Actually they're just used for inventory.. the article mentions nothing of loss prevention.
The RFID tags are contained in throwaway paper labels attached to, but not embedded in, a variety of men's and women's clothing items in stores.
Someone could simply rip off the label before exiting the store if they wanted to shoplift.
Anyway, I think people's objection is that eventually the RFID tags will become commonplace. But instead of placing them in easy-to-remove paper lables, they will be embeddeded in the fabric, or other materials/products, to be used as you describe.
I'm not saying that will happen, although I think someone will try, or that there's any legitimate risk of people being tracked using these things, but that's "how this is bad" in a nutshell.
Marks & Spencer -- a department store as quintessentially British as tea & cake -- seems to be setting itself up as a tweed-clad Public Enemy Number One.
They clothe their businesses in the UK? That is weird.
But pro gaming and at least the popularity of gaming are here to stay.
If nothing else, the lack of posts under this topic -- on the "News For Nerds" site, of all places -- should be something of an indicator. Anyway, here are the problems in simple, easily digestible, line item form, since you keep making straw man arguments and attacking my analogies instead of the meat.
1) Watching gaming, if it's popular with anyone, will only be popular with a very narrow segment of the youth. Young kids will get bored with it quickly, as will those over 20 (IMO). Nobody else cares. Really. 2) That same demographic is watching less and less TV, and shifting toward on-demand entertainment from iTunes, BT, etc. 3) Competitive events on TV basically requires a large number of live viewers in order to succeed. See also: WNBA, MLS.
Your argument again? Oh yeah.. "You're old and professional gaming is here to stay for teh win!"
Re:IMO, a step towards improving our education
on
More A's, More Pay
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· Score: 1
They don't need to slip answers to cheat. They can make the multiple choice answers obvious, do practice tests, take questions verbatim from homework, and use other methods. Basically it's teaching the test instead of testing the teaching.
Additionally, this opens up teachers to student blackmail, especially from students who may not care about their grade to begin with.
That's not to say that there shouldn't be performance-based compensation, but QA should be performed by an semi-independant authority rather than the person who produces the goods, just like every other industry in the world.
I'm not shooting down nuclear -- I'm all for nuclear -- I was merely discussing hydrogen and the problems it faces in adoption. But even if we had a cheap, abundant source of electrical power, it would STILL be more efficient to put that power into batteries than use it to produce, compress, and distribute hydrogen, as each of those steps requires significant amounts of energy, and storing the stuff isn't easy either. Electricity already has a fairly reliable and efficient distribution network (in most places).
Batteries might not be feasible for planes, but the weight requirements wouldn't be any different for hydrogen due to the storage requirements.
I'm not advocating that we abandon hydrogen R&D (or any other promising technology), just that I'll be surprised if it pans out.
I'm not saying it's not impressive -- just not particularly impressive for most people to watch.
Also, by your logic, virtually everyone eats, so competitive eating should be the most popular event, and the best eater should be incredibly impressive.
Just because lots of people engage in a particular activity doesn't make it entertaining to watch. Usually it's the opposite, with a few notable exceptions, such as procreation, and sometimes talking.
Uh, the heat isn't treated as waste -- it drives the whole process. We're not talking about internal combustion -- nearly all power plants (except gas turbine) use the heat from [coal|oil|nuclear] fuel to create steam and drive turbines which turn the generators, and they're are designed to utilize every bit of heat that they can. Sure, some of it is exhausted, but as much of it is captured as possible. Some loss is unavoidable without superconductors, but we don't exactly have a cost effective method of producing those. In the meantime turning it into AC is the most effecient method we have. Even if we could distribute energy as heat, it would still probably be safer to stick with electricty. It's a lot easier to insulate electric current than heat.
Hydrogen is probably a red herring for portable energy. It costs too much (in terms of both dollars and energy) to produce, compress, and transport. Additionally, the most efficient method of producing hydrogen is using methane (natural gas), which releases C02 in the process. It'd be more economical to simply run cars straight off the methane.
It was recognized automatically on the Mac as well. If you're running Linux, you probably have a copy of XP. There may be 1 or 2 people who don't, but they're the exceptions. And of course, if you don't have any form of PC, then no, this wouldn't apply to you, although -- and this is purely anecdotal -- I haven't noticed a lot of people without computers reading Slashdot.
"Sucker Free?" Is that some sort of area where lollipops are prohibited? Not that MTV has ever been particularly good at naming shows. "Yo, MTV Raps" and "Headbanger's Ball" spring immediately to mind. Bah, I'm getting old.
Anyway, I play games fairly regularly. That said, I'm not so sure gaming deserves respect. To me it's a hobby, and putting a camera on it doesn't legitimize it as a profession any more than it would legitimize armpit farts (although I'm sure a certain portion of the population would be convinced merely because it was on TV). Sure, some people are exceptionally good at pushing buttons, but.. they're still just pushing buttons. The reason Monday Night Football hasn't been replaced by Monday Night Madden isn't because the latter isn't popular, but because a whole team of people working together, maintaining physical and mental discipline (or trying to) for hours on end is ultimately far more engaging, entertaining, and exciting.
IMO, video games are like golf: Fun to play; mind-numbing to watch. There may turn out to be an audience, but it definately won't be the old people who like to watch golf, and it seems that younger people -- especially in the nerd demographic -- are steering away from (live) TV in general, and probably wouldn't be watching MTV in particular.
Additionally, the space elevator is expected to be very tall, taking riders several miles above the surface of the earth where, experts say, they could fall to a harrowing death. And if that's not bad enough -- it turns out that if the earth were to suddenly stop spinning, the entire space elevator could come crashing back down to the ground!!! I, for one, will from now on refer to them only as "Space Elevators of Death!" in order to raise awareness about this potentially leathal issue!
The internet saved my life one time too. I was in a pretty bad car accident a few weeks ago. My car hydroplaned on the highway, and spun out, careening backwards into a concrete phone pole. The gas tank ruptured, and I was knocked unconscious. Fortunately the internet pulled me from the vehicle and rushed me to the ER. As it turned out, I suffered only some minor lacerations and a moderate case of whiplash, but who knows what might have happened if the internet hadn't been there.
4 MILLION! That's enough to sway the outcome of almost any national election.
Sure... any election that's within 1.25%.
Also, if you're going to do the Chicken Little routine, you may as well use the actual numbers. 1 vote out of 36 is 2.8%. The size of the population is (still) irrelevant.
It seems like the SSDD. Targeted advertising? Come on, this has been a pipe dream for years. Targeted advertising is about as useful as it is desirable -- which is to say, not very. Sure, it works for Google... because people are actively seeking something. Nobody goes to the ballpark to find out about a new car.
Tickets on a cellphone? This is obviously change for change's sake. Two peices of paper are just fine as it. You can put them in your shirt pocket, give one to a friend, or sell them when you can't make a game. Why in the hell would I want to tie that to my cellphone? Even if it worked exactly as intended, it would be less functional than the existing solution. There's a reason e-books haven't caught on.
Paying to show your face on the big screen? This has got to be the worst idea ever. Any and all excitement related to seeing yourself on the large display is directly related to the serendipity of the event (aside from those morons who propose at baseball games). People who don't want to pay will resent it, it will be abused by morons, and it's not like it couldn't be done just fine with existing technology. Call or log in up to a week in advance, give your seat number and CC#, and congratulations! You're on TV.
Watching instant replays? Everybody who wants this feature carries a small TV. If you're going to go digital with this, how about streaming the entire game in HD to the internet at large. I bet far more people would be interested in that than there are people who want to watch laptops in the stadium.
In short, adding a few new features that nobody wants and changing a perfectly working process would make this the Windows Vista of stadiums. T ujtw oolriserh y i hsluh arn oncbdit'at ehdsri itslgoo lhrt. yo tonhzacl raweee
Home locks are pickable so that police and locksmiths can open them. Your home is accessible by law.
Nonsense... Locks are pickable because there's little demand for something better. Most people realize that locks "keep honest people honest," so to speak, and it's not cost effective to use more expensive locks because a thief will just target the next weakest point, such as the front window. Locks simply prevent most people from just walking in and then saying "Well, the door was open!"
And it's largely the same for most home networks. Using WPA will keep out most people except those with a lot of time and a lot of determination, which is good enough for most home users.
It goes through waves. In early August, most colleges started back-to-school, the same thing happened. I'm not sure if that's relevant at all, but there definately seems to be a moderation famine every so often.
they see that the future is about integrating everything on the motherboard into one IC, and AMD wants the CPU to be that point of integration
So everything old is new again, eh?
I don't see the GPU disappearing anytime soon. It's much easier to create an IC that is good at one specific task than a multi-use IC that is just as good at that particular task. As long as there are companies that can outshine the CPU manufacturers' performance in graphics, there will be a market for GPUs. The only exception is if/when we reach a point where the limitation on graphic quality is purely the artists' skills/time, but that's a ways off, especially since art design is relatively easy to parallelize.
Not everyone has the right to vote. Absentee ballots are rarely counted, and some places (DC and protectorates) have no voting representation. Not to mention 4 million felons who can't vote.
Also, there's no reason to believe a sample size of 64% is significantly less accurate than a sample of 100%. So just because someone doesn't vote doesn't mean the results would change.
Additionally, Arrow's impossibility theorem makes a pretty convincing argument that voting is a fundamentally flawed decision-making process to begin with.
So there are lots of reasons for people not to vote. That doesn't mean they should remain silent in other areas. Of course it's always better to provide potential solutions than merely complain about the problems. On the other hand, problems rarely get attention if nobody complains about them, so it's not entirely unproductive to bitch, as you so eloquently put it, and nobody should remain silent just because he or she didn't vote.
Nonsense. It may be catastrophic for people who live in coastal regions, but not for humanity as a whole. That's not to say we shouldn't try to prevent catastrophy when possible, but in the big-big picture, a global ice age would be much closer to an extinction-level event than a +7C change. An ice age would affect the world's food supply, for everyone and everything. That would certainly be worse than even repeated hurricanes or widespread coastal flooding.
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Actually they're just used for inventory.. the article mentions nothing of loss prevention.
The RFID tags are contained in throwaway paper labels attached to, but not embedded in, a variety of men's and women's clothing items in stores.
Someone could simply rip off the label before exiting the store if they wanted to shoplift.
Anyway, I think people's objection is that eventually the RFID tags will become commonplace. But instead of placing them in easy-to-remove paper lables, they will be embeddeded in the fabric, or other materials/products, to be used as you describe.
I'm not saying that will happen, although I think someone will try, or that there's any legitimate risk of people being tracked using these things, but that's "how this is bad" in a nutshell.
Marks & Spencer -- a department store as quintessentially British as tea & cake -- seems to be setting itself up as a tweed-clad Public Enemy Number One.
They clothe their businesses in the UK? That is weird.
But pro gaming and at least the popularity of gaming are here to stay.
If nothing else, the lack of posts under this topic -- on the "News For Nerds" site, of all places -- should be something of an indicator. Anyway, here are the problems in simple, easily digestible, line item form, since you keep making straw man arguments and attacking my analogies instead of the meat.
1) Watching gaming, if it's popular with anyone, will only be popular with a very narrow segment of the youth. Young kids will get bored with it quickly, as will those over 20 (IMO). Nobody else cares. Really.
2) That same demographic is watching less and less TV, and shifting toward on-demand entertainment from iTunes, BT, etc.
3) Competitive events on TV basically requires a large number of live viewers in order to succeed. See also: WNBA, MLS.
Your argument again? Oh yeah.. "You're old and professional gaming is here to stay for teh win!"
They don't need to slip answers to cheat. They can make the multiple choice answers obvious, do practice tests, take questions verbatim from homework, and use other methods. Basically it's teaching the test instead of testing the teaching.
Additionally, this opens up teachers to student blackmail, especially from students who may not care about their grade to begin with.
That's not to say that there shouldn't be performance-based compensation, but QA should be performed by an semi-independant authority rather than the person who produces the goods, just like every other industry in the world.
I'm not shooting down nuclear -- I'm all for nuclear -- I was merely discussing hydrogen and the problems it faces in adoption. But even if we had a cheap, abundant source of electrical power, it would STILL be more efficient to put that power into batteries than use it to produce, compress, and distribute hydrogen, as each of those steps requires significant amounts of energy, and storing the stuff isn't easy either. Electricity already has a fairly reliable and efficient distribution network (in most places).
Batteries might not be feasible for planes, but the weight requirements wouldn't be any different for hydrogen due to the storage requirements.
I'm not advocating that we abandon hydrogen R&D (or any other promising technology), just that I'll be surprised if it pans out.
I'm not saying it's not impressive -- just not particularly impressive for most people to watch.
Also, by your logic, virtually everyone eats, so competitive eating should be the most popular event, and the best eater should be incredibly impressive.
Just because lots of people engage in a particular activity doesn't make it entertaining to watch. Usually it's the opposite, with a few notable exceptions, such as procreation, and sometimes talking.
Uh, the heat isn't treated as waste -- it drives the whole process. We're not talking about internal combustion -- nearly all power plants (except gas turbine) use the heat from [coal|oil|nuclear] fuel to create steam and drive turbines which turn the generators, and they're are designed to utilize every bit of heat that they can. Sure, some of it is exhausted, but as much of it is captured as possible. Some loss is unavoidable without superconductors, but we don't exactly have a cost effective method of producing those. In the meantime turning it into AC is the most effecient method we have. Even if we could distribute energy as heat, it would still probably be safer to stick with electricty. It's a lot easier to insulate electric current than heat.
Hydrogen is probably a red herring for portable energy. It costs too much (in terms of both dollars and energy) to produce, compress, and transport. Additionally, the most efficient method of producing hydrogen is using methane (natural gas), which releases C02 in the process. It'd be more economical to simply run cars straight off the methane.
Geothermal, hydro and tidal power all have much promise, but many parts of the world have no access to any of these options.
Over half the world's population lives near the coast, and for those who don't, we're working hard to bring the coast to them!
Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin is about to take a space walk where he will hit a golf ball from the ISS
Either that, or he will hit the ISS and send himself flying. Stay tuned!
It was recognized automatically on the Mac as well. If you're running Linux, you probably have a copy of XP. There may be 1 or 2 people who don't, but they're the exceptions. And of course, if you don't have any form of PC, then no, this wouldn't apply to you, although -- and this is purely anecdotal -- I haven't noticed a lot of people without computers reading Slashdot.
"Sucker Free?" Is that some sort of area where lollipops are prohibited? Not that MTV has ever been particularly good at naming shows. "Yo, MTV Raps" and "Headbanger's Ball" spring immediately to mind. Bah, I'm getting old.
Anyway, I play games fairly regularly. That said, I'm not so sure gaming deserves respect. To me it's a hobby, and putting a camera on it doesn't legitimize it as a profession any more than it would legitimize armpit farts (although I'm sure a certain portion of the population would be convinced merely because it was on TV). Sure, some people are exceptionally good at pushing buttons, but.. they're still just pushing buttons. The reason Monday Night Football hasn't been replaced by Monday Night Madden isn't because the latter isn't popular, but because a whole team of people working together, maintaining physical and mental discipline (or trying to) for hours on end is ultimately far more engaging, entertaining, and exciting.
IMO, video games are like golf: Fun to play; mind-numbing to watch. There may turn out to be an audience, but it definately won't be the old people who like to watch golf, and it seems that younger people -- especially in the nerd demographic -- are steering away from (live) TV in general, and probably wouldn't be watching MTV in particular.
Additionally, the space elevator is expected to be very tall, taking riders several miles above the surface of the earth where, experts say, they could fall to a harrowing death. And if that's not bad enough -- it turns out that if the earth were to suddenly stop spinning, the entire space elevator could come crashing back down to the ground!!! I, for one, will from now on refer to them only as "Space Elevators of Death!" in order to raise awareness about this potentially leathal issue!
Consider that raw numbers still don't matter, only percentages. The only reason to mention X million voters is to dramatize.
The internet saved my life one time too. I was in a pretty bad car accident a few weeks ago. My car hydroplaned on the highway, and spun out, careening backwards into a concrete phone pole. The gas tank ruptured, and I was knocked unconscious. Fortunately the internet pulled me from the vehicle and rushed me to the ER. As it turned out, I suffered only some minor lacerations and a moderate case of whiplash, but who knows what might have happened if the internet hadn't been there.
4 MILLION! That's enough to sway the outcome of almost any national election.
Sure... any election that's within 1.25%.
Also, if you're going to do the Chicken Little routine, you may as well use the actual numbers. 1 vote out of 36 is 2.8%. The size of the population is (still) irrelevant.
Or a very small Geo.
It seems like the SSDD. Targeted advertising? Come on, this has been a pipe dream for years. Targeted advertising is about as useful as it is desirable -- which is to say, not very. Sure, it works for Google... because people are actively seeking something. Nobody goes to the ballpark to find out about a new car.
Tickets on a cellphone? This is obviously change for change's sake. Two peices of paper are just fine as it. You can put them in your shirt pocket, give one to a friend, or sell them when you can't make a game. Why in the hell would I want to tie that to my cellphone? Even if it worked exactly as intended, it would be less functional than the existing solution. There's a reason e-books haven't caught on.
Paying to show your face on the big screen? This has got to be the worst idea ever. Any and all excitement related to seeing yourself on the large display is directly related to the serendipity of the event (aside from those morons who propose at baseball games). People who don't want to pay will resent it, it will be abused by morons, and it's not like it couldn't be done just fine with existing technology. Call or log in up to a week in advance, give your seat number and CC#, and congratulations! You're on TV.
Watching instant replays? Everybody who wants this feature carries a small TV. If you're going to go digital with this, how about streaming the entire game in HD to the internet at large. I bet far more people would be interested in that than there are people who want to watch laptops in the stadium.
In short, adding a few new features that nobody wants and changing a perfectly working process would make this the Windows Vista of stadiums.
T ujtw oolriserh y i
hsluh arn oncbdit'at
ehdsri itslgoo lhrt.
yo tonhzacl raweee
Home locks are pickable so that police and locksmiths can open them. Your home is accessible by law.
Nonsense... Locks are pickable because there's little demand for something better. Most people realize that locks "keep honest people honest," so to speak, and it's not cost effective to use more expensive locks because a thief will just target the next weakest point, such as the front window. Locks simply prevent most people from just walking in and then saying "Well, the door was open!"
And it's largely the same for most home networks. Using WPA will keep out most people except those with a lot of time and a lot of determination, which is good enough for most home users.
That is why our founding fathers set up our educational system.
If by "set up," you mean "failed to mention anything about it in the Constitution," then yes. Yes they did.
If a product is recalled before any have been sold, is it really a recall?
It goes through waves. In early August, most colleges started back-to-school, the same thing happened. I'm not sure if that's relevant at all, but there definately seems to be a moderation famine every so often.
they see that the future is about integrating everything on the motherboard into one IC, and AMD wants the CPU to be that point of integration
So everything old is new again, eh?
I don't see the GPU disappearing anytime soon. It's much easier to create an IC that is good at one specific task than a multi-use IC that is just as good at that particular task. As long as there are companies that can outshine the CPU manufacturers' performance in graphics, there will be a market for GPUs. The only exception is if/when we reach a point where the limitation on graphic quality is purely the artists' skills/time, but that's a ways off, especially since art design is relatively easy to parallelize.
Not everyone has the right to vote. Absentee ballots are rarely counted, and some places (DC and protectorates) have no voting representation. Not to mention 4 million felons who can't vote.
Also, there's no reason to believe a sample size of 64% is significantly less accurate than a sample of 100%. So just because someone doesn't vote doesn't mean the results would change.
Additionally, Arrow's impossibility theorem makes a pretty convincing argument that voting is a fundamentally flawed decision-making process to begin with.
So there are lots of reasons for people not to vote. That doesn't mean they should remain silent in other areas. Of course it's always better to provide potential solutions than merely complain about the problems. On the other hand, problems rarely get attention if nobody complains about them, so it's not entirely unproductive to bitch, as you so eloquently put it, and nobody should remain silent just because he or she didn't vote.
To the humans just as bad if not worse.
Nonsense. It may be catastrophic for people who live in coastal regions, but not for humanity as a whole. That's not to say we shouldn't try to prevent catastrophy when possible, but in the big-big picture, a global ice age would be much closer to an extinction-level event than a +7C change. An ice age would affect the world's food supply, for everyone and everything. That would certainly be worse than even repeated hurricanes or widespread coastal flooding.