Note: I don't mind any non-felon of sound mind owning: musket, pistol, hunting rifle, shotgun. As you say, some shootings will happen. But your statement that mass murderers would switch to other methods to go on killing sprees doesn't help your point, because nothing a random mentally unstable nobody can get their hands on is as effective as a gun.
Give me a killing spree with a knife any day. You know what? You can't kill more than a few people with a knife before someone tackles you with a baseball bat.
I'd love it if this guy had been denied a shotgun like he was a handgun. Maybe he'd try to build a bomb - but you know, building your own weapons isn't as easy as just buying one made to work. Maybe his bomb wouldn't explode, or he wouldn't know how to position it. Maybe he'd go at it with a knife, but then he'd have to catch them to kill them.
As an industry we're now finding it very hard to employ people who know this kind of stuff. Most graduates are taught Java or C++ and have no decent experience at the assembler or hardware level.
On the other hand, in my experience electrical and computer engineers (i.e. hardware engineers) are getting this sort of low-level experience, albeit without the higher-level abstract programming science that a computer science major (i.e. software engineer) would receive. Thus, at least at my company, the hardware engineers will do that low-level programming work.
In other words, there is a market for people who know how to do that sort of programming. Given that Slashdot seems mostly filled with software engineers, keep in mind that you could expand your marketability with low-level programming techniques, and fend off yet another group that's "moving in"* on your job space.
* (Though I think the hardware engineers were there first, and technically you're just "moving in" on their turf. Either way, you're welcome to it; I'd rather be designing a piece of hardware than programming it.)
As someone who was involved in FIRST for the last three years, I wouldn't say that the competition has just now piqued the interest of major sponsors such as NASA - I'd say that they were integral to the development of FIRST from the beginning, most especially NASA.
Indeed, I competed with my high school in the U.S. FIRST robotics competition in 1995, and there were serious contenders sponsored by major companies like Proctor and Gamble back then. Actually, I think they sponsored two teams - one that used Tide as its logo, and the other that used Sunny D...
Too bad our team had a relatively poor sponsor. Our robot's basic design worked, but a reload mechanism was designed too weak to operate, and the sponsor wouldn't/couldn't pay to rebuild the parts scaled up to handle the load. Still, I have some great memories of our matches. Ours was one of the few "shooting" robots that year, and our final match - with three shooters competing - was considered one of the most exciting of the competition.
Later, the power company comes back and says "Hey, public, we're running out of power, and we need to build three more coal-fired power plants near your town, and by the way, we want to avoid regulations that require us to clean our exhaust because that would hurt our bottom line."
The public says "No way, I don't want your pollution clogging my air, worsening my asthma, and causing my city to become subject to EPA regulations. I resent you trying to avoid cleaning up your own mess. By the way, who's driving this demand for power? Is it big business or folks like me, because I know I try to conserve my power use by turning off lights and even switching to CFLs? I don't want to pay (in terms of taxes or pollution) for power generated to serve some big out-of-state business, especially one that doesn't generate many local jobs."
Then, the power company says "-snicker- We can't tell you who is using the power. Just give us the plants or we'll do rolling blackouts on your homes and schools."
Those awful handgun laws that prevented him from getting one made him wait a whole week, until he easily bought a shotgun, before he could go on his killing spree.
I'll send a few dollars to the libertarians to make sure that never happens again.
Alas, I've read that, but they seem to have at most four unique walk-throughs that use different characters. The rest of them all say "Just use Bernard and whoever".
IIRC Texas law says that no red light can be programmed to stop any given lane of traffic for longer than two minutes. If the light is red for longer than five minutes, and it's safe to do so, you can run it.
I think if there are cameras or weight sensors in the street this works differently, of course; the light doesn't *have* to turn green if there's not a car there. If one pulls up, however, the light has to change within two minutes. This of course means that people on bicycles, or cars that fail stop correctly over the weight sensor, or on days where the camera is blinded by the sun, the light might not work correctly.
There's a fan base for Monkey Island as well, but that game came later. For whatever reason, Maniac Mansion is the one that "clicked". Maybe it's the same for the developers.
See the "syd" in my username? Yeah, that's from Maniac Mansion. I've used it ever since.
Incidentally, I was only able to solve Maniac Mansion using one particular method with one set of people. (Very sadly, that didn't include Syd.) I've *always* wanted to go through the game to reach every possible ending. Is there a web site that charts out all the possible events that can occur with each set of characters, and all the possible end sequences?
Whenever I played a game after this where I could make personnel choices, or where the game was set up for me to interact and explore the environment, I always felt a little cheated if the game only had one way to solve a particular puzzle. ("Damn, I have to flip *that* switch? Why can't I instead use this chair to break through the glass?) Compares to the seemingly-endless combinations that could produce different results in Maniac Mansion, everything else seemed like it ran on rails...
The fact that they consider my TV that I spent $3 grand on unworthy of their video, because it doesn't have the correct plug thingy in the back, is enough to put me off the damn thing.
Oh, and I watch 100+ movies a year (over 30 so far this year in the theater, another dozen on DVD). Most of those were independent films at festivals, but still, I'm the perfect market for HD movies at home: watch lots and lots of movies, invested early in hidef, etc. Instead they don't want to sell me product I can use.
Have you tried to get one? I started looking in December without success, but by January I knew the UPS delivery dates of every GameStop, Target, and Best Buy within 5 miles. (That's not too hard to do; just ask.)
Within a few days I caught a GameStop as the UPS truck was driving off. While the clerk fended off phone callers ("Yes we have Wii, no we can't hold one, yes there's a line.") I bought mine and left. I ran across a few more at a Target the next day, though then I was just looking for a game and not another system.
All told, I spent perhaps 2 hours in December making extra stops, then three or four lunch hours in January. If you live in a major metropolitan area, I doubt it would take you more than that.
You got it backwards. He made the devices and came up with applications, but he couldn't do the theory. That's why he tried to get Einstein's help.
That sort of thing happens frequently. An experimental physicist or engineer notices a phenomena in the lab, can reproduce it, and can think of uses for it. He or she can't however, mathematically prove why it happens. Then, a theoretical physicist (probably working at the same company or university) comes up with a mathematical model to explain the phenomena. Together, they file for and receive a patent.
However, the patent process doesn't require mathematical proof to patent something, so Losev seems to have met all the requirements to patent a new invention.
So what science is going to get canned to pay for this fix?
This reminds me of the accident at the Princeton TFTR when it was being installed. The fusion reactor used huge flywheels to store sufficient power to operate the tokamak (without pulling down the electric grid). During installation, a contractor dropped one of the flywheels from an overhead crane.
To fix the flywheel, congress cancelled almost every other fusion research project in the country. This was when, for example, the EFBT project at NASA was cancelled - despite having results as or more promising than tokamak research.
(My plasma sciences professor at college had previously led the EFBT project; the story is repeated from him.)
I wonder what dozen other less-well-known research projects are going to get canned to fix this high-profile mistake, and what breakthroughs we'll lose because of it.
? I was under the impression that Linux got where it is today because companies like IBM, Novell, and Red Hat paid their employees to work on open source code, organizations like OSDN paid people like Linus Torvalds to manage and organize the material, funders like the Linux Fund and (recently) Google's Summer of Code provided grants for smaller developers, and, finally, some people contributed volunteer work.
I certainly wouldn't want to criticize the work done by unpaid volunteers, but I would have to doubt that they now represent a "large" portion of the code in Linux, either in terms of lines in the kernal or features.
No, not at all. The net neutrality debate is about whether ISPs can throttle content based on the content's particular source, not on the content type.
Throttling based on content type is called packet shaping, and it's been done in the US and elsewhere for many years. Nothing about the net neutrality legislation would affect that, and anyone who says otherwise is confused or trying to deliberately mislead.
Throttling based on source, where content of the same type from different sources receives different priorities, is what the net neutrality legislation is about. In other words, any ISP can choose to tone down streaming video traffic so that all their customers can use basic web and email services. No ISP should be able to block video streaming from Google but allow video to stream from Microsoft, just because Microsoft paid them money. (Unless that was clearly advertised to the ISP's customers before they signed up, that is.)
In this case, it sounds like the ISP is throttling all encrypted content, regardless of its source or destination, so the net neutrality concept doesn't apply at all.
On the hardware side, having the schematic and layout up and visible at the same time is a tremendous productivity saver. The software even supports cross probing, so I can, say, go down the row selecting symbols in the schematic, and they are automatically selected in layout. I also have my computer set up to give focus to the window my mouse pointer is in, so I can jump back and forth selecting, grabbing, and moving parts very quickly.
If you work with research and design software, like LabVIEW, having the front panel and block diagram both visible at once is also a lifesaver.
When simulating VHDL, having the simulation control windows (hierarchy, console, signal tree) maximized in one window while have the wave outputs maximized in the other makes it much faster to see both.
And, of course, any time you need to reference one thing to produce another, a second monitor can reduce the amount of printing required. This can be as simple as having a spreadsheet with raw test results up in one monitor, while writing up a formal report document in the other monitor.
In summary, the productivity improvement is significant enough that the excuse "Salaried people would be expected to get the job done anyway" is irrelevant. No one would expect me to work as many hours as it would take to do this work with one monitor, when I already work more than 40 hours with the productivity of two monitors.
(And yes, I'm monitoring a simulation in the other monitor while I typed this!)
What I want is the following: (This is my own invention, don't patent it!)
- Power strip with remote control to turn it on and off
- Surge protection on all outlets
- At least one, possibly two outlets that bypass the remote control and are always on (for the DVR)
- Battery backup for at least one always-on outlet and at least one regular outlet
I could build one - I have the expertise to do so - but it's just not worth the time to me. Instead, when I rewired our TV room electronics this weekend, I added a regular UPS to the DVR, but I didn't get the remote control (.
If I turn off the UPS/power strip to cut power to the Wii, I'd lose the DVR. I could try running them to separate outlets, but that's just getting overly complicated. The assortment of devices I have in a cabinet next to my TV have greatly varied power requirements, and no power products on the market today meet them all.
I have no idea if the WiiConnect24 feature would sync correctly if the Wii is left unplugged until use. If it does work, then that proves the Wii can sync on demand, and that makes it even more stupid that it can't sync on demand with WiiConnect24 disabled.
However, I have noticed that in order to receive a message that someone just sent me, I have to turn the console into "sleep" mode. I wish the Wii could update while it's in the main menu.
Hmm, now that I think about it, I haven't received any Wii mail since I disabled WiiConnect24, either. (Not that I ever got much; we only have one friend that we know of with a Wii.)
You CAN use these features, you're just not WILLING to... you said so yourself!:-)
This game sounds neat, but it doesn't sound neat enough to have a $10 montly fee. =p
Or you could have two computers streaming two different channels, so your wife and you could watch different stuff. Heaven forbid you have kids who want to watch a third thing. Throw in the DVR and all your "reasonable" assumptions go out the window.
(I'm not saying that's healthy family life, but it's certainly reasonable to expect that with typical American families.)
The features of this game sound pretty cool; I like the tie ins between the different Wii channels.
However, I've disabled WiiConnect24 due to its power use. When the console is in standby and WiiConnect24 is disabled, it uses about 1W. With WiiConnect24 enabled, it uses about 10W. That's about $10 a year I'm not willing to pay in power.
The problem is that, when I turn on the console, it doesn't attempt to synchronize the WiiConnect data. The net connection works - I can use the internet channel and the votes channel - but the new and forecast channels just tell me "WiiConnect24 is disabled" and error out.
Is there any way I can configure the console so that WiiConnect24 is disabled, but when I turn on the chassis I get the data update? I don't mind if the data takes a few minutes or even half an hour to load; I'll play Elebits or something in the mean time.
Sorry if this seems mildly off-topic. I'd like to get excited about this game if I can use its features.
Slashdot Mirror
Replace "shooting" with "stabbing" and I'd guarantee the number killed and wounded would be cut in half (40 to 20):
n dex.html
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/16/vtech.shooting/i
Note: I don't mind any non-felon of sound mind owning: musket, pistol, hunting rifle, shotgun. As you say, some shootings will happen. But your statement that mass murderers would switch to other methods to go on killing sprees doesn't help your point, because nothing a random mentally unstable nobody can get their hands on is as effective as a gun.
Give me a killing spree with a knife any day. You know what? You can't kill more than a few people with a knife before someone tackles you with a baseball bat.
I'd love it if this guy had been denied a shotgun like he was a handgun. Maybe he'd try to build a bomb - but you know, building your own weapons isn't as easy as just buying one made to work. Maybe his bomb wouldn't explode, or he wouldn't know how to position it. Maybe he'd go at it with a knife, but then he'd have to catch them to kill them.
Yes, the plants are in Texas, and the rolling blackouts were in CA. I was pulling together bits of real-world events to illustrate a scenario.
My post was meant purely as an example, to show one reason why the power company would want to hide the identities of its largest customers.
MS will have the ability to control it all via windows and MSIE (whereas Google does not have the ability to control except via natural).
Wait a sec... if Microsoft buys DoubleClick, will the ads be changed so that I would have to use Internet Explorer to view them?
If so, I change my mind: Microsoft CAN buy DoubleClick, please!
As an industry we're now finding it very hard to employ people who know this kind of stuff. Most graduates are taught Java or C++ and have no decent experience at the assembler or hardware level.
On the other hand, in my experience electrical and computer engineers (i.e. hardware engineers) are getting this sort of low-level experience, albeit without the higher-level abstract programming science that a computer science major (i.e. software engineer) would receive. Thus, at least at my company, the hardware engineers will do that low-level programming work.
In other words, there is a market for people who know how to do that sort of programming. Given that Slashdot seems mostly filled with software engineers, keep in mind that you could expand your marketability with low-level programming techniques, and fend off yet another group that's "moving in"* on your job space.
* (Though I think the hardware engineers were there first, and technically you're just "moving in" on their turf. Either way, you're welcome to it; I'd rather be designing a piece of hardware than programming it.)
As someone who was involved in FIRST for the last three years, I wouldn't say that the competition has just now piqued the interest of major sponsors such as NASA - I'd say that they were integral to the development of FIRST from the beginning, most especially NASA.
Indeed, I competed with my high school in the U.S. FIRST robotics competition in 1995, and there were serious contenders sponsored by major companies like Proctor and Gamble back then. Actually, I think they sponsored two teams - one that used Tide as its logo, and the other that used Sunny D...
Too bad our team had a relatively poor sponsor. Our robot's basic design worked, but a reload mechanism was designed too weak to operate, and the sponsor wouldn't/couldn't pay to rebuild the parts scaled up to handle the load. Still, I have some great memories of our matches. Ours was one of the few "shooting" robots that year, and our final match - with three shooters competing - was considered one of the most exciting of the competition.
My guess is:
Later, the power company comes back and says "Hey, public, we're running out of power, and we need to build three more coal-fired power plants near your town, and by the way, we want to avoid regulations that require us to clean our exhaust because that would hurt our bottom line."
The public says "No way, I don't want your pollution clogging my air, worsening my asthma, and causing my city to become subject to EPA regulations. I resent you trying to avoid cleaning up your own mess. By the way, who's driving this demand for power? Is it big business or folks like me, because I know I try to conserve my power use by turning off lights and even switching to CFLs? I don't want to pay (in terms of taxes or pollution) for power generated to serve some big out-of-state business, especially one that doesn't generate many local jobs."
Then, the power company says "-snicker- We can't tell you who is using the power. Just give us the plants or we'll do rolling blackouts on your homes and schools."
Clearly this guy has a right to own one, too:n g.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/04/13/michigan.shooti
Those awful handgun laws that prevented him from getting one made him wait a whole week, until he easily bought a shotgun, before he could go on his killing spree.
I'll send a few dollars to the libertarians to make sure that never happens again.
Alas, I've read that, but they seem to have at most four unique walk-throughs that use different characters. The rest of them all say "Just use Bernard and whoever".
IIRC Texas law says that no red light can be programmed to stop any given lane of traffic for longer than two minutes. If the light is red for longer than five minutes, and it's safe to do so, you can run it.
I think if there are cameras or weight sensors in the street this works differently, of course; the light doesn't *have* to turn green if there's not a car there. If one pulls up, however, the light has to change within two minutes. This of course means that people on bicycles, or cars that fail stop correctly over the weight sensor, or on days where the camera is blinded by the sun, the light might not work correctly.
There's a fan base for Monkey Island as well, but that game came later. For whatever reason, Maniac Mansion is the one that "clicked". Maybe it's the same for the developers.
See the "syd" in my username? Yeah, that's from Maniac Mansion. I've used it ever since.
Incidentally, I was only able to solve Maniac Mansion using one particular method with one set of people. (Very sadly, that didn't include Syd.) I've *always* wanted to go through the game to reach every possible ending. Is there a web site that charts out all the possible events that can occur with each set of characters, and all the possible end sequences?
Whenever I played a game after this where I could make personnel choices, or where the game was set up for me to interact and explore the environment, I always felt a little cheated if the game only had one way to solve a particular puzzle. ("Damn, I have to flip *that* switch? Why can't I instead use this chair to break through the glass?) Compares to the seemingly-endless combinations that could produce different results in Maniac Mansion, everything else seemed like it ran on rails...
The fact that they consider my TV that I spent $3 grand on unworthy of their video, because it doesn't have the correct plug thingy in the back, is enough to put me off the damn thing.
Oh, and I watch 100+ movies a year (over 30 so far this year in the theater, another dozen on DVD). Most of those were independent films at festivals, but still, I'm the perfect market for HD movies at home: watch lots and lots of movies, invested early in hidef, etc. Instead they don't want to sell me product I can use.
Have you tried to get one? I started looking in December without success, but by January I knew the UPS delivery dates of every GameStop, Target, and Best Buy within 5 miles. (That's not too hard to do; just ask.)
Within a few days I caught a GameStop as the UPS truck was driving off. While the clerk fended off phone callers ("Yes we have Wii, no we can't hold one, yes there's a line.") I bought mine and left. I ran across a few more at a Target the next day, though then I was just looking for a game and not another system.
All told, I spent perhaps 2 hours in December making extra stops, then three or four lunch hours in January. If you live in a major metropolitan area, I doubt it would take you more than that.
You got it backwards. He made the devices and came up with applications, but he couldn't do the theory. That's why he tried to get Einstein's help.
That sort of thing happens frequently. An experimental physicist or engineer notices a phenomena in the lab, can reproduce it, and can think of uses for it. He or she can't however, mathematically prove why it happens. Then, a theoretical physicist (probably working at the same company or university) comes up with a mathematical model to explain the phenomena. Together, they file for and receive a patent.
However, the patent process doesn't require mathematical proof to patent something, so Losev seems to have met all the requirements to patent a new invention.
And you're still on dial-up, then?
Seriously, I can't get anything faster without going to a national company.
So what science is going to get canned to pay for this fix?
This reminds me of the accident at the Princeton TFTR when it was being installed. The fusion reactor used huge flywheels to store sufficient power to operate the tokamak (without pulling down the electric grid). During installation, a contractor dropped one of the flywheels from an overhead crane.
To fix the flywheel, congress cancelled almost every other fusion research project in the country. This was when, for example, the EFBT project at NASA was cancelled - despite having results as or more promising than tokamak research.
(My plasma sciences professor at college had previously led the EFBT project; the story is repeated from him.)
I wonder what dozen other less-well-known research projects are going to get canned to fix this high-profile mistake, and what breakthroughs we'll lose because of it.
? I was under the impression that Linux got where it is today because companies like IBM, Novell, and Red Hat paid their employees to work on open source code, organizations like OSDN paid people like Linus Torvalds to manage and organize the material, funders like the Linux Fund and (recently) Google's Summer of Code provided grants for smaller developers, and, finally, some people contributed volunteer work.
I certainly wouldn't want to criticize the work done by unpaid volunteers, but I would have to doubt that they now represent a "large" portion of the code in Linux, either in terms of lines in the kernal or features.
No, not at all. The net neutrality debate is about whether ISPs can throttle content based on the content's particular source, not on the content type.
Throttling based on content type is called packet shaping, and it's been done in the US and elsewhere for many years. Nothing about the net neutrality legislation would affect that, and anyone who says otherwise is confused or trying to deliberately mislead.
Throttling based on source, where content of the same type from different sources receives different priorities, is what the net neutrality legislation is about. In other words, any ISP can choose to tone down streaming video traffic so that all their customers can use basic web and email services. No ISP should be able to block video streaming from Google but allow video to stream from Microsoft, just because Microsoft paid them money. (Unless that was clearly advertised to the ISP's customers before they signed up, that is.)
In this case, it sounds like the ISP is throttling all encrypted content, regardless of its source or destination, so the net neutrality concept doesn't apply at all.
DishNetwork merely has a sales and marketing agreement with AT&T. They aren't owned by them, at least not in a substantial way.
On the hardware side, having the schematic and layout up and visible at the same time is a tremendous productivity saver. The software even supports cross probing, so I can, say, go down the row selecting symbols in the schematic, and they are automatically selected in layout. I also have my computer set up to give focus to the window my mouse pointer is in, so I can jump back and forth selecting, grabbing, and moving parts very quickly.
If you work with research and design software, like LabVIEW, having the front panel and block diagram both visible at once is also a lifesaver.
When simulating VHDL, having the simulation control windows (hierarchy, console, signal tree) maximized in one window while have the wave outputs maximized in the other makes it much faster to see both.
And, of course, any time you need to reference one thing to produce another, a second monitor can reduce the amount of printing required. This can be as simple as having a spreadsheet with raw test results up in one monitor, while writing up a formal report document in the other monitor.
In summary, the productivity improvement is significant enough that the excuse "Salaried people would be expected to get the job done anyway" is irrelevant. No one would expect me to work as many hours as it would take to do this work with one monitor, when I already work more than 40 hours with the productivity of two monitors.
(And yes, I'm monitoring a simulation in the other monitor while I typed this!)
http://www.greenmountain.com/pollutionfree/service s_rates.jsp
Those are blended rates shown on their table; my incremental rate is about $0.10/kWh.
I'm going room by room and unplugging all those other things, too, at the same time that I'm swapping in CFLs.
What I want is the following: (This is my own invention, don't patent it!)
- Power strip with remote control to turn it on and off
- Surge protection on all outlets
- At least one, possibly two outlets that bypass the remote control and are always on (for the DVR)
- Battery backup for at least one always-on outlet and at least one regular outlet
I could build one - I have the expertise to do so - but it's just not worth the time to me. Instead, when I rewired our TV room electronics this weekend, I added a regular UPS to the DVR, but I didn't get the remote control (.
If I turn off the UPS/power strip to cut power to the Wii, I'd lose the DVR. I could try running them to separate outlets, but that's just getting overly complicated. The assortment of devices I have in a cabinet next to my TV have greatly varied power requirements, and no power products on the market today meet them all.
I have no idea if the WiiConnect24 feature would sync correctly if the Wii is left unplugged until use. If it does work, then that proves the Wii can sync on demand, and that makes it even more stupid that it can't sync on demand with WiiConnect24 disabled.
However, I have noticed that in order to receive a message that someone just sent me, I have to turn the console into "sleep" mode. I wish the Wii could update while it's in the main menu.
:-)
Hmm, now that I think about it, I haven't received any Wii mail since I disabled WiiConnect24, either. (Not that I ever got much; we only have one friend that we know of with a Wii.)
You CAN use these features, you're just not WILLING to... you said so yourself!
This game sounds neat, but it doesn't sound neat enough to have a $10 montly fee. =p
Or you could have two computers streaming two different channels, so your wife and you could watch different stuff. Heaven forbid you have kids who want to watch a third thing. Throw in the DVR and all your "reasonable" assumptions go out the window.
(I'm not saying that's healthy family life, but it's certainly reasonable to expect that with typical American families.)
The features of this game sound pretty cool; I like the tie ins between the different Wii channels.
However, I've disabled WiiConnect24 due to its power use. When the console is in standby and WiiConnect24 is disabled, it uses about 1W. With WiiConnect24 enabled, it uses about 10W. That's about $10 a year I'm not willing to pay in power.
The problem is that, when I turn on the console, it doesn't attempt to synchronize the WiiConnect data. The net connection works - I can use the internet channel and the votes channel - but the new and forecast channels just tell me "WiiConnect24 is disabled" and error out.
Is there any way I can configure the console so that WiiConnect24 is disabled, but when I turn on the chassis I get the data update? I don't mind if the data takes a few minutes or even half an hour to load; I'll play Elebits or something in the mean time.
Sorry if this seems mildly off-topic. I'd like to get excited about this game if I can use its features.