glasses, on your face, obvious to everyone, with a camera sitting there pointing at everyone, drawing suspicion about what is being recorded or what you might be seeing, etc. They should not be the core of the system, but a peripheral to be used only when needed for those specific functions.
Now take Samsung's watch. It SHOULD be the core of the system. It should have your CPU, storage, networking, etc, because it is a non-invasive device that billions of people are already used to wearing all day every day. It is the optimum form factor for having with you all the time everywhere you go (even while swimming, etc). But instead they made it a mere peripheral for their phones / tablets.
The watch should be the core of the system. You can do simple tasks with its small display, it can vibrate in different places (on the bottom of the band, in the watch, etc) in different patterns that could communicate a variety of things without any annoying sound effects (since it's on the wrist the vibration could be very light, unlike a cell phone which has to be felt through clothing, etc). Then if you need a bigger display, you grab a tablet IO device (a mere wireless peripheral for IO for your watch), or a device like Google Glass, or you simply output media from your watch to the nearest TV, etc.
Anyway, IMO I think everyone is getting it totally backwards when it comes to wearable computing devices.
I was also going to point out the BioLite stove (direct link to the product on their site). I see a couple advantages of the BioLite already. It doesn't consume / require water, and can operate off of a wide variety of fuels (little sticks and leaves and stuff) since the combustion takes place in its own combustion chamber. The Biolite appears to operate off a smaller heat source (and thus less fuel) because of the efficiency of burning the fuel in a controlled manner, instead of merely sticking it over flame you have to produce and manage manually in some way.
Who the heck posted this here? An employee of the Wall Street Journal? Get this crap off here or at least provide links you don't have to pay to access. There's only a hundred or so other news sites carrying the same story. Ridiculous.
Yeah. The CGI in LOTR totally sucked. I kept thinking how much better Gollum would have looked as an actual puppet. Actually I didn't think that at all.
I can think of two really simple solutions right off the top of my head. Pour lots of bleach in the water, or place bright full-spectrum lights around the lake to shine all night. Duh!
It will glorify and make "celebrities" of those terrorists that are martyring themselves for their religion. That will have a very strong influence on the youth already brainwashed by Islam, and prompt them to follow in their footsteps. The purpose is not to try and convert people to Islam, but to encourage and mobilize the existing followers of the religion. I think it would succeed in that (specifically talking about live video, etc).
Yet it can still be "affordable" because these are designed to achieve this efficiency at 297 suns' worth of energy. Thus you have 297 cheap 1 m^2 mirrors reflecting sunlight at just a single 1 m^2 solar panel. So if the panel costs less than 297 times the cost of a normal solar panel designed to capture a single sun's worth of energy, it is actually cheaper (not counting cost of mirrors or active hardware to aim the mirrors as the sun moves across the sky, but you get the idea).
One is a crime against "the innocent" (I know, I know - think about the children!), while the other is unauthorized use of the commercial properties of specific businesses. It is reasonable to expect that the more disseminated and prolific child pornography is, the more children would be abused in the creation of more images and video. Thus by directly fighting child pornography, Google is protecting children. On the other hand, when it comes to pirated material, the only supposed (and I say "supposed" because numerous studies have shown this isn't the case) damage is to a corporation's profit margin.
To me, it comes down to expecting Google to do the work of policing copyrighted material, which should be the responsibility of the copyright holders, not some middle-man search entity.
Once you lose your credibility you can never get it back.
I disagree. History will look back on this period as a mere blip in the overall "goodness" of the USA. What we're seeing right now is just a remaining ripple from the splash that was 9/11. Half a century from now (at most) the ripple will be gone. There have been far worse things that have taken place in the USA. Slavery, rounding up the Japanese when WW2 started, etc. These things were overcome, although those ripples lasted decades (at least), but they are now nearly faded away. What we're seeing also is a government trying to balance itself with a relatively newly found power, which is the ability to monitor so many things because of the way information is now transmitted and the technology that now exists. It will balance it out and find the reasonable, acceptable levels.
The mouse is a hardware interface to a virtual construct within the GUI - the mouse pointer. With the exception of the middle-button "paste" functionality, all the other controls are generic interactions into the virtual environment ("touch" the object under the pointer, get extended options for the object under the pointer, scroll the area under the pointer, etc). Binding such an abstract and specific editing command such as "paste" to the mouse is not a good practice in the first place. It should be optional or application specific and not defined as paste by default in the WM in general.
Assume it were possible to slingshot our sun out of the galaxy into intergalactic space. Would we be better off there, or does the Milky Way offer some sort of protection against whatever's out there (radiation, etc)?
I think autonomous cars will be safer in general because they can avoid accidents caused by fatigue and lack of concentration during long trips or heavy traffic. However, I think that as long as autonomous cars are mixed in with other cars operated by human drivers, there will be the potential for worse accidents of the more extreme kind. For example, an oncoming car suddenly swerving into your lane head-on. I would assume the AI would apply maximum brakes and that's it. A human (especially an experienced driver) could take more extreme action, like going off the side of the road to avoid a head-on collision. That is an option I doubt would be built into an AI system (intentionally wrecking the vehicle to prevent a more extreme accident - what if the AI incorrectly identified a scenario that didn't actually exist and decided to drive off the side of the road?)
If autonomous cars do prove to be as successful and safe as they could potentially be, there will be a hard push to force humans out of the driver's seat. It would start by building or designating high speed roadways that only allow autonomous vehicles. It will continue spreading from there.
Slashdot Mirror
It's too late to attempt something like this, but micro controllers are very low cost (a few bucks each) and can drive LEDs right from the GPIOs. You can code in assembly or C and the sky's the limit as far as anything you want to do flashing LEDs. Main downside is you need a $20ish programmer to flash the microcontroller with your software. It's just fascinating to me to have an entire computer in a single DIP package that costs so little. I usually work with PIC microcontrollers.
Sheesh. How many interns did it take to come up with that acronym?
It's ridiculous to count "plants". The number of people employed total is the key factor. A plant could employ 250 people, or 2,500.
There are certainly other factors involved besides healthcare as to why Toyota built plants in Canada. Tax breaks are a huge incentive, and I'm sure Canada is willing to offer much better breaks than the USA (which has its own auto industry to protect).
First off, New Horizons is travelling at 35,000 MPH, not kph. Second, those escape velocities would be at the surface of the body for unpowered bodies. Escape velocity decreases with distance from the body. It's possible to simply accelerate directly away from an object and never reach speeds anywhere close to escape velocity, until you are far enough away that you have simply exceeded (that now much lower) escape velocity threshold. So I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
I'm not talking about healthcare. I'm talking about EMR and other software involved in healthcare. By other countries do you mean like the UK's multibillion pound fiasco where they attempted to create a single centralized EMR system for the country? They started that 7 years ago and are basically giving up on it at this point.
I commented about insurance and liability a couple days ago when another autonomous vehicle story was posted. This answered my question:
a new dashboard display that his group has developed to help people understand what an autonomous car is doing and when they might want to take over
Well there you have it. As long as a human has the ability to take over, and it's a decision they have to make, then the liability goes from Google to the person sitting in the driver's seat. Subtle but clear as day. Google wants to transfer liability off of their system onto a person in the vehicle. I can see it in court now "Our dashboard clearly indicated to the driver 5 seconds before the accident that it could no longer maintain control of the vehicle given the circumstances involved and that the driver was to disengage the system and take over control."
After doing software development in the healthcare field for over a decade, I finally made the wise decision to never work in that industry again. Government is even worse, because the rules the software have to follow change on the whim of elections and the rug is constantly being pulled out from under you. Now this mess? Well it's healthcare taken to the bureaucratic power (h^b). Sounds like a good way to shave 10 years off your life in stress.
First of all, by "internet" they mean social networks like Facebook and Twitter and the interpersonal communication between people. Second, they have created a simulation, but it's not clear how it actually correlates to the real world. The key thing is they have the concept of "exhausting" sources, so once a person has communicated something, they won't receive or communicate that information again. Obviously that's not the case in the real world, because some people are more interested in certain pieces of information and will continue propagating them much longer than others, potentially seeding enough to compensate for the "exhaustion" of other average users.
Further, social networks all have a backlog where previous posts can be viewed (particularly true with FB), thus a person still "transmits" a given piece of information indefinitely as other people view their wall going back far in time. Thus it is always possible for a "dark corner" of the "internet" to always catch up by seeing a piece of information in that way instead of only real-time.
Self driving cars do not cause accidents, therefore insurance isn't necessary
That's ridiculous. Things will happen to autonomous vehicles that will result in deaths and destruction of property, even if 100% of vehicles are autonomous. Insurance will not go away because the stakes are too high both with liability and the cost of the hardware involved.
This topic has been discussed here several times now, but one thing I haven't seen brought up is insurance. If my vehicle is driving itself and causes an accident, then what driver is to blame? The person sitting behind the wheel? Why would my insurance company want to pay for an accident caused by a piece of software when they can go after the company that produced the software? Or what if they will only insure Ford cars and not Chrysler because statistics show that one auto-driving system performs better than the other? If my car's autonomous system just flat out runs over a little girl playing in the street and kills her, could I be charged with manslaughter because I was behind the wheel reading the newspaper?
Think back a few years to the Toyota "auto acceleration" issue, and the lawsuits and government testing, etc, etc that was going on over that one issue. And that was possible hiccup in a single system that merely relayed user input to the engine. It wasn't even remotely as complex as a vehicle actually driving itself.
There's going to be a whole lot to figure out in the legal, insurance and liability areas that makes the technical challenge and development look like child's play.
I think it's all about the form factor, and Google has gotten it wrong with Google Glass. IMO, the best possible form factor for wearable computing is that of a wrist watch. Even in that regard, companies like Samsung have still gotten it wrong, and for the exact opposite reason that Google has gone wrong.
Glasses are essentially a display device. They should be an I/O type peripheral, but Google made them the heart of the system. They can't be anything but glasses, on your face, obvious to everyone, with a camera sitting there pointing at everyone, drawing suspicion about what is being recorded or what you might be seeing, etc. They should not be the core of the system, but a peripheral to be used only when needed for those specific functions.
Now take Samsung's watch. It SHOULD be the core of the system. It should have your CPU, storage, networking, etc, because it is a non-invasive device that billions of people are already used to wearing all day every day. It is the optimum form factor for having with you all the time everywhere you go (even while swimming, etc). But instead they made it a mere peripheral for their phones / tablets.
The watch should be the core of the system. You can do simple tasks with its small display, it can vibrate in different places (on the bottom of the band, in the watch, etc) in different patterns that could communicate a variety of things without any annoying sound effects (since it's on the wrist the vibration could be very light, unlike a cell phone which has to be felt through clothing, etc). Then if you need a bigger display, you grab a tablet IO device (a mere wireless peripheral for IO for your watch), or a device like Google Glass, or you simply output media from your watch to the nearest TV, etc.
Anyway, IMO I think everyone is getting it totally backwards when it comes to wearable computing devices.
.... ..
I was also going to point out the BioLite stove (direct link to the product on their site). I see a couple advantages of the BioLite already. It doesn't consume / require water, and can operate off of a wide variety of fuels (little sticks and leaves and stuff) since the combustion takes place in its own combustion chamber. The Biolite appears to operate off a smaller heat source (and thus less fuel) because of the efficiency of burning the fuel in a controlled manner, instead of merely sticking it over flame you have to produce and manage manually in some way.
Who the heck posted this here? An employee of the Wall Street Journal? Get this crap off here or at least provide links you don't have to pay to access. There's only a hundred or so other news sites carrying the same story. Ridiculous.
Yeah. The CGI in LOTR totally sucked. I kept thinking how much better Gollum would have looked as an actual puppet. Actually I didn't think that at all.
Considering Firefly came a quarter of a century after Star Wars, your question should be "Firefly is Star Wars?"
I can think of two really simple solutions right off the top of my head. Pour lots of bleach in the water, or place bright full-spectrum lights around the lake to shine all night. Duh!
It will glorify and make "celebrities" of those terrorists that are martyring themselves for their religion. That will have a very strong influence on the youth already brainwashed by Islam, and prompt them to follow in their footsteps. The purpose is not to try and convert people to Islam, but to encourage and mobilize the existing followers of the religion. I think it would succeed in that (specifically talking about live video, etc).
Yet it can still be "affordable" because these are designed to achieve this efficiency at 297 suns' worth of energy. Thus you have 297 cheap 1 m^2 mirrors reflecting sunlight at just a single 1 m^2 solar panel. So if the panel costs less than 297 times the cost of a normal solar panel designed to capture a single sun's worth of energy, it is actually cheaper (not counting cost of mirrors or active hardware to aim the mirrors as the sun moves across the sky, but you get the idea).
One is a crime against "the innocent" (I know, I know - think about the children!), while the other is unauthorized use of the commercial properties of specific businesses. It is reasonable to expect that the more disseminated and prolific child pornography is, the more children would be abused in the creation of more images and video. Thus by directly fighting child pornography, Google is protecting children. On the other hand, when it comes to pirated material, the only supposed (and I say "supposed" because numerous studies have shown this isn't the case) damage is to a corporation's profit margin.
To me, it comes down to expecting Google to do the work of policing copyrighted material, which should be the responsibility of the copyright holders, not some middle-man search entity.
Once you lose your credibility you can never get it back.
I disagree. History will look back on this period as a mere blip in the overall "goodness" of the USA. What we're seeing right now is just a remaining ripple from the splash that was 9/11. Half a century from now (at most) the ripple will be gone. There have been far worse things that have taken place in the USA. Slavery, rounding up the Japanese when WW2 started, etc. These things were overcome, although those ripples lasted decades (at least), but they are now nearly faded away. What we're seeing also is a government trying to balance itself with a relatively newly found power, which is the ability to monitor so many things because of the way information is now transmitted and the technology that now exists. It will balance it out and find the reasonable, acceptable levels.
The mouse is a hardware interface to a virtual construct within the GUI - the mouse pointer. With the exception of the middle-button "paste" functionality, all the other controls are generic interactions into the virtual environment ("touch" the object under the pointer, get extended options for the object under the pointer, scroll the area under the pointer, etc). Binding such an abstract and specific editing command such as "paste" to the mouse is not a good practice in the first place. It should be optional or application specific and not defined as paste by default in the WM in general.
Assume it were possible to slingshot our sun out of the galaxy into intergalactic space. Would we be better off there, or does the Milky Way offer some sort of protection against whatever's out there (radiation, etc)?
Perhaps more, depending on how many magic mushrooms he enjoyed.
I think autonomous cars will be safer in general because they can avoid accidents caused by fatigue and lack of concentration during long trips or heavy traffic. However, I think that as long as autonomous cars are mixed in with other cars operated by human drivers, there will be the potential for worse accidents of the more extreme kind. For example, an oncoming car suddenly swerving into your lane head-on. I would assume the AI would apply maximum brakes and that's it. A human (especially an experienced driver) could take more extreme action, like going off the side of the road to avoid a head-on collision. That is an option I doubt would be built into an AI system (intentionally wrecking the vehicle to prevent a more extreme accident - what if the AI incorrectly identified a scenario that didn't actually exist and decided to drive off the side of the road?)
If autonomous cars do prove to be as successful and safe as they could potentially be, there will be a hard push to force humans out of the driver's seat. It would start by building or designating high speed roadways that only allow autonomous vehicles. It will continue spreading from there.