Systems like this depersonalize the citizens to the officers. That's just how people work.
As cops go from spending their day walking the beat, to spending their day in a police cruiser, to spending their day cam-surfing from their desk, policing becomes less and less about maintaining order through person-to-person interactions, and more about authoritarian gotcha-style law enforcement. Society as a whole suffers.
At the lowest level, I know of one anecdotal story where couples having a quickie in a popular spot were unaware a camera had gone up; and the security guard watching was in fact recording their sex, compiling the events into tapes, and selling them.
Only one? Let me tell you about this thing called YouTube...
Aside from the security issue, I don't think most people would care if their ATM card was RFID vs swipe.
It doesn't save anyone any time, really. At an ATM, I've got my wallet open anyway, to put the cash in. In the grocery checkout, I've got plenty of time to reach briefly into my pocket or purse, while waiting for the checker.
For an undergrad senior project, long ago, we built a furnace that could melt glass or metals in a common household microwave oven. Yes, metals, with no resulting plasma ball blowing out the klystron.
It melted copper quite easily, and I'd guess it exceeded 1500 C for brief moments, as the refractory insulation sometimes melted in parts.
...until Microsoft decides to "suck all the air out of the room" (i.e., buy up all of the shelf space in stores), just as they have done with their software products in the past.
People buy from the front shelves, not the bottom shelf in the back.
135 degrees is a great trunk-leg angle, but only if your weight is supported down to your bottom. Slouching down to 135 deg in a "regular" 90 deg chair will buy you some expensive back surgery in your mid 30's.
I have made the stuff with much simpler apparatus.... crucible in a bell jar... Evacuate the air... Pass current to melt the gold.
Ah yes, you're right. Similarly, good old arc melters will do the same as well. Metal soot deposits all over inside the bell.
Metal soot is often pyrophoric. Ding it with a wrench and it will burn like a grass fire, chromium and titanium-containing alloys especially.:) Not only would this guy's "black metal coating" rub off, but it might spontaneously ignite as well.
"Affirmative. I've got nothing on radar, but we've got visual on a flaming object. Over."
This "technology" is nothing new. Just a prof trying to make something mundane sound flashy.
Hit things with enough laser fluence and the surface atoms will move around, and may even be blasted off of the surface. This is the basis of a standard materials synthesis technique, pulsed laser deposition (PLD). Hit a target with a laser, and collect the ejected material on a nearby crystal.
Anyone who has done PLD knows that the surface of the target gets rough when you blast it. If the target is a metal, and the roughness is smaller than the wavelength of light (nanoscale), it will absorb light - it will be black.
In any case, the article asserts that the "blackness" is a material property and is therefore permanent. Nonsense. Touch it and the surface particles will rub off, leaving behind a shiny metal surface. Further, I'd be extremely surprised if there weren't tons of existing patents on surface modification by lasers. There are certainly tons of academic publications on the topic.
...making perfectly marbled beef and reliably lean and tasty pork the norm...
BS. Genes do play a role in controlling the raw potential of an organism, but it is diet, excercise, etcetera that determine the ultimate quality of their tasty, tasty flesh.
And anyway, agribusiness won't focus on making products we really want. Their first priority is to make it cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap. All other qualities are secondary. (I speak generally of the mainstream commodity food market. Those who raise quality lines from quality stock using quality methods will continue as they were.)
Lest people think that Eugenics could only happened under the Nazis, various mental health places in America and other countries were practicing forms of it until the 1960-70s with practices like sterilizing the mentally handicapped
/
It was going on in the USA long before that. A US Supreme court decision upheld state laws of forced strilization and intermarriage prohibition in 1927, which in the end helped to legitimize or at least delay scrutiny of Hitler's racial cleansing. From the Wik, "By 1945 over 45,000 mentally ill individuals in the United States had been forcibly sterilized."
For good or ill, the US sets the trend for practices that are acceptable for countries to engage in.
Greenpeace issued a report ranking manufacturers according to how "green" they are. In response, one of the companies decided to change their packaging to increase their rank.
That is the whole point of such rankings and Greenpeace PR campaigns. It looks like it worked. Good for them.
True. And manipulating the opinions of the public is straightforward affair. So whoever had majority control over mass media (etc.) would control how the public votes.
A true democracy would be as bad as Soviet Communism.
The US representative republic system has flaws, as does any system, but it works pretty well.
Slashdot Mirror
Systems like this depersonalize the citizens to the officers. That's just how people work.
As cops go from spending their day walking the beat, to spending their day in a police cruiser, to spending their day cam-surfing from their desk, policing becomes less and less about maintaining order through person-to-person interactions, and more about authoritarian gotcha-style law enforcement. Society as a whole suffers.
Stalin would have liked it.
At the lowest level, I know of one anecdotal story where couples having a quickie in a popular spot were unaware a camera had gone up; and the security guard watching was in fact recording their sex, compiling the events into tapes, and selling them.
Only one? Let me tell you about this thing called YouTube...
Aside from the security issue, I don't think most people would care if their ATM card was RFID vs swipe.
It doesn't save anyone any time, really. At an ATM, I've got my wallet open anyway, to put the cash in. In the grocery checkout, I've got plenty of time to reach briefly into my pocket or purse, while waiting for the checker.
It's a solution in search of a problem.
For an undergrad senior project, long ago, we built a furnace that could melt glass or metals in a common household microwave oven. Yes, metals, with no resulting plasma ball blowing out the klystron.
It melted copper quite easily, and I'd guess it exceeded 1500 C for brief moments, as the refractory insulation sometimes melted in parts.
...until Microsoft decides to "suck all the air out of the room" (i.e., buy up all of the shelf space in stores), just as they have done with their software products in the past.
People buy from the front shelves, not the bottom shelf in the back.
135 degrees is a great trunk-leg angle, but only if your weight is supported down to your bottom. Slouching down to 135 deg in a "regular" 90 deg chair will buy you some expensive back surgery in your mid 30's.
Trust me, I know.
Today, it almost seems that voice calls are the least-used function of most phones
Perhaps in the bizarro world the author inhabits. In the real world, I see people using them only for talking, and nothing else.
OK, except maybe for texting, but I don't really hang out with barflies and teenagers, so I don't see it.
and they're way more expensive than the latest video game system
If you think they're expensive, you obviously haven't been following the advice of the original commenter. You selfish bastard.
As you've commented AC, I'll assume you're the "researcher" in question.
I think you should ignore the slashdot crowd and worry more about your DARPA proposal review board. They can see through this sort of hocus-pocus.
I have made the stuff with much simpler apparatus. ... crucible in a bell jar ... Evacuate the air ... Pass current to melt the gold.
:) Not only would this guy's "black metal coating" rub off, but it might spontaneously ignite as well.
Ah yes, you're right. Similarly, good old arc melters will do the same as well. Metal soot deposits all over inside the bell.
Metal soot is often pyrophoric. Ding it with a wrench and it will burn like a grass fire, chromium and titanium-containing alloys especially.
"Affirmative. I've got nothing on radar, but we've got visual on a flaming object. Over."
This "technology" is nothing new. Just a prof trying to make something mundane sound flashy.
Hit things with enough laser fluence and the surface atoms will move around, and may even be blasted off of the surface. This is the basis of a standard materials synthesis technique, pulsed laser deposition (PLD). Hit a target with a laser, and collect the ejected material on a nearby crystal.
Anyone who has done PLD knows that the surface of the target gets rough when you blast it. If the target is a metal, and the roughness is smaller than the wavelength of light (nanoscale), it will absorb light - it will be black.
In any case, the article asserts that the "blackness" is a material property and is therefore permanent. Nonsense. Touch it and the surface particles will rub off, leaving behind a shiny metal surface. Further, I'd be extremely surprised if there weren't tons of existing patents on surface modification by lasers. There are certainly tons of academic publications on the topic.
Was it a man that compiled the list?
If anyone other than myself had actually read any articles about this, you'd know that the library had instituted a policy....
Policy != law
Policy is just what they say they are going to do. It doesn't make it legal. No one is compelled by law to follow a company's "policy."
IANAL, but it seems to me that requiring presentation of ID = arrest.
If you could stand up after being Tased they wouldn't be using them in the first place.
Actually, in the video, he eventually does stand up. And is immediately tasered as a reward for doing as instructed by the officers. Twice.
How often do you use an ATM and have the touch-screen read you selection incorrectly? How about never?
Many of these are not science jobs. And the ones that are, well, the dirty grunt work would be assigned to a technician. Or by grad students.
Mut be a slow news day.
No matter how great it is, I won't buy it.
I will not pay to have ads splashed in my face. And this is just on step scummier than that.
Too bad most buyers will be teenagers, who won't base their purchasing decision on such criteria.
BS. Genes do play a role in controlling the raw potential of an organism, but it is diet, excercise, etcetera that determine the ultimate quality of their tasty, tasty flesh.
And anyway, agribusiness won't focus on making products we really want. Their first priority is to make it cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap. All other qualities are secondary. (I speak generally of the mainstream commodity food market. Those who raise quality lines from quality stock using quality methods will continue as they were.)
For good or ill, the US sets the trend for practices that are acceptable for countries to engage in.
How is it "not so very nice"?
Greenpeace issued a report ranking manufacturers according to how "green" they are. In response, one of the companies decided to change their packaging to increase their rank.
That is the whole point of such rankings and Greenpeace PR campaigns. It looks like it worked. Good for them.
So, they extrapolated from their initial made up number, eh?
This type of false logic is called the Broken Window Fallacy. Read it.
True. And manipulating the opinions of the public is straightforward affair. So whoever had majority control over mass media (etc.) would control how the public votes.
A true democracy would be as bad as Soviet Communism.
The US representative republic system has flaws, as does any system, but it works pretty well.
Out of an abundance of sensitivity, we have elected to drop this particular case."
Shouldn't that read, "Out of an abuundance of bad press, we have elected to drop this particular case."?
I would no sooner clean out my inbox than I would throw out all the documents in my filing cabinet.
Am I the only one that thinks this is a novel Slashvertizement?
Judging from the number of "I'm 45 and I can hear it," replies, it appears to have beackired if that was the case.