You're right. *sigh* Back to reading comprehension 101 for me. In any case I suspect that the posture aspect (feasible at work) has more to do with reduced back pain than the reclining (not feasible at work), but the research has compounded the study of posture and back support in such a way that no really useful conclusion can be drawn about either aspect separately. Oh well...maybe next time.
The summary is a little misleading. The article actually doesn't say anything about reclining, it is talking about a lap to abdomen angle greater than 90 degrees, with the optimal angle being about 135 degrees. This isn't a new finding, though perhaps this is the first research backing it up. People have been making kneeling chairs for a long time now. I had one when I was in high school.
Since I have never found a kneeling chair that doesn't suck I tend to sit on the edge of my chair with my knees down, roughly approximating the "optimal" 135 degree angle. Rough on the chair, but over the long haul it makes my back happier.
You should go read some of the text of the signing statements. Every other sentence refers to the constitution and disputes the given legislature's ability to direct the executive's enforcement activities.
Plus, I have to agree with other folks that signing statements only effect the executive branch. Indirectly they effect everyone, due to their effect on the behavior of the branches of the executive.
The courts determine if laws were broken and the president enforces the will of the courts.
You have missed the most important role of the Judiciary, which is to invalidate unconstitutional laws. Yes, the Executive branch is responsible for the enforcement of laws, but it is left in a predicament if it is required to enforce a law that it believes to be unconstitutional. There's no feedback here, except by enforcing the law and waiting for someone to complain to the courts (and extremely expensive proposition).
While I don't approve of the current use of the signing statement I do believe that it highlights a shortcoming in our process. The president's oath of office directs him to "preserve, protect, and defend the constitution". How is he to do this when the constitution directs him to enforce the law, yet the law is unconstitutional? The only portion of the government which can legitimitely answer this question is the Judicial branch.
Wow, way to convince me. Your arguments are well reasoned and informative, plus really easy to understand. You must have been on a debate team in high school.
Seriously, why do you have a problem with this? Isn't it the role of the judicial branch to act as a check on the legislative? Are you actually advocating the current system, where the wealthy decide which laws get reviewed?
That's an interesting list of signing statements and it just goes to reaffirm my belief that there need to be a mechanism in place for immediate judicial review of laws. Effectively every one of these "signing statements" is an attempt to declare that the given law is unconstitutional. The executive branch is not empowered to make that decision at this time, and the judicial branch is given no obvious means to make a determination on the constitutional questions raised.
If the president includes a signing statement *of any kind* the law should be immidiately placed before a federal court for review. The legislative branch should also be empowered to evaluate the constitutionality of any law at any time. It is fantastically expensive in this (or any other) country to invalidate unconstitutional laws. This means that many of these laws go unchallenged until they offend someone rich enough to complain about it. How is this a fair system?
You know, If I were going to try to be subtle about hacking these machines I would do it pretty much exactly this way. Randomly bias towards the candidates I want selected, in the knowledge that most people don't really check their ballots thoroughly.
What I'd need though is an easy out in case it gets detected...some way to allow the blame to be placed on something that can be 'fixed'. Maybe the touch-screen alignment? That's a great idea...I'll just make it so that my random bias hack is temporarilly disabled when the touch sceen calibration routine is executed. That way the pollsters have a simple fix that seems reasonable. I'm sure it will be one of the first things they try if anyone complains.
For New York lawyers who write frequently updated blogs, this could force them to make multiple (and potentially expensive) reports to the New York Bar every single day.
Don't be absurd. It won't force them to report more, it will force them not to update their web logs, which is, no doubt, the real point.
What, precisely, was gained by doing this with actual physical robots, rather than a computer simulation?
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." -- Computer Scientist Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut (or Yogi Berra, depending on who you believe)
Well, when you can only send one type of robot to mars, it is best to find the most adaptible one. Having one style of robot that is capable of lifting heavy objects, climbing a rope, driving a vehicle, fixing other robots, etc. is a powerful argument. It lessens the number of separate robots that need to be sent, it allows them to function for a longer time (self repair) using a single common stock of replacement parts. Most significant, they are capable of being modified purely in software to accomplish tasks widely divergent from their original design criteria.
Sure, there are probably better designes for specific tasks, but I don't think that is the point. Is there a better, simpler design for the non-specific task?
An e-mail or a document sent through ReadNotify includes hidden links to one or more files hosted by the service. When the message or the file is opened, the program retrieves the files and by doing so checks in with ReadNotify.
Ok, I read the F-ing article and maybe I don't understand what *you* mean by "image bugs" but this is exactly the technique I associate with that term. Apparently ReadNotify.com is making money on their ability to do this in things other than just web pages/mail (like embedded in MS Word and Excel documents), but the technique isn't novel.
"The US government today confirmed a seismic event on the Korean peninsula. The government of the United States has extended an offer of humanitarian assistance in this time of crisis, in exchange for the new earthquake prediction technologies employed by the government of north Korea. Statements made by the Korean government in the days preceeding this event show clear indications of a new technology capable of predicting such seismic activity days or even weeks in advance. George Bush, president of the United States, indicated that the hiding of such technology was 'double plus ungood' and would be handled with his usual delicate aplomb."
Also the amount of post processing needed to create a useful video feed from such a craft makes it almost impractical for use.
Really it isn't that bad. In fact, depending on how fast the thing spins you could just have it trigger at the same point in each revolution, or place three cameras in a concentric ring (one on each armature) and do the same thing for all three cameras. It almost has to spin faster than 10 revolutions per second which would yeild 30 frames/second. And there's no reason that you really need full motion video, just enough frames to be able to identify elements in the terrain.
And this doesn't even get into the esoteric sensing systems. Strap an IR laser emitter and paint a stripe/grid on the ground, and make sure your cameras can pick up IR. Voila, instant paralax for high precision terrain mapping (+/- 2-3 inches). Use the IR portions to sense heat (like say, engines and people).
Depending on how quiet it is (hopefully reasonably quiet, or at least filterable), mount speakers and record sound in 3 point stereo, which should give you pretty high accuracy triangulation.
Speaking of triangulation, what happens when every platoon has one of these. Toss it in the air, and have it act as a (highly encrypted) broadcast relay. Automatic in field floating mesh network that relays in field video, terrain, communications, troop locations back to the big processing computers which integrate and process all that data (and feed it into IVIS or whatever the next new thing is).
I might add, how does one determine the direction of travel when one's compass is constantly spinning around?
While I can't provide any specific suggestions I'm guessing that a combination of gyroscopic/intertial navigation with corrections based on video processing of that terrain data. Why, exactly did you think they sponsored the Grand Challenge?
Everything I've mentioned so far could be designed into one electronics package weighing maybe 3 pounds (3 high speed, visible and IR sensitive CCDs, single chip accellerometers, enough memory, processor and network bandwidth to pass the data). Now you just need a power source (which I'm guessing they already have) and you are ready to go.
So, instead of "used on accident victims without their permission" what you advocate is "withheld from dying people because they couldn't say yes."
Explain to me how that's better. I agree that oversight is needed for such a program. But the rules of the program only allow it in critical cases where no alternative is available. The only thing that bothers me about it is the continuation of its use once in the hospital.
If you are going to complain about this trial, don't just take one aspect of it in isolation and whine about that. Yes, no prior consent is received...but it only matters in cases where option 'b' is die.
In the US there exists a means for dealing with such small claims. Small claims court generally doesn't require a lawyer and you must agree to accept the judgement of the court (this is the basis of all those idiotic court tv shows).
This sound exactly like the sort of complaint that should be taken to small claims court...does Canada not have such a thing?
"I don't like this" is not a sufficient reason for violating classification.
I have never held a security clearance. While I agree that "I don't like that" is not OK, what we are talking about here goes *way* beyond that. I believe that the *vast* majority of the US population would condemn torture if asked. Most of those people aren't just vaguely opposed -- They find the concept to be morally reprehensible.
So my question is this: What *is* sufficient justification for violating the terms of your security clearance? You cannot expect me to believe that the answer is none. I can't think of a whole lot that exceeds evidence of torture.
In looking back over some responses to older comments I couldn't help but notice this response. I generally don't clarify my stance to people who haven't brought something to the conversation, but my words have been so twisted by this response I felt the need to straighten them just a bit.
My God, do you know what you're advocating? It'll be hell on earth.
Well, I'd have to wonder what overpopulation would be? Constant fighting for scarce resources, like land, food, and water. That doesn't really sound better to me.
You're advocating performing elective surgery on young children for your "Ideal Society" that is not in their interest.
First, I didn't advocate any specific method, I just stated a requirment of "the program". I'd prefer a non-surgical method, but its a technological question. Second, how is population control not in the intrest of the populace?
And who does the selection?
Now you are asking the right question. That's a *very* complicated problem without a simple solution. I'll let you know when I figure it out.
terrorists, criminals, disabled, the $RELIGIOUS_GROUP, the stupid, the poor
Well, they do get their first child without penalty. If they want more then they need to have some positive impact on the world. Its not as though I'm advocating no children for these people, just that they need to show that they are worth selecting for higher gene pool representation. Again we get back to the real question of how do we do selection.
What's to stop backyard "desterilization"?
The law. As I said unapproved conception is punishable by permanent sterilization, or worse. I realize that the biological drive to reproduce is very powerful, so the punishments would have to be balanced against this.
Do you even understand what "natural" selection means? You don't want natural selection, you want artificial selection...
Note, please, the quotes around the word "natural" in my original text. I never said anything about desiring natural selection, in fact I specifically say that "we need to explicitly select", i.e. artificial selection. I would also mention that you haven't defined what *you* mean by natural selection. Perhaps my method of selection, in that it is performed using no paranormal means or methods *does* qualify.
you want artificial selection, with the power to select vested in an elite group of people.
I'm looking for that in my text and I just don't see it. Now, I do see that you are describing a methodology for selection which both you and I agree is really terrible. Why do you think I want an elite group of people to decide? I certainly never said that. What I did say is "we need to explicitly select." By "we" I mean the populace, not the government (or any other (non-random) subset).
...with such power, corruption is bound to occur over time.
Yes. That is why the question you asked above (the right one) is so difficult to answer. Corruption (well, maybe I should say self intrest) seems to be the only constant in all human systems. Math says that the status quo is unmaintainable (substantially more births than deaths). Both human nature and history define what will happen if the status quo is left until it collapses on its own (scarcity == war). Therefore if you don't want our entire race to eradicate itself (the probable outcome of the next really big war) perhaps we should do something. I'm open to suggestions...got a better idea?
While most of the discussion here covers the technical aspects of the question I think that the biggest factor here is being overlooked. I've been employed now in 5 different environments 4 of which used threading for parallelism. For some reason many programmers just have a problem wrapping their minds around shared memory problems. The number of times I have reveiwed code changes and seen someone not lock a mutex, or forget to release a semaphore is mind boggling.
As far as I'm concerned threading should only be considered when you have either:
1) a high tolerance for extremely difficult debugging
2) a customer who likes it (pays you more) when your program crashes
3) a team of programmers experienced with threading (at least 75%...if not 100% you *must* review code changes)
In modern Unix systems most people won't be able to really tell the speed difference between create_thread and fork. If you screw up pushing data through a pipe it just doesn't come out the other end, but if you screw up using shared memory you won't know until something unexpected (and seemingly unrelated) happens.
Although the only way to make it really work would be to have forced abortions a la the Chinese authoritarian state.
While it is true that forced abortion is a possibility I don't think it is a requirement for a population controlled state. I personally would say that everyone should be sterilized at birth (with a reliable reversable process) and then at a specific age (probably 21 or so) they can have it reversed. Upon conception you are back on "the program". Unapproved conception is punishable by permanent sterilization (and lots of community service...prison for extraordinary cases). Since people cannot seem to find a way to implicitly perform "natural" selection (like most members of an ecosystem), we need to explicitly select. We have the brainpower to do it...but do we have the will power?
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. *sigh* Back to reading comprehension 101 for me. In any case I suspect that the posture aspect (feasible at work) has more to do with reduced back pain than the reclining (not feasible at work), but the research has compounded the study of posture and back support in such a way that no really useful conclusion can be drawn about either aspect separately. Oh well...maybe next time.
The summary is a little misleading. The article actually doesn't say anything about reclining, it is talking about a lap to abdomen angle greater than 90 degrees, with the optimal angle being about 135 degrees. This isn't a new finding, though perhaps this is the first research backing it up. People have been making kneeling chairs for a long time now. I had one when I was in high school.
Since I have never found a kneeling chair that doesn't suck I tend to sit on the edge of my chair with my knees down, roughly approximating the "optimal" 135 degree angle. Rough on the chair, but over the long haul it makes my back happier.
The new MacBook Pro, now with a new X-ray vision lid (USB keyboard required).
Now there's a switch ad for you!
You should go read some of the text of the signing statements. Every other sentence refers to the constitution and disputes the given legislature's ability to direct the executive's enforcement activities.
Plus, I have to agree with other folks that signing statements only effect the executive branch. Indirectly they effect everyone, due to their effect on the behavior of the branches of the executive.
You should read it again then. All I propose is a fast track method for judicial review of laws that raise constitutional questions.
You have missed the most important role of the Judiciary, which is to invalidate unconstitutional laws. Yes, the Executive branch is responsible for the enforcement of laws, but it is left in a predicament if it is required to enforce a law that it believes to be unconstitutional. There's no feedback here, except by enforcing the law and waiting for someone to complain to the courts (and extremely expensive proposition).
While I don't approve of the current use of the signing statement I do believe that it highlights a shortcoming in our process. The president's oath of office directs him to "preserve, protect, and defend the constitution". How is he to do this when the constitution directs him to enforce the law, yet the law is unconstitutional? The only portion of the government which can legitimitely answer this question is the Judicial branch.
Wow, way to convince me. Your arguments are well reasoned and informative, plus really easy to understand. You must have been on a debate team in high school.
Seriously, why do you have a problem with this? Isn't it the role of the judicial branch to act as a check on the legislative? Are you actually advocating the current system, where the wealthy decide which laws get reviewed?
That's an interesting list of signing statements and it just goes to reaffirm my belief that there need to be a mechanism in place for immediate judicial review of laws. Effectively every one of these "signing statements" is an attempt to declare that the given law is unconstitutional. The executive branch is not empowered to make that decision at this time, and the judicial branch is given no obvious means to make a determination on the constitutional questions raised.
If the president includes a signing statement *of any kind* the law should be immidiately placed before a federal court for review. The legislative branch should also be empowered to evaluate the constitutionality of any law at any time. It is fantastically expensive in this (or any other) country to invalidate unconstitutional laws. This means that many of these laws go unchallenged until they offend someone rich enough to complain about it. How is this a fair system?
You know, If I were going to try to be subtle about hacking these machines I would do it pretty much exactly this way. Randomly bias towards the candidates I want selected, in the knowledge that most people don't really check their ballots thoroughly.
What I'd need though is an easy out in case it gets detected...some way to allow the blame to be placed on something that can be 'fixed'. Maybe the touch-screen alignment? That's a great idea...I'll just make it so that my random bias hack is temporarilly disabled when the touch sceen calibration routine is executed. That way the pollsters have a simple fix that seems reasonable. I'm sure it will be one of the first things they try if anyone complains.
Don't be absurd. It won't force them to report more, it will force them not to update their web logs, which is, no doubt, the real point.
Computers evolve quckly because we have no fear of the guess and check method of discovery.
Were I to try to debug my fancy new drug by testing it out on real humans to see what happened they would promptly lock me up and throw away the keys.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." -- Computer Scientist Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut (or Yogi Berra, depending on who you believe)
Well, when you can only send one type of robot to mars, it is best to find the most adaptible one. Having one style of robot that is capable of lifting heavy objects, climbing a rope, driving a vehicle, fixing other robots, etc. is a powerful argument. It lessens the number of separate robots that need to be sent, it allows them to function for a longer time (self repair) using a single common stock of replacement parts. Most significant, they are capable of being modified purely in software to accomplish tasks widely divergent from their original design criteria.
Sure, there are probably better designes for specific tasks, but I don't think that is the point. Is there a better, simpler design for the non-specific task?
Ok, I read the F-ing article and maybe I don't understand what *you* mean by "image bugs" but this is exactly the technique I associate with that term. Apparently ReadNotify.com is making money on their ability to do this in things other than just web pages/mail (like embedded in MS Word and Excel documents), but the technique isn't novel.
No denying that one.
"The US government today confirmed a seismic event on the Korean peninsula. The government of the United States has extended an offer of humanitarian assistance in this time of crisis, in exchange for the new earthquake prediction technologies employed by the government of north Korea. Statements made by the Korean government in the days preceeding this event show clear indications of a new technology capable of predicting such seismic activity days or even weeks in advance. George Bush, president of the United States, indicated that the hiding of such technology was 'double plus ungood' and would be handled with his usual delicate aplomb."
Really it isn't that bad. In fact, depending on how fast the thing spins you could just have it trigger at the same point in each revolution, or place three cameras in a concentric ring (one on each armature) and do the same thing for all three cameras. It almost has to spin faster than 10 revolutions per second which would yeild 30 frames/second. And there's no reason that you really need full motion video, just enough frames to be able to identify elements in the terrain.
And this doesn't even get into the esoteric sensing systems. Strap an IR laser emitter and paint a stripe/grid on the ground, and make sure your cameras can pick up IR. Voila, instant paralax for high precision terrain mapping (+/- 2-3 inches). Use the IR portions to sense heat (like say, engines and people).
Depending on how quiet it is (hopefully reasonably quiet, or at least filterable), mount speakers and record sound in 3 point stereo, which should give you pretty high accuracy triangulation.
Speaking of triangulation, what happens when every platoon has one of these. Toss it in the air, and have it act as a (highly encrypted) broadcast relay. Automatic in field floating mesh network that relays in field video, terrain, communications, troop locations back to the big processing computers which integrate and process all that data (and feed it into IVIS or whatever the next new thing is).
While I can't provide any specific suggestions I'm guessing that a combination of gyroscopic/intertial navigation with corrections based on video processing of that terrain data. Why, exactly did you think they sponsored the Grand Challenge?
Everything I've mentioned so far could be designed into one electronics package weighing maybe 3 pounds (3 high speed, visible and IR sensitive CCDs, single chip accellerometers, enough memory, processor and network bandwidth to pass the data). Now you just need a power source (which I'm guessing they already have) and you are ready to go.
Must be quaking in their boots.
Oh, right, nevermind. I'm just showing my age...they never show videos anymore anyway.
Why do people always call places they have no clue about 'dull'?
It's a reflection of their imagination.
Hey I can play that game too:
So, instead of "used on accident victims without their permission" what you advocate is "withheld from dying people because they couldn't say yes."
Explain to me how that's better. I agree that oversight is needed for such a program. But the rules of the program only allow it in critical cases where no alternative is available. The only thing that bothers me about it is the continuation of its use once in the hospital.
If you are going to complain about this trial, don't just take one aspect of it in isolation and whine about that. Yes, no prior consent is received...but it only matters in cases where option 'b' is die.
In the US there exists a means for dealing with such small claims. Small claims court generally doesn't require a lawyer and you must agree to accept the judgement of the court (this is the basis of all those idiotic court tv shows).
This sound exactly like the sort of complaint that should be taken to small claims court...does Canada not have such a thing?
"I don't like this" is not a sufficient reason for violating classification.
I have never held a security clearance. While I agree that "I don't like that" is not OK, what we are talking about here goes *way* beyond that. I believe that the *vast* majority of the US population would condemn torture if asked. Most of those people aren't just vaguely opposed -- They find the concept to be morally reprehensible.
So my question is this: What *is* sufficient justification for violating the terms of your security clearance? You cannot expect me to believe that the answer is none. I can't think of a whole lot that exceeds evidence of torture.
In looking back over some responses to older comments I couldn't help but notice this response. I generally don't clarify my stance to people who haven't brought something to the conversation, but my words have been so twisted by this response I felt the need to straighten them just a bit.
...with such power, corruption is bound to occur over time.
My God, do you know what you're advocating? It'll be hell on earth.
Well, I'd have to wonder what overpopulation would be? Constant fighting for scarce resources, like land, food, and water. That doesn't really sound better to me.
You're advocating performing elective surgery on young children for your "Ideal Society" that is not in their interest.
First, I didn't advocate any specific method, I just stated a requirment of "the program". I'd prefer a non-surgical method, but its a technological question. Second, how is population control not in the intrest of the populace?
And who does the selection?
Now you are asking the right question. That's a *very* complicated problem without a simple solution. I'll let you know when I figure it out.
terrorists, criminals, disabled, the $RELIGIOUS_GROUP, the stupid, the poor
Well, they do get their first child without penalty. If they want more then they need to have some positive impact on the world. Its not as though I'm advocating no children for these people, just that they need to show that they are worth selecting for higher gene pool representation. Again we get back to the real question of how do we do selection.
What's to stop backyard "desterilization"?
The law. As I said unapproved conception is punishable by permanent sterilization, or worse. I realize that the biological drive to reproduce is very powerful, so the punishments would have to be balanced against this.
Do you even understand what "natural" selection means? You don't want natural selection, you want artificial selection...
Note, please, the quotes around the word "natural" in my original text. I never said anything about desiring natural selection, in fact I specifically say that "we need to explicitly select", i.e. artificial selection. I would also mention that you haven't defined what *you* mean by natural selection. Perhaps my method of selection, in that it is performed using no paranormal means or methods *does* qualify.
you want artificial selection, with the power to select vested in an elite group of people.
I'm looking for that in my text and I just don't see it. Now, I do see that you are describing a methodology for selection which both you and I agree is really terrible. Why do you think I want an elite group of people to decide? I certainly never said that. What I did say is "we need to explicitly select." By "we" I mean the populace, not the government (or any other (non-random) subset).
Yes. That is why the question you asked above (the right one) is so difficult to answer. Corruption (well, maybe I should say self intrest) seems to be the only constant in all human systems. Math says that the status quo is unmaintainable (substantially more births than deaths). Both human nature and history define what will happen if the status quo is left until it collapses on its own (scarcity == war). Therefore if you don't want our entire race to eradicate itself (the probable outcome of the next really big war) perhaps we should do something. I'm open to suggestions...got a better idea?
I'm thinking that my microwave will do some serious damage to any RFID transmitter built into your passport. Has anyone tried this yet?
While most of the discussion here covers the technical aspects of the question I think that the biggest factor here is being overlooked. I've been employed now in 5 different environments 4 of which used threading for parallelism. For some reason many programmers just have a problem wrapping their minds around shared memory problems. The number of times I have reveiwed code changes and seen someone not lock a mutex, or forget to release a semaphore is mind boggling.
As far as I'm concerned threading should only be considered when you have either:
1) a high tolerance for extremely difficult debugging
2) a customer who likes it (pays you more) when your program crashes
3) a team of programmers experienced with threading (at least 75%...if not 100% you *must* review code changes)
In modern Unix systems most people won't be able to really tell the speed difference between create_thread and fork. If you screw up pushing data through a pipe it just doesn't come out the other end, but if you screw up using shared memory you won't know until something unexpected (and seemingly unrelated) happens.
Although the only way to make it really work would be to have forced abortions a la the Chinese authoritarian state.
While it is true that forced abortion is a possibility I don't think it is a requirement for a population controlled state. I personally would say that everyone should be sterilized at birth (with a reliable reversable process) and then at a specific age (probably 21 or so) they can have it reversed. Upon conception you are back on "the program". Unapproved conception is punishable by permanent sterilization (and lots of community service...prison for extraordinary cases). Since people cannot seem to find a way to implicitly perform "natural" selection (like most members of an ecosystem), we need to explicitly select. We have the brainpower to do it...but do we have the will power?