Oh sure, that will work for very low densities of information, but what about something the size of the Wikipedia? That article states that the Wikipedia has over 2.4 billion words across over 4 million articles. The article has a nice visual image of what would happen if you took all that information and printed it into 1000 page encyclopedia volumes (each containing 8 million characters). It totals over 1800 print volumes.
Now, where are you going to find that much stone writing surface in one place, and how are you going to economically carve it in a reasonable lifetime, and how are you going to arrange it in a fashion that it's human readable/explorable?
Even reproducing something immensely valuable for a recovering industrial society like Machinery's Handbook in stonework would take an immense amount of space, time, and money to do. Just something as simple as the Georgia Guidestones cost about $225,000 to do.
No, try again when you come up with something practical.
A 286? Luxury! I used to use AppleWorks on an Apple II GS running a 65C816 chip, and that's the system that convinced me that programming was a fun hobby.
Aside the whole paralysis thing, this sounds like a better method for gender reassignment surgery.
You know, and the whole murder / bodytheft thing.
I guess you could try to find a matching service, but given all the factors involved, I doubt you're going to have an easy time finding someone who wants to swap bodies with you who has the same tissue type, same skin color, compatible build, equitable age & health, etc.
But I mean that aside, this is virtual immortality if one were ruthless enough, or alternatively if we could clone human bodies without heads immortality for all who could afford it.
Brain meats decay and age too. Unless you're operating off of some bizarre ship of Theseus theory of identity.
Maybe he'll actually be able to raise the standards of ethics and customer relations at Zynga. After all, starting so much closer to their level than the average executive will make it easier for the business culture there to relate to him.
I have never, ever noticed this, not in a single movie. Talking on the phone would definitely be a problem, but I've never seen this either.
My own freaking mother did this once in a theater and talked for 2-3 minutes. My father and I were appalled. IT was embarrassing, and she didn't really understand that what she did was wrong at first.
Frankly I don't really give a shit if people are texting or surfing on their phone during the movie. I'm looking ahead at the screen. I find it hard to believe that it should really bother someone that much.
Not all of us have tunnel vision, and cell phone screens are bright. Someone texting out of the corner of your eye can be very distracting even if you can't see the screen and only see the glow, especially in stadium-style theaters where multiple rows are easily visible. Plus, even phones on vibrate make distracting noise when text after text comes in.
Oh, I wouldn't, but then again I'd mostly be up in arms about why some jerk decided to reach into my pocket and grab my silenced cell phone from out of my front pocket in the first place. Bad touch! Bad touch!
Any web developer worth his pay should already be coding with graceful degradation in mind. CSS and Javascript should fail gracefully on less capable (or deliberately secured) browsers. Failure to do so may leave people with very minimal browsers, like the deafblind, unable to use a site. It also shuts out people with older browsers, and the days of "This site best viewed in Internet Explorer 6 at a resolution of 1440 x 800" are best left buried and gone.
But I disagree that there is very little income mobility. I found there is quite a bit of income mobility. I was making just under min-wage... hmm 10 years ago. Now I'm making more in a week than I did in a month before.
Your anecdote does not trump statistics. Inter-generational income mobility is the standard measure, and in the US roughly 40% of people born to the top or bottom 20% will stay in that bracket. A country with true mobility would have a 20% chance of staying in any 20% bracket, and countries like Denmark and Norway come pretty close to that.
The US ranks behind France, Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark in income mobility. (And those are just countries I have stats for. The UK was the only country worse than the US in the numbers I've seen for developed nations.) The US is less "the land of opportunity" than much of Europe.
That said, your experience with part of the problem being cultural seems spot on. Not all the barriers in the US are imposed from the outside of people, and there is some rather rank class envy that our inequality has helped foster that turns to excuse-making. Those attitudes do nothing to help people any more than any other form of resentment.
Already possible? That's just two people. This is three, and would allow a lesbian couple to have a biological child with a Y chromosome lent by a third party, so they could have a son.
The technology to pick and choose single chromosomes out of one nucleus to replace a chromosome in another nucleus simply does not exist and may not for quite some time since DNA does not wrap itself up neatly into little X's until cellular division. No, the techniques involved are far cruder than that.
Similarly, the technology to combine two egg nuclei into a single, viable diploid cell also does not yet exist.
On the other hand, it will break physics so bad that astronomers will just throw up their hands and leave all stellar objects classified as "spatial anomalies."
The Constitution wasn't written to be subject to interpretation by arcane legal rules, but by citizens.
Yeah, that's a common misconception. Most of the drafters of the Constitution were legal scholars themselves. That's why the Constitution has reference to all kinds of terms of the art well-understood in 18th century common law but not defined for the common man like "corruption of the blood," "habeas corpus," and "due process." (Seriously. What the heck is "due process," formally defined? Do you think the average citizen of 18th century America had the faintest foggiest clue?)
The founders knew the the courts would be the ones to interpret and ensure the fair application of the law. As Hamilton said in the Federalist Papers, "The interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts."
You may rage and fume when said interpretation goes against your "common sense," but the public's "common sense" has just as often been terribly, terribly wrong. After all, Dred Scott was "common sense" in the South when it was decided. Plessy v. Ferguson, which gave us "separate but equal" was considered "common sense" at the time by many. "Common sense" is nothing but personal biases and confident ignorance wrapped up in the robes of wisdom.
Half of all people score in the lower 50% of intelligent tests.
Actually, that depends on how you define the lower 50% and how fine-grained the test results are.
Let's say (for simplicity) that 5 people take a 2 question IQ test. As with most IQ tests, we get a bell curve of results: 1 person gets both right, 1 person gets both wrong, and 3 people only get 1 right. How many people scored in the lower 50%? Is it 1? Is it 4? It's certainly not 2.5.
Even if you expand the test taking population and add more questions, you still run into the possibility that you won't necessarily hit 50%.
This has nothing to do with saving the planet. It's a totally transparent (!) and cynical attempt to change the subject away from the web of scandals entangling Obama.
Yeah, yeah Republicans said the same thing about Clinton sending cruise missiles after Osama bin Ladin in Afghanistan after the attack on the USS Cole. Look how pointless of a distraction that turned out to be! Good thing his successor didn't waste as much effort on it when he got into office.
That's what my roommates did at the house I live at. Keyless entry via numeric pad attached to a battery-powered* dead bolt. Simple, convenient, and no less secure than physical keys. It just replaces "something I have" with "something I know," and it isn't vulnerable to bump-keys or lock-picking tools.
*Lasts for months and gives plenty of warning before it goes out, so no worries there.
I hope this is sarcasm, because the Montreal Protocol is widely hailed as one of the greatest successes in international cooperation and pollution control. As a result of the treaty, ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere (as measured in equivalent chlorine) have declined by 10%, and the ozone hole over Antarctica is poised to have resorted by 1 million square km (of a peak of 25 million square km) by 2015.
Really, the only failure of the Montreal Protocol was the promotion of HCFC-22 which does less ozone damage but is a major greenhouse gas. (It's being phased out for more ozone-safe refrigerants, but it'll be up there for centuries.)
Does anyone remember the introduction of catalytic converters for cars? What was it we were told? We were told the converters would convert the noxious emissions into harmless water...and carbon dioxide.
Well, when the alternative is carbon monoxide, unburned gasoline, and NOx, I think we'll take the CO2 and water. But just because it's non-toxic doesn't mean that it's not a pollutant.
Nah, you can do it just as trivially in C, just make a struct mapping the physical record just as in COBOL. People often don't do that, but that's people for you.
Here's a homework assignment for you. What is the layout in memory and total size in bytes of the following struct on x86 and on ARM? struct account {
short account_number;
char first_name[30];
char last_name[30];
float balance;
char account_type[3];
int ssn; };
Ignore endianness or, I suppose, continue ignoring endianness.
Having to pay much more for electricity will mean having less money left over for food, which means less obesity!
Imagine how much weight they'll lose if droughts like last year's put an end to meat and dairy production. Global warming will make America a vegan's dream come true!
There is just no end to the benefits from artificially inflating the cost of energy.
Oh, if only they could save us as much as dumping the costs of production on our children and grandchildren has!
Most people, I find, aren't really aware of the ramifications of Administrative Law and the evolution of the Executive Branch. Over the past couple of centuries, Congress had passed laws and created agencies under the purview of the President to administrate. Over time, this has resulted in a massive federal system of administrative agencies who have the power to issue regulations based on their interpretation of the law. This has been found Constitutional, since it's nothing but the natural outgrowth of "Congress makes laws, the President executes them," but sometimes it produces shocking results to the lay person.
Kind of like the patent system and "limited time," perhaps the administrative apparatus has gone far beyond its original intent, but by the letter of the law, that's perfectly fine. It's a matter for the voters and Congress to fix it, not the courts.
I've been posting AC for months; I might as well go ahead and login and admit that I've relapsed on Slashdot...
The job of the government is to analyze the proposal and then based on that analysis grant or deny permission preferably providing feedback regarding the proposal.
Analyzing a proposal in a vacuum creates shortsighted governance. Management of common resources like clean air or the radio spectrum or water usage require attention to be paid to other inputs into the system. If you don't, you end up with the death of a thousand paper cuts. Building a pipeline that makes cheaper the development of tar sands oil encourages its exploitation and use and puts everyone at risk of worse impact from climate change and threatens the waterways of the US due to the inevitable failure of the best constructed pipelines. (And this pipeline isn't one.)
While I'd rather see the pipeline's approval denied, offsetting its impact is a compromise. (Though, once again, Obama negotiates and make concessions with himself before negotiating with the opposition.)
The President is tying the approval of this JOB CREATING PROJECT to his political stance.
I tend to find that when all people can say for a project is that it "creates jobs" or "will contribute tax dollars to the local economy" that they damn it with faint praise. Anything you pay people to do "creates jobs." Paying someone to shovel sand from one pile to another and then back "creates jobs." Whorehouses and drug dealers "create jobs." That doesn't mean that the activity itself is a net contribution. Look up the Broken Windows Fallacy.
But, I guess it will provide lots of long-term jobs in the future if the nightmare of the Pegasus pipeline spill cleanup is any indication.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh sure, that will work for very low densities of information, but what about something the size of the Wikipedia? That article states that the Wikipedia has over 2.4 billion words across over 4 million articles. The article has a nice visual image of what would happen if you took all that information and printed it into 1000 page encyclopedia volumes (each containing 8 million characters). It totals over 1800 print volumes.
Now, where are you going to find that much stone writing surface in one place, and how are you going to economically carve it in a reasonable lifetime, and how are you going to arrange it in a fashion that it's human readable/explorable?
Even reproducing something immensely valuable for a recovering industrial society like Machinery's Handbook in stonework would take an immense amount of space, time, and money to do. Just something as simple as the Georgia Guidestones cost about $225,000 to do.
No, try again when you come up with something practical.
A 286? Luxury!
I used to use AppleWorks on an Apple II GS running a 65C816 chip, and that's the system that convinced me that programming was a fun hobby.
Aside the whole paralysis thing, this sounds like a better method for gender reassignment surgery.
You know, and the whole murder / bodytheft thing.
I guess you could try to find a matching service, but given all the factors involved, I doubt you're going to have an easy time finding someone who wants to swap bodies with you who has the same tissue type, same skin color, compatible build, equitable age & health, etc.
But I mean that aside, this is virtual immortality if one were ruthless enough, or alternatively if we could clone human bodies without heads immortality for all who could afford it.
Brain meats decay and age too. Unless you're operating off of some bizarre ship of Theseus theory of identity.
Maybe he'll actually be able to raise the standards of ethics and customer relations at Zynga. After all, starting so much closer to their level than the average executive will make it easier for the business culture there to relate to him.
I have never, ever noticed this, not in a single movie. Talking on the phone would definitely be a problem, but I've never seen this either.
My own freaking mother did this once in a theater and talked for 2-3 minutes. My father and I were appalled. IT was embarrassing, and she didn't really understand that what she did was wrong at first.
Frankly I don't really give a shit if people are texting or surfing on their phone during the movie. I'm looking ahead at the screen. I find it hard to believe that it should really bother someone that much.
Not all of us have tunnel vision, and cell phone screens are bright. Someone texting out of the corner of your eye can be very distracting even if you can't see the screen and only see the glow, especially in stadium-style theaters where multiple rows are easily visible. Plus, even phones on vibrate make distracting noise when text after text comes in.
I'd probably just sit there and be quiet.
Oh, I wouldn't, but then again I'd mostly be up in arms about why some jerk decided to reach into my pocket and grab my silenced cell phone from out of my front pocket in the first place. Bad touch! Bad touch!
Any web developer worth his pay should already be coding with graceful degradation in mind. CSS and Javascript should fail gracefully on less capable (or deliberately secured) browsers. Failure to do so may leave people with very minimal browsers, like the deafblind, unable to use a site. It also shuts out people with older browsers, and the days of "This site best viewed in Internet Explorer 6 at a resolution of 1440 x 800" are best left buried and gone.
But I disagree that there is very little income mobility. I found there is quite a bit of income mobility. I was making just under min-wage... hmm 10 years ago. Now I'm making more in a week than I did in a month before.
Your anecdote does not trump statistics. Inter-generational income mobility is the standard measure, and in the US roughly 40% of people born to the top or bottom 20% will stay in that bracket. A country with true mobility would have a 20% chance of staying in any 20% bracket, and countries like Denmark and Norway come pretty close to that.
The US ranks behind France, Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark in income mobility. (And those are just countries I have stats for. The UK was the only country worse than the US in the numbers I've seen for developed nations.) The US is less "the land of opportunity" than much of Europe.
That said, your experience with part of the problem being cultural seems spot on. Not all the barriers in the US are imposed from the outside of people, and there is some rather rank class envy that our inequality has helped foster that turns to excuse-making. Those attitudes do nothing to help people any more than any other form of resentment.
I find vegetables and fruit from the local market...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
Stop talking like everyone shares your privileges.
Already possible? That's just two people. This is three, and would allow a lesbian couple to have a biological child with a Y chromosome lent by a third party, so they could have a son.
The technology to pick and choose single chromosomes out of one nucleus to replace a chromosome in another nucleus simply does not exist and may not for quite some time since DNA does not wrap itself up neatly into little X's until cellular division. No, the techniques involved are far cruder than that.
Similarly, the technology to combine two egg nuclei into a single, viable diploid cell also does not yet exist.
When men can donate eggs, "unaffiliated" will make sense.
On the other hand, it will break physics so bad that astronomers will just throw up their hands and leave all stellar objects classified as "spatial anomalies."
Ha, yes, the tschyo-kyu first ones.Very yinteres ting siri. Rots of kara-kiter.
Man, that German DRM sure is getting out of hand!
Presumably, they would rather go to work than shop for a new car.
The Constitution wasn't written to be subject to interpretation by arcane legal rules, but by citizens.
Yeah, that's a common misconception. Most of the drafters of the Constitution were legal scholars themselves. That's why the Constitution has reference to all kinds of terms of the art well-understood in 18th century common law but not defined for the common man like "corruption of the blood," "habeas corpus," and "due process." (Seriously. What the heck is "due process," formally defined? Do you think the average citizen of 18th century America had the faintest foggiest clue?)
The founders knew the the courts would be the ones to interpret and ensure the fair application of the law. As Hamilton said in the Federalist Papers, "The interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts."
You may rage and fume when said interpretation goes against your "common sense," but the public's "common sense" has just as often been terribly, terribly wrong. After all, Dred Scott was "common sense" in the South when it was decided. Plessy v. Ferguson, which gave us "separate but equal" was considered "common sense" at the time by many. "Common sense" is nothing but personal biases and confident ignorance wrapped up in the robes of wisdom.
Half of all people score in the lower 50% of intelligent tests.
Actually, that depends on how you define the lower 50% and how fine-grained the test results are.
Let's say (for simplicity) that 5 people take a 2 question IQ test. As with most IQ tests, we get a bell curve of results: 1 person gets both right, 1 person gets both wrong, and 3 people only get 1 right. How many people scored in the lower 50%? Is it 1? Is it 4? It's certainly not 2.5.
Even if you expand the test taking population and add more questions, you still run into the possibility that you won't necessarily hit 50%.
If you reject DRM, you "risk" walling off parts of the Web.
If you accept DRM, however, you GUARANTEE that parts of the Web will become walled off.
"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."
This has nothing to do with saving the planet. It's a totally transparent (!) and cynical attempt to change the subject away from the web of scandals entangling Obama.
Yeah, yeah Republicans said the same thing about Clinton sending cruise missiles after Osama bin Ladin in Afghanistan after the attack on the USS Cole. Look how pointless of a distraction that turned out to be! Good thing his successor didn't waste as much effort on it when he got into office.
That's what my roommates did at the house I live at. Keyless entry via numeric pad attached to a battery-powered* dead bolt. Simple, convenient, and no less secure than physical keys. It just replaces "something I have" with "something I know," and it isn't vulnerable to bump-keys or lock-picking tools.
*Lasts for months and gives plenty of warning before it goes out, so no worries there.
I hope this is sarcasm, because the Montreal Protocol is widely hailed as one of the greatest successes in international cooperation and pollution control. As a result of the treaty, ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere (as measured in equivalent chlorine) have declined by 10%, and the ozone hole over Antarctica is poised to have resorted by 1 million square km (of a peak of 25 million square km) by 2015.
Really, the only failure of the Montreal Protocol was the promotion of HCFC-22 which does less ozone damage but is a major greenhouse gas. (It's being phased out for more ozone-safe refrigerants, but it'll be up there for centuries.)
Does anyone remember the introduction of catalytic converters for cars? What was it we were told? We were told the converters would convert the noxious emissions into harmless water...and carbon dioxide.
Well, when the alternative is carbon monoxide, unburned gasoline, and NOx, I think we'll take the CO2 and water. But just because it's non-toxic doesn't mean that it's not a pollutant.
Nah, you can do it just as trivially in C, just make a struct mapping the physical record just as in COBOL. People often don't do that, but that's people for you.
Here's a homework assignment for you. What is the layout in memory and total size in bytes of the following struct on x86 and on ARM?
struct account {
short account_number;
char first_name[30];
char last_name[30];
float balance;
char account_type[3];
int ssn;
};
Ignore endianness or, I suppose, continue ignoring endianness.
Having to pay much more for electricity will mean having less money left over for food, which means less obesity!
Imagine how much weight they'll lose if droughts like last year's put an end to meat and dairy production. Global warming will make America a vegan's dream come true!
There is just no end to the benefits from artificially inflating the cost of energy.
Oh, if only they could save us as much as dumping the costs of production on our children and grandchildren has!
Most people, I find, aren't really aware of the ramifications of Administrative Law and the evolution of the Executive Branch. Over the past couple of centuries, Congress had passed laws and created agencies under the purview of the President to administrate. Over time, this has resulted in a massive federal system of administrative agencies who have the power to issue regulations based on their interpretation of the law. This has been found Constitutional, since it's nothing but the natural outgrowth of "Congress makes laws, the President executes them," but sometimes it produces shocking results to the lay person. Kind of like the patent system and "limited time," perhaps the administrative apparatus has gone far beyond its original intent, but by the letter of the law, that's perfectly fine. It's a matter for the voters and Congress to fix it, not the courts.
I've been posting AC for months; I might as well go ahead and login and admit that I've relapsed on Slashdot...
The job of the government is to analyze the proposal and then based on that analysis grant or deny permission preferably providing feedback regarding the proposal.
Analyzing a proposal in a vacuum creates shortsighted governance. Management of common resources like clean air or the radio spectrum or water usage require attention to be paid to other inputs into the system. If you don't, you end up with the death of a thousand paper cuts. Building a pipeline that makes cheaper the development of tar sands oil encourages its exploitation and use and puts everyone at risk of worse impact from climate change and threatens the waterways of the US due to the inevitable failure of the best constructed pipelines. (And this pipeline isn't one.)
While I'd rather see the pipeline's approval denied, offsetting its impact is a compromise. (Though, once again, Obama negotiates and make concessions with himself before negotiating with the opposition.)
The President is tying the approval of this JOB CREATING PROJECT to his political stance.
I tend to find that when all people can say for a project is that it "creates jobs" or "will contribute tax dollars to the local economy" that they damn it with faint praise. Anything you pay people to do "creates jobs." Paying someone to shovel sand from one pile to another and then back "creates jobs." Whorehouses and drug dealers "create jobs." That doesn't mean that the activity itself is a net contribution. Look up the Broken Windows Fallacy.
But, I guess it will provide lots of long-term jobs in the future if the nightmare of the Pegasus pipeline spill cleanup is any indication.