I'm picturing your parent poster as some Roman nerd yelling at everybody that they shouldn't be celebrating the onset of Year 10 since Jesus Christ was born only nine years ago.
And I'm picturing an older, wiser Roman tapping him on the shoulder and pointing out that:
1) They're not using the birth of Jesus as the basis of their time system yet.
2) When the A.D. system is implemented, it will be miscalculated and land the birth of Jesus in 4 A.D.
3) Jesus wasn't born at midnight on January 1st. And the winter solstice isn't at that time either. So it's clear that the moment chosen to increment the year counter is arbitrary anyway.
4) If we use your definition of "decade", then what are we going to call the decade that includes the year 1985 A.D.? "I Love The 80's Including 1990 But Not 1980"?
It's one thing to cross one kind of corn with another. It's another thing to stick tomato genes into corn. That could be an unfortunate surprise to somebody with tomato allergies who eats some special popcorn. And it's quite a bit scarier to start sticking insect genes into plants.
When two organisms have to breed to produce a hybrid, at least you have some idea what to expect. But even that has unintended negative consequences, like Africanized bees. If you go tossing far flung genes, or even fully synthetic genes, into a food plant and try to keep calling it "corn" then you're just asking for trouble.
If foods are designed and fabricated like pharmaceuticals, then they should be tested like pharmaceuticals before being sold for public consumption.
Now, you have a whole plane load of security experts.
Now, you have a whole plane load of murder experts. A recent event demonstrates that a trained murderer is good at his specialty, even when the intended victims are trained murderers themselves. In the quest for safety and security, a good offense is not the best defense.
This doesn't sound like a hijacking. This sounds like a (failed) bombing. If it went as planned, the moment the terrorist lit the bomb there'd be boom and mid-air disintegration instead of smoke and flame. Not a lot of time for other passengers to overpower and prevent the terrorist from carrying out his plan.
No, that is like saying that Taco Bell is not a toy company. Yes, Taco Bell has occasionally offered toys in their restaurants. And for some toy collectors that may be their main reason for visiting a Taco Bell. But Taco Bell sees their main business as selling tacos and soda. And Taco Bell has never been the primary destination for finding toys.
I remember the early years of the Web and submitting my own sites to be listed in Yahoo's catalog. Back then, searching by keyword was a futile endeavor. The only ways to find something were browsing through a catalog of sites or surfing from site to site. Google was revolutionary in making search-by-keyword the best way to find anything on the Web.
Yahoo is the start page on my home computer because it gives easy access to news, sports, and movie times. Any search is conducted through my browser search box which is tuned to Google.
What part of your intestines is malfunctioning? A person can lead a nearly normal life without a colon (large intestines). They just have to go to the bathroom in a special way. But that's better than being tethered to a bathroom by a tantrum-throwing colon. I suspect a person can also lose a big chunk of small intestine before they're any worse than having that chunk misbehaving.
I went for six months without using my colon after surgery for colon cancer. After healing it was reconnected minus eighteen inches of colon and a foot or two of small intestine (about a meter total). My digestive function is pretty normal now and I don't have any of the pain, bleeding, and unpredictable bowel movements that the tumors caused.
So I'd be hopeful that the surgery to remove part of your intestines could lead to a big improvement in quality of life. As much as I dislike the plumbing modifications that I've had to make, it's vastly better than suffering with malfunctioning plumbing.
The team estimates that every cigarette smoked results in 15 mutations.
I follow that link to find the article saying:
The team estimates that every 15 cigarettes smoked results in a DNA mutation.
And now there's a notice at the bottom:
CORRECTED: This article previously stated that each cigarette smoked could result in an estimated 15 DNA mutations. In fact, the typical smoker would acquire one mutation for every 15 cigarettes smoked.
If you fire a rifle at a running car, it might survive several shots and still keep running. Some of the shots go through the windows, some through the doors, and some just bounce off the pillars. But some shots could poke holes in the body and leave underlying parts exposed. Then further shots might puncture the gas tank or the radiator. A little less likely, shots might break the fuel pump or electric distributor. And just maybe a shot will interrupt the ignition circuit.
Even though any particular car's damage will be unique, the damage that made cars stop running will be common. Most will involve the gas tank or radiator. And a few will involve smaller parts.
A study like this is looking for those major parts which are likely to be damaged in cancer cells. It might also reveal common patterns of damage which disabled protective mechanisms and left those key part vulnerable. Then you might have an idea of how to detect critical damage, how to repair subcritical damage, how to armor critical areas, and how to completely disable malfunctioning cells.
Ooh, that explains why some commercials jump in 0.5 seconds before what seems like the intended break point. I always thought it was just sloppy editing or some uncertainty of timing when inserting local ads into national broadcasts. But maybe some broadcasters do that to stick in a commercial break without a blank frame and get more eyeballs on the ads.
I had a Magnavox with Smart Sound for many years. It didn't really work. It might have helped make the whispers louder, but the commercials still sounded much louder than the programs on channels that muck around that way.
There was an article on Slashdot many years ago that explained why Smart Sound couldn't work and revealing an improved technology. The problem is that according to older definitions of "volume" the program and commercials were already the same. But according to human perception the commercials were much louder. Smart Sound wasn't smart enough make the distinction. But some new algorithm could.
I understand your explanation, but I don't buy that it explains the worst offenders. There are cable channels which seem to broadcast the entire show with its soundtrack turned down so that 1.0X comes out as 0.6X. And since most of the soundtrack is supposed to be at 0.5X, it comes out at 0.3X and I have to turn my TV up a few extra notches to hear the regular dialogue.
Then a commercial comes on THAT'S ALL AT 1.0X and even the quietest part of the commercial is louder than the loudest part of the program. I can't watch those channels anymore. Comedy Central did that several years ago and I complained to them, but they've toned down the effect since then. At the time, they explained that it was just advertisements that were inserted by local cable operators which were louder than the programming. But that was bull.
So I fully support a bill to legislate non-bastard behavior by businesses operating in use of public airwaves and interstate commerce. I just hope the jurisdiction includes those worst offenders.
Vacuum is a pretty good thermal insulator. And running electricity through detectors is a pretty good way to heat them up. Without many cold molecules around to hit those sensors they'll have a hard time dissipating that heat.
There's still a problem of terminology. The programmer knew that there could be errors that his code wouldn't explain to the user. He even put a default message box in there to notify the user.
So it becomes a philosophical question: If you know that something can happen that you didn't plan for, is it really unexpected?
Maybe the programmer should have given unhandled errors a fancy name. Then users would see the error and contact a system administrator or just chalk it up to their own ignorance and try something else. Maybe a name like: GURU MEDITATION ERROR.
Driving while distracted is not a victimless crime. There wouldn't be so much support for penalizing phoning and texting while driving if we weren't all experiencing idiotic driving by cell phone wielding seat warmers every day. Ninety percent of the time when I see another vehicle do something dumb - like running a red light, plowing through a pedestrian crosswalk when all the other traffic has stopped for somebody to cross, changing lanes without looking, or sitting at a green light - I then see that the zombie in the driver seat has a cell phone in their hand. It's just a matter of time before those dangerous acts become fatal acts.
Should driving drunk not be a crime until you kill somebody? Should firing a rifle randomly at a park not be a crime until you kill somebody?
I'm willing to wager that at least 50% of accidents these days involve somebody under the influence of a cell phone. My 45-minute commute frequently gets pushed over an hour by daily accidents on busy roads. What's the cost of the thousands of people like me who are stuck in traffic for an extra 30 minutes?
I'd like a hood-mounted cell phone jammer on my car. But I fear it would just confuse the zombies more if they lost contact with their super important urgent essential conversation partner.
Indeed. And what an odd way to draw a chart, omitting a key to what counts as "80 light years". Does it count stars 80.1 light years away? 80.5? 82? Probably (79.5,80.5], but I've never seen "at" have an uncertainty of three trillion miles.
The source for that chart says there are 2539 stars within 80 light years (24.53 parsecs).
Do we know that he was banned? Might he not have just gotten fed up and walked away himself? As I remember, TopCod3r was a sincere and gifted troll. He wrote comments that were funny and insightful to anybody with two functioning brain cells. Yet half the comments that followed were TDWTFers arguing about how misguided he was.
What happens if you copy some text with ligatures and paste it into a program that doesn't expect them? What happens if you search for "finally" in a document where "fi" was replaced with a ligature?
An invention that can easily be examined and cloned doesn't need patent protection.
Neither reality nor logic support that statement. Lots of patented machines seem obvious in retrospect. The hard part isn't making it work once you see the design. The hard part is developing a design that solves an unsolved problem. These designs need protection because they take a lot of time, money, and ingenuity to develop and many of them would never be developed, much less published, if there weren't an incentive like a temporary monopoly.
A machine that can easily be cloned without examining somebody else's invention is obvious and ineligible for patent protection. But a machine that a person skilled in the art can't think of when faced with the same problem is not obvious and society will reward somebody for inventing a solution and making it obvious to the rest of us.
The hammer/executable is neither patented nor copyrighted. But making a copy of the hammer/executable would be patent infringement. So the effect would be the same (you can't copy this unless I say so) except the duration of protection would be about 20 years instead of 70+ years.
That sounds reasonable. The parts of the executable that are considered "machine" rather than "expression" should be copyable verbatim after the patent expires.
We will know we're reaching the limits of computer technology when using a computer as a space heater no longer seems like a clever idea. A computer should only use as much energy as it takes to flip the output bits plus a little extra to make it happen faster than the age of the universe.
Wikipedia says: "When used for heating a building on a mild day, a typical air-source heat pump has a COP of 3 - 4, whereas a typical electric resistance heater has a COP of 1.0."
So, yes, contrary to popular belief, resistive heating is a terrible waste. Burning the coal in a potbelly stove would be a little better then burning it in a power plant to generate electricity to transmit (with losses) over power lines to heat a wire near your ceiling. But using it to drive a refrigeration cycle would be a far better use of the energy.
I am opposed to copyrights that last a century. I am opposed to patents on natural phenomena or obvious combinations of existing technology. I am opposed to laws that abolish fair use of copyrighted material.
But I am very much in favor of intellectual property laws that promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
So you're saying that a cat queues up its activities for the hour of wakefulness by planning during its hours of sleep? Kind of like the Mars rovers get commands issued from Earth, move a little, and then wait around for another batch? And therefore cats can't respond to any new stimuli during their wakeful hour until they have another sleep cycle to process the new information? Fascinating.
It's nonlinear for small numbers of neurons since you need to count connections to second and third nearest neighbors as well as first nearest neighbors. But once you get past the length scale of the longest connection, it scales linearly from there.
It's like the road system. A city with a bunch of intersections will have more road segments between the intersections than there are intersections themselves. But a second city won't build roads from each of its intersections back to each intersection in the first city. If you want to get from one to the other, you'll traverse some local intersections and then choose one of the roads spanning the rural area between. So the cost to repave the roads scales linearly with the area of the nation.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm picturing your parent poster as some Roman nerd yelling at everybody that they shouldn't be celebrating the onset of Year 10 since Jesus Christ was born only nine years ago.
And I'm picturing an older, wiser Roman tapping him on the shoulder and pointing out that:
1) They're not using the birth of Jesus as the basis of their time system yet.
2) When the A.D. system is implemented, it will be miscalculated and land the birth of Jesus in 4 A.D.
3) Jesus wasn't born at midnight on January 1st. And the winter solstice isn't at that time either. So it's clear that the moment chosen to increment the year counter is arbitrary anyway.
4) If we use your definition of "decade", then what are we going to call the decade that includes the year 1985 A.D.? "I Love The 80's Including 1990 But Not 1980"?
It's one thing to cross one kind of corn with another. It's another thing to stick tomato genes into corn. That could be an unfortunate surprise to somebody with tomato allergies who eats some special popcorn. And it's quite a bit scarier to start sticking insect genes into plants.
When two organisms have to breed to produce a hybrid, at least you have some idea what to expect. But even that has unintended negative consequences, like Africanized bees. If you go tossing far flung genes, or even fully synthetic genes, into a food plant and try to keep calling it "corn" then you're just asking for trouble.
If foods are designed and fabricated like pharmaceuticals, then they should be tested like pharmaceuticals before being sold for public consumption.
Now, you have a whole plane load of murder experts. A recent event demonstrates that a trained murderer is good at his specialty, even when the intended victims are trained murderers themselves. In the quest for safety and security, a good offense is not the best defense.
This doesn't sound like a hijacking. This sounds like a (failed) bombing. If it went as planned, the moment the terrorist lit the bomb there'd be boom and mid-air disintegration instead of smoke and flame. Not a lot of time for other passengers to overpower and prevent the terrorist from carrying out his plan.
No, that is like saying that Taco Bell is not a toy company. Yes, Taco Bell has occasionally offered toys in their restaurants. And for some toy collectors that may be their main reason for visiting a Taco Bell. But Taco Bell sees their main business as selling tacos and soda. And Taco Bell has never been the primary destination for finding toys.
I remember the early years of the Web and submitting my own sites to be listed in Yahoo's catalog. Back then, searching by keyword was a futile endeavor. The only ways to find something were browsing through a catalog of sites or surfing from site to site. Google was revolutionary in making search-by-keyword the best way to find anything on the Web.
Yahoo is the start page on my home computer because it gives easy access to news, sports, and movie times. Any search is conducted through my browser search box which is tuned to Google.
What part of your intestines is malfunctioning? A person can lead a nearly normal life without a colon (large intestines). They just have to go to the bathroom in a special way. But that's better than being tethered to a bathroom by a tantrum-throwing colon. I suspect a person can also lose a big chunk of small intestine before they're any worse than having that chunk misbehaving.
I went for six months without using my colon after surgery for colon cancer. After healing it was reconnected minus eighteen inches of colon and a foot or two of small intestine (about a meter total). My digestive function is pretty normal now and I don't have any of the pain, bleeding, and unpredictable bowel movements that the tumors caused.
So I'd be hopeful that the surgery to remove part of your intestines could lead to a big improvement in quality of life. As much as I dislike the plumbing modifications that I've had to make, it's vastly better than suffering with malfunctioning plumbing.
You quote the article as saying:
I follow that link to find the article saying:
And now there's a notice at the bottom:
Nature got it wrong and got corrected.
If you fire a rifle at a running car, it might survive several shots and still keep running. Some of the shots go through the windows, some through the doors, and some just bounce off the pillars. But some shots could poke holes in the body and leave underlying parts exposed. Then further shots might puncture the gas tank or the radiator. A little less likely, shots might break the fuel pump or electric distributor. And just maybe a shot will interrupt the ignition circuit.
Even though any particular car's damage will be unique, the damage that made cars stop running will be common. Most will involve the gas tank or radiator. And a few will involve smaller parts.
A study like this is looking for those major parts which are likely to be damaged in cancer cells. It might also reveal common patterns of damage which disabled protective mechanisms and left those key part vulnerable. Then you might have an idea of how to detect critical damage, how to repair subcritical damage, how to armor critical areas, and how to completely disable malfunctioning cells.
Here's my own Gravatar hash:
b835b33911b93c136d8e61cbbbe6736d
Who will be the first to crack it?
Ooh, that explains why some commercials jump in 0.5 seconds before what seems like the intended break point. I always thought it was just sloppy editing or some uncertainty of timing when inserting local ads into national broadcasts. But maybe some broadcasters do that to stick in a commercial break without a blank frame and get more eyeballs on the ads.
I had a Magnavox with Smart Sound for many years. It didn't really work. It might have helped make the whispers louder, but the commercials still sounded much louder than the programs on channels that muck around that way.
There was an article on Slashdot many years ago that explained why Smart Sound couldn't work and revealing an improved technology. The problem is that according to older definitions of "volume" the program and commercials were already the same. But according to human perception the commercials were much louder. Smart Sound wasn't smart enough make the distinction. But some new algorithm could.
I understand your explanation, but I don't buy that it explains the worst offenders. There are cable channels which seem to broadcast the entire show with its soundtrack turned down so that 1.0X comes out as 0.6X. And since most of the soundtrack is supposed to be at 0.5X, it comes out at 0.3X and I have to turn my TV up a few extra notches to hear the regular dialogue.
Then a commercial comes on THAT'S ALL AT 1.0X and even the quietest part of the commercial is louder than the loudest part of the program. I can't watch those channels anymore. Comedy Central did that several years ago and I complained to them, but they've toned down the effect since then. At the time, they explained that it was just advertisements that were inserted by local cable operators which were louder than the programming. But that was bull.
So I fully support a bill to legislate non-bastard behavior by businesses operating in use of public airwaves and interstate commerce. I just hope the jurisdiction includes those worst offenders.
Vacuum is a pretty good thermal insulator. And running electricity through detectors is a pretty good way to heat them up. Without many cold molecules around to hit those sensors they'll have a hard time dissipating that heat.
So, no.
There's still a problem of terminology. The programmer knew that there could be errors that his code wouldn't explain to the user. He even put a default message box in there to notify the user.
So it becomes a philosophical question: If you know that something can happen that you didn't plan for, is it really unexpected?
Maybe the programmer should have given unhandled errors a fancy name. Then users would see the error and contact a system administrator or just chalk it up to their own ignorance and try something else. Maybe a name like: GURU MEDITATION ERROR.
Driving while distracted is not a victimless crime. There wouldn't be so much support for penalizing phoning and texting while driving if we weren't all experiencing idiotic driving by cell phone wielding seat warmers every day. Ninety percent of the time when I see another vehicle do something dumb - like running a red light, plowing through a pedestrian crosswalk when all the other traffic has stopped for somebody to cross, changing lanes without looking, or sitting at a green light - I then see that the zombie in the driver seat has a cell phone in their hand. It's just a matter of time before those dangerous acts become fatal acts.
Should driving drunk not be a crime until you kill somebody? Should firing a rifle randomly at a park not be a crime until you kill somebody?
I'm willing to wager that at least 50% of accidents these days involve somebody under the influence of a cell phone. My 45-minute commute frequently gets pushed over an hour by daily accidents on busy roads. What's the cost of the thousands of people like me who are stuck in traffic for an extra 30 minutes?
I'd like a hood-mounted cell phone jammer on my car. But I fear it would just confuse the zombies more if they lost contact with their super important urgent essential conversation partner.
Indeed. And what an odd way to draw a chart, omitting a key to what counts as "80 light years". Does it count stars 80.1 light years away? 80.5? 82? Probably (79.5,80.5], but I've never seen "at" have an uncertainty of three trillion miles.
The source for that chart says there are 2539 stars within 80 light years (24.53 parsecs).
Do we know that he was banned? Might he not have just gotten fed up and walked away himself? As I remember, TopCod3r was a sincere and gifted troll. He wrote comments that were funny and insightful to anybody with two functioning brain cells. Yet half the comments that followed were TDWTFers arguing about how misguided he was.
What happens if you copy some text with ligatures and paste it into a program that doesn't expect them? What happens if you search for "finally" in a document where "fi" was replaced with a ligature?
Neither reality nor logic support that statement. Lots of patented machines seem obvious in retrospect. The hard part isn't making it work once you see the design. The hard part is developing a design that solves an unsolved problem. These designs need protection because they take a lot of time, money, and ingenuity to develop and many of them would never be developed, much less published, if there weren't an incentive like a temporary monopoly.
A machine that can easily be cloned without examining somebody else's invention is obvious and ineligible for patent protection. But a machine that a person skilled in the art can't think of when faced with the same problem is not obvious and society will reward somebody for inventing a solution and making it obvious to the rest of us.
The hammer/executable is neither patented nor copyrighted. But making a copy of the hammer/executable would be patent infringement. So the effect would be the same (you can't copy this unless I say so) except the duration of protection would be about 20 years instead of 70+ years.
That sounds reasonable. The parts of the executable that are considered "machine" rather than "expression" should be copyable verbatim after the patent expires.
We will know we're reaching the limits of computer technology when using a computer as a space heater no longer seems like a clever idea. A computer should only use as much energy as it takes to flip the output bits plus a little extra to make it happen faster than the age of the universe.
Wikipedia says: "When used for heating a building on a mild day, a typical air-source heat pump has a COP of 3 - 4, whereas a typical electric resistance heater has a COP of 1.0."
So, yes, contrary to popular belief, resistive heating is a terrible waste. Burning the coal in a potbelly stove would be a little better then burning it in a power plant to generate electricity to transmit (with losses) over power lines to heat a wire near your ceiling. But using it to drive a refrigeration cycle would be a far better use of the energy.
I am opposed to copyrights that last a century. I am opposed to patents on natural phenomena or obvious combinations of existing technology. I am opposed to laws that abolish fair use of copyrighted material.
But I am very much in favor of intellectual property laws that promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
So you're saying that a cat queues up its activities for the hour of wakefulness by planning during its hours of sleep? Kind of like the Mars rovers get commands issued from Earth, move a little, and then wait around for another batch? And therefore cats can't respond to any new stimuli during their wakeful hour until they have another sleep cycle to process the new information? Fascinating.
It's nonlinear for small numbers of neurons since you need to count connections to second and third nearest neighbors as well as first nearest neighbors. But once you get past the length scale of the longest connection, it scales linearly from there.
It's like the road system. A city with a bunch of intersections will have more road segments between the intersections than there are intersections themselves. But a second city won't build roads from each of its intersections back to each intersection in the first city. If you want to get from one to the other, you'll traverse some local intersections and then choose one of the roads spanning the rural area between. So the cost to repave the roads scales linearly with the area of the nation.