I wouldn't want to live to be 1000. That last century you spend in a nursing home probably would Suck with a capital "S"
Do you really think that medicine and other technology will have advanced so little in 900 years that it will not be able to give you a good quality of life? Given how much progress has been made in just the last 100 years, I find such a prospect absurd. More likely, by the time you entered that 10th century, not only would you not be twiddling your thumbs in a nursing home, you'd also no longer be referring to it as "That last century".
An IE-only banking site is a better reason to switch banks than to switch browsers. Should you really trust your money to a bank that forces you to use insecure software?
All they needed was the time that ST needed to go on, and also the times for some of the other bands on the schedule the guys wanted to see. OO.o rules.
It does. But this also demonstrates why it's bad to send simple information in needlessly complex, closed, proprietary formats.
Nothing pisses off advertisers more than an informed consumer, and intelligent consumers tend to be informed. Ads are almost all content-free, appealing to emotions. That works well for people with limited education and/or intelligence. It doesn't work well for most people reading Slashdot.... That's why we find them so offensive, and thus why we are -less- likely to buy a product after seeing an advertisement, unlike a typical consumer.
Not to worry, gentle reader. This bill has provisions to ensure that everyone is properly educated. The followers of the old, bad ways will die out, leaving a new generation that will have the proper reverence for the corporate doctrine.
SEC. 205. EDUCATION PROGRAM.
(a) Establishment- There shall be established within the Office of the Associate Attorney General of the United States an Internet Use Education Program.
(b) Purpose- The purpose of the Internet Use Education Program shall be to--
(1) educate the general public concerning the value of copyrighted works and the effects of the theft of such works on those who create them; and
(2) educate the general public concerning the privacy, security, and other risks of using the Internet to obtain illegal copies of copyrighted works.
(c) Sector Specific Materials- The Internet Use Educational Program shall, to the extent appropriate, develop materials appropriate to Internet users in different sectors of the general public where criminal copyright infringement is a concern. The Attorney General shall consult with appropriate interested parties in developing such sector-specific materials.
(d) Consultations- The Attorney General shall consult with the Register of Copyrights and the Secretary of Commerce in developing the Internet Use Education Program under this section.
(e) Prohibition on Use of Certain Funds- The program created under this section shall not use funds or resources of the Department of Justice allocated for criminal investigation or prosecution.
(f) Additional Prohibition on the Use of Funds- The program created under this section shall not use any funds or resources of the Department of Justice allocated for the Civil Rights Division of the Department, including any funds allocated for the enforcement of civil rights or the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
I'm a little surprised that TI would sample something as common and cheap as an LM317. Those things have been widely used for 25 years, so it's not like they need a lot of promotion. It probably cost TI more to pack and mail them than it would have cost this guy to buy them.
Why don't you compare and contrast for us the merits of the hydrogen fuel station 50 yards away from the school with what's likely the natural gas line and furnace that likely runs driectly to and resides inside the school?
You mean like this one? That's the incident that effectively silenced all opposition to putting odorants in natural gas. Kids and teachers had been complaining about not feeling well for several days. No one knew why until the school exploded from the odorless gas that had been accumulating in and under the building. 300 people died. Most were children.
similar quackery was investigated by the Nazi scientists who were deeply into the occult and other "black arts" including the flat earth society and the hollow earthers (how do you reconcile those two groups? flat and hollow??)
The only way to increase quality of life for all of humanity is by instituting strict birth control policies so we do what nature used to do for us: limit population size so it matches available resources.
It seems to me that fertility is the natural price to pay for immortality.
Re:Well I'll be damned
on
Nuclear Batteries
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The real problem is the issue of keeping the materials out of landfills.
I think the way to deal with that is to make them artificially valuable. Pay a deposit at the time of purchase, get a refund for turning one in. Make it large enough to be attractive, but small enough that the cost add isn't prohibitive. Say $10. That would be enough to discourage many from throwing them away, and if many throw them out anyway, you'd have people searching the trash with geiger counters to make a few bucks. Like bottle deposits, but bigger.
What I mean is, while conventional water heaters consume moderate power for long periods, tankless ones consume very high power for short periods. Probably no big deal if you have the only one on the block. But what happens when everyone in a neighborhood has one and a significant number of them like to take showers at about the same time every morning? Would that require a more overbuilt infrastructure just to handle the peak loads?
Going back to Charles Babbage doesn't really seem a fair comparison to me. We're not starting from scratch here. Babbage had no useful existing computing technology to build from. The creaters of this new tech have some pretty fantastic old tech to work with. A better comparison might be the time since the first integrated circuits. Computers were already around. Ideas about data busses and address decoding were in place and in practice. The use of programming languages to put a useful layer of abstraction between man and machine had already happened. And numerous algorithms and other concepts were already around. So we had some idea of what to do with the IC technology even when it was still in the "laboratory curiosity" phase. And we had some already developed technologies that would remain useful in conjunction with the new stuff. Recording digital data on magnetic media, for example. And I think that's where we stand today, only moreso. Our pre-QC computers may be primitive compared to what is to come, but they are still fantastically beyond the tools that developers of earlier technologies had to work with. Our pre-QC tech will serve both as tools, and as an integral part of the next generation technology. A quantum computer will still need to get data from somewhere, and present it, and transmit it, and store it. We have some pretty good ways of doing those things already. Some of that technology will eventually be supplanted, but some will likely remain very useful well into post-QC times. I suspect that the first practical QC's may be a sort of coprocessor that an otherwise conventional computer will call upon to perform certain tasks.
So I guess I favor a much more optimistic time scale than you do. But predicting the future has never been easy, and it seems much harder now than ever before. 20 years ago I had a reasonably accurate idea of what computers would be like 10 years later. My expectations for the next ten were less accurate, mostly erring on the conservative side. Now I have little confidence in predicting what they'll be like in 5 years. Expand that past 10 and throw in a very fundamental wildcard like QC, and I'm left without even a yardstick with which to distinguish between the reasonable and the patently absurd.
This is the SAME court that banned the Pledge of Allegiance because of the words "Under God".
Not true. The Pledge of Allegiance has never been banned by the 9th Circuit nor any other court. They ruled only that public schools cannot compel students to recite it. And for that they should be commended. They upheld the Constitution even when there was political pressure to do otherwise.
Metropolis is great. I'd really love to see a modern remake as long as it's respectful to the original story and doesn't try to completely remove the anachronistic 1920's view of the future. That it now simultaneously speaks something of the real past and an imagined future is one of the things I love about it.
In case any are unfamiliar with it, Metropolis is a silent movie made in 1926. There are no known complete copies, so any version you see will necessarily be an assemblage from bits of various copies. And while there's enough bits to make a full length movie, I don't think there's any version that's totally complete.
I've only seen two reconstructions of it. One was pretty much just an assemblage of whatever bits could be recovered, without any embelleshment except for a soundtrack that I think was a guess at the general kind of thing that might have been played with it at a theatre in the 1920's. The other is the one made by Georgio Moroder that has some poorly done embellishments and a soundtrack of 80's music, mostly badly chosen.
Moroder's version is widely criticized and often considered a bit insulting to the original, but I actually rather liked it in spite of the obvious warts. What I liked about it was that it seemed to tell the story better than the straight restoration, and best I can tell, without losing the spirit of it. Also, there was one musical track in Moroder's version that I think actually fit the scene very well. And that was the "Blood from a Stone" song that played during the "Shift Change" scene from the beginning of the movie.
A great old movie like this should not languish forever in such disrepair. A really good remake would be great.
Slashdot Mirror
An IE-only banking site is a better reason to switch banks than to switch browsers. Should you really trust your money to a bank that forces you to use insecure software?
I don't know. But they probably use BR-549 as their phone number.
No. It took four minutes to close all the IE popup ads.
I'm a little surprised that TI would sample something as common and cheap as an LM317. Those things have been widely used for 25 years, so it's not like they need a lot of promotion. It probably cost TI more to pack and mail them than it would have cost this guy to buy them.
I found that I could get higher scores by closing my eyes and playing it by sound alone.
Not if your primary function is to help out your oil industry buddies.
Ah yes. This could create a whole new industry for the coastal towns of Tennessee.
Those will probably get outsourced just like so many other American jobs this president has "saved".
Oh man, that would be perfect for playing Pong.
Are tankless water heaters a scalable solution?
What I mean is, while conventional water heaters consume moderate power for long periods, tankless ones consume very high power for short periods. Probably no big deal if you have the only one on the block. But what happens when everyone in a neighborhood has one and a significant number of them like to take showers at about the same time every morning? Would that require a more overbuilt infrastructure just to handle the peak loads?
Going back to Charles Babbage doesn't really seem a fair comparison to me. We're not starting from scratch here. Babbage had no useful existing computing technology to build from. The creaters of this new tech have some pretty fantastic old tech to work with. A better comparison might be the time since the first integrated circuits. Computers were already around. Ideas about data busses and address decoding were in place and in practice. The use of programming languages to put a useful layer of abstraction between man and machine had already happened. And numerous algorithms and other concepts were already around. So we had some idea of what to do with the IC technology even when it was still in the "laboratory curiosity" phase. And we had some already developed technologies that would remain useful in conjunction with the new stuff. Recording digital data on magnetic media, for example. And I think that's where we stand today, only moreso. Our pre-QC computers may be primitive compared to what is to come, but they are still fantastically beyond the tools that developers of earlier technologies had to work with. Our pre-QC tech will serve both as tools, and as an integral part of the next generation technology. A quantum computer will still need to get data from somewhere, and present it, and transmit it, and store it. We have some pretty good ways of doing those things already. Some of that technology will eventually be supplanted, but some will likely remain very useful well into post-QC times. I suspect that the first practical QC's may be a sort of coprocessor that an otherwise conventional computer will call upon to perform certain tasks.
So I guess I favor a much more optimistic time scale than you do. But predicting the future has never been easy, and it seems much harder now than ever before. 20 years ago I had a reasonably accurate idea of what computers would be like 10 years later. My expectations for the next ten were less accurate, mostly erring on the conservative side. Now I have little confidence in predicting what they'll be like in 5 years. Expand that past 10 and throw in a very fundamental wildcard like QC, and I'm left without even a yardstick with which to distinguish between the reasonable and the patently absurd.
Metropolis is great. I'd really love to see a modern remake as long as it's respectful to the original story and doesn't try to completely remove the anachronistic 1920's view of the future. That it now simultaneously speaks something of the real past and an imagined future is one of the things I love about it.
In case any are unfamiliar with it, Metropolis is a silent movie made in 1926. There are no known complete copies, so any version you see will necessarily be an assemblage from bits of various copies. And while there's enough bits to make a full length movie, I don't think there's any version that's totally complete.
I've only seen two reconstructions of it. One was pretty much just an assemblage of whatever bits could be recovered, without any embelleshment except for a soundtrack that I think was a guess at the general kind of thing that might have been played with it at a theatre in the 1920's. The other is the one made by Georgio Moroder that has some poorly done embellishments and a soundtrack of 80's music, mostly badly chosen.
Moroder's version is widely criticized and often considered a bit insulting to the original, but I actually rather liked it in spite of the obvious warts. What I liked about it was that it seemed to tell the story better than the straight restoration, and best I can tell, without losing the spirit of it. Also, there was one musical track in Moroder's version that I think actually fit the scene very well. And that was the "Blood from a Stone" song that played during the "Shift Change" scene from the beginning of the movie.
A great old movie like this should not languish forever in such disrepair. A really good remake would be great.