I agree. If you are concerned about this, TinyURL allows you to enable "previews" now. When enabled, clicking on a tinyurl link will direct you to a page that shows you the link, where you can decide to click or not. See http://tinyurl.com/preview.php.
Bluetooth is unlike USB in that a single device can act as either a master or a slave at different times. (With USB you are either host or device, no switching around.) So I guess you could approximate a cube topology by alternately acting as a master or a slave. This would be slower since it can take up to three seconds to establish a new connection. On the other hand, this slowdown will prevent the Mindstorms hive from the high processing speeds required to gain consciousness and overthrow its user.
Bluetooth uses a (politically incorrect) master/slave topology. Meaning, if the three other bricks are slaves to your master, it is difficult for them to be masters to other slaves (because slaves are supposed to be responsive to the master). Having a device that is both master and slave creates what is known as a "scatternet" which isn't supported very well by most Bluetooth radios. Disclaimer: I haven't tried this with Mindstorms NXT yet to find out what happens.
Why would I want to put my information under your control?
Because Google can very likely manage it better than you can. If you don't agree, don't give it to them. If it follows the general trend we see in Google's Search/Maps/Earth/GMail/Picasa etc., Google Base will be more reliable, more accessible, more flexible, and more searchable than anything you will be able to assemble with your one little brain, or purchase with your one little pocketbook.
"Waah waah," you say, "what if Google uses the information nefariously?" If you use Windows then consider that Microsoft software sees every keystroke, every mouse click, every file you read or write, and every 0 or 1 you exchange on any network you happen to use. You sure trust them a lot, huh. So why freak out about Google seeing data that you deliberately upload to their servers?
Maybe we should build a city on top of this bulge.
Great idea! It could be America's new hot spot. A party town that is sure to be a blast. I predict real estate will explode there.
Thanks, wheelbarrow! Before reading your message I hadn't realized that people who advocate bicycles as a means of locomotion are evil, and want to steal my house, and force me to live in a shoebox, and require me to get a hall pass to go potty. I promise to run over a couple of them on my way home from work today.
Wait a minute. _I_ rode my bike to work today. And I have my own free-standing home! Living in this kind of self-contradiction is torture. I will have to go shoot myself now.
The actual difference is that creationists take their personal beliefs as axiomatic and work from there, whereas scientists use observables to winnow out which beliefs are true and which aren't.
I don't see a difference. Scientists every day take their personal beliefs (for example, that all phenomena have a materialistic cause) and work from there.
If you say, "but it's obvious that all phenomena have a materialistic cause" you are begging the question. To a theist, the existence of God is just as obvious.
Electoral College vs IRV vs Condorcet vs... but how will we decide which system to use, since a majority vote obviously isn't good enough? Do we draw straws?
Actually the only thing I can't decide on is, which is the sillier idea:
Joe Voter will correctly navigate a ranking system, when he can't even push the whole chad out of the correct row.
Joe Voter has even the foggiest notion what's best for the country.
Can someone explain to me why it's so gosh-durned important to pretend my actions in a public arena are really private?
Oh right, the evil gummint will track all of my "private" usage of public transportation and... and... do something evil with that info like nefariously improving the schedules.
And my evil local supermarket will track my purchases and give this "private" information to evil marketers who will... um... try to provide products and services that I want. The humanity!
If you want to stay anonymous then wear a paper bag on your head 24/7 and pay for everything with coin (you know those Euros have RFID tags in them now). But you might attract attention and, uh-oh, someone might write a newspaper article about you... better stay home with shades drawn.
Why not go 100% electric? I've been driving a Gizmo for about a month and I couldn't be happier with it.
During the day, it moves one human (me) 20-30 miles around town at up to 45mph. At night, it gets plugged in to an ordinary 110V outlet. That's it. No gas, no oil changes, hardly any insurance cost ($150/yr), practically nothing to break or wear out. If you factor in everything (depreciation, insurance, repair, etc.) it's about 35% of the operating costs of a normal car.
On the "minus" side: yes, it looks weird. Which means people smile and wave when you drive by. Busloads of schoolchildren try to get your attention. Hot chicks stare at you for a change. Ah well, you get used to it.
Just got back from a 3-day Christian men's camp this weekend. A group of us were debating a particular point of theology and someone said "now what's that verse...".
Naturally, I whipped out my Zire 71, did a full text NASB search and found and quoted the verse. In about 10 seconds. While we were walking. In the dark.
I'm sure people resisted the move away from rolled-up animal skins, too...
IrDA not good for anything? IrDA less convenient than Bluetooth or 802.11? You've got to be kidding me. On a Palm, here's how to send a business card:
IrDA: hold down contacts button, point at target, *BAM* it's done.
Bluetooth: select business card, inquire for devices in range (3-5 seconds), select target device, punch in PIN codes, finally send the data.
WiFi: !?!?, curse, change batteries.
IrDA takes up hardly any space in the design (you can easily find transceivers less than 10x5x4mm), uses hardly any power, and can have about 500% faster effective throughput. What's not to love?
Unfortunately, I think we're at a point in computing where a revolutionary improvements (like your 3-D-Chinese-character idea) can probably never happen.
Even if the idea was 3x as good, you would need to convince a critical mass of programmers to throw away their mice and keyboards for some wacky new 3D input device, learn Chinese, and basically relearn everything they know about programming. Ain't gonna happen.
Therefore, I predict that in 100 years, most programmers will be entering code into...ASCII text files! Long live emacs!
Alan Alda's bit was at least entertaining, if not original. To paraphrase: if only the Government could toss in a few billion...*poof* we're all browsing./ over IPv6 on our Linux desktops as our Hydrogen-powered cars navigate the freeway automatically.
Here's the solution: to watch a TV show you "subscribe" to it for a small fee, but you get a small credit back every time you sit through a commercial. Kinda like a metered sewer system, but in reverse.
What these companies are doing is so different from "traditional cross-breeding" that it's not even comparable. You can cross-breed all you want and you're not going to get corn that produces a specific drug.
The danger here is very real. For example, imagine corn that manufactures a human contraceptive managing to cross-polinate itself into ordinary corn. Imagine that corn being inadvertently used as a seed crop.
Nobody here is against scientific inquiry, so relax the anti-luddite rhetoric already. Are you going to let the 13-year-old next door experiment with radioactive isotopes? No? But just think of the scientific progress he might achieve!
My objection is to companies that run slipshod operations, are discovered by the USDA, and get away with a slap on the wrist. The second article describes how ProdiGene is negotiating for permission to resell the contaiminated soybeans as biodeisel fuel. Clever solution, but IMHO there should have been punitive damages that put ProdiGene out of business.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. If you are concerned about this, TinyURL allows you to enable "previews" now. When enabled, clicking on a tinyurl link will direct you to a page that shows you the link, where you can decide to click or not. See http://tinyurl.com/preview.php.
Bluetooth is unlike USB in that a single device can act as either a master or a slave at different times. (With USB you are either host or device, no switching around.) So I guess you could approximate a cube topology by alternately acting as a master or a slave. This would be slower since it can take up to three seconds to establish a new connection. On the other hand, this slowdown will prevent the Mindstorms hive from the high processing speeds required to gain consciousness and overthrow its user.
Bluetooth uses a (politically incorrect) master/slave topology. Meaning, if the three other bricks are slaves to your master, it is difficult for them to be masters to other slaves (because slaves are supposed to be responsive to the master). Having a device that is both master and slave creates what is known as a "scatternet" which isn't supported very well by most Bluetooth radios. Disclaimer: I haven't tried this with Mindstorms NXT yet to find out what happens.
Because Google can very likely manage it better than you can. If you don't agree, don't give it to them. If it follows the general trend we see in Google's Search/Maps/Earth/GMail/Picasa etc., Google Base will be more reliable, more accessible, more flexible, and more searchable than anything you will be able to assemble with your one little brain, or purchase with your one little pocketbook.
"Waah waah," you say, "what if Google uses the information nefariously?" If you use Windows then consider that Microsoft software sees every keystroke, every mouse click, every file you read or write, and every 0 or 1 you exchange on any network you happen to use. You sure trust them a lot, huh. So why freak out about Google seeing data that you deliberately upload to their servers?
Maybe we should build a city on top of this bulge. Great idea! It could be America's new hot spot. A party town that is sure to be a blast. I predict real estate will explode there.
Thanks, wheelbarrow! Before reading your message I hadn't realized that people who advocate bicycles as a means of locomotion are evil, and want to steal my house, and force me to live in a shoebox, and require me to get a hall pass to go potty. I promise to run over a couple of them on my way home from work today.
Wait a minute. _I_ rode my bike to work today. And I have my own free-standing home! Living in this kind of self-contradiction is torture. I will have to go shoot myself now.
I don't see a difference. Scientists every day take their personal beliefs (for example, that all phenomena have a materialistic cause) and work from there.
If you say, "but it's obvious that all phenomena have a materialistic cause" you are begging the question. To a theist, the existence of God is just as obvious.
Actually the only thing I can't decide on is, which is the sillier idea:
Worse than that: they'll force others to follow the same hypocritical standards! Niggardly pedagogues!
Oh right, the evil gummint will track all of my "private" usage of public transportation and ... and ... do something evil with that info like nefariously improving the schedules.
And my evil local supermarket will track my purchases and give this "private" information to evil marketers who will ... um ... try to provide products and services that I want. The humanity!
If you want to stay anonymous then wear a paper bag on your head 24/7 and pay for everything with coin (you know those Euros have RFID tags in them now). But you might attract attention and, uh-oh, someone might write a newspaper article about you ... better stay home with shades drawn.
During the day, it moves one human (me) 20-30 miles around town at up to 45mph. At night, it gets plugged in to an ordinary 110V outlet. That's it. No gas, no oil changes, hardly any insurance cost ($150/yr), practically nothing to break or wear out. If you factor in everything (depreciation, insurance, repair, etc.) it's about 35% of the operating costs of a normal car.
On the "minus" side: yes, it looks weird. Which means people smile and wave when you drive by. Busloads of schoolchildren try to get your attention. Hot chicks stare at you for a change. Ah well, you get used to it.
Naturally, I whipped out my Zire 71, did a full text NASB search and found and quoted the verse. In about 10 seconds. While we were walking. In the dark.
I'm sure people resisted the move away from rolled-up animal skins, too...
- IrDA: hold down contacts button, point at target, *BAM* it's done.
- Bluetooth: select business card, inquire for devices in range (3-5 seconds), select target device, punch in PIN codes, finally send the data.
- WiFi: !?!?, curse, change batteries.
IrDA takes up hardly any space in the design (you can easily find transceivers less than 10x5x4mm), uses hardly any power, and can have about 500% faster effective throughput. What's not to love?Unfortunately, I think we're at a point in computing where a revolutionary improvements (like your 3-D-Chinese-character idea) can probably never happen.
Even if the idea was 3x as good, you would need to convince a critical mass of programmers to throw away their mice and keyboards for some wacky new 3D input device, learn Chinese, and basically relearn everything they know about programming. Ain't gonna happen.
Therefore, I predict that in 100 years, most programmers will be entering code into...ASCII text files! Long live emacs!
Alan Alda's bit was at least entertaining, if not original. To paraphrase: if only the Government could toss in a few billion...*poof* we're all browsing ./ over IPv6 on our Linux desktops as our Hydrogen-powered cars navigate the freeway automatically.
- SciFi creates show for geeks...
- ...who buy DVRs so they can skip the ads...
- ...so the advertisers pull their funding and SciFi cancels the show...
- ...and the geeks start whining.
Here's the solution: to watch a TV show you "subscribe" to it for a small fee, but you get a small credit back every time you sit through a commercial. Kinda like a metered sewer system, but in reverse.What these companies are doing is so different from "traditional cross-breeding" that it's not even comparable. You can cross-breed all you want and you're not going to get corn that produces a specific drug.
The danger here is very real. For example, imagine corn that manufactures a human contraceptive managing to cross-polinate itself into ordinary corn. Imagine that corn being inadvertently used as a seed crop.
Nobody here is against scientific inquiry, so relax the anti-luddite rhetoric already. Are you going to let the 13-year-old next door experiment with radioactive isotopes? No? But just think of the scientific progress he might achieve!
My objection is to companies that run slipshod operations, are discovered by the USDA, and get away with a slap on the wrist. The second article describes how ProdiGene is negotiating for permission to resell the contaiminated soybeans as biodeisel fuel. Clever solution, but IMHO there should have been punitive damages that put ProdiGene out of business.