My problem with unlicensed drug sales is there's no quality control. There's HUGE money to be made (billions of dollars) selling diluted or outright fake drugs. It's bad enough with illicit drugs like marijuana where at least people can try it and find out what happens 2 minutes later; now consider a cancer drug, where the lack of efficacy might not be evident until months later... when you're dead.
Fake drugs were the norm back in the 1900s and before. It still happens, even with the FDA in place, but at least there's a real deterrent, and the guy in that link is rotting in jail now instead of peddling overpriced water.
The overprotection of fat, spolied American pharmaceutical companies is a separate issue. We need to fix the regulation, but not drop it.
IANAL, but every time this comes up, the conclusion seems to be that ISPs are not Common Carriers, and how they avoid liability for infringement is by complying with DMCA requests to do whatever purported copyright holders ask that they do.
Gasoline explodes 100 times per second, per cylinder in your engine. It's certainly more explosive than hydrogen, anyways:
With an ideal Hydrogen-air mixture, a flame front can travel at around 8 feet/second. For comparison, a gasoline-air mixture creates a flame front speed that ranges from around 70 feet/second up to around 170 feet/second in normal engines.
Thanks for the info. It sounds like it is done geographically, and there's not a big federal list of each person's phone number? I.e. they don't know who they are sending the alert to, except "everybody in this location"?
If you look at the linked page, the collector says these are "input and interactive devices that he found interesting, useful, or important," not (as the submitter read into it) "failed."
I'd imagine a high percentage of the collection did fail in the marketplace, simply because there's no point adding a normal PC mouse, for example, to a collection. But neither is this a random collection of crappy failed products, which would be endless and not very valuable.
I have one of the products, a wireless keyboard/trackpad, which is perfect for controlling a computer connected to a TV - which is very useful now that "TVs" are 1080p digital displays.
Recognizing groupthink as a problem is one thing, fixing it is another. Even the legal system (laws and court system, all the way to the Supreme Court) are all just low-pass filters that make society's judgments register with society's long-term values. They reduce kneejerk reactions, but they're still ultimately based on nothing but collective values.
I think that problem is unavoidable in a peer moderation system. It would be somewhat mitigated with "editor" moderation (i.e. centralized moderation), but that has a raft of other problems.
Of the news comment sites I frequent, none have comment threading (at most, they limit indenting to one level), and none have effective moderation. Despite its flaws, the/. system is light years ahead of them, especially if you start counting from 1999 or whenever it was.
The solution to the horseshit crisis was the automobile; their emissions are a lot less than a horse, on a per-mile basis. The positive view of this is we can innovate our way out of anything. The negative view is we might create even bigger long-term problems by doing so.
I am closer to the positive view. If nothing else, we could adopt nuclear on a massive scale to make ample electricity and greatly reduce gasoline consumption without changing life all that much. Yes, it would be several trillion dollars, and driving might be somewhat more expensive for several decades. But I don't think we're at risk of sliding back out of the industrial revolution or anything like that.
It's Haiti... think hard... there was some sort of disruption to their electrical and gas supply lines not too long ago, which coincided with a spike in the demand for medical procedures, and a lot of unsanitary procedures such as amputations were performed. This is not hypothetical. There actually are places where people cannot simply assume reliable energy sources all the time (and that isn't just a jab at California).
we still think of electricity as primarily being used to light bulbs... and that's something we typically want to do when the sun isn't up.
I wonder how true that is? I.e. what percentage of electricity used for lighting is during daylight hours? I can't think of anywhere that artificial lighting is *not* used during the day. The only time people don't use lights are when they are asleep, at night. Unfortunately I couldn't find any statistics either way, but I think it is conceivable the majority of lighting energy is consumed during daylight.
If this tech is so top-secret, why don't they spend some time and build a self-immolate feature into the entire helicopter?
Didn't they? I'm amazed the biggest piece left is the tail rotor. Where did the rest go? Of all the IEDs insurgents have been putting into cars, they never actually vaporize the frame and body.
Since practically everybody will need networking, and a USB Ethernet device doubles the size and cost of this particular computer, it seems like it would be justified (for almost any conceivable user) to include integrated WiFi. With millions of those being built into phones they must be pretty cheap?
Hopefully it will never matter, but I do wonder sometimes how much re-discovery would be necessary for society to rebuild from scratch. Are there cases where the knowledge needed to build the tool needed to build the component needed to build the machine no longer exists? Like a company whose custom software stack is rooted, several layers down, in some COBOL understood only by a guy who retired 10 years ago and is dead now.
Alternately, the taxes may have benefits that outweigh the costs, thus being part of a tax-paying populace may make you richer. There certainly aren't any near-0 taxation nations I would want to live in.
Maps are technology too. They aren't produced by nature and you aren't born knowing how to read them. Isn't it awfully risky to go out when you don't really know where you're going and need a piece of paper to tell you? What if it blows away or gets stolen? And think of the mental decay from not having to memorize where things are any more.
The fact is, technology and specialization have placed us far beyond self-sufficiency at this point. You don't really know how your food is grown, how your home is constructed, how your car works, or what happens when you flip a light switch. You think you do, but you couldn't reconstruct all that from scratch if you found yourself alone on an island, not in a 1000 lifetimes. So I don't see why we would suddenly draw an arbitrary line to exclude GPS or other "gadgets."
It's not a synthetic IPC measure, it's CineBench (ray tracing basically). In other words modern CPUs just aren't all that much faster, except for the cores. At least on that benchmark.
You could find a wider variety of benchmarks with results reported on a wide range of new and old CPUs if you took points/core/MHz.
Slashdot Mirror
Fake drugs were the norm back in the 1900s and before. It still happens, even with the FDA in place, but at least there's a real deterrent, and the guy in that link is rotting in jail now instead of peddling overpriced water.
The overprotection of fat, spolied American pharmaceutical companies is a separate issue. We need to fix the regulation, but not drop it.
Nazis with real jet-engine backpacks? Do tell. Their Me-262 was the first operational jet aircraft, and wasn't out until the final year of the war.
I suppose you're thinking of Hydrogen Peroxide packs, which are totally different. Those basically hover; this goes 125 mph.
IANAL, but every time this comes up, the conclusion seems to be that ISPs are not Common Carriers, and how they avoid liability for infringement is by complying with DMCA requests to do whatever purported copyright holders ask that they do.
Huh? Most newer TVs have netflix streaming built in. Sony and Samsung aren't "bleeding edge," they're mainstream.
Well, you're wrong. What we need to do is develop a large number of promising ideas in parallel and see which turn out best.
Gasoline explodes 100 times per second, per cylinder in your engine. It's certainly more explosive than hydrogen, anyways:
Thanks for the info. It sounds like it is done geographically, and there's not a big federal list of each person's phone number? I.e. they don't know who they are sending the alert to, except "everybody in this location"?
And hopefully the President is careful with "Reply All".
I'd imagine a high percentage of the collection did fail in the marketplace, simply because there's no point adding a normal PC mouse, for example, to a collection. But neither is this a random collection of crappy failed products, which would be endless and not very valuable.
I have one of the products, a wireless keyboard/trackpad, which is perfect for controlling a computer connected to a TV - which is very useful now that "TVs" are 1080p digital displays.
Recognizing groupthink as a problem is one thing, fixing it is another. Even the legal system (laws and court system, all the way to the Supreme Court) are all just low-pass filters that make society's judgments register with society's long-term values. They reduce kneejerk reactions, but they're still ultimately based on nothing but collective values.
Of the news comment sites I frequent, none have comment threading (at most, they limit indenting to one level), and none have effective moderation. Despite its flaws, the /. system is light years ahead of them, especially if you start counting from 1999 or whenever it was.
I am closer to the positive view. If nothing else, we could adopt nuclear on a massive scale to make ample electricity and greatly reduce gasoline consumption without changing life all that much. Yes, it would be several trillion dollars, and driving might be somewhat more expensive for several decades. But I don't think we're at risk of sliding back out of the industrial revolution or anything like that.
It's Haiti... think hard... there was some sort of disruption to their electrical and gas supply lines not too long ago, which coincided with a spike in the demand for medical procedures, and a lot of unsanitary procedures such as amputations were performed. This is not hypothetical. There actually are places where people cannot simply assume reliable energy sources all the time (and that isn't just a jab at California).
I wonder how true that is? I.e. what percentage of electricity used for lighting is during daylight hours? I can't think of anywhere that artificial lighting is *not* used during the day. The only time people don't use lights are when they are asleep, at night. Unfortunately I couldn't find any statistics either way, but I think it is conceivable the majority of lighting energy is consumed during daylight.
You could use it to spot your mortar fire.
If you're waiting for everybody to agree with each other (or even be consistent with themselves over time) it ain't gonna happen.
Didn't they? I'm amazed the biggest piece left is the tail rotor. Where did the rest go? Of all the IEDs insurgents have been putting into cars, they never actually vaporize the frame and body.
Since practically everybody will need networking, and a USB Ethernet device doubles the size and cost of this particular computer, it seems like it would be justified (for almost any conceivable user) to include integrated WiFi. With millions of those being built into phones they must be pretty cheap?
Hopefully it will never matter, but I do wonder sometimes how much re-discovery would be necessary for society to rebuild from scratch. Are there cases where the knowledge needed to build the tool needed to build the component needed to build the machine no longer exists? Like a company whose custom software stack is rooted, several layers down, in some COBOL understood only by a guy who retired 10 years ago and is dead now.
Well, actually...
Alternately, the taxes may have benefits that outweigh the costs, thus being part of a tax-paying populace may make you richer. There certainly aren't any near-0 taxation nations I would want to live in.
Good lord, they headed off that complaint right in the summary, and it still wasn't enough.
The fact is, technology and specialization have placed us far beyond self-sufficiency at this point. You don't really know how your food is grown, how your home is constructed, how your car works, or what happens when you flip a light switch. You think you do, but you couldn't reconstruct all that from scratch if you found yourself alone on an island, not in a 1000 lifetimes. So I don't see why we would suddenly draw an arbitrary line to exclude GPS or other "gadgets."
You could find a wider variety of benchmarks with results reported on a wide range of new and old CPUs if you took points/core/MHz.