Would it be feasible to create hybrid sat-phone/GPS satellites? The GPS satellites have to be replaced regularly anyway... Adding more to get better phone coverage would increase GPS accuracy.
Golly, if only Manning had been treated like Alan Turing and driven to suicide... right? I bet you would have been right there with the needle for the hormone therapy, trying to force one of the most brilliant minds of his--and possibly any--generation into a neat little cubbyhole that doesn't make you feel all icky inside.
You realize that homophobic douchbags like yourself very nearly made us lose WWII, don't you? Do you have any idea how close things were? What would have happened if we hadn't broken ULTRA?...And that a significant number of Arabic-language analysts were drummed out of the DoD in compliance with DADT, significantly weakening our ability to process and understand the vast quantity of SIGINT and HUMINT gathered on a daily basis?
Manning is a criminal, but leave his fucking sexual preference out of it, troll.
Iran already blames Israel, for pretty much everything including why the crops fail. I mean, christ, they made the 100th anniversary of the original publishing of "the protocols of the elders of zion" (you know, the anti-semitic forged pamphlet) into a national holiday. It's not like things could get any worse.
The only reason that Iran doesn't attack Israel is because they know that Israel has nukes, and the will to use them with very little provocation. Even for those countries who would likely come down on Iran's side in any conflict, how many of them have any military to speak of? How many have nukes? Even one?
Really, it's in Israel's best interest that Iran starts hostilities and the sooner the better, before Iran gets nukes. In many ways it would actually stabilize the region to have Iran beat down somewhat--you know, at least from Israel's perspective.
Also, you should know by now that ulcers come from infection, not stress. Seriously, there was a Nobel Prize and everything.
Right, I didn't mean to suggest that people had believed pterosaurs to be birds, but that certain specific pterosaurs very closely resembled living bird species in proportion (presumably because they filled the same ecological niches, and not because they shared a close ancestor) i.e. pelicans and gulls.
As many others in this thread have noted, the summary completely misrepresents the content of the article.
Regardless, there are many very interesting examples of parallel evolution. Startling to me was finding out that fruit bats and insectivorous bats are very much unrelated... meaning that true flight evolved at least twice in mammals. Pterosaurs and true birds, the same thing. What a wondrous universe we live in.
The biggest difference being that for the guys doing North Sea fishing, most of us Americans wouldn't be able to understand their accents (or the slang, for god's sake). Everything would have to be subtitled, and so the target market of wannabe manly men wouldn't watch it.
The thing about Courier is that nobody ever saw it actually working: they just saw tech demos. In the tech demos, the stylus handwriting recognition was always perfect. Considering that we never once saw an on-screen keyboard in the demos, it appears that the handwriting recognition portion of the formula was crucial to the concept. What do you want to bet that it wasn't nearly as good as it was supposed to be? Can you say Newton? "Eat up Martha?"
There was one other thing that made me think that perhaps it was less realistic than it first appeared: Battery life vs. weight. With both of those screens going all the time, that's two separate backlights sucking power. Either the weight would have to be a lot heavier than the iPad's (which is already heavier than I would like), or the battery life would be much worse.
Remember: Lies, Damn lies, Statistics, and Tech Demos.
A: "Hey, some of the stuff you guys do really sucks." T: "Us? Oh, no we don't do stuff like that." A: "Those are your guys over there, and they are doing exactly what you claim you don't do." T: "Oh, uh. They aren't with us, cause if they were with us they wouldn't do stuff like that. QED."
I don't know. If malicious apps have actually made it through the app store approval process, we certainly haven't heard much about them. There have been instances where people's iTunes account info was grabbed off a compromised PC and then used to generate fraudulent app sales, but that isn't quite the same as having a malicious app. That's probably why the flashlight tethering app was such a surprise--with the number of submitted apps that have gone through, this is the only one to be able to pull off something like this? On the other hand, there have been quite a number of Android marketplace apps identified as having malicious intent.
Neither approach is perfect, but it's not as if the risk is identical.
I realize that this isn't a popular viewpoint on this site, but I'm glad that both models exist (walled garden and wild west) in the marketplace right now. Competition is good, especially when the alternatives have markedly different approaches. (unlike say, Visa and Mastercard, which are essentially identical)
Eventually, there are a couple different possible outcomes: 1. one model or the other will prove to be so overwhelmingly superior that the other will either fold up, or incorporate the relevant parts of the others strategy. 2. It will turn out that there are enough users with such divergent tastes/priorities/platform loyalty that both marketplaces will flourish and grow independent of each other.
Take for instance sex. No one is going to say that sex is unhealthy, but when you pursue it to the exclusion of everything else, its an addiction or an abuse and takes on a clinical aspect. That is actually how professionals do draw the line between harmless habits and addictions. A little fuzzy, but a relatively straightforward way of looking at what represents an abuse.
Ok, if it's only "a little fuzzy", then you are probably having sex with people of an inappropriate age, which would indeed be a serious problem.
The best feature of this proposed standard is that if you place a ceramic mug directly between your CPU and the external graphic processor, it will keep your (coffee, soup or whatever) steaming hot, all day long! Those days of long WoW raids with only cold beverages and snacks are over!
Indeed, it's so impossible to follow that only 60 bajillion developers have managed to figure it out. I mean, it's so impossibly inane and stupid as fuck that it's quickly become the most successful mobile application market on the planet.
They review on the order of 10,000 apps a week. This kind of thing is inevitable when you have a limited number of people with that kind of workload. People are making judgment calls all day, so some edge cases are going to get miscalled. Humans are making the decisions, and humans make mistakes.
They say that 95% of apps get approved within one week. That means that about 500 apps a week are rejected for various reasons. Here on/. we see these rejection stories about once every two weeks. That means for every 999 apps that are rejected, 1 is controversial. Almost all of those controversial decisions get reversed.
I wish my record of decision making was 1/1000 blown calls.
Oftentimes, it seems like people who've significantly changed society or our culture for the better turn out to be difficult (at the very least) interpersonally. I'm not saying it's impossible for people to be great in every way, but it does seem uncommon.
Personally, I tend to judge people in a simple way: balancing their private and public lives, has the person made the world significantly better overall? In Twain's place, I would judge yes. Maybe he was a jerk in to his family or kids, but it seems like he wasn't SO MUCH of a jerk that it wipes out his other contributions. For a ridiculous contrast, look at that Rieser guy who murdered his wife and thought he could get away with it: sure, he came up with a file system people seemed to like, but his psychopathic behavior aside from that totally wipes out any good feelings I could ever have had about the guy.
I mean, can't you think of anyone who you totally respect, even though they have serious personal flaws that probably made people living around them miserable?
"Contradicts", you mean, not "juxtaposes".:) To juxtapose is to place side-by-side, usually for purposes of comparison.
To keep this on-topic, I would juxtapose this disaster with Chernobyl, not Katrina. Huge scale, and long-term consequences that we don't fully appreciate.
The Leaf has one basic flaw which makes it a non-starter: 100 mile range. I mean, sure it's great for running around town, but if you want to drive further than 100 miles in a day (and who would even want to cut it that close?), you're screwed.
I don't know about you, but I can't afford to own a $26k vehicle that I can't take on a road trip in a pinch. Hell, even just running errands it's pretty easy to hit 100 miles in a day.
Worst case with a Prius, you stop and fill it up again. It doesn't really matter how good your mileage is if you can't go anywhere because you need to stop and charge for 5 hours.
It's a perfectly logical statement. The soldiers don't have any say in their mission: if it's a good one or a stupid destructive one, they still go out there and serve their country to the best of their ability. It's not their fault that chickenhawks like Cheney and Wolfowitz put us into a war we didn't have to fight, can't afford and have no easy way of getting out of.
So yeah, I support the soldiers for their willingness to put themselves in harms way for the good of the nation, trusting that the people up the chain of command aren't going to spill their blood needlessly, but I don't support the inane warmongers who put us into this mess in the first place, wasting money and the lives of the people under them.
Right. And since much (if not most) of that existing Flash content requires mouseover to work properly--something that doesn't exist on a touch-based device--the site would be broken and have to be rewritten anyway. So if you're going to re-write it anyway, why not do so using open standards that aren't tied to a single company?
OK, and maybe it's just me, but I don't see Flash being used a lot for critical functionality on important sites like online banking, ecommerce and the like. Aside from Farmville (ugh), it seems like the vast majority of Flash out there is just bells and whistles. Good riddance.
Here's what I said on the subject in a similar BoingBoing thread recently:
If you really think that Twitter is terrible and causing the downfall of civilization or whatever, that's just a sign that you're not subscribed to the right feeds.
There are tons of feeds by brilliant, creative people like Peter Serafinowicz who really use the medium to its true advantage. The feed shitmydadsays, for example.
Also, if you have a small group of family and friends who have been scattered to the four winds for the usual reasons, it's a lovely way to be connected to them daily in an asynchronous, casual way. Perhaps you're lucky enough to have everyone you care about in the same time zone, but a lot of us are not that fortunate.
Slashdot Mirror
Would it be feasible to create hybrid sat-phone/GPS satellites? The GPS satellites have to be replaced regularly anyway... Adding more to get better phone coverage would increase GPS accuracy.
Perhaps it's a weight/miniaturization thing?
Golly, if only Manning had been treated like Alan Turing and driven to suicide... right? I bet you would have been right there with the needle for the hormone therapy, trying to force one of the most brilliant minds of his--and possibly any--generation into a neat little cubbyhole that doesn't make you feel all icky inside.
You realize that homophobic douchbags like yourself very nearly made us lose WWII, don't you? Do you have any idea how close things were? What would have happened if we hadn't broken ULTRA? ...And that a significant number of Arabic-language analysts were drummed out of the DoD in compliance with DADT, significantly weakening our ability to process and understand the vast quantity of SIGINT and HUMINT gathered on a daily basis?
Manning is a criminal, but leave his fucking sexual preference out of it, troll.
That was probably the thought behind some of the people in Florida who voted for Nader... didn't turn out too well, IMO.
Iran already blames Israel, for pretty much everything including why the crops fail. I mean, christ, they made the 100th anniversary of the original publishing of "the protocols of the elders of zion" (you know, the anti-semitic forged pamphlet) into a national holiday. It's not like things could get any worse.
The only reason that Iran doesn't attack Israel is because they know that Israel has nukes, and the will to use them with very little provocation. Even for those countries who would likely come down on Iran's side in any conflict, how many of them have any military to speak of? How many have nukes? Even one?
Really, it's in Israel's best interest that Iran starts hostilities and the sooner the better, before Iran gets nukes. In many ways it would actually stabilize the region to have Iran beat down somewhat--you know, at least from Israel's perspective.
Also, you should know by now that ulcers come from infection, not stress. Seriously, there was a Nobel Prize and everything.
Right, I didn't mean to suggest that people had believed pterosaurs to be birds, but that certain specific pterosaurs very closely resembled living bird species in proportion (presumably because they filled the same ecological niches, and not because they shared a close ancestor) i.e. pelicans and gulls.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_primates_theory
I stand corrected, while this was once the current theory, more recent genetic studies suggest both branches had a common flying ancestor.
-sigh- that's what happens when you don't keep up on research.
As many others in this thread have noted, the summary completely misrepresents the content of the article.
Regardless, there are many very interesting examples of parallel evolution. Startling to me was finding out that fruit bats and insectivorous bats are very much unrelated... meaning that true flight evolved at least twice in mammals. Pterosaurs and true birds, the same thing. What a wondrous universe we live in.
The biggest difference being that for the guys doing North Sea fishing, most of us Americans wouldn't be able to understand their accents (or the slang, for god's sake). Everything would have to be subtitled, and so the target market of wannabe manly men wouldn't watch it.
I wish I were joking.
That's because all generalizations are false.
The thing about Courier is that nobody ever saw it actually working: they just saw tech demos. In the tech demos, the stylus handwriting recognition was always perfect. Considering that we never once saw an on-screen keyboard in the demos, it appears that the handwriting recognition portion of the formula was crucial to the concept. What do you want to bet that it wasn't nearly as good as it was supposed to be? Can you say Newton? "Eat up Martha?"
There was one other thing that made me think that perhaps it was less realistic than it first appeared: Battery life vs. weight. With both of those screens going all the time, that's two separate backlights sucking power. Either the weight would have to be a lot heavier than the iPad's (which is already heavier than I would like), or the battery life would be much worse.
Remember: Lies, Damn lies, Statistics, and Tech Demos.
We like to call that the True Scotsman Fallacy.
A: "Hey, some of the stuff you guys do really sucks."
T: "Us? Oh, no we don't do stuff like that."
A: "Those are your guys over there, and they are doing exactly what you claim you don't do."
T: "Oh, uh. They aren't with us, cause if they were with us they wouldn't do stuff like that. QED."
I don't know. If malicious apps have actually made it through the app store approval process, we certainly haven't heard much about them. There have been instances where people's iTunes account info was grabbed off a compromised PC and then used to generate fraudulent app sales, but that isn't quite the same as having a malicious app. That's probably why the flashlight tethering app was such a surprise--with the number of submitted apps that have gone through, this is the only one to be able to pull off something like this? On the other hand, there have been quite a number of Android marketplace apps identified as having malicious intent.
Neither approach is perfect, but it's not as if the risk is identical.
I realize that this isn't a popular viewpoint on this site, but I'm glad that both models exist (walled garden and wild west) in the marketplace right now. Competition is good, especially when the alternatives have markedly different approaches. (unlike say, Visa and Mastercard, which are essentially identical)
Eventually, there are a couple different possible outcomes: 1. one model or the other will prove to be so overwhelmingly superior that the other will either fold up, or incorporate the relevant parts of the others strategy. 2. It will turn out that there are enough users with such divergent tastes/priorities/platform loyalty that both marketplaces will flourish and grow independent of each other.
Take for instance sex. No one is going to say that sex is unhealthy, but when you pursue it to the exclusion of everything else, its an addiction or an abuse and takes on a clinical aspect. That is actually how professionals do draw the line between harmless habits and addictions. A little fuzzy, but a relatively straightforward way of looking at what represents an abuse.
Ok, if it's only "a little fuzzy", then you are probably having sex with people of an inappropriate age, which would indeed be a serious problem.
The best feature of this proposed standard is that if you place a ceramic mug directly between your CPU and the external graphic processor, it will keep your (coffee, soup or whatever) steaming hot, all day long! Those days of long WoW raids with only cold beverages and snacks are over!
In Soviet Russia, you would just call him "comrade" and be done with it.
Indeed, it's so impossible to follow that only 60 bajillion developers have managed to figure it out. I mean, it's so impossibly inane and stupid as fuck that it's quickly become the most successful mobile application market on the planet.
Now, who are you calling a fanboi?
They review on the order of 10,000 apps a week. This kind of thing is inevitable when you have a limited number of people with that kind of workload. People are making judgment calls all day, so some edge cases are going to get miscalled. Humans are making the decisions, and humans make mistakes.
They say that 95% of apps get approved within one week. That means that about 500 apps a week are rejected for various reasons. Here on /. we see these rejection stories about once every two weeks. That means for every 999 apps that are rejected, 1 is controversial. Almost all of those controversial decisions get reversed.
I wish my record of decision making was 1/1000 blown calls.
The problem is that Somy monitor of yours.
Oftentimes, it seems like people who've significantly changed society or our culture for the better turn out to be difficult (at the very least) interpersonally. I'm not saying it's impossible for people to be great in every way, but it does seem uncommon.
Personally, I tend to judge people in a simple way: balancing their private and public lives, has the person made the world significantly better overall? In Twain's place, I would judge yes. Maybe he was a jerk in to his family or kids, but it seems like he wasn't SO MUCH of a jerk that it wipes out his other contributions. For a ridiculous contrast, look at that Rieser guy who murdered his wife and thought he could get away with it: sure, he came up with a file system people seemed to like, but his psychopathic behavior aside from that totally wipes out any good feelings I could ever have had about the guy.
I mean, can't you think of anyone who you totally respect, even though they have serious personal flaws that probably made people living around them miserable?
"Contradicts", you mean, not "juxtaposes". :) To juxtapose is to place side-by-side, usually for purposes of comparison.
To keep this on-topic, I would juxtapose this disaster with Chernobyl, not Katrina. Huge scale, and long-term consequences that we don't fully appreciate.
The Leaf has one basic flaw which makes it a non-starter: 100 mile range. I mean, sure it's great for running around town, but if you want to drive further than 100 miles in a day (and who would even want to cut it that close?), you're screwed.
I don't know about you, but I can't afford to own a $26k vehicle that I can't take on a road trip in a pinch. Hell, even just running errands it's pretty easy to hit 100 miles in a day.
Worst case with a Prius, you stop and fill it up again. It doesn't really matter how good your mileage is if you can't go anywhere because you need to stop and charge for 5 hours.
It's a perfectly logical statement. The soldiers don't have any say in their mission: if it's a good one or a stupid destructive one, they still go out there and serve their country to the best of their ability. It's not their fault that chickenhawks like Cheney and Wolfowitz put us into a war we didn't have to fight, can't afford and have no easy way of getting out of.
So yeah, I support the soldiers for their willingness to put themselves in harms way for the good of the nation, trusting that the people up the chain of command aren't going to spill their blood needlessly, but I don't support the inane warmongers who put us into this mess in the first place, wasting money and the lives of the people under them.
Right. And since much (if not most) of that existing Flash content requires mouseover to work properly--something that doesn't exist on a touch-based device--the site would be broken and have to be rewritten anyway. So if you're going to re-write it anyway, why not do so using open standards that aren't tied to a single company?
OK, and maybe it's just me, but I don't see Flash being used a lot for critical functionality on important sites like online banking, ecommerce and the like. Aside from Farmville (ugh), it seems like the vast majority of Flash out there is just bells and whistles. Good riddance.
Here's what I said on the subject in a similar BoingBoing thread recently:
If you really think that Twitter is terrible and causing the downfall of civilization or whatever, that's just a sign that you're not subscribed to the right feeds.
There are tons of feeds by brilliant, creative people like Peter Serafinowicz who really use the medium to its true advantage. The feed shitmydadsays, for example.
Also, if you have a small group of family and friends who have been scattered to the four winds for the usual reasons, it's a lovely way to be connected to them daily in an asynchronous, casual way. Perhaps you're lucky enough to have everyone you care about in the same time zone, but a lot of us are not that fortunate.
..afabbro then goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed at the next zebra crossing.
M-