> I think the distinction between "government" and "family" is actually a little artificial
I think this is one of the most wrong things I've ever read.
A parent has a direct compelling desire to protect and nurture his/her child. The parent has intimate knowledge and experience of that child's unique requirements. The parent has a genetic drive to insure the child's welfare. I can tell you as a parent that this drive is powerful and in the same realm as the drive for food and shelter. I feel the need to care for my child the same way I feel the need to eat.
The "government" is not a single entity, but the resultant vector of millions of competing agendas and forces. As such it doesn't "care" for any child and it doesn't have knowledge of any child. It can only set broad policies that hopefully indirectly cause "good" but often cause "bad" in it's pursuit of particular agendas.
Corporations and Governments are not people. They are not living entities, although we often treat them as such legally. To say the "government" can care for a child is simply incorrect. A teacher, a nanny, a social worker, a lawyer and a congressman may be affecting a child, but there is no such person as "the government".
> Common misconception - the actual marginal cost of each additional sale is its *support* component not the cost of copying. Each additional copy costs the manufacturer next to nothing only if the software manufacturer provides no support with each new sale.
Really? Why don't you call Microsoft right now and see what kind of support you get. It's next to worthless.
> I would much rather have children watch [the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan. Black Hawk Down] at an early age, and have those images burned into their brains > In my opinion, if children are going to be exposed to any violence, it should only be the most realistic violence
> I'm not even a pacifist
I think we got that point without the disclaimer...
Don't think this will be limited to 'printing' cheap plastic prototypes for long.
The next evolution will be a generation of application specific 3D printers for other materials. Case in point is this machine that prints an entire house out of concrete.
The next evolution after that will be 3D printers with a variety of materials at their disposal that can print designs with different components made out of different materials.
I admit that it could be a very long time before we have a machine that could squeeze out a Ferrari, because of all the sophisticated requirements of the various internal parts. Some materials can't just be extruded out of a tube. They have to be alloyed, heated, annealed, zapped, thin-film deposited, welded, extracted from live bacteria, etc, etc, etc
>...the coolness of which is directly proportional to hotness of your daughter, the hotness of whom must then be further weighted by multiplying her hotness by some function of her age. The age-multiplier curve features an abrupt discontinuity that jumps 0.00 to 1.00 at age 18, and some sort of exponential backoff function that starts decreasing the multiplier at around age 35-45.
Gives you maximum hotness at 18, falling slowly in the 20's, dropping rapidly after that. Also, some hotness under 18 (lets be realistic!) , but not too far under 18
> Get your credit account cancelled by Oil Company A because they know how often you should need oil and you didn't order form them
I suspect you are misrepresenting this for greater outrage.
Here, in New York, I can sign up for an oil account at a fixed price. If oil rates go up I am protected because I keep paying the rate at the time I signed up (with all kinds of possible modifiers from different oil companies, like the price is reset each year, etc). I am also locked in to that rate if oil prices go down.
If oil prices go down, many people try to 'cheat' on their accounts by buying oil from a cheaper oil company at the current rate. Note that it is not necessarily that my oil company is more expensive, it is that I have signed up for a fixed rate account with protection against oil price variations.
If the oil company sees that I have ordered significantly less than my house should use they will cancel my account because I have broken my deal with them. I can't enjoy the protection of a fixed price when the rates go up, but not buy from them when the rates go down. That's not the deal they are offering.
That is like getting a fixed rate mortgage on a house. As long as the current rates are higher than my mortgage I pay my mortgage. If current rates go down I stop paying my mortgage and start paying a variable rate instead. You can't do that. You would have to break your contract, cancel your account, and refinance with someone else. But then, of course, you are no longer protected in case rates go up again.
My idea of backpacking around the world is very different from most of the posters I read here. I've done it and my recommendation is bring a good sturdy pair of boots, a toothbrush, and of course a small towel (tnx HGTTG).
Anything else will get broken, stolen, soaked, dropped, forgotten, traded. I had two sets of socks, underwear, t-shirts, pants. One to wear while the other set was drying - I would rinse them out each night wherever I was, sometimes I had a sink sometimes a stream.
Leaving the rest up to ingenuity and fate forces you to become part of the place you are in and makes for a far more interesting trip.
NEO impacts are the only major natural hazard that we can effectively protect ourselves against, by deflecting (or destroying) the NEO before it hits the Earth. The first step in any program of planetary defense is to find the NEOs; we can't protect against something we don't know exists. We also need a long warning time, at least a decade, to send spacecraft to intercept the object and deflect it. Many defensive schemes have been studied in a preliminary way, but none in detail. In the absence of active defense, warning of the time and place of an impact would at least allow us to store food and supplies and to evacuate regions near ground zero where damage would be the greatest.
My joke had a point, which was illustrated by gross hyperbole to the point of ridiculousness, or as you put it, 'unrelated and asinine'.
If we found a comet headed right at us there is nothing we could do about it. Not even Bruce Willis could save us. The universe is full of dangers on a scale so large that we would have no hope of avoiding them should they involve us. Some of them are not merely possible, but inevitable. Everyone dies eventually. Even the Earth.
"insurance" is meaningless when there is nothing left to benefit from the payout.
That is not to say we shouldn't do something about the dangers we CAN avoid, mitigate, or prepare for, like charcoal grilled food and sunspots. But let's not get too upset about the dangers we can't do anything about. Case in point: I have a fire detector. I can detect and avoid the worst repercussions of a fire. I do not spend any time worrying about an airplane crashing on my head. It could happen but I cant do anything about it.
I think that was somewhere in the back of her mind as she was speaking.
The number of existing connections in any single actual or hypothetical brain is of course less than the number of atoms in the universe, since again the connections are also made of atoms.
But as you said, the number of possible combinations of all potential connections, assuming that all brain cells could theoretically be connected to any combination of other brain cells and still have a viable brain, is greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
However, the vast majority of those theoretical combinations would not be viable or possible brains. Just think about the extremes, only one brain cell connected to one other. Only one brain cell connected to two others, all brain cells connected to all other brain cells, all brain cells connected to all other brain cells except one, etc.
So again, even if we give her the benefit of the doubt that she was explaining poorly but actually talking about combinatorials... she was still wrong.
My favorite anecdote was my Junior High science teacher who, trying to emphasize how complex the brain is, told us 'There are more brain cells in the brain than atoms in the universe.' I raised my hand and said 'If brain cells are made out of atoms that is clearly impossible.' She disagreed. We argued and I got detention for undermining her in front of the class.
I think the point she was trying to make was that there are more possible interconnections between brains cells in the brain than atoms in the universe, which is still wrong.
Sigh. I wonder how many kids thought I was being a wiseass vs how many realized how stupid the teacher's statement was.
I'm sure there is discontent among artists who wish they were paid as much as engineers in private sector as well. They get over it. They made their choice for many reasons besides the money. Teachers will get over it too.
> contact the wireless phone provider you are using, and ask them about setting up a micro-cell, repeater, or enhancer
I don't know what universe you live in, but in mine my wireless phone provider can barely explain my bill, and technical support consists of: 'Power it off, then power it on again' repeated ten times, followed by 'your phone is broken you have to buy a new one', all in an Indian accent. If I were to ask about a 'micro-cell' they would reply that nothing is on sale at this time. If I were to ask about a repeater they would repeat their introduction.
Well, my point was that Microsoft can and will do what they can to make their 'open standard' as proprietary as possible. They can hire/bribe third-party companies to write (crappy) implementations to meet some of those requirements. I think specifying XML in the requirements is a useless, even foolish, thing to do. If XML is the best way to meet the interoperable requirements then it will be used, otherwise something else will. Why are politicians making technical implementation decisions? And this isn't because I despise XML. Really, it's not.
Actually, it's not so much the trash I'm worried about, as much as the occasional broken bulb spewing Mercury into the carpets that my kids play on. I won't have it in my house.
> California actually has a higher population than Australia
And are all of these Californians and Australians going to bring their used CF bulbs to the hazardous waste disosal facility, as the instructions say to do? NO. Nobody is going to do this. Everyone is going to dump their used CF bulbs in the garbage EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE MERCURY IN THEM.
Great environmental move California and Australia.
Slashdot Mirror
> I think the distinction between "government" and "family" is actually a little artificial
I think this is one of the most wrong things I've ever read.
A parent has a direct compelling desire to protect and nurture his/her child. The parent has intimate knowledge and experience of that child's unique requirements. The parent has a genetic drive to insure the child's welfare. I can tell you as a parent that this drive is powerful and in the same realm as the drive for food and shelter. I feel the need to care for my child the same way I feel the need to eat.
The "government" is not a single entity, but the resultant vector of millions of competing agendas and forces. As such it doesn't "care" for any child and it doesn't have knowledge of any child. It can only set broad policies that hopefully indirectly cause "good" but often cause "bad" in it's pursuit of particular agendas.
Corporations and Governments are not people. They are not living entities, although we often treat them as such legally.
To say the "government" can care for a child is simply incorrect. A teacher, a nanny, a social worker, a lawyer and a congressman may be affecting a child, but there is no such person as "the government".
> Common misconception - the actual marginal cost of each additional sale is its *support* component not the cost of copying. Each additional copy costs the manufacturer next to nothing only if the software manufacturer provides no support with each new sale.
Really? Why don't you call Microsoft right now and see what kind of support you get.
It's next to worthless.
> I would much rather have children watch [the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan. Black Hawk Down] at an early age, and have those images burned into their brains
> In my opinion, if children are going to be exposed to any violence, it should only be the most realistic violence
> I'm not even a pacifist
I think we got that point without the disclaimer...
Don't think this will be limited to 'printing' cheap plastic prototypes for long.
The next evolution will be a generation of application specific 3D printers for other materials. Case in point is this machine that prints an entire house out of concrete.
The next evolution after that will be 3D printers with a variety of materials at their disposal that can print designs with different components made out of different materials.
I admit that it could be a very long time before we have a machine that could squeeze out a Ferrari, because of all the sophisticated requirements of the various internal parts. Some materials can't just be extruded out of a tube. They have to be alloyed, heated, annealed, zapped, thin-film deposited, welded, extracted from live bacteria, etc, etc, etc
> ...the coolness of which is directly proportional to hotness of your daughter, the hotness of whom must then be further weighted by multiplying her hotness by some function of her age. The age-multiplier curve features an abrupt discontinuity that jumps 0.00 to 1.00 at age 18, and some sort of exponential backoff function that starts decreasing the multiplier at around age 35-45.
Hotness = BeautyFactor * SexyFactor * AgeHotnesseAdjustment
AgeHotnessAdjustment = cos(2*(Age-18)/3.14159)
Gives you maximum hotness at 18, falling slowly in the 20's, dropping rapidly after that.
Also, some hotness under 18 (lets be realistic!) , but not too far under 18
> Get your credit account cancelled by Oil Company A because they know how often you should need oil and you didn't order form them
I suspect you are misrepresenting this for greater outrage.
Here, in New York, I can sign up for an oil account at a fixed price. If oil rates go up I am protected because I keep paying the rate at the time I signed up (with all kinds of possible modifiers from different oil companies, like the price is reset each year, etc).
I am also locked in to that rate if oil prices go down.
If oil prices go down, many people try to 'cheat' on their accounts by buying oil from a cheaper oil company at the current rate. Note that it is not necessarily that my oil company is more expensive, it is that I have signed up for a fixed rate account with protection against oil price variations.
If the oil company sees that I have ordered significantly less than my house should use they will cancel my account because I have broken my deal with them. I can't enjoy the protection of a fixed price when the rates go up, but not buy from them when the rates go down. That's not the deal they are offering.
That is like getting a fixed rate mortgage on a house. As long as the current rates are higher than my mortgage I pay my mortgage. If current rates go down I stop paying my mortgage and start paying a variable rate instead. You can't do that. You would have to break your contract, cancel your account, and refinance with someone else.
But then, of course, you are no longer protected in case rates go up again.
My idea of backpacking around the world is very different from most of the posters I read here. I've done it and my recommendation is bring a good sturdy pair of boots, a toothbrush, and of course a small towel (tnx HGTTG).
Anything else will get broken, stolen, soaked, dropped, forgotten, traded.
I had two sets of socks, underwear, t-shirts, pants. One to wear while the other set was drying - I would rinse them out each night wherever I was, sometimes I had a sink sometimes a stream.
Leaving the rest up to ingenuity and fate forces you to become part of the place you are in and makes for a far more interesting trip.
NASA seems to agree with you:
How can we protect ourselves?
NEO impacts are the only major natural hazard that we can effectively protect ourselves against, by deflecting (or destroying) the NEO before it hits the Earth. The first step in any program of planetary defense is to find the NEOs; we can't protect against something we don't know exists. We also need a long warning time, at least a decade, to send spacecraft to intercept the object and deflect it. Many defensive schemes have been studied in a preliminary way, but none in detail. In the absence of active defense, warning of the time and place of an impact would at least allow us to store food and supplies and to evacuate regions near ground zero where damage would be the greatest.
> No, but you probably pay taxes which fund the FAA. They worry for you so you don't have to.
Ah, if only there were a UUA (Universal Universe Administration) to make sure all those objects in space are behaving!
Humor, meet 'Living Fractal'. 'Living Fractal', humor.
My joke had a point, which was illustrated by gross hyperbole to the point of ridiculousness, or as you put it, 'unrelated and asinine'.
If we found a comet headed right at us there is nothing we could do about it. Not even Bruce Willis could save us.
The universe is full of dangers on a scale so large that we would have no hope of avoiding them should they involve us.
Some of them are not merely possible, but inevitable. Everyone dies eventually. Even the Earth.
"insurance" is meaningless when there is nothing left to benefit from the payout.
That is not to say we shouldn't do something about the dangers we CAN avoid, mitigate, or prepare for, like charcoal grilled food and sunspots. But let's not get too upset about the dangers we can't do anything about.
Case in point: I have a fire detector. I can detect and avoid the worst repercussions of a fire. I do not spend any time worrying about an airplane crashing on my head. It could happen but I cant do anything about it.
I think that was somewhere in the back of her mind as she was speaking.
The number of existing connections in any single actual or hypothetical brain is of course less than the number of atoms in the universe, since again the connections are also made of atoms.
But as you said, the number of possible combinations of all potential connections, assuming that all brain cells could theoretically be connected to any combination of other brain cells and still have a viable brain, is greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
However, the vast majority of those theoretical combinations would not be viable or possible brains. Just think about the extremes, only one brain cell connected to one other. Only one brain cell connected to two others, all brain cells connected to all other brain cells, all brain cells connected to all other brain cells except one, etc.
So again, even if we give her the benefit of the doubt that she was explaining poorly but actually talking about combinatorials... she was still wrong.
I think we also need NASA to monitor the Sun for any signs of impending supernova.
A supernova would destroy the Earth and clearly kill all of us. Therefore we should spend whatever it takes to monitor the Sun.
Oh, and I suppose we need NASA to keep a death-clock for the heat-death of the Universe too.
And perhaps satellites to monitor the humongous black holes in the center of galaxies to make sure we aren't drifting towards any of them.
Oh, and we shouldn't eat charcoaled food either. Don't forget the blackened food...
> I took a poll and found that more kids thought you were being a wiseass than there are people in the USA!!!
If Americans are made of wiseass, then this is clearly impossible!
Meme, anyone?
(of course, by directly addressing the possibility of becoming a meme it has been doomed to non-memehood)
My favorite anecdote was my Junior High science teacher who, trying to emphasize how complex the brain is, told us 'There are more brain cells in the brain than atoms in the universe.'
I raised my hand and said 'If brain cells are made out of atoms that is clearly impossible.' She disagreed. We argued and I got detention for undermining her in front of the class.
I think the point she was trying to make was that there are more possible interconnections between brains cells in the brain than atoms in the universe, which is still wrong.
Sigh. I wonder how many kids thought I was being a wiseass vs how many realized how stupid the teacher's statement was.
I'm sure there is discontent among artists who wish they were paid as much as engineers in private sector as well. They get over it. They made their choice for many reasons besides the money. Teachers will get over it too.
> contact the wireless phone provider you are using, and ask them about setting up a micro-cell, repeater, or enhancer
I don't know what universe you live in, but in mine my wireless phone provider can barely explain my bill, and technical support consists of: 'Power it off, then power it on again' repeated ten times, followed by 'your phone is broken you have to buy a new one', all in an Indian accent. If I were to ask about a 'micro-cell' they would reply that nothing is on sale at this time. If I were to ask about a repeater they would repeat their introduction.
Well, my point was that Microsoft can and will do what they can to make their 'open standard' as proprietary as possible. They can hire/bribe third-party companies to write (crappy) implementations to meet some of those requirements. I think specifying XML in the requirements is a useless, even foolish, thing to do. If XML is the best way to meet the interoperable requirements then it will be used, otherwise something else will. Why are politicians making technical implementation decisions? And this isn't because I despise XML. Really, it's not.
Just specifying XML doesn't mean much, really:
... more binary crap...
<document>
Description of MS Open Format
<![CDATA[
37642364 78346478 23465789 34657834 65783465 78934653 47895634 78563478 65347856
56347825 63478256 34786578 34567893 45678934 65783456 78465783 46578346 57834567
34895723 48957348 90578934 75890347 58934758 93475892
]]>
</document>
> They were told to take enough food for the year on the arc, what did they eat
What do you think happened to the Gironamous, the Hippalati, the Woola, and many other species that Noah "saved" but aren't around anymore?
Noah: "Woola, we have good news and bad news. The good news is we are inviting you to lunch..."
Redundant? Redundant?! Did you even click on the link?
-1 lazy moderating
The problem is widely believed to be due to crossbreeding. The "mutt" bees get their homing insticts mixed up.
> mercury pollution
Actually, it's not so much the trash I'm worried about, as much as the occasional broken bulb spewing Mercury into the carpets that my kids play on. I won't have it in my house.
> The bowling alley... ...runs out of spares
>
+1 unintentionally funny
> California actually has a higher population than Australia
And are all of these Californians and Australians going to bring their used CF bulbs to the hazardous waste disosal facility, as the instructions say to do? NO. Nobody is going to do this. Everyone is going to dump their used CF bulbs in the garbage EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE MERCURY IN THEM.
Great environmental move California and Australia.
> Why should we let the Americans control our internal policy?
You Canadians will let your internal policy be controlled for the same reason Americans let their internal policy be controlled.
$$$$