To be fair, Bush's TARP plan was basically "put a giant pile of money on the table, turn your back, and whatever the banks want they can take". The Obama plan is far more directed and includes oversight as well as earmarks to reduce the chance that the money just goes directly into someone's pocket, never to be seen again.
Or, maybe, they are actually guilty. It looks to me like if you're not guilty you're far better off pleading not-guilty. Look at the conviction rate: 30%!!
The conviction rate in the the US above 98% [Citation needed]
A quick google search wasn't too helpful, but it did come across this article claiming that the US conviction rates range from 65-80% depending on the state.
Why is it every time the Zune comes up the PlaysForSure DRM becomes even more ironically named? Seems like it should be called NeverWorksRight or PlaysIfYouAreVeryLucky.
I thought the problem was that they can't get the transmission lines built because the NIMBY guys have been keeping the power companies in court for years. Last I heard they were finally getting started with the lines though, so the situation might turn around in a few years.
It doesn't seem impossible if they're at ATMs that ask you "another transaction?" after you finish one, so you don't have to swipe and enter your PIN again. Presumably they're hitting ATMs that are stocked with 100s so it doesn't spend precious minutes counting out 20s. Plus, after you do it a couple of times you'll have the button presses down pretty quick, and it's not like these guys were going to read every screen.
I only wish the people ahead of me at the ATM were this fast. It always seems like there's the person who has never heard of ATMs or buttons and has to puzzle over every single screen when I'm in a hurry.
The devil is in the details though. How does an application just "hand over" data? According to TFA they can't just share data spaces, the memory model doesn't allow for it. They have to negotiate some sort of explicit handoff and copy the data over.
That's just substituting a database for a filesystem, and really a filesystem is a database already, so you're just substituting a different kind of database for the one you had originally.
After you ponder this, try to get MS Word and Keynote to interoperate.
The problem is when you have 500 or 5000 or 50000 different unrelated documents that you need to keep organized. Right now you just write them out to the filesystem and let the existing tools work for you. In this new system each program would have to figure something out on it's own. Having a pipe like interface or cut and paste between programs suffers from the fact that programmers will implement exactly how much they think people need, and will miss out on the last 10% of the functionality.
The biggest annoyance would be that you would always have to start the original program in order to open it's data with another program. I'm sure the people who think this is a good idea will point out that programs never technically stop in their system, but there's not much practical difference between starting Word from scratch and merely swapping it's entire runtime in from disk. Then you would have to navigate through whatever custom organization scheme the program uses to find the data you want and hit the "export" (or "copy") button, and then switch back to the program you actually wanted to use and hit the "import" (or "paste") button. This is as opposed to just going to the destination program, opening up a file browser, and pointing it at the file you want. This is the sort of stuff that people do all day long and the current system we use may not be perfect, but it's certainly a lot better than the proposed one.
Oh boy, I can't wait for every application to have to invent it's own directory system to store saved state in, since it can't just use the filesystem to save the file to like in the old days. I bet it will be all kinds of fun to try to get your data from one application into another, especially competitors applications. Not to mention the pure joy that making an incremental backup on this system must be.
This seems like a throwback to old IBM mainframes and PalmOS. It's fine if your users don't mind being more or less locked into their applications and don't want to move data around very much, but it's crappy when they want to do more sophisticated things like compressing and emailing the document they're working on.
In short: This is a compatibility nightmare. There is a good reason full fledged systems don't use it.
My guess is that if they tried to go for the high end GPU market they would release a couple of powerful but flawed chips before they finally got it right. Unfortunately, flaws that get in a console can't be corrected until the next generation of the console 5-7 years later.
That said, console developers are accustomed to having to work around hardware flaws, sometimes quite severe, to get their games working. One thing seems certain: Sony is going to skimp on the memory again (for the fourth time) and give developers headaches.
Actually, asking Intel to design the console makes it sound like Sony has been drinking the Raytracing Kool-aid and thinks that maybe Intel could succeed where they failed with the PS3 and trying to create some sort of generalized software based rendering system.
I've always considered WISP to be between Cable/DSL and Satellite internet on the hierarchy of ISPs.
Basically, you're best off going down this list and choosing the first one available to you most of the time.
1. Locally provided (University, shared owned connection, etc...) Ethernet type connections
2. FiOS
3. U-Verse
4. Cable/DSL (if you have both then compare the available plans to see which is best
5. WISP
6. 3G Cell service -- But be careful of tight usage caps
7. Satellite
8. Dial Up
9. Carrier Pigeon -- Minor extinction problem left as an exercise to the reader
Basically, you'll tend to have the best price/performance ratios the higher up you are on the tree. Dial Up is pretty competitive price wise, but the terrible speed and medium latency is a real downer.
I can't imagine there are a large number of people who are not only going to read the flyer, but take it home and remember to get on their computer and type in a URL from it. The "parking ticket" gambit seems pretty weak too if you look around and notice two things:
1. You are parked legally
2. Everybody else has these "tickets"
So your argument is that the clone would be starved for love because it only has one parent (and egocentric parent at that)? I'd rather not think about the implications of not allowing people to breed unless they can pass some sort of test to prove that they're not too selfish. I also take issue with your statment:
clearly with some sort of egocentrical goal that couldn't be accomplished through the typical procreative process.
What if it's two loving parents that are infertile or perhaps one of the parents has a terrible genetic disease that they don't want to pass on? That's two reasons right off of the top of my head that don't involve the parents being egomaniacs.
They don't work yet. We just don't know enough about how life processes work yet, but maybe sometime in the future we will. My guess is that it'll take 10 or 20 years before we're anywhere close to pulling it off though (and I really pulled those guesses out of my ass).
What if you did the same with normal retard babies? These are really separate issues from cloning. If someone wanted to today, they could find a partner with the same blood type, have a whole lot of babies, lobotomize them at birth, and then harvest the organs later in life for transplants, etc...
Just because someone might try the same thing with cloning doesn't make it any less evil.
The answer for pretty much all of these "ethical dilemmas" is very easy: Clones have just as many rights as humans do once born, because they are human. Even these human-animal hybrids are easy, since they're just humans that happen to be born in a cow. If someday we get to the point where we can make actual catgirls then that's still easy: they're human (unless it's a cat that just happens to be born from a woman for some reason). This is pretty much moot though because we're not talking about beastman type movie monsters, just people with odd births.
This has a lot of the same false problems that seems to plague morality based discussions of human cloning. The idea that a clone is going to be some sort of non-human entity with no moral standing one way or the other is just plain nuts. If you clone a person then that person has all of the rights any other person would have. It's really just a complicated way of giving birth. Even these human-animal hybrids are badly named, as they aren't going to be catgirls or manbearpigs or anything of the sort, just normal people with a really weird birth.
The only time ethical concerns should really come into play is when you're attempting to convict someone of a crime based on DNA evidence, but it's not like the law has not had to deal with this sort of problem before. Identical twins have already generated plenty of precedents to draw from.
It drives me crazy when congresspeople are spending hours and hours talking about how cloning is an affront before god and has to be stopped, but can't seem to make a good argument as to why other than citing bad movie plots or vague "They won't have a soul!" type arguments.
As I think about it, the thing can't work like an inkjet, coffee grounds are not AFAIK magnetic. It doesn't seem like it would work like a laser printer either, as it would be difficult to build up enough charge from mere linear motion of the hopper to power a laser. Also, again, coffee grounds are not magnetic. As a thermal wax type printer it would fail too since coffee grounds burn, not melt. About the only mechanism I can think of that would work is just using mechanical pumping action on a microscopic scale, but that still doesn't answer the question of how you're going to grind up the grounds fine enough to be useful and more importantly, how you are going to get them to stick to the paper.
The more I think about it, the stupider it becomes.
The kind that is completely impractical and stupid. I notice they didn't include any actual pictures of said device, or, more importantly, what a printout from said device looks like. I'll eat my hat if the lines are even and the color stays worth a damn and if the thing doesn't constantly jam up.
Ultimately, the problem I have with the SETI project is that they're looking for signals that by nature will have to suffer lightyears of Free-Space Path Loss (In short: it's proportional to the square of the distance). Worse, since we assume such alien civilizations will be hanging out near a star for the most part (deep space is cold and lacking in resources), you have a gigantic open fusion reaction happening right behind your signal, raising the noise floor tremendously.
From a layman's perspective, I don't see how they could reasonably hope to see anything, especially if the aliens are like us and tend to direct their transmitted energy rather tightly to avoid wasting too much of it.
Lets say for instance that we can pick up a signal from Geosync Earth orbit using little more than a crappy whip antenna (See: Satellite radio) for a system with maybe 200dB gain in total. Now lets say we're looking for ET with a magical system that has a million dB worth of gain. The distance from the Earth to a Geo satellite is 26,200 miles. The distance from the Earth to Alpha Centauri is 2.57 Ã-- 10^13 miles. Just comparing the square of the distances (6.86 x 10^6 to 6.5536 Ã-- 10^26), you can see that a gain of 10^9 is just not going to cut it, not by a long shot.
It seems to me that the only way SETI could possibly work is if ET was narrow beaming an extremely powerful signal directly at Earth 24/7 for centuries, or if they were hanging out in orbit chatting away over CB radios in stealth spaceships. The most plausible reason why SETI has not found anything is that any signals that are out there are well below are detection threshold, and this is even before we begin to think about a civilization that moves beyond RF transmissions in favor of something more exotic (entangled photon radios?).
Is it supposed to be surprising that they didn't rewrite their entire codebase for every new OS release?!? Obviously Windows 7 is going to be built on top of the Vista codebase, that's how almost every software release works. Usually if a company decides to rewrite a program from the ground up (see: Adobe from time to time), the rewritten version is less featureful, less stable, and takes much longer to come out than the previous version.
I've always distrusted the whole "But Thai people love their King!" reporting that you always get with these stories. When the penalty for not loving your King is 15 years in Thai prison, I bet you won't find too many people who don't "love the King". The same effect can be seen in North Korea, where every time a reporter goes over there he finds nothing but unconditional love for their glorious god-leader.
I also find suspicious the story that the King doesn't really like all of that fuss over his name, it's the nasty military guys who always take it too far. Is Thailand some kind of odd monarchy where the King doesn't have any control over the military? Is he so powerless he can't even write formal letter to the Military advisers saying basically "Don't be dicks."?
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To be fair, Bush's TARP plan was basically "put a giant pile of money on the table, turn your back, and whatever the banks want they can take". The Obama plan is far more directed and includes oversight as well as earmarks to reduce the chance that the money just goes directly into someone's pocket, never to be seen again.
Or, maybe, they are actually guilty. It looks to me like if you're not guilty you're far better off pleading not-guilty. Look at the conviction rate: 30%!!
The conviction rate in the the US above 98% [Citation needed]
A quick google search wasn't too helpful, but it did come across this article claiming that the US conviction rates range from 65-80% depending on the state.
Why is it every time the Zune comes up the PlaysForSure DRM becomes even more ironically named? Seems like it should be called NeverWorksRight or PlaysIfYouAreVeryLucky.
I thought the problem was that they can't get the transmission lines built because the NIMBY guys have been keeping the power companies in court for years. Last I heard they were finally getting started with the lines though, so the situation might turn around in a few years.
It doesn't seem impossible if they're at ATMs that ask you "another transaction?" after you finish one, so you don't have to swipe and enter your PIN again. Presumably they're hitting ATMs that are stocked with 100s so it doesn't spend precious minutes counting out 20s. Plus, after you do it a couple of times you'll have the button presses down pretty quick, and it's not like these guys were going to read every screen.
I only wish the people ahead of me at the ATM were this fast. It always seems like there's the person who has never heard of ATMs or buttons and has to puzzle over every single screen when I'm in a hurry.
The devil is in the details though. How does an application just "hand over" data? According to TFA they can't just share data spaces, the memory model doesn't allow for it. They have to negotiate some sort of explicit handoff and copy the data over.
That's just substituting a database for a filesystem, and really a filesystem is a database already, so you're just substituting a different kind of database for the one you had originally.
After you ponder this, try to get MS Word and Keynote to interoperate.
The problem is when you have 500 or 5000 or 50000 different unrelated documents that you need to keep organized. Right now you just write them out to the filesystem and let the existing tools work for you. In this new system each program would have to figure something out on it's own. Having a pipe like interface or cut and paste between programs suffers from the fact that programmers will implement exactly how much they think people need, and will miss out on the last 10% of the functionality.
The biggest annoyance would be that you would always have to start the original program in order to open it's data with another program. I'm sure the people who think this is a good idea will point out that programs never technically stop in their system, but there's not much practical difference between starting Word from scratch and merely swapping it's entire runtime in from disk. Then you would have to navigate through whatever custom organization scheme the program uses to find the data you want and hit the "export" (or "copy") button, and then switch back to the program you actually wanted to use and hit the "import" (or "paste") button. This is as opposed to just going to the destination program, opening up a file browser, and pointing it at the file you want. This is the sort of stuff that people do all day long and the current system we use may not be perfect, but it's certainly a lot better than the proposed one.
To be fair, that's a similar problem to the one we have with files currently, as newer versions often aren't compatible with the older versions.
Oh boy, I can't wait for every application to have to invent it's own directory system to store saved state in, since it can't just use the filesystem to save the file to like in the old days. I bet it will be all kinds of fun to try to get your data from one application into another, especially competitors applications. Not to mention the pure joy that making an incremental backup on this system must be.
This seems like a throwback to old IBM mainframes and PalmOS. It's fine if your users don't mind being more or less locked into their applications and don't want to move data around very much, but it's crappy when they want to do more sophisticated things like compressing and emailing the document they're working on.
In short: This is a compatibility nightmare. There is a good reason full fledged systems don't use it.
My guess is that if they tried to go for the high end GPU market they would release a couple of powerful but flawed chips before they finally got it right. Unfortunately, flaws that get in a console can't be corrected until the next generation of the console 5-7 years later.
That said, console developers are accustomed to having to work around hardware flaws, sometimes quite severe, to get their games working. One thing seems certain: Sony is going to skimp on the memory again (for the fourth time) and give developers headaches.
Actually, asking Intel to design the console makes it sound like Sony has been drinking the Raytracing Kool-aid and thinks that maybe Intel could succeed where they failed with the PS3 and trying to create some sort of generalized software based rendering system.
I've always considered WISP to be between Cable/DSL and Satellite internet on the hierarchy of ISPs.
Basically, you're best off going down this list and choosing the first one available to you most of the time.
1. Locally provided (University, shared owned connection, etc...) Ethernet type connections
2. FiOS
3. U-Verse
4. Cable/DSL (if you have both then compare the available plans to see which is best
5. WISP
6. 3G Cell service -- But be careful of tight usage caps
7. Satellite
8. Dial Up
9. Carrier Pigeon -- Minor extinction problem left as an exercise to the reader
Basically, you'll tend to have the best price/performance ratios the higher up you are on the tree. Dial Up is pretty competitive price wise, but the terrible speed and medium latency is a real downer.
I can't imagine there are a large number of people who are not only going to read the flyer, but take it home and remember to get on their computer and type in a URL from it. The "parking ticket" gambit seems pretty weak too if you look around and notice two things:
1. You are parked legally
2. Everybody else has these "tickets"
And that's before you notice that your local government is using a website like: http://qlmbix.ch/parkingticets.html
I mean for this infection to work, the victim has to be not only stupid, but also not lazy. It has to have a low infection rate.
More intense than a 7.9? That's edging up into the cataclysm range.
What if it's two loving parents that are infertile or perhaps one of the parents has a terrible genetic disease that they don't want to pass on? That's two reasons right off of the top of my head that don't involve the parents being egomaniacs.
They don't work yet. We just don't know enough about how life processes work yet, but maybe sometime in the future we will. My guess is that it'll take 10 or 20 years before we're anywhere close to pulling it off though (and I really pulled those guesses out of my ass).
What if you did the same with normal retard babies? These are really separate issues from cloning. If someone wanted to today, they could find a partner with the same blood type, have a whole lot of babies, lobotomize them at birth, and then harvest the organs later in life for transplants, etc...
Just because someone might try the same thing with cloning doesn't make it any less evil.
The answer for pretty much all of these "ethical dilemmas" is very easy: Clones have just as many rights as humans do once born, because they are human. Even these human-animal hybrids are easy, since they're just humans that happen to be born in a cow. If someday we get to the point where we can make actual catgirls then that's still easy: they're human (unless it's a cat that just happens to be born from a woman for some reason). This is pretty much moot though because we're not talking about beastman type movie monsters, just people with odd births.
This has a lot of the same false problems that seems to plague morality based discussions of human cloning. The idea that a clone is going to be some sort of non-human entity with no moral standing one way or the other is just plain nuts. If you clone a person then that person has all of the rights any other person would have. It's really just a complicated way of giving birth. Even these human-animal hybrids are badly named, as they aren't going to be catgirls or manbearpigs or anything of the sort, just normal people with a really weird birth.
The only time ethical concerns should really come into play is when you're attempting to convict someone of a crime based on DNA evidence, but it's not like the law has not had to deal with this sort of problem before. Identical twins have already generated plenty of precedents to draw from.
It drives me crazy when congresspeople are spending hours and hours talking about how cloning is an affront before god and has to be stopped, but can't seem to make a good argument as to why other than citing bad movie plots or vague "They won't have a soul!" type arguments.
As I think about it, the thing can't work like an inkjet, coffee grounds are not AFAIK magnetic. It doesn't seem like it would work like a laser printer either, as it would be difficult to build up enough charge from mere linear motion of the hopper to power a laser. Also, again, coffee grounds are not magnetic. As a thermal wax type printer it would fail too since coffee grounds burn, not melt. About the only mechanism I can think of that would work is just using mechanical pumping action on a microscopic scale, but that still doesn't answer the question of how you're going to grind up the grounds fine enough to be useful and more importantly, how you are going to get them to stick to the paper.
The more I think about it, the stupider it becomes.
What's all this Spooky Action at a Distance stuff about then?
The kind that is completely impractical and stupid. I notice they didn't include any actual pictures of said device, or, more importantly, what a printout from said device looks like. I'll eat my hat if the lines are even and the color stays worth a damn and if the thing doesn't constantly jam up.
Ultimately, the problem I have with the SETI project is that they're looking for signals that by nature will have to suffer lightyears of Free-Space Path Loss (In short: it's proportional to the square of the distance). Worse, since we assume such alien civilizations will be hanging out near a star for the most part (deep space is cold and lacking in resources), you have a gigantic open fusion reaction happening right behind your signal, raising the noise floor tremendously.
From a layman's perspective, I don't see how they could reasonably hope to see anything, especially if the aliens are like us and tend to direct their transmitted energy rather tightly to avoid wasting too much of it.
Lets say for instance that we can pick up a signal from Geosync Earth orbit using little more than a crappy whip antenna (See: Satellite radio) for a system with maybe 200dB gain in total. Now lets say we're looking for ET with a magical system that has a million dB worth of gain. The distance from the Earth to a Geo satellite is 26,200 miles. The distance from the Earth to Alpha Centauri is 2.57 Ã-- 10^13 miles. Just comparing the square of the distances (6.86 x 10^6 to 6.5536 Ã-- 10^26), you can see that a gain of 10^9 is just not going to cut it, not by a long shot.
It seems to me that the only way SETI could possibly work is if ET was narrow beaming an extremely powerful signal directly at Earth 24/7 for centuries, or if they were hanging out in orbit chatting away over CB radios in stealth spaceships. The most plausible reason why SETI has not found anything is that any signals that are out there are well below are detection threshold, and this is even before we begin to think about a civilization that moves beyond RF transmissions in favor of something more exotic (entangled photon radios?).
Is it supposed to be surprising that they didn't rewrite their entire codebase for every new OS release?!? Obviously Windows 7 is going to be built on top of the Vista codebase, that's how almost every software release works. Usually if a company decides to rewrite a program from the ground up (see: Adobe from time to time), the rewritten version is less featureful, less stable, and takes much longer to come out than the previous version.
I've always distrusted the whole "But Thai people love their King!" reporting that you always get with these stories. When the penalty for not loving your King is 15 years in Thai prison, I bet you won't find too many people who don't "love the King". The same effect can be seen in North Korea, where every time a reporter goes over there he finds nothing but unconditional love for their glorious god-leader.
I also find suspicious the story that the King doesn't really like all of that fuss over his name, it's the nasty military guys who always take it too far. Is Thailand some kind of odd monarchy where the King doesn't have any control over the military? Is he so powerless he can't even write formal letter to the Military advisers saying basically "Don't be dicks."?