People don't vote because people are generally lazy and apathetic about things outside their immediate sphere of reference.
This is why I don't like Australia's mandatory voting system. Apathetic voters tend to be uninformed voters. Uninformed voters tend to make poor choices. Forcing apathetic people to the polls degrades the overall quality of the choices made by the electorate.
"The control capsule located on the cable of the right earpiece includes a microphone and three buttons. With this convenient remote, you can adjust the volume, control music or video playback -- including play/pause and next/previous -- and record voice memos."
If you just plugged enough LEDs in series to plug straight into AC, they'd flicker at a very noticeable 60Hz.
That must be what's going on with those strings of LED Christmas lights. The flicker is very noticable, to me anyway. (I have always been sensitive to flicker. Did you ever ask someone whose CRT monitor was set to 60 Hz, "Doesn't that flicker bother you?" To which they reply, "What flicker?") Between the flicker and the bluish hue, the LED Christmas lights of 2008 are Not Acceptable to this consumer.
two competing steam companies couldn't use each other's improvements
They could have licensed their improvements from each other. That way, both companies' products would be efficient, and at the same time, the company that came up with more/better improvements would receive greater financial reward, as it should. The idea of IP licensing probably was not as widespread in the 1800s as it is today; still, there was nothing stopping them from doing so.
suppose someone patented an affordable, powerful, stylish 100 mpg car (urban legend, I know). We'd have 20 more years of other car companies selling gas guzzlers because the one company sat on that patent.
If that company "sits on" the patent, as opposed to putting its 100 mpg car into production, it was probably never a viable product to begin with. (As is the case with many patented ideas that never go into production.)
Or suppose it was medicine -- you'd have people dying because they couldn't afford the prices of the main supplier, and their competitors couldn't use the formula.
Better that only rich people receive the drug for the first 20 years of its existence, than that the drug had never been developed at all due to insufficient incentives. It's not harsh to say that. It's compassionate. Think about it. If you want to make life-saving treatments more affordable for low-income people, by all means contribute to one of the existing charities that subsidize medical care for the poor. But please don't mess with the incentives that have spurred the development of myriad of remarkable life-saving treatments -- and might spur a treatment that will save your own life someday.
How do you feel about building the solar arrays out of lunar material, and keeping them on the lunar surface, as advocated by Dr. David R. Criswell ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Criswell ) ?
Lift costs would not be as great a barrier under this plan.
this piece goes into much more detail about how that engine works -- he got the original idea from the upmodded Henry Ford artifact in the basement of his insane island lab
Actually,
* The article reveals precious little about how Kamen's Stirling engine works. If he has truly come up with a workable design, I would love to hear a few details about how he overcame the glitches that previous experimenters had with the Stirling engine (such as leaky seals being unable to contain the working gas).
* Ford's steamboat engine is in Kamen's New Hampshire mansion, not on his Connecticut island, and nowhere does the article say that Ford's engine inspired Kamen to improve the Stirling engine.
The objective answer will come when cognitive science figures out what type of information processing gives rise to the phenomena we call "consciousness" and thus mind. Then it is simply a matter of finding out when said information process in the human brain "comes online".
Trust me: we are never going to discover this succinct, objective definition of consciousness that you dream of. We will always wonder, to some degree, about human life. Erring on the side of human life, although it may become less popular, will always be the right thing to do. And thank goodness for that.
From what I see, the ethics of cloning are headed in the wrong direction. Which of the following is likely to become legal first?
* Cloning a human for the purpose of harvesting organs or stem cells * Cloning a human to "give a second chance" to the parents of a beloved child who was killed in a tragic accident
I know which one should become legal first, but with people like Peter Singer influencing our ethical debates, I'd put money on the other one.
Seems to me that the relevant question, environmentally, is this:
Is it better to turn all the carbon in your trash into CO2 and release it now, or to put your trash in a landfill and have some of the carbon be released in the form of methane later?
Wouldn't those same concerns apply to the venerable rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which were able to "come back up" after multiple Martian winters, even though their design life was only 90 days? They make it look easy. Unless you have specific reasons to be more pessimistic about Phoenix, don't count it out.
Seconds after the Russian crew initiated the descent, however, their Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) instructed them to climb, while at about the same time the TCAS on Flight 611 instructed the pilots of that aircraft to descend. Had both aircraft followed those automated instructions, it is likely that the collision would not have occurred.
TCAS merely issued warnings that were not heeded. That's not the kind of system I'm talking about. I'm talking about a flight control system that automatically and routinely makes course adjustments without even informing the pilot.
All aircraft should transmit their position and velocity to all other aircraft in the vicinity. It then doesn't take much computing power for the autopilot computer to calculate the minor course correction that would be needed to avoid the other aircraft (or even its wake vortices). It would make mid-air collisions a thing of the past (at least, while autopilot is turned on. All bets are off if a human's at the yoke.)
In earlier years, this kind of fraud could have been executed over the telephone, or through the mail. Why does the medium that was used affect the specific criminal charge applied -- "computer fraud"? Just plain fraud would do nicely.
Did Apple retain the capability to start making PowerPC Macs again, or have they washed their hands of IBM's tech? IBM just might become CPU king once again (stranger things have happened).
Slashdot Mirror
What if you used Schrödinger's lolcat?
People don't vote because people are generally lazy and apathetic about things outside their immediate sphere of reference.
This is why I don't like Australia's mandatory voting system. Apathetic voters tend to be uninformed voters. Uninformed voters tend to make poor choices. Forcing apathetic people to the polls degrades the overall quality of the choices made by the electorate.
URL for the "Apple In-Ear Headphones with Remote and Mic":
http://www.apple.com/ipod/inearheadphones
"The control capsule located on the cable of the right earpiece includes a microphone and three buttons. With this convenient remote, you can adjust the volume, control music or video playback -- including play/pause and next/previous -- and record voice memos."
eom
If you just plugged enough LEDs in series to plug straight into AC, they'd flicker at a very noticeable 60Hz.
That must be what's going on with those strings of LED Christmas lights. The flicker is very noticable, to me anyway. (I have always been sensitive to flicker. Did you ever ask someone whose CRT monitor was set to 60 Hz, "Doesn't that flicker bother you?" To which they reply, "What flicker?") Between the flicker and the bluish hue, the LED Christmas lights of 2008 are Not Acceptable to this consumer.
If what you were saying was true we could destroy the earth by having a 10 year old do the calculations since they would almost certainly be wrong.
I'm 10 years old, you insensitive clod!
Oh I remember... Symantec and Sun are both on the list of "Tech Giants that Might Not Survive 2009." http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=910
I wish the new president would bring successful executives into government, not losers.
Batman, here's an article by a reputable source, Agence France Presse, which says coal kills 20,000 people every year: http://tinyurl.com/CoalCarnage
two competing steam companies couldn't use each other's improvements
They could have licensed their improvements from each other. That way, both companies' products would be efficient, and at the same time, the company that came up with more/better improvements would receive greater financial reward, as it should. The idea of IP licensing probably was not as widespread in the 1800s as it is today; still, there was nothing stopping them from doing so.
suppose someone patented an affordable, powerful, stylish 100 mpg car (urban legend, I know). We'd have 20 more years of other car companies selling gas guzzlers because the one company sat on that patent.
If that company "sits on" the patent, as opposed to putting its 100 mpg car into production, it was probably never a viable product to begin with. (As is the case with many patented ideas that never go into production.)
Or suppose it was medicine -- you'd have people dying because they couldn't afford the prices of the main supplier, and their competitors couldn't use the formula.
Better that only rich people receive the drug for the first 20 years of its existence, than that the drug had never been developed at all due to insufficient incentives. It's not harsh to say that. It's compassionate. Think about it. If you want to make life-saving treatments more affordable for low-income people, by all means contribute to one of the existing charities that subsidize medical care for the poor. But please don't mess with the incentives that have spurred the development of myriad of remarkable life-saving treatments -- and might spur a treatment that will save your own life someday.
Use the disambiguation page, you insensitive clod!
Clarus the Dogcow:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow
The resemblance to Queen Amidala's "Naboo Cruiser" is remarkable.
http://www.galacticempiredatabank.com/NabooCruiser1.jpg
Coincidence?
How do you feel about building the solar arrays out of lunar material, and keeping them on the lunar surface, as advocated by Dr. David R. Criswell ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Criswell ) ?
Lift costs would not be as great a barrier under this plan.
this piece goes into much more detail about how that engine works -- he got the original idea from the upmodded Henry Ford artifact in the basement of his insane island lab
Actually,
* The article reveals precious little about how Kamen's Stirling engine works. If he has truly come up with a workable design, I would love to hear a few details about how he overcame the glitches that previous experimenters had with the Stirling engine (such as leaky seals being unable to contain the working gas).
* Ford's steamboat engine is in Kamen's New Hampshire mansion, not on his Connecticut island, and nowhere does the article say that Ford's engine inspired Kamen to improve the Stirling engine.
Bad summary.
The objective answer will come when cognitive science figures out what type of information processing gives rise to the phenomena we call "consciousness" and thus mind. Then it is simply a matter of finding out when said information process in the human brain "comes online".
Trust me: we are never going to discover this succinct, objective definition of consciousness that you dream of. We will always wonder, to some degree, about human life. Erring on the side of human life, although it may become less popular, will always be the right thing to do. And thank goodness for that.
From what I see, the ethics of cloning are headed in the wrong direction. Which of the following is likely to become legal first?
* Cloning a human for the purpose of harvesting organs or stem cells
* Cloning a human to "give a second chance" to the parents of a beloved child who was killed in a tragic accident
I know which one should become legal first, but with people like Peter Singer influencing our ethical debates, I'd put money on the other one.
This would provide some relief to Mac users who lost the ability to run VBA macros in Office 2008.
Seems to me that the relevant question, environmentally, is this:
Is it better to turn all the carbon in your trash into CO2 and release it now, or to put your trash in a landfill and have some of the carbon be released in the form of methane later?
Store your backup drives in a Faraday cage if you're worried about EMP.
Wouldn't those same concerns apply to the venerable rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which were able to "come back up" after multiple Martian winters, even though their design life was only 90 days? They make it look easy. Unless you have specific reasons to be more pessimistic about Phoenix, don't count it out.
Economic essay by Hugo Award winner, and registered Democrat, Orson Scott Card:
Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
Seconds after the Russian crew initiated the descent, however, their Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) instructed them to climb, while at about the same time the TCAS on Flight 611 instructed the pilots of that aircraft to descend. Had both aircraft followed those automated instructions, it is likely that the collision would not have occurred. TCAS merely issued warnings that were not heeded. That's not the kind of system I'm talking about. I'm talking about a flight control system that automatically and routinely makes course adjustments without even informing the pilot.
All aircraft should transmit their position and velocity to all other aircraft in the vicinity. It then doesn't take much computing power for the autopilot computer to calculate the minor course correction that would be needed to avoid the other aircraft (or even its wake vortices). It would make mid-air collisions a thing of the past (at least, while autopilot is turned on. All bets are off if a human's at the yoke.)
In earlier years, this kind of fraud could have been executed over the telephone, or through the mail. Why does the medium that was used affect the specific criminal charge applied -- "computer fraud"? Just plain fraud would do nicely.
some climatologists yearn to simulate 100 years in a day
Why does the yearning stop there? Why not yearn to simulate, say, 1000 years in three seconds?
Did Apple retain the capability to start making PowerPC Macs again, or have they washed their hands of IBM's tech? IBM just might become CPU king once again (stranger things have happened).