Not sure that I agree. Chicken Pox on the whole is a lot more harmful than the vaccine. Sure, the people who die from the vaccine were not likely to die from Chicken Pox, but lots more people would have died from the Chicken Pox if they didn't have the vaccine. And yes, Chicken Pox can be fatal.
Keep in mind that the risks/benefits for many vaccines are both relatively low, and the effects are only seen on the scale of populations. If you give 100 people a chicken pox vaccine you will likely neither save nor take lives. If you give it to 100 million you will likely do both.
BEFORE BES became popular you're suggesting that RIM was selling texting toys to teenagers?
Blackberry was a corporate phone long before it took off with teens. They cost a fortune in the early days, and were an executive status symbol. In the US at least in that era it wasn't super-common for teenagers to even have phones, though some did have them. We're talking 1990s here...
Well, I wouldn't even say that WP is run by computer geeks so much as legal geeks or bureaucracy geeks. Or, maybe people who act like computers. I guess you could call them wikipedia geeks.
A typical dispute over what goes on with some article ends up having nothing to do with either common sense or the truth, but rather who can twist the greatest number of WP:STUPID-POLICYs to get their way. Having no life helps a great deal as well, since even the tiniest dispute tends to turn into the 100 years war.
Yup. I've had more trouble getting twitter to work in Chrome than I care to detail. I'll take standard html over AJAX any day. Sure, if you're building a fancy application I can see the value in AJAX, but to present content, forget it!
If they wanted to build an AJAX WYSIWYG/M page editor for WP I could see the logic in that. However, the site layout is perfectly readable as it is right now...
Ah, well, it still requires telling a lie. Maybe it is no longer a crime, but the woman in this particular case refused to do it on moral grounds.
A prosecutor can even ask you to allocute. That means you need to completely describe the details of what you did. Could you imagine having to make that up?
Besides, this stuff is getting crazy. Somebody designs a system. Somebody else says, hey, if we moved this component of the system from right here to over there, making one wire longer, and one wire shorter, then it would have some benefit. It sounds like this hinged on where the DAC was placed.
Is that the kind of "innovation" that warrants patent protection?
So, what's the alternative? Let the people who can't compete starve?
So now instead of factories and billions of workers we have robotic factories and millions of robot designers. Then the robots are good enough to meet demand, so we have robotic factories and thousands of robot designers. Then we figure out how to get robots to design themselves and we have a world full of robots.
By this point either everybody is living on resorts tended to by robots, or there is only one person left on the planet - the guy who owns all the robots, and we've let everybody else starve. Which sounds like the better future?
The fact is that a lot of people aren't capable of doing truely useful work. This has always been the case, but what is changing is the percentage of the population that they constitute. Do we assign value to these people, or consider them waste?
The problem is that maybe I know I want a 1TB 7200RPM hard drive, and maybe I'm willing to pay more for cache if the price is right.
Amazon doesn't really do good filtering by these kinds of criteria, which leaves you wading through lots of stuff, or wondering if you are seeing everything you want. Sure, I can type 1TB 7200 in the box and get results, but I don't KNOW that this is all of them. Then if I sort by price I end up with three pages of SATA cables or something at the top.
If I know I need a model 1405 widget their site is great.
So, non-sheep, what is an appropriate "safety limit." Is that the speed at which it is most safe to drive, or is it the speed at which the local neighbor got the signs set to after collecting a million signatures for the mayor's re-election?
Nobody ships ice across the atlantic anymore - that was just an illustration.
It is easy to ship ice cream and not lose a bit of it. You just stick it in styrofoam with some dry ice. The problem is that the dry ice costs more than the ice cream. I hear there are some competitive cold packs out now that are good enough, but they also are likely more expensive than the ice cream unless you somehow re-use them.
Sure, you can refrigerate shipments. However, the cost of this is pretty high.
You can ship ice across the Atlantic on a freighter (believe it or not that used to be how it was done, granted in the era of wooden ships). If you do it with an ice cube, you end up with a puddle before you're done hauling anchor. If you do it with a full hold you have fairly minimal losses (maybe 10%).
When shipping cold stuff the surface area to volume matters A LOT, as does relative amount of heat transfer. A cubic inch of styrofoam allows so many calories per hour to go through - whether there is a pint or a ton of ice cream inside. As you scale up the volume goes up faster than surface area. Then factor in other economies of scale.
The bottom line is that if you want to buy a ton of ice cream the shipping cost is pretty minimal compared to manufacturing costs. If you want to ship a pint of ice cream the shipping cost probably exceeds manufacturing cost.
And if you actually are innocent, a good lawyer will tell you to refuse the deal and take it to court.
And what if the deal is for time served? All you have to do is lie under oath and say you committed a crime you didn't commit. Your integrity, or your freedom, which will it be?
I'm not sure if this works out better for Amazon or not. I think it might just be a case of a company actually adapting to the real world and not just trying to change it. They fought off the tax changes, and made a fortune for while that lasted. Now they probably figured the writing was on the wall, so while they were ahead they probably cut deals to get tax breaks of one kind or another to implement this new strategy. I'll take that any day over lobbying Congress to keep the buggywhip manufacturers around.
I agree on the Walmart bit. Honestly I buy about 99% of everything from 2-3 places now - Amazon, Walmart, and a local mega-grocery chain (though Walmart has introduced food and is now largely replacing that).
For perishable stuff, or stuff where the cost:size/weight ratio does not favor shipment I go to Walmart. For everything else there is Amazon. Amazon is so much cheaper that even paying for expedited shipping is often a break-even at worst, and it saves me the hassle of the store.
I remember when somebody got me a Best Buy gift card for christmas. I think I still have it lying around years later, probably worth nothing. Every time I thought about using it and checked their prices I'd pay more even after using the card than I would online. Same for most other chain stores - unless you're buying really cheap stuff or things that are bulky/heavy/perishable, you can't beat Amazon. And forget cables - even Walmart rips you off on those.
Even tiny linux distros with 20 users usually have policies. Their policy might be that they don't do security updates, but they have a policy or can produce one if asked.
Nothing wrong with changing the policy either, as long as it is forward-moving.
Who knows what vulnerabilities they are just sitting on because people are willing to buy their product without any promise of a response.
While I can see applications for something like this, I don't see how espionage and special forces ops are among them.
The whole point of these kinds of operations is to not let anybody know they are happening. They even talk about this drone as being extra quiet and stealthy. So, if that is the case, does it really make sense to shine a big laser at it? Maybe you could start it out quiet and then only turn the laser on after the bullets start flying, which makes more sense for special forces than espionage.
Where I could see something like this as being more useful is general surveillance of established territory. If I had a base that I had to protect it would be nice to have cameras orbiting up high showing me everything going on around me. The base isn't a secret, and in fact is a target. The bad guys already know I probably have drones. This just makes it possible for me to actually have drones all the time. If the bad guys try to shoot one down, well, I know something is up, which is their whole point.
I'm happy to stand corrected on their OS support if true, but I couldn't find any clearly stated policy on the Apple website (I looked). The best I could do was some oneline discussion which suggested they stopped publishing updates two versions in the past.
An object doesn't even need more energy to move faster at relativistic speeds, FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE OBJECT.
If you're travelling along and going faster and faster, you don't suddenly sense some futile point where you can't go any faster (the speed of light). Instead you feel like you're going faster and faster, but you do notice that everything around you is shrinking and moving towards the front of your field of view. If you want to travel from here to the other side of the universe in 15 minutes that isn't a problem at all, as long as it is 15 minutes on a clock you take with you.
Happy to be corrected by an expert, but my understanding is that the speed of light is the same in every frame of reference. So, in your ship travelling at the speed of light (relative to somebody outside) if you turn on a flashlight it works just fine - you're no closer to the speed of light than when you started, as you measure it. What you see is everybody else in the universe moving backwards at very close to the speed of light - imagine how much energy it must have take to accelerate the entire universe to that speed!
Well, you'd keep stations to a minimum - the point is to use it for long haul and keep it at very high speed (think NY-LA in half an hour). You'd obviously aim to miss populated areas, except for the terminals. Those might even be away from city centers, but it would make sense to have them near airports and conventional train hubs.
Sure, there are the usual right-of-way issues when you're in urban areas, but much of the country is flyover territory.
Infrastructure also has huge long-term value, and often it employs the sorts of people who aren't going to be working on the next iPhone. If we're going to be paying them welfare anyway so that they don't starve, why not at least have them build something useful, which gives Americans a competitive advantage in the workforce?
Maybe, but speeds of 4000mph+ could be a game-changer.
You wouldn't build these all over the place. However, imagine a few strategic lines, like New York to San Francisco. A train travelling at 8000mph could make that trip in something like 20 minutes, with half of that spend accelerating at 1g.
If you give both ends easy transit to an airport you now have a hub-and-spoke system that can use planes to make the rest of the trip, while cutting upwards of 5-6 hours off the travel time. The train would not be affected by weather, so it should be reliable enough to eliminate all the extra time wasted on layovers for multi-stop travel.
Maybe add one stop in the middle of the country and now it is a 40 minute trip, but it gives you more options, or have local/express lines.
The key is to not go crazy with having one of these things stop in every city. The whole point of it is to cover enormous distances in very little time.
An interesting effect would be that at 8000mph you'd experience -0.2g of vertical accelleration, ie you'd feel 20% lighter due to the curvature of the earth.
Yeah, but you can STILL get security updates for XP, let alone Vista or Win7.
It sounds like Apple only supports one previous version.
That means that if you run windows you STILL get completely official security updates for a computer 12 years old, though you should be saving up to replace it now as that will end TWO YEARS from now, when your computer is 14 years old.
It sounds like with OSX you're going to be on shaky ground in 5-6 years. I don't think that is terrible for personal use, but for a corporate user having to roll out a new OS version every other Apple release (they release annually it seems) is a huge amount of overhead, and if you do have some kind of oddball hardware setup you will be forced to keep that moving along as well.
Yup - the limitation is on takeoff weight, and carrying less fuel reduces that, but of course decreases range.
An extreme example of this is B52 bombers. A B52 fully loaded with bombs can only carry a small percentage of its fuel capacity. Basically they take off, climb to a reasonable altitude, and then immediately refuel. At cruising velocity they can carry a lot more weight, but to get that much weight up to that kind of speed on takeoff would require many miles of runway, and would be dangerous besides (you normally don't want jets flying 200 knots on the ground).
The other typical military solution is to use JATO, but that isn't terribly cost-effective for commercial use. It would look pretty neat though. I don't know what the rejected takeoff procedure is like with JATO - since not flying a mission in combat can mean dead people on the ground it might very well be that the rejected takeoff procedure is to say your prayers.
The whole risk situation changes in the military. Maybe the weather isn't great for flying, but you can't exactly decide to keep your fighters grounded if there is an incoming air raid. It isn't like the pilots will be any safer on the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure that I agree. Chicken Pox on the whole is a lot more harmful than the vaccine. Sure, the people who die from the vaccine were not likely to die from Chicken Pox, but lots more people would have died from the Chicken Pox if they didn't have the vaccine. And yes, Chicken Pox can be fatal.
Keep in mind that the risks/benefits for many vaccines are both relatively low, and the effects are only seen on the scale of populations. If you give 100 people a chicken pox vaccine you will likely neither save nor take lives. If you give it to 100 million you will likely do both.
I think RIM's whole point was that the Backberry WAS prior art. I wish there were a link to the actual rulings...
BEFORE BES became popular you're suggesting that RIM was selling texting toys to teenagers?
Blackberry was a corporate phone long before it took off with teens. They cost a fortune in the early days, and were an executive status symbol. In the US at least in that era it wasn't super-common for teenagers to even have phones, though some did have them. We're talking 1990s here...
Well, I wouldn't even say that WP is run by computer geeks so much as legal geeks or bureaucracy geeks. Or, maybe people who act like computers. I guess you could call them wikipedia geeks.
A typical dispute over what goes on with some article ends up having nothing to do with either common sense or the truth, but rather who can twist the greatest number of WP:STUPID-POLICYs to get their way. Having no life helps a great deal as well, since even the tiniest dispute tends to turn into the 100 years war.
Yup. I've had more trouble getting twitter to work in Chrome than I care to detail. I'll take standard html over AJAX any day. Sure, if you're building a fancy application I can see the value in AJAX, but to present content, forget it!
If they wanted to build an AJAX WYSIWYG/M page editor for WP I could see the logic in that. However, the site layout is perfectly readable as it is right now...
Am I reading something wrong. The linked page has an A>20 watch right now.
Ah, well, it still requires telling a lie. Maybe it is no longer a crime, but the woman in this particular case refused to do it on moral grounds.
A prosecutor can even ask you to allocute. That means you need to completely describe the details of what you did. Could you imagine having to make that up?
Besides, this stuff is getting crazy. Somebody designs a system. Somebody else says, hey, if we moved this component of the system from right here to over there, making one wire longer, and one wire shorter, then it would have some benefit. It sounds like this hinged on where the DAC was placed.
Is that the kind of "innovation" that warrants patent protection?
So, what's the alternative? Let the people who can't compete starve?
So now instead of factories and billions of workers we have robotic factories and millions of robot designers. Then the robots are good enough to meet demand, so we have robotic factories and thousands of robot designers. Then we figure out how to get robots to design themselves and we have a world full of robots.
By this point either everybody is living on resorts tended to by robots, or there is only one person left on the planet - the guy who owns all the robots, and we've let everybody else starve. Which sounds like the better future?
The fact is that a lot of people aren't capable of doing truely useful work. This has always been the case, but what is changing is the percentage of the population that they constitute. Do we assign value to these people, or consider them waste?
The problem is that maybe I know I want a 1TB 7200RPM hard drive, and maybe I'm willing to pay more for cache if the price is right.
Amazon doesn't really do good filtering by these kinds of criteria, which leaves you wading through lots of stuff, or wondering if you are seeing everything you want. Sure, I can type 1TB 7200 in the box and get results, but I don't KNOW that this is all of them. Then if I sort by price I end up with three pages of SATA cables or something at the top.
If I know I need a model 1405 widget their site is great.
So, non-sheep, what is an appropriate "safety limit." Is that the speed at which it is most safe to drive, or is it the speed at which the local neighbor got the signs set to after collecting a million signatures for the mayor's re-election?
Nobody ships ice across the atlantic anymore - that was just an illustration.
It is easy to ship ice cream and not lose a bit of it. You just stick it in styrofoam with some dry ice. The problem is that the dry ice costs more than the ice cream. I hear there are some competitive cold packs out now that are good enough, but they also are likely more expensive than the ice cream unless you somehow re-use them.
Sure, you can refrigerate shipments. However, the cost of this is pretty high.
You can ship ice across the Atlantic on a freighter (believe it or not that used to be how it was done, granted in the era of wooden ships). If you do it with an ice cube, you end up with a puddle before you're done hauling anchor. If you do it with a full hold you have fairly minimal losses (maybe 10%).
When shipping cold stuff the surface area to volume matters A LOT, as does relative amount of heat transfer. A cubic inch of styrofoam allows so many calories per hour to go through - whether there is a pint or a ton of ice cream inside. As you scale up the volume goes up faster than surface area. Then factor in other economies of scale.
The bottom line is that if you want to buy a ton of ice cream the shipping cost is pretty minimal compared to manufacturing costs. If you want to ship a pint of ice cream the shipping cost probably exceeds manufacturing cost.
And if you actually are innocent, a good lawyer will tell you to refuse the deal and take it to court.
And what if the deal is for time served? All you have to do is lie under oath and say you committed a crime you didn't commit. Your integrity, or your freedom, which will it be?
And yes, this has happened.
Uh, where in that whole post did I comment on the law at all?
I'm not sure if this works out better for Amazon or not. I think it might just be a case of a company actually adapting to the real world and not just trying to change it. They fought off the tax changes, and made a fortune for while that lasted. Now they probably figured the writing was on the wall, so while they were ahead they probably cut deals to get tax breaks of one kind or another to implement this new strategy. I'll take that any day over lobbying Congress to keep the buggywhip manufacturers around.
I agree on the Walmart bit. Honestly I buy about 99% of everything from 2-3 places now - Amazon, Walmart, and a local mega-grocery chain (though Walmart has introduced food and is now largely replacing that).
For perishable stuff, or stuff where the cost:size/weight ratio does not favor shipment I go to Walmart. For everything else there is Amazon. Amazon is so much cheaper that even paying for expedited shipping is often a break-even at worst, and it saves me the hassle of the store.
I remember when somebody got me a Best Buy gift card for christmas. I think I still have it lying around years later, probably worth nothing. Every time I thought about using it and checked their prices I'd pay more even after using the card than I would online. Same for most other chain stores - unless you're buying really cheap stuff or things that are bulky/heavy/perishable, you can't beat Amazon. And forget cables - even Walmart rips you off on those.
Sort of. There are lots of cheap phones. There are few if any that run stock Android and provide decent updates.
One of the things Google should do with Nexus is raise the bar, as they did from the start.
Seems really bizarre not to have a policy.
Even tiny linux distros with 20 users usually have policies. Their policy might be that they don't do security updates, but they have a policy or can produce one if asked.
Nothing wrong with changing the policy either, as long as it is forward-moving.
Who knows what vulnerabilities they are just sitting on because people are willing to buy their product without any promise of a response.
While I can see applications for something like this, I don't see how espionage and special forces ops are among them.
The whole point of these kinds of operations is to not let anybody know they are happening. They even talk about this drone as being extra quiet and stealthy. So, if that is the case, does it really make sense to shine a big laser at it? Maybe you could start it out quiet and then only turn the laser on after the bullets start flying, which makes more sense for special forces than espionage.
Where I could see something like this as being more useful is general surveillance of established territory. If I had a base that I had to protect it would be nice to have cameras orbiting up high showing me everything going on around me. The base isn't a secret, and in fact is a target. The bad guys already know I probably have drones. This just makes it possible for me to actually have drones all the time. If the bad guys try to shoot one down, well, I know something is up, which is their whole point.
I'm happy to stand corrected on their OS support if true, but I couldn't find any clearly stated policy on the Apple website (I looked). The best I could do was some oneline discussion which suggested they stopped publishing updates two versions in the past.
An object doesn't even need more energy to move faster at relativistic speeds, FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE OBJECT.
If you're travelling along and going faster and faster, you don't suddenly sense some futile point where you can't go any faster (the speed of light). Instead you feel like you're going faster and faster, but you do notice that everything around you is shrinking and moving towards the front of your field of view. If you want to travel from here to the other side of the universe in 15 minutes that isn't a problem at all, as long as it is 15 minutes on a clock you take with you.
Happy to be corrected by an expert, but my understanding is that the speed of light is the same in every frame of reference. So, in your ship travelling at the speed of light (relative to somebody outside) if you turn on a flashlight it works just fine - you're no closer to the speed of light than when you started, as you measure it. What you see is everybody else in the universe moving backwards at very close to the speed of light - imagine how much energy it must have take to accelerate the entire universe to that speed!
Well, you'd keep stations to a minimum - the point is to use it for long haul and keep it at very high speed (think NY-LA in half an hour). You'd obviously aim to miss populated areas, except for the terminals. Those might even be away from city centers, but it would make sense to have them near airports and conventional train hubs.
Sure, there are the usual right-of-way issues when you're in urban areas, but much of the country is flyover territory.
Infrastructure also has huge long-term value, and often it employs the sorts of people who aren't going to be working on the next iPhone. If we're going to be paying them welfare anyway so that they don't starve, why not at least have them build something useful, which gives Americans a competitive advantage in the workforce?
Maybe, but speeds of 4000mph+ could be a game-changer.
You wouldn't build these all over the place. However, imagine a few strategic lines, like New York to San Francisco. A train travelling at 8000mph could make that trip in something like 20 minutes, with half of that spend accelerating at 1g.
If you give both ends easy transit to an airport you now have a hub-and-spoke system that can use planes to make the rest of the trip, while cutting upwards of 5-6 hours off the travel time. The train would not be affected by weather, so it should be reliable enough to eliminate all the extra time wasted on layovers for multi-stop travel.
Maybe add one stop in the middle of the country and now it is a 40 minute trip, but it gives you more options, or have local/express lines.
The key is to not go crazy with having one of these things stop in every city. The whole point of it is to cover enormous distances in very little time.
An interesting effect would be that at 8000mph you'd experience -0.2g of vertical accelleration, ie you'd feel 20% lighter due to the curvature of the earth.
Yeah, but you can STILL get security updates for XP, let alone Vista or Win7.
It sounds like Apple only supports one previous version.
That means that if you run windows you STILL get completely official security updates for a computer 12 years old, though you should be saving up to replace it now as that will end TWO YEARS from now, when your computer is 14 years old.
It sounds like with OSX you're going to be on shaky ground in 5-6 years. I don't think that is terrible for personal use, but for a corporate user having to roll out a new OS version every other Apple release (they release annually it seems) is a huge amount of overhead, and if you do have some kind of oddball hardware setup you will be forced to keep that moving along as well.
Yup - the limitation is on takeoff weight, and carrying less fuel reduces that, but of course decreases range.
An extreme example of this is B52 bombers. A B52 fully loaded with bombs can only carry a small percentage of its fuel capacity. Basically they take off, climb to a reasonable altitude, and then immediately refuel. At cruising velocity they can carry a lot more weight, but to get that much weight up to that kind of speed on takeoff would require many miles of runway, and would be dangerous besides (you normally don't want jets flying 200 knots on the ground).
The other typical military solution is to use JATO, but that isn't terribly cost-effective for commercial use. It would look pretty neat though. I don't know what the rejected takeoff procedure is like with JATO - since not flying a mission in combat can mean dead people on the ground it might very well be that the rejected takeoff procedure is to say your prayers.
The whole risk situation changes in the military. Maybe the weather isn't great for flying, but you can't exactly decide to keep your fighters grounded if there is an incoming air raid. It isn't like the pilots will be any safer on the ground.