"Who pays for smokers who can't work because of emphysema, or the man who ends up in trauma care because he chose not to wear his seat belt?"
The same people that pay for crack babies, welfare moms and homeless people. The same people that indirectly sponsor cancer research through government grants. Taxpayers.
No matter what the system is, there will be those that contribute and those who unfairly benefit from it. All you can do is try to intelligently manage it and keep the damage low. However this is all unrelated to the topic at hand, which is a small, lazy, vocal group grabbing the reins of the government and steering it into an Orwellian domain where what you see and what you play is strictly monitored by the government.
The less responsibility you take for yourself, the more responsibility society, and by extension, the government, must take for you. Stop expecting the government and laws to solve your problems, and stop trying to pass laws that circumvent the freedom we all take for granted in this country.
Yeah and it needs to be mentioned that the Amiga and older (Falcon) Ataris were some of the first truly multi-tasking machines available for the desktop. By 'truly' multi-tasking I mean they had separate chips for each part of the system. They had a video chip, an audio chip, a drive controller chip, etc. and the OS just had to lay around and send commands to each one. This was way different than the IBM PCs at that time which were horribly limited in comparison. The way they worked was beneficial to musicians, particularly MIDI musicians, because the latency tended to be very low. This makes perfect sense for arcade hardware.
Well, I wouldn't exactly call my post 'all wrong' because the gist of it remains true, but thanks for the history lesson. This stuff is interesting..you should check the Military Channel, they had a show on Spitfires vs. Messers and even had two old tyme pilots, one German and one British, meet up and sit in each other's planes. Fascinating to see what they had to say.
BTW the Messer also had a serious flaw that few but the pilots knew about: the giant piece of steel behind the pilot's head serving as armor was a massive blind spot. German pilots couldn't see directly behind themselves.
The first iteration of the Spitfire was a complete weakling due to the machine guns mounted in it's wings. This was likely a design compromise due to the unusual wing design. As a result a ton of British pilots got shot down on a regular basis by the almighty Messerschmitt BF 109 with their Rheinmetall MK 108 30MM cannons. This was an actual cannon and was devastating to any plane unlucky enough to get hit by one or two rounds. In addition the Messer had twin 13mm machine guns mounted in the wings. The Spitfire, however, was an equal in all other aspects; size, horsepower, maneuverability (had a tiny edge there). The armor was quite a bit weaker than that of the Messer, another design compromise.
All in all the Spitfire, minus the weak guns, was a great plane. Any type of fighter is a conglomeration of compromises but the difference between success and failure can be judged by the aspects most affected by compromise. You can have heavily armored but slow, lightly armored but quick, etc. etc. I think the designers of the Spitfire and Messerschmitt did a wonderful job for their era.
You're right about Americans being desensitized to hearing aids. The weird part about that is the fact that World War II was the impetus. For milennia people have had hearing problems from birth or as they age but usually not en masse.
During World War II many soldiers that fought overseas were constantly exposed to extremely loud noise. I guess you could say this about any group of soldiers at any time, but the major impact here was the sheer volume of Americans that went off to war.
My grandfather was a Marine and fired off 120mm antiaircraft cannons. Back then I guess nobody thought about ear protection, so he came back about half deaf. He and his fellow Marines have had hearing aids for as long as I can remember. To me, it was a one-day curiousity, and I just have to speak up when I talk to him.
The point is that when something once unusual becomes commonplace, acceptance is nearly automatic.
I always assumed that 'the stranger' was using your other hand rather than your 'daily stroker' hand. I guess your disturbing explanation changes all that.
The beginning of the Movie Games Suck tenet was the awful E.T. for Atari 2600. Later, the worst game house of all time, Ocean, cemented that tenet. Crappy game after crappy game, from Robocop to Batman, they just ruined everything they touched yet kept on landing contracts for some unknown reason.
You must have set some kind of recording for beating that super crappy game. How did you avoid falling into the holes and spending 10 hours wiggling the joystick around to get ET to float out of the hole? Better yet, how did you avoid instantly falling back into the same hole the second you got out?
Thanks for the extra information. I've always found the Nazi eugenics program fascinating but the results were never really exposed. Lebensborn might have been a success for all we know, it was just on too small of a scale to make an impact on the general populous. Then again, maybe it was a big waste of time and resources.
What I'd like to know is if Hitler's eugenics program had the desired result. I mean, it's 50 years later, there should be some generational samples you can take to judge the effectiveness.
Also, he implemented a super soldier program, where the best soldiers (by physical characteristic measurements and IQ tests) were 'encouraged' to breed with very suitable females. I can't remember what the whorehouses were called but they had a special name. At any rate, there were plenty of births as a result, and I'm sure they're documented.
I know what you mean. I posted earlier saying that Nintendo needs to grow with their fanbase, but the rabid Nintendo fanboys moderated me to oblivion for opposing their viewpoint.
It still puzzles me why Nintendo refuses to grow up. Since the Sega Genesis, they've been stuck in 'baby game' mode where you play as fruity little stuffed animal characters and use whistles instead of swords. Nintendo didn't even use 'blood' in their games at the time the Genesis did, and for them it was almost a selling point at the time.
I understand that they feel they need to be kid and parent-friendly, but they need to understand that their user base is growing up, and to thrive in the market, you have to cater to your users. You can still have Mario and Luigi jumping around collecting coins, but RPG fans probably won't go for another round of tiny-little-kid-wielding-paring-knife-saving-yet-a nother-princess They've had so many FF games that have taught them to expect a whole lot more. The comments in the blog article from hardcore players, complaining about the graphics on the last title, bear this out. The world no longer consists of single platform living rooms, and Nintendo needs to face the facts.
Back in the day, all you had to play was Nintendo. If you wanted platforming, you had SMB. If you wanted role playing, Zelda. Adventure, Metroid. Things have changed. Alot. Now, you may have an Xbox sitting next to your PS2, two rooms away from your PC with Battlefield 2 and WOW installed on it. Who cares about Nintendo anymore, seriously? Sure, they have a great handheld market...well except for the dismal sales of the DS and lack of titles. The GBA is still strong right?
I think Nintendo sealed their own fate by refusing to switch to the CD format back in the late 90's. If the N64 would have been CD based like the original Playstation was (hell even the Saturn had one), they would have kept more developers around and might still have a position of dominance. AFAIK they're in third place, behind Microsoft for god's sake! 15 years ago this was unimaginable.
I've said it before and I'll say it again..Nintendo, it's time to grow up.
Wow, so it does exactly what Teatimer does, that's pretty fancy.
It's part of spybot s&d now, basically it babysits the registry and alerts you to attempted changes. If you install/uninstall software alot it can get on your nerves, but that one registry change from a random app is all it takes to hose your box.
If I were to bet on a winner in the race for flexible displays, I'd put my money on Fujitsu. Just a month or so ago they had an article on their prototype color (!) roll-up display that looked much better. It was also bi-stable. I'll take two when they're ready.:)
Stiff competitive spirit? It's so stiff it's unhealthy for the market. It's twice as unhealthy for computing security, because it gives the world a handful of singular targets to attack. Diversity is one of the security field's greatest allies, and you do not get this from Microsoft. It's always App X running on Platform Y at Version Z with holes in A, B, C and D.
Security aside, without competition, what spurs improvement? The only motivating force is internal greed, not the driving urge to 'just make it better'. That's why you get the Windows treadmill, upgrade everything, hardware included, every 3 years or so, or risk having the newest OS run poorly or not at all. Apple is starting to do the same thing now with their expensive service packs bi-yearly, upgrade or don't use anything new.
It's one thing to be a winner by being fastest in the race. It's another to win by throwing banana peels at your competitor's feet.
Warming water by a few degrees won't make much of a difference. Going from room temperature @ 72F to lukewarm at 90F doesn't cause much measurable expansion, and this would be an unusual change that may be devastating to the creatures in the sea.
Yes, putting a bottle on a cooker will vaporize the water and lead to much greater expansion than freezing it would. However, the change from glacial ice to seawater temperature (whatever it is, probably cooler than room temperature on average) wouldn't cause the same extreme expansion you mention. Even if you did manage to heat the water close to the boiling point to where measurable expansion took place, your displacement argument dies because the water vaporizes and evaporates.
Again, alot of this sealevel stuff is bad science and I stand by my assertion.
As a previous poster mentioned, a few bucks worth of liquid rubber or some sort of gelatin easily allows someone to copy your fingerprint. It's not nearly as secure as a handshake would be. People hurting their hands..well, honestly, in the IT and most other soft industries, it doesn't happen very often. You probably couldn't use something like this at a junkyard or construction site but I don't see a need for it at either place.
Try this one on for size. It's my little gift to the biometric community.
In many protocols, when a session is initiated, the beginning of the transaction includes a handshake. One side says hello are you there, the other replies yes I'm here and the session continues.
Why not make an actual, physical handshake verifier? I'm sure most people are consistent with their real handshakes, and there are a wide variety of measurable parameters a handshake can provide. For example, when shaking someone's hand, you apply very specific pressure, grip a particular way that spreads pressure to consistent points on your buddy's hand, hand temperature (which can vary depending on a number of factors but we're talking average), hand placement, duration and motion of the shake, etc. You could take it one step further and teach your employees and the system some jive handshakes that involve many steps. The admin could have the most intricate handshake of all.
The beauty to all this is that handshakes tend to be very personal and never given out. How could someone hack or even learn a secret handshake? It'd be pretty damn hard to do and even harder to replicate once you figured out the sequence due to pressure and duration, etc.
Schneier should give this one some thought. All you really need is a rubber jointed hand sticking out of the wall (or hidden inside it, retractable) that feels appropriately like a real human hand. Ask the RealDoll people for advice on this. Load it up with sensors and start training it.
Slashdot Mirror
The human body and the earth's surface are comprised of about 70% water. So...do the math on how much your morbidly obese relatives will net you.
"Who pays for smokers who can't work because of emphysema, or the man who ends up in trauma care
because he chose not to wear his seat belt?"
The same people that pay for crack babies, welfare moms and homeless people. The same people that indirectly sponsor cancer research through government grants. Taxpayers.
No matter what the system is, there will be those that contribute and those who unfairly benefit from it. All you can do is try to intelligently manage it and keep the damage low. However this is all unrelated to the topic at hand, which is a small, lazy, vocal group grabbing the reins of the government and steering it into an Orwellian domain where what you see and what you play is strictly monitored by the government.
The less responsibility you take for yourself, the more responsibility society, and by extension, the government, must take for you. Stop expecting the government and laws to solve your problems, and stop trying to pass laws that circumvent the freedom we all take for granted in this country.
Yeah and it needs to be mentioned that the Amiga and older (Falcon) Ataris were some of the first truly multi-tasking machines available for the desktop. By 'truly' multi-tasking I mean they had separate chips for each part of the system. They had a video chip, an audio chip, a drive controller chip, etc. and the OS just had to lay around and send commands to each one. This was way different than the IBM PCs at that time which were horribly limited in comparison. The way they worked was beneficial to musicians, particularly MIDI musicians, because the latency tended to be very low. This makes perfect sense for arcade hardware.
Well at least we'd get alot of really cheap glass.
Well, you're in luck. After 30 minutes of straining my brain, googling, and searching Discovery.com, I've found the series.
u ctDisplay?catalogId=10000&storeId=10000&langId=-1& productId=52514
... World War II disc that I was talking about. Probably worth the money if this stuff interests you. :)
http://shopping.discovery.com/stores/servlet/Prod
It's the Greatest Clashes
Well, I wouldn't exactly call my post 'all wrong' because the gist of it remains true, but thanks for the history lesson. This stuff is interesting..you should check the Military Channel, they had a show on Spitfires vs. Messers and even had two old tyme pilots, one German and one British, meet up and sit in each other's planes. Fascinating to see what they had to say.
BTW the Messer also had a serious flaw that few but the pilots knew about: the giant piece of steel behind the pilot's head serving as armor was a massive blind spot. German pilots couldn't see directly behind themselves.
The first iteration of the Spitfire was a complete weakling due to the machine guns mounted in it's wings. This was likely a design compromise due to the unusual wing design. As a result a ton of British pilots got shot down on a regular basis by the almighty Messerschmitt BF 109 with their Rheinmetall MK 108 30MM cannons. This was an actual cannon and was devastating to any plane unlucky enough to get hit by one or two rounds. In addition the Messer had twin 13mm machine guns mounted in the wings. The Spitfire, however, was an equal in all other aspects; size, horsepower, maneuverability (had a tiny edge there). The armor was quite a bit weaker than that of the Messer, another design compromise.
All in all the Spitfire, minus the weak guns, was a great plane. Any type of fighter is a conglomeration of compromises but the difference between success and failure can be judged by the aspects most affected by compromise. You can have heavily armored but slow, lightly armored but quick, etc. etc. I think the designers of the Spitfire and Messerschmitt did a wonderful job for their era.
Great for bikers, it's a helmet-optional job.
You're right about Americans being desensitized to hearing aids. The weird part about that is the fact that World War II was the impetus. For milennia people have had hearing problems from birth or as they age but usually not en masse.
During World War II many soldiers that fought overseas were constantly exposed to extremely loud noise. I guess you could say this about any group of soldiers at any time, but the major impact here was the sheer volume of Americans that went off to war.
My grandfather was a Marine and fired off 120mm antiaircraft cannons. Back then I guess nobody thought about ear protection, so he came back about half deaf. He and his fellow Marines have had hearing aids for as long as I can remember. To me, it was a one-day curiousity, and I just have to speak up when I talk to him.
The point is that when something once unusual becomes commonplace, acceptance is nearly automatic.
I always assumed that 'the stranger' was using your other hand rather than your 'daily stroker' hand. I guess your disturbing explanation changes all that.
The beginning of the Movie Games Suck tenet was the awful E.T. for Atari 2600. Later, the worst game house of all time, Ocean, cemented that tenet. Crappy game after crappy game, from Robocop to Batman, they just ruined everything they touched yet kept on landing contracts for some unknown reason.
You must have set some kind of recording for beating that super crappy game. How did you avoid falling into the holes and spending 10 hours wiggling the joystick around to get ET to float out of the hole? Better yet, how did you avoid instantly falling back into the same hole the second you got out?
Quite possibly THE worst game ever made.
Thanks for the extra information. I've always found the Nazi eugenics program fascinating but the results were never really exposed. Lebensborn might have been a success for all we know, it was just on too small of a scale to make an impact on the general populous. Then again, maybe it was a big waste of time and resources.
What I'd like to know is if Hitler's eugenics program had the desired result. I mean, it's 50 years later, there should be some generational samples you can take to judge the effectiveness.
Also, he implemented a super soldier program, where the best soldiers (by physical characteristic measurements and IQ tests) were 'encouraged' to breed with very suitable females. I can't remember what the whorehouses were called but they had a special name. At any rate, there were plenty of births as a result, and I'm sure they're documented.
don't be harsh, everynoe nose that programers are teh worst spelars, evar. how do you thnki bugs hapen by acident LOL
I know what you mean. I posted earlier saying that Nintendo needs to grow with their fanbase, but the rabid Nintendo fanboys moderated me to oblivion for opposing their viewpoint.
Viva democracy, viva Slashdot!
It still puzzles me why Nintendo refuses to grow up. Since the Sega Genesis, they've been stuck in 'baby game' mode where you play as fruity little stuffed animal characters and use whistles instead of swords. Nintendo didn't even use 'blood' in their games at the time the Genesis did, and for them it was almost a selling point at the time.
a nother-princess They've had so many FF games that have taught them to expect a whole lot more. The comments in the blog article from hardcore players, complaining about the graphics on the last title, bear this out. The world no longer consists of single platform living rooms, and Nintendo needs to face the facts.
I understand that they feel they need to be kid and parent-friendly, but they need to understand that their user base is growing up, and to thrive in the market, you have to cater to your users. You can still have Mario and Luigi jumping around collecting coins, but RPG fans probably won't go for another round of tiny-little-kid-wielding-paring-knife-saving-yet-
Back in the day, all you had to play was Nintendo. If you wanted platforming, you had SMB. If you wanted role playing, Zelda. Adventure, Metroid. Things have changed. Alot. Now, you may have an Xbox sitting next to your PS2, two rooms away from your PC with Battlefield 2 and WOW installed on it. Who cares about Nintendo anymore, seriously? Sure, they have a great handheld market...well except for the dismal sales of the DS and lack of titles. The GBA is still strong right?
I think Nintendo sealed their own fate by refusing to switch to the CD format back in the late 90's. If the N64 would have been CD based like the original Playstation was (hell even the Saturn had one), they would have kept more developers around and might still have a position of dominance. AFAIK they're in third place, behind Microsoft for god's sake! 15 years ago this was unimaginable.
I've said it before and I'll say it again..Nintendo, it's time to grow up.
Wow, so it does exactly what Teatimer does, that's pretty fancy.
It's part of spybot s&d now, basically it babysits the registry and alerts you to attempted changes. If you install/uninstall software alot it can get on your nerves, but that one registry change from a random app is all it takes to hose your box.
Well it really comes down to which SID chip you're talking about. One had a cleaner sound and better filters, the other was dry and buzzy.
I made SID tunes back in the olden tymes and for people to really appreciate them they had to have the same C64 I did to match the chips.
BTW as a point of trivia, Ensoniq engineered those chips. Probably one of the greatest synth chips ever.
If I were to bet on a winner in the race for flexible displays, I'd put my money on Fujitsu. Just a month or so ago they had an article on their prototype color (!) roll-up display that looked much better. It was also bi-stable. I'll take two when they're ready. :)
Stiff competitive spirit? It's so stiff it's unhealthy for the market. It's twice as unhealthy for computing security, because it gives the world a handful of singular targets to attack. Diversity is one of the security field's greatest allies, and you do not get this from Microsoft. It's always App X running on Platform Y at Version Z with holes in A, B, C and D.
Security aside, without competition, what spurs improvement? The only motivating force is internal greed, not the driving urge to 'just make it better'. That's why you get the Windows treadmill, upgrade everything, hardware included, every 3 years or so, or risk having the newest OS run poorly or not at all. Apple is starting to do the same thing now with their expensive service packs bi-yearly, upgrade or don't use anything new.
It's one thing to be a winner by being fastest in the race. It's another to win by throwing banana peels at your competitor's feet.
Hahaha, nice Shatner rip. What movie was that from? Or was that from a Saturday Night Live skit?
Warming water by a few degrees won't make much of a difference. Going from room temperature @ 72F to lukewarm at 90F doesn't cause much measurable expansion, and this would be an unusual change that may be devastating to the creatures in the sea.
Yes, putting a bottle on a cooker will vaporize the water and lead to much greater expansion than freezing it would. However, the change from glacial ice to seawater temperature (whatever it is, probably cooler than room temperature on average) wouldn't cause the same extreme expansion you mention. Even if you did manage to heat the water close to the boiling point to where measurable expansion took place, your displacement argument dies because the water vaporizes and evaporates.
Again, alot of this sealevel stuff is bad science and I stand by my assertion.
As a previous poster mentioned, a few bucks worth of liquid rubber or some sort of gelatin easily allows someone to copy your fingerprint. It's not nearly as secure as a handshake would be. People hurting their hands..well, honestly, in the IT and most other soft industries, it doesn't happen very often. You probably couldn't use something like this at a junkyard or construction site but I don't see a need for it at either place.
Try this one on for size. It's my little gift to the biometric community.
In many protocols, when a session is initiated, the beginning of the transaction includes a handshake. One side says hello are you there, the other replies yes I'm here and the session continues.
Why not make an actual, physical handshake verifier? I'm sure most people are consistent with their real handshakes, and there are a wide variety of measurable parameters a handshake can provide. For example, when shaking someone's hand, you apply very specific pressure, grip a particular way that spreads pressure to consistent points on your buddy's hand, hand temperature (which can vary depending on a number of factors but we're talking average), hand placement, duration and motion of the shake, etc. You could take it one step further and teach your employees and the system some jive handshakes that involve many steps. The admin could have the most intricate handshake of all.
The beauty to all this is that handshakes tend to be very personal and never given out. How could someone hack or even learn a secret handshake? It'd be pretty damn hard to do and even harder to replicate once you figured out the sequence due to pressure and duration, etc.
Schneier should give this one some thought. All you really need is a rubber jointed hand sticking out of the wall (or hidden inside it, retractable) that feels appropriately like a real human hand. Ask the RealDoll people for advice on this. Load it up with sensors and start training it.