we can conclude that the extra energy reaching the Earth would be in the region of 0.0000001%.
Please don't confuse the trolls with numbers! If you start bringing quantitative facts into the discussion they won't be able to lie with abstraction, using the false identity "heats the atmosphere" to imply "heats the atmosphere to a significant degree" instead of the true "heats the atmosphere vastly less than an equivalent fossil fuel plant would."
I gotta love the "it seems to me" replies on this story: they demonstrate the complete scientific and technical illiteracy of/. posters. All kinds of information--actual, quantitative facts!--is available in the linked stories, and clever people can even go out and search around to generate independent confirmation the way you have. But that won't stop the morons who want to tell us all that "it just makes sense" to them that this will result in boiling lakes of fire, deep-fried tweety birds and gigantic lizards stepping on Tokyo.
"I may be ignorant and innumerate, but I that doesn't stop me from having a strongly held opinion!"
That pales beside the "thinking skillz" demonstrated by people who think this is different from fossil-fuelled power because it "adds energy to the atmosphere that would otherwise have passed us by." Gosh, then, it's exactly the same as coal, oil, gas and nuclear power, all of which "add energy to the atmosphere which would otherwise have not been added to the atmosphere." Carbon-based power does nothing more than "add solar energy from another time" to the atmosphere. How that is better than "adding solar energy from another place" to the atmosphere is really unclear. I guess I'm just not smrt enough to figure it out.
Nuclear power "adds energy from a bygone supernova" to the atmosphere! No wonder people are worried about it! They know exploding stars kill people, unlike all those silly nuclear physicists who don't!
So how many human civilizations' worth of CO2 and other emissions did that just kick out?;-)
The comments on the original are to the same tune. What makes anyone think that volcanoes are a significant source of CO2? Where would the CO2 that volcanoes are supposed to emit come from?
Volcanoes do emit some C02, but then, they emit some of just about everything. Their climate effects are mostly reduced atmospheric heat content due to an increase in ash and aerosols in the upper atmosphere. This effect is particularly pronounced for tropical volcanoes because (surprise!) Earth gets most of its sunlight in the tropics, and while the ash/aerosol cloud does spread out over a few months timescale to all latitudes, its effect is greatest at the latitude of the volcano.
"Volcanoes emit far more CO2 than humans" is the equivalent of "Anthropogenic CO2 emissions increase the frequency and severity of hurricanes". The majority of people on both sides in the public debate on climate change have left the science far, far behind, and are happy to believe stuff that "just makes sense" to them.
My dick tastes like taffy. Go on, test it, or else I shall dub thee "Not a scientist."
There are many ways of testing a claim. In this case, I'd just ask your boyfriend or girlfriend.
Or did you have some other means of testing in mind? Taking a tissue sample from the surface of your dick and subjecting it to chemical analysis would also work.
You've inadvertently identified an important aspect of crank claims: they typically not only make a claim, but also want a great deal of control over what is done to test that claim so that when the claim turns out to be false based on independent testing they can say it wasn't tested properly.
The essence of science is "claims are tested by experiment", not "claims are tested by experiments the claimant approves of."
What people who claim to know something about patents "point out" is contradicted by the actual prosecution of patent violations, where the claims are construed rather more broadly than patent fans would imply
I'm not a fan of software patents, and your comment doesn't answer my point because you correctly ground the prosecution of patent violations in the claims, however broadly construed, rather than in completely unrelated matter like the abstract, background, and company press releases, all of which get top billing in/. patent stories.
The question of whether or not the claims in this patent are sufficiently novel to pass examination is independent of the question of what is being claimed. The summary of the article, and the headline in particular, is misleading to the point of falsehood.
The headline is talking about a "patent for hotspot access", which the patent in question has nothing to do with. It is a patent for presenting multiple hotspots from the same provider to the user as a single choice in the UI, not a patent for accessing hotspots.
dogg, its/. it aint exactly the place to go for an honest summary of a patent.
What he said. It's tiresome that/. continues to cite completely irrelevant information in patent story summaries. I don't know whether the editors are simply too stupid to understand the very simple fact that nothing but the claims matter or if they are deliberately posting false and misleading summaries to boost readership outrage.
If the latter,/. risks becoming just another boingboing, with its carefully crafted culture of Two Minutes Hate.
Yeah, but you have to understand that none of the/. editors knows anything about patents, which is why summaries on patent-related stories always cite completely irrelevant information that has nothing at all to do with what is actually patented. This despite nearly a decade of people who DO know something about patents pointing it out.
It's kind of sad, really. Nerds are supposed to be all up on the facts, but as patent stories on/. make clear, the editors and most of the readership don't care about facts at all, which is why they insist on treating totally unrelated information, like the patent abstract, as if it had something to do with what is actually being patented. It doesn't, and anyone who knows anything about patents knows that.
Re:I stopped reading the summary
on
Best eSATA JBOD?
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after the cretin suggested that RAID was some sort of substitute for a backup.
I realize that English may not be your first language, but can you point out what makes you think that anything in summary implies RAID is any sort of substitute for a backup?
He's looking for a system on which to keep a duplicate copy of his primary drives. RAID gives you relatively cheap mass storage. Such a duplicate copy is generally known as a "backup".
RAID can be used as media for backing systems up. When it is used that way, it is not a substitute for a backup, it IS a backup.
He's asking if that's a good idea or not.
It doesn't seem like a question a cretin would ask, to me.
In any case the seat belt may help, it may also become life threatening.
How can a seat belt become life-threatening in a accident in a parking lot at 20 kph, which is a common situation that seat belts save lives in?
Ask any emergency room doc if they wear their seat-belt. They'll all tell you they do, because they've seen too many nights when someone comes in after a 100 kph head-on with minor contusions when wearing a seatbelt, and someone else come in with multiple fractures after a fender-bender when not wearing a seat-belt.
The statistics back up this impression: wearing a seat-belt reduces the risk of both death and serious injury by about a factor of two. If you don't wear your seat-belt based on purported additional seat-belt-induced risk you are in the same category as people who believe in creationism, healing crystals and energy therapy. That is to say, an anti-empirical kook who hates the very foundations of science.
I'm not sure the comparison to battlefield weapons and counter-measures is apt, because these are weapons that will be aimed primarily at soft targets. What I'm concerned with is the shift in social structure implicit in the widespread availability of safe assassination technology.
Saddam, in some imaginary world where these weapons were ubiquitous and he had hostile intent toward the United States, could have happily lived in a bunker surrounded by concubines and yes-men while his doubles wandered around and got blown up by American drones. The American government as it is currently constituted would not have that ability. Ergo, in a world where these weapons are common, the degree to which American politicians live public lives is going to change. Government transparency will suffer in the process.
The issue of non-state actors still seems to me to loom large, precisely because non-battlefield technology is cheap. These things don't have to be hardened against anything much because they will be used against soft civilian targets in nominal peacetime. To counter them, civil society would have to become a lot harder, and that is again a significant social change.
I'm not saying that we absolutely can't adapt to these weapons, but that the effect of commodity killer robots on the organization of civil society will be comparable to the effect that firearms had. They aren't just a better longbow. They're a game-changer whose effects will not be restricted to battlefield tactics because of the way they shift the equation of cost and risk for any organization, state or non-state, that might contemplate assassination as a means to furthering their ends.
When a politician puts his own personal life on the line when he decides to do something nasty to another nation and decides that it is worth risking his personal life, it is vastly more likely that the cause is 'just'.
You're not thinking this through. You're assuming we can have pretty much the same kind of social and political structures that we have now in a world where political assassination is pretty much consequence-free for the perpetrators.
Take a look at English society during the first generation of the War of the Roses to get an idea of what the future might look like: the primary tool of war at that time was political assassination, the leaders of both sides knew it, and they still fought for a cause that to modern eyes looks almost completely pointless.
Now imagine a world where it isn't just princes and presidents who have this technology, but triads and motorcycle gangs. Ask yourself, "What would Tony Soprano do?"
The landscape will change. "God made man, Colt made men equal" is a bit of an overstatement, but it's not a huge surprise that democratic forms of government grew up in the West at about the same time firearms were becoming widely available.
The technology of killing changes the social landscape, although how it does so depends on purely social factors as well. So don't assume the world of tomorrow will be "just like today, but with robotic assassination machines." The equilibrium will shift, and not necessarily for the better.
All it did was make it easier to empty your sinuses of mucus.
Nope.
For one, the nasal swabs aren't available in Canada, so I've been using the oral spray for the past six months. I've used the nasal swabs in the past, and both preparations have the same outcome.
For two, the stuff is maximally effective if you use it at the first sign of symptoms, which for me is almost always a sore throat, not a stuffy nose.
For three, Zicam does not provide topical relief of symptoms. It drastically reduces, to the extent of almost eliminating, the duration and severity of the cold.
For four, even the Zicam nasal swabs get no-where near the sinuses if used properly. You apply the disgusting goop to the mucus membranes just inside the nostrils, not deep within the nose.
This is what gives scepticism a bad name: you are making stuff up to preserve a belief that amounts to nothing more than prejudice.
You are right to be sceptical, particularly of a drug that falsely markets itself as homeopathic, but wrong to make claims for which you have no evidence whatsoever, such as your incorrect claim as to why I think Zicam works.
Making up claims without evidence so you can hang on to a deeply held belief is exactly what quacks do. Don't be one. Be an empiricist, not a sceptic.
Basically, they marketed an unproven drug as homeopathic, when it wasn't, in order to get around FDA regulations.
Don't confuse "unapproved" with "unproven". They claim to have clinical data demonstrating effectiveness. My own experience as a former cold-sufferer is consistent with their claims. It's true that "data is not the plural of anecdote", but it is also true that "informal observation is the beginning of science."
You're right to be sceptical, but have a look at their actual data first (I believe it has been published in not-entirely-quack journals.)
I believe they market it as homeopathic to avoid FDA regulation. It contains a non-trivial amount of a zinc compound, and zinc is an anti-viral.
The homeopathic label has never made any sense to me (although it had the pleasant effect of breaking me up with a psycho girlfriend who didn't like what I said about homoeopathy when I described Zicam to her...)
For example, about 70% of what you think of as "taste" when you are eating food comes from your sense of smell.
This is one strong indication that the complaints to the FDA are bogus: only a very few of them mention taste at all, whereas virtually everyone who had really lost their sense of smell would notice a radical reduction in their sense of taste.
I feel a bit tinfoilhattish for saying it, but it wouldn't surprise me if a OTC cold treatment manufacturer were behind this, because Zicam really does work extremely well to reduce the duration and severity of cold symptoms. I wouldn't expect a marketing droid running a campaign of lies to know about the association of smell and taste, but now that this is getting talked about online I'm betting that quite suddenly all the new complaints will mention taste.
If I were Zicam I'd press the FDA about the inconsistency in their own data: how can you lose your sense of smell without your sense of taste, and if the complaintants had lost their sense of taste why didn't they mention it?
Zicam has kept me essentially cold-free for several years, and I used to suffer like hell through winters. I even had the opportunity to do a on/off test, as I'm a Canadian who used to work in the States, and when I was working there I could get it and was cold-free, and when I wasn't I couldn't and still got colds. Now that it's available in Canada, I'm cold-free again.
Borders will mean nothing to the people that have this capability.
But everyone will have this technology, including the Timothy McVeigh clone down the street who thinks some strange collective entity he calls "the gubmint" should be attacked by force of arms. He will therefore send these assassination machines out to kill government functionaries, as for some reason he thinks his imagined nemesis, "the gubmint", is somehow associated with the government.
It's only a matter of time before anybody, anywhere in the world can be picked off by a robot without any warning.
Correct, and the vile idiots designing and deploying these systems for the United States should be asking themselves, "How will I feel when one of them kills an American president?"
Because they will. These are assassination machines, and the only thing that has kept assassination at bay as a first-line political tactic is the certainty that the assassin will die or get caught, and therefore be traceable back to their handlers.
The incredible thing, to me, is that we are still so far from a world of ubiquitous political assassination. The writing has been on the wall since the early '90's. And as is usual with these things, once the cycle of tactical violence has begun, it will be very, very difficult to stop. Even in cases where it is screamingly evident to absolutely anyone with two brain cells to rub together that more violence will never under any circumstances improve the situation, people on both sides keep doing it (I'm thinking of the Palestinian-Israeli situation, ON BOTH SIDES.)
So after the first presidential candidate dies, say around 2020, the urge to retaliate will be overwhelming. After that, it's tit-for-tat, all the way to hell.
It won't be the parties doing the killing, either. These things are, or should be, relatively cheap, and the programming is not that difficult. The only reason they are currently expensive is that it is the US government doing it. An "open source" killer robot drone would cost at most a few thousand bucks (use an off-the shelf 1/10th scale RC model as the basic platform).
How would you like to live in the world when any nutjob with a few thousand bucks to spare can assassinate anyone? Because that's the world you'll be living in, soon enough.
Really, people who think you can't run an efficient paper ballot system with a large population aren't really thinking
"We're too big to do that" has become a standard American line recently as to why their government is incapable of so many things. It has been deployed with regard to health care delivery in particular, and fails for the reasons you point out: shear size is not an impediment to organizational competency because most of the things governments deliver are highly scalable.
For some reason you never hear Americans saying they can't have a competent military due to the shear size of the country.
Keep fighting guys, I only wish I could help fro way over here.
You can help: by keeping out of it.
Even my progressive American friends are all flag-waving and drum-beating over this. The last thing the world needs is for anyone in the United States to do anything other than say, "We really hope the Iranian constitutional democratic process works this out. As a fellow-democracy we understand that elections can be contentious, but we also understand that the Iranian people and the Iranian people alone need to decide the outcome here, without interference by any other sovereign power."
Imperialism has taken such deep root in the American mind that even the progressives take it for granted that whatever happens anywhere Americans should be taking a hand. Do you think the Swiss--a much older democracy--are doing so? I doubt it. They are probably shaking their heads and saying, "Yes, it was like that here in 1500, but we got over it and so will they."
Call-time has nothing to do with customer satisfaction.
This is the central problem: all the metrics that are easy to measure are unrelated to the central goal, which is customer satisfaction.
"I called a help centre and was on the phone for fifteen minutes."
I defy anyone to say anything based on that statement alone about whether or not I'm a satisfied customer. To do so you have to make some completely arbitrary, unjustified auxiliary assumptions, which means you may as well just start by assuming whatever it is you want to conclude, without all the bother of collecting the irrelevant metric.
Calling Haskell a "pure functional language" is a bit like calling C++ a "pure object-oriented language." There are parts of the Haskell language that allow you to do pure functional programming. But there are parts of the language that allow you to do things like I/O, too.
Greens don't want us to find innovative new sources of energy to continue our lifestyle, they want to make energy scarce so as to reshape our society along lines THEY find more pleasing.
It's important to be aware the puritans are NOT green, although they have managed to hijack the green movement for the past couple of decades. The only thing that has kept them going is the impracticality of most genuine green tech. They are under siege within the movement now, and over the course of the next couple of decades will become a footnote to history, precisely because most people are in favour of sustainable solutions to the power generation problem and are, of course, not puritans.
They are not puritans for a very simple reason: puritanism is not sustainable. The only way the puritans can impose themselves on the world is if no green technology actually works. Unfortunately everything from solar to wind is coming along nicely, and even nuclear and clean coal are talked about seriously.
So don't make the mistake of confusing the puritans with the greens. The puritans are on the way out. The greens are finally coming back from the debacle of the early '70's, when formerly scientific organizations like Greenpeace became marketing shills for the puritans.
"Free market" is an oxymoron. Anyone who believes it can solve all the world's problems is just a moron.
On the other hand, a well-designed market is one of the most effective machines for achieving as close to Pareto-optimal results as anyone has ever found. Well-designed markets are actually able to achieve the state that socialist managers of the economy should be aiming for, and they do it much more reliably and cheaply than socialist managers have ever been able to achieve. And they do this despite having right-wing nitwits on one side who think that any regulatory or legal oversight is somehow a violation of their god-given right to screw people over, and left-wing nitwits on the other side who believe that markets are somehow the agents of satan, rather than just a particularly good social management tool.
It's unfortunate that so many on the left take the right-wing nutjob view of markets seriously, because if you adopt the view of markets as just an ordinary tool of neo-socialist economic management you can find a whole lot of ways to deploy them usefully to achieve efficient allocation of limited resources across the whole economy. Well-designed markets can't solve all the world's problems, but neither can anything else, and markets have a long history of solving problems more effectively than most of the alternatives.
Keep in mind, this is not about a patent - it is a patent application.
And the summary doesn't even tell us what's being claimed, which is the only thing that matters in a patent application.
The first few claims actually read: "1. A computer-implemented system, comprising:a presentation component for receiving and presenting media of a contributor, the media associated with personal appearance information; and a voting component for receiving a vote generated by a viewer selecting one of the media and presenting new media of the contributor to the viewer in response to receiving the vote, the new media associated with new personal appearance information.
2. The system of claim 1, wherein the media are presented as a pair of images, each image depicting a different instance of related personal appearance information and each image selectable by the viewer to provide the vote.
3. The system of claim 1, wherein the media are differentiated by a single change in the personal appearance information. "
Still sounds like HotOrNot and similar sites, but the least/. could do is present the actual claims, as opposed to some completely irrelevant information.
Err... no. Testing is not a replacement for code reviews, which do a variety of things, including enforcing coding and commenting standards, act as sanity checks in implementation of design, etc. They also find the bugs that you never thought to design tests against.
Test driven development is a good way of capturing requirements in testing up-front, rather than leaving that as a downstream activity the way conventional testing is done. Doing test-driven development will not cause your test set to be any more thorough than a properly done V&V test set.
A while back on/. we had a story about a serious bug in a major product (can't remember what it was) and someone commented that "this seems like the kind of thing that test-driven development would have caught" as if the tests the developers would have thought of doing in a test-driven environment would have been any different than the tests developers would have thought of doing in an environment with sane down-stream testing. There is absolutely no reason to believe this.
Fixed the subject line for you. The only reason these things are in the news is the sensationalism, not the science.
If anyone was honest about reporting threats to human well-being they would be saying, "Sensationalist News Reporting Proven To Be A Threat To Human Life."
At least we know that sensationalist news reporting, unlike supernovae and supervolcanoes and super-anythingelse, has actually already killed people, and will certainly do so again in future.
Slashdot Mirror
we can conclude that the extra energy reaching the Earth would be in the region of 0.0000001%.
Please don't confuse the trolls with numbers! If you start bringing quantitative facts into the discussion they won't be able to lie with abstraction, using the false identity "heats the atmosphere" to imply "heats the atmosphere to a significant degree" instead of the true "heats the atmosphere vastly less than an equivalent fossil fuel plant would."
I gotta love the "it seems to me" replies on this story: they demonstrate the complete scientific and technical illiteracy of /. posters. All kinds of information--actual, quantitative facts!--is available in the linked stories, and clever people can even go out and search around to generate independent confirmation the way you have. But that won't stop the morons who want to tell us all that "it just makes sense" to them that this will result in boiling lakes of fire, deep-fried tweety birds and gigantic lizards stepping on Tokyo.
"I may be ignorant and innumerate, but I that doesn't stop me from having a strongly held opinion!"
That pales beside the "thinking skillz" demonstrated by people who think this is different from fossil-fuelled power because it "adds energy to the atmosphere that would otherwise have passed us by." Gosh, then, it's exactly the same as coal, oil, gas and nuclear power, all of which "add energy to the atmosphere which would otherwise have not been added to the atmosphere." Carbon-based power does nothing more than "add solar energy from another time" to the atmosphere. How that is better than "adding solar energy from another place" to the atmosphere is really unclear. I guess I'm just not smrt enough to figure it out.
Nuclear power "adds energy from a bygone supernova" to the atmosphere! No wonder people are worried about it! They know exploding stars kill people, unlike all those silly nuclear physicists who don't!
So how many human civilizations' worth of CO2 and other emissions did that just kick out? ;-)
The comments on the original are to the same tune. What makes anyone think that volcanoes are a significant source of CO2? Where would the CO2 that volcanoes are supposed to emit come from?
Volcanoes do emit some C02, but then, they emit some of just about everything. Their climate effects are mostly reduced atmospheric heat content due to an increase in ash and aerosols in the upper atmosphere. This effect is particularly pronounced for tropical volcanoes because (surprise!) Earth gets most of its sunlight in the tropics, and while the ash/aerosol cloud does spread out over a few months timescale to all latitudes, its effect is greatest at the latitude of the volcano.
"Volcanoes emit far more CO2 than humans" is the equivalent of "Anthropogenic CO2 emissions increase the frequency and severity of hurricanes". The majority of people on both sides in the public debate on climate change have left the science far, far behind, and are happy to believe stuff that "just makes sense" to them.
My dick tastes like taffy. Go on, test it, or else I shall dub thee "Not a scientist."
There are many ways of testing a claim. In this case, I'd just ask your boyfriend or girlfriend.
Or did you have some other means of testing in mind? Taking a tissue sample from the surface of your dick and subjecting it to chemical analysis would also work.
You've inadvertently identified an important aspect of crank claims: they typically not only make a claim, but also want a great deal of control over what is done to test that claim so that when the claim turns out to be false based on independent testing they can say it wasn't tested properly.
The essence of science is "claims are tested by experiment", not "claims are tested by experiments the claimant approves of."
What people who claim to know something about patents "point out" is contradicted by the actual prosecution of patent violations, where the claims are construed rather more broadly than patent fans would imply
I'm not a fan of software patents, and your comment doesn't answer my point because you correctly ground the prosecution of patent violations in the claims, however broadly construed, rather than in completely unrelated matter like the abstract, background, and company press releases, all of which get top billing in /. patent stories.
The question of whether or not the claims in this patent are sufficiently novel to pass examination is independent of the question of what is being claimed. The summary of the article, and the headline in particular, is misleading to the point of falsehood.
The headline is talking about a "patent for hotspot access", which the patent in question has nothing to do with. It is a patent for presenting multiple hotspots from the same provider to the user as a single choice in the UI, not a patent for accessing hotspots.
"Lies for Nerds. Stuff that isn't true."
dogg, its /. it aint exactly the place to go for an honest summary of a patent.
What he said. It's tiresome that /. continues to cite completely irrelevant information in patent story summaries. I don't know whether the editors are simply too stupid to understand the very simple fact that nothing but the claims matter or if they are deliberately posting false and misleading summaries to boost readership outrage.
If the latter, /. risks becoming just another boingboing, with its carefully crafted culture of Two Minutes Hate.
The independent claims contain the key limitation
Yeah, but you have to understand that none of the /. editors knows anything about patents, which is why summaries on patent-related stories always cite completely irrelevant information that has nothing at all to do with what is actually patented. This despite nearly a decade of people who DO know something about patents pointing it out.
It's kind of sad, really. Nerds are supposed to be all up on the facts, but as patent stories on /. make clear, the editors and most of the readership don't care about facts at all, which is why they insist on treating totally unrelated information, like the patent abstract, as if it had something to do with what is actually being patented. It doesn't, and anyone who knows anything about patents knows that.
after the cretin suggested that RAID was some sort of substitute for a backup.
I realize that English may not be your first language, but can you point out what makes you think that anything in summary implies RAID is any sort of substitute for a backup?
He's looking for a system on which to keep a duplicate copy of his primary drives. RAID gives you relatively cheap mass storage. Such a duplicate copy is generally known as a "backup".
RAID can be used as media for backing systems up. When it is used that way, it is not a substitute for a backup, it IS a backup.
He's asking if that's a good idea or not.
It doesn't seem like a question a cretin would ask, to me.
In any case the seat belt may help, it may also become life threatening.
How can a seat belt become life-threatening in a accident in a parking lot at 20 kph, which is a common situation that seat belts save lives in?
Ask any emergency room doc if they wear their seat-belt. They'll all tell you they do, because they've seen too many nights when someone comes in after a 100 kph head-on with minor contusions when wearing a seatbelt, and someone else come in with multiple fractures after a fender-bender when not wearing a seat-belt.
The statistics back up this impression: wearing a seat-belt reduces the risk of both death and serious injury by about a factor of two. If you don't wear your seat-belt based on purported additional seat-belt-induced risk you are in the same category as people who believe in creationism, healing crystals and energy therapy. That is to say, an anti-empirical kook who hates the very foundations of science.
I'm not sure the comparison to battlefield weapons and counter-measures is apt, because these are weapons that will be aimed primarily at soft targets. What I'm concerned with is the shift in social structure implicit in the widespread availability of safe assassination technology.
Saddam, in some imaginary world where these weapons were ubiquitous and he had hostile intent toward the United States, could have happily lived in a bunker surrounded by concubines and yes-men while his doubles wandered around and got blown up by American drones. The American government as it is currently constituted would not have that ability. Ergo, in a world where these weapons are common, the degree to which American politicians live public lives is going to change. Government transparency will suffer in the process.
The issue of non-state actors still seems to me to loom large, precisely because non-battlefield technology is cheap. These things don't have to be hardened against anything much because they will be used against soft civilian targets in nominal peacetime. To counter them, civil society would have to become a lot harder, and that is again a significant social change.
I'm not saying that we absolutely can't adapt to these weapons, but that the effect of commodity killer robots on the organization of civil society will be comparable to the effect that firearms had. They aren't just a better longbow. They're a game-changer whose effects will not be restricted to battlefield tactics because of the way they shift the equation of cost and risk for any organization, state or non-state, that might contemplate assassination as a means to furthering their ends.
When a politician puts his own personal life on the line when he decides to do something nasty to another nation and decides that it is worth risking his personal life, it is vastly more likely that the cause is 'just'.
You're not thinking this through. You're assuming we can have pretty much the same kind of social and political structures that we have now in a world where political assassination is pretty much consequence-free for the perpetrators.
Take a look at English society during the first generation of the War of the Roses to get an idea of what the future might look like: the primary tool of war at that time was political assassination, the leaders of both sides knew it, and they still fought for a cause that to modern eyes looks almost completely pointless.
Now imagine a world where it isn't just princes and presidents who have this technology, but triads and motorcycle gangs. Ask yourself, "What would Tony Soprano do?"
The landscape will change. "God made man, Colt made men equal" is a bit of an overstatement, but it's not a huge surprise that democratic forms of government grew up in the West at about the same time firearms were becoming widely available.
The technology of killing changes the social landscape, although how it does so depends on purely social factors as well. So don't assume the world of tomorrow will be "just like today, but with robotic assassination machines." The equilibrium will shift, and not necessarily for the better.
All it did was make it easier to empty your sinuses of mucus.
Nope.
For one, the nasal swabs aren't available in Canada, so I've been using the oral spray for the past six months. I've used the nasal swabs in the past, and both preparations have the same outcome.
For two, the stuff is maximally effective if you use it at the first sign of symptoms, which for me is almost always a sore throat, not a stuffy nose.
For three, Zicam does not provide topical relief of symptoms. It drastically reduces, to the extent of almost eliminating, the duration and severity of the cold.
For four, even the Zicam nasal swabs get no-where near the sinuses if used properly. You apply the disgusting goop to the mucus membranes just inside the nostrils, not deep within the nose.
This is what gives scepticism a bad name: you are making stuff up to preserve a belief that amounts to nothing more than prejudice.
You are right to be sceptical, particularly of a drug that falsely markets itself as homeopathic, but wrong to make claims for which you have no evidence whatsoever, such as your incorrect claim as to why I think Zicam works.
Making up claims without evidence so you can hang on to a deeply held belief is exactly what quacks do. Don't be one. Be an empiricist, not a sceptic.
Basically, they marketed an unproven drug as homeopathic, when it wasn't, in order to get around FDA regulations.
Don't confuse "unapproved" with "unproven". They claim to have clinical data demonstrating effectiveness. My own experience as a former cold-sufferer is consistent with their claims. It's true that "data is not the plural of anecdote", but it is also true that "informal observation is the beginning of science."
You're right to be sceptical, but have a look at their actual data first (I believe it has been published in not-entirely-quack journals.)
I believe they market it as homeopathic to avoid FDA regulation. It contains a non-trivial amount of a zinc compound, and zinc is an anti-viral.
The homeopathic label has never made any sense to me (although it had the pleasant effect of breaking me up with a psycho girlfriend who didn't like what I said about homoeopathy when I described Zicam to her...)
For example, about 70% of what you think of as "taste" when you are eating food comes from your sense of smell.
This is one strong indication that the complaints to the FDA are bogus: only a very few of them mention taste at all, whereas virtually everyone who had really lost their sense of smell would notice a radical reduction in their sense of taste.
I feel a bit tinfoilhattish for saying it, but it wouldn't surprise me if a OTC cold treatment manufacturer were behind this, because Zicam really does work extremely well to reduce the duration and severity of cold symptoms. I wouldn't expect a marketing droid running a campaign of lies to know about the association of smell and taste, but now that this is getting talked about online I'm betting that quite suddenly all the new complaints will mention taste.
If I were Zicam I'd press the FDA about the inconsistency in their own data: how can you lose your sense of smell without your sense of taste, and if the complaintants had lost their sense of taste why didn't they mention it?
Zicam has kept me essentially cold-free for several years, and I used to suffer like hell through winters. I even had the opportunity to do a on/off test, as I'm a Canadian who used to work in the States, and when I was working there I could get it and was cold-free, and when I wasn't I couldn't and still got colds. Now that it's available in Canada, I'm cold-free again.
Borders will mean nothing to the people that have this capability.
But everyone will have this technology, including the Timothy McVeigh clone down the street who thinks some strange collective entity he calls "the gubmint" should be attacked by force of arms. He will therefore send these assassination machines out to kill government functionaries, as for some reason he thinks his imagined nemesis, "the gubmint", is somehow associated with the government.
It's only a matter of time before anybody, anywhere in the world can be picked off by a robot without any warning.
Correct, and the vile idiots designing and deploying these systems for the United States should be asking themselves, "How will I feel when one of them kills an American president?"
Because they will. These are assassination machines, and the only thing that has kept assassination at bay as a first-line political tactic is the certainty that the assassin will die or get caught, and therefore be traceable back to their handlers.
The incredible thing, to me, is that we are still so far from a world of ubiquitous political assassination. The writing has been on the wall since the early '90's. And as is usual with these things, once the cycle of tactical violence has begun, it will be very, very difficult to stop. Even in cases where it is screamingly evident to absolutely anyone with two brain cells to rub together that more violence will never under any circumstances improve the situation, people on both sides keep doing it (I'm thinking of the Palestinian-Israeli situation, ON BOTH SIDES.)
So after the first presidential candidate dies, say around 2020, the urge to retaliate will be overwhelming. After that, it's tit-for-tat, all the way to hell.
It won't be the parties doing the killing, either. These things are, or should be, relatively cheap, and the programming is not that difficult. The only reason they are currently expensive is that it is the US government doing it. An "open source" killer robot drone would cost at most a few thousand bucks (use an off-the shelf 1/10th scale RC model as the basic platform).
How would you like to live in the world when any nutjob with a few thousand bucks to spare can assassinate anyone? Because that's the world you'll be living in, soon enough.
Really, people who think you can't run an efficient paper ballot system with a large population aren't really thinking
"We're too big to do that" has become a standard American line recently as to why their government is incapable of so many things. It has been deployed with regard to health care delivery in particular, and fails for the reasons you point out: shear size is not an impediment to organizational competency because most of the things governments deliver are highly scalable.
For some reason you never hear Americans saying they can't have a competent military due to the shear size of the country.
Keep fighting guys, I only wish I could help fro way over here.
You can help: by keeping out of it.
Even my progressive American friends are all flag-waving and drum-beating over this. The last thing the world needs is for anyone in the United States to do anything other than say, "We really hope the Iranian constitutional democratic process works this out. As a fellow-democracy we understand that elections can be contentious, but we also understand that the Iranian people and the Iranian people alone need to decide the outcome here, without interference by any other sovereign power."
Imperialism has taken such deep root in the American mind that even the progressives take it for granted that whatever happens anywhere Americans should be taking a hand. Do you think the Swiss--a much older democracy--are doing so? I doubt it. They are probably shaking their heads and saying, "Yes, it was like that here in 1500, but we got over it and so will they."
Call-time has nothing to do with customer satisfaction.
This is the central problem: all the metrics that are easy to measure are unrelated to the central goal, which is customer satisfaction.
"I called a help centre and was on the phone for fifteen minutes."
I defy anyone to say anything based on that statement alone about whether or not I'm a satisfied customer. To do so you have to make some completely arbitrary, unjustified auxiliary assumptions, which means you may as well just start by assuming whatever it is you want to conclude, without all the bother of collecting the irrelevant metric.
the pure functional language Haskell
<nitpick>
Calling Haskell a "pure functional language" is a bit like calling C++ a "pure object-oriented language." There are parts of the Haskell language that allow you to do pure functional programming. But there are parts of the language that allow you to do things like I/O, too.
</nitpick>
Greens don't want us to find innovative new sources of energy to continue our lifestyle, they want to make energy scarce so as to reshape our society along lines THEY find more pleasing.
It's important to be aware the puritans are NOT green, although they have managed to hijack the green movement for the past couple of decades. The only thing that has kept them going is the impracticality of most genuine green tech. They are under siege within the movement now, and over the course of the next couple of decades will become a footnote to history, precisely because most people are in favour of sustainable solutions to the power generation problem and are, of course, not puritans.
They are not puritans for a very simple reason: puritanism is not sustainable. The only way the puritans can impose themselves on the world is if no green technology actually works. Unfortunately everything from solar to wind is coming along nicely, and even nuclear and clean coal are talked about seriously.
So don't make the mistake of confusing the puritans with the greens. The puritans are on the way out. The greens are finally coming back from the debacle of the early '70's, when formerly scientific organizations like Greenpeace became marketing shills for the puritans.
"Free market" is an oxymoron. Anyone who believes it can solve all the world's problems is just a moron.
On the other hand, a well-designed market is one of the most effective machines for achieving as close to Pareto-optimal results as anyone has ever found. Well-designed markets are actually able to achieve the state that socialist managers of the economy should be aiming for, and they do it much more reliably and cheaply than socialist managers have ever been able to achieve. And they do this despite having right-wing nitwits on one side who think that any regulatory or legal oversight is somehow a violation of their god-given right to screw people over, and left-wing nitwits on the other side who believe that markets are somehow the agents of satan, rather than just a particularly good social management tool.
It's unfortunate that so many on the left take the right-wing nutjob view of markets seriously, because if you adopt the view of markets as just an ordinary tool of neo-socialist economic management you can find a whole lot of ways to deploy them usefully to achieve efficient allocation of limited resources across the whole economy. Well-designed markets can't solve all the world's problems, but neither can anything else, and markets have a long history of solving problems more effectively than most of the alternatives.
Keep in mind, this is not about a patent - it is a patent application.
And the summary doesn't even tell us what's being claimed, which is the only thing that matters in a patent application.
The first few claims actually read: "1. A computer-implemented system, comprising:a presentation component for receiving and presenting media of a contributor, the media associated with personal appearance information; and a voting component for receiving a vote generated by a viewer selecting one of the media and presenting new media of the contributor to the viewer in response to receiving the vote, the new media associated with new personal appearance information.
2. The system of claim 1, wherein the media are presented as a pair of images, each image depicting a different instance of related personal appearance information and each image selectable by the viewer to provide the vote.
3. The system of claim 1, wherein the media are differentiated by a single change in the personal appearance information. "
Still sounds like HotOrNot and similar sites, but the least /. could do is present the actual claims, as opposed to some completely irrelevant information.
then code reviews would be redundant.
Err... no. Testing is not a replacement for code reviews, which do a variety of things, including enforcing coding and commenting standards, act as sanity checks in implementation of design, etc. They also find the bugs that you never thought to design tests against.
Test driven development is a good way of capturing requirements in testing up-front, rather than leaving that as a downstream activity the way conventional testing is done. Doing test-driven development will not cause your test set to be any more thorough than a properly done V&V test set.
A while back on /. we had a story about a serious bug in a major product (can't remember what it was) and someone commented that "this seems like the kind of thing that test-driven development would have caught" as if the tests the developers would have thought of doing in a test-driven environment would have been any different than the tests developers would have thought of doing in an environment with sane down-stream testing. There is absolutely no reason to believe this.
Fixed the subject line for you. The only reason these things are in the news is the sensationalism, not the science.
If anyone was honest about reporting threats to human well-being they would be saying, "Sensationalist News Reporting Proven To Be A Threat To Human Life."
At least we know that sensationalist news reporting, unlike supernovae and supervolcanoes and super-anythingelse, has actually already killed people, and will certainly do so again in future.