The school exists to teach children the subjects - math, physics, etc. If the parent wants the kid to eat healthy, school needs to help.
How exactly do these two claims connect? If it's the school's job just to teach their material, they should keep their noses out of the student's lunches. If they're supposed to help parents enforce healthy eating, then obviously their sphere of responsibility is larger than just reading, writing and arithmetic.
I hear so many people talk about how Americans eat too much, how kids are too fat, and how it's always the parents' fault if a kid is fat. Now here's a way for parents to control what their kids eat, and people are screaming about how it's invasive and controlling.
Because having people control what you eat doesn't mean you will never get fat. It means you'll be tempted by the forbidden fruit until such time as the controls are released, and then you'll go nuts, having never had the need for self-discipline before.
Do you think this will actually prevent people getting fat and reduce the occurance of diabetes? Or, when they leave home and are suddenly able to eat all the things their parents prevented them from ever having, will they go nuts and show no restraint, because the only restraint they had previously was externally enforced and they never developed the ability to restrain themselves?
Imagine twenty 1 gig flash memory cards in a row... less space then the equivelent hard drive.
Now imagine 500 1 gig flash memory cards in a row - I bet the 500GB HDs beat them out on form-factor quite considerable. Not to mention the other problems with flash as a replacement for harddrives - read/write times and the relatively low write-limit are the things that jump to mind.
As I understand it, embryonic stem cells are better to do research with because they are less differentiated than adult stem cells. An embryonic stem cell can progress into any other type of cell; skin, hair, bone, muscle, whatever. Adult stem cells have a more limited range of cells they can develop into, based on where they were harvested. Embyronic stem cells have a greater potential. I have also heard that because of this, they are easier to perform research on. It may be possible to discover something more quickly researching on embryonic cells, and then translate this discovery over to adult stem cells for use in therepeutics.
However, in current therepeutic terms, adult stem cells are better. For one, embryonic stem cells have had a tendancy to develop into tumors. For another, adult stem cells can be harvested from the patient himself, meaning there is no chance of the patients immune system rejecting the therapy. Since current techniques for harvesting embryonic stem cells involve the destruction of the embryo, its not likely you'll be able to be treated with cells from yourself.
For the record, I disagree with embryonic stem cell research.
I've met sadly too many people (and most of this group seems to be women) whose main concern about whether to see a movie is "who's in it?" The idea of a movie as an artform to tell a story is utterly alien to them.
Instead of insulting them, you ever think about why they do this? Could it be, perhaps, that actors tend to take roles on similar sorts of movies? Have a look at Julia Roberts back catalogue and see if you can find any similarity between her movies. If you like one of hers, chances are you'll like the others. Ditto for people like Robin Williams (his comedies anyway), or Adam Sandler. These are actors who put a lot of themselves into their characters; if you like Adam Sandler's brand of comedy, chances are you'll like any movie he's in. If you liked Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, you'll probably like My Best Friend's Wedding. If Vin Diesel's in a movie, it's likely to be action, so if you like action movies, it's probably a good bet.
Then too, big names attached to a movie means they think there's a chance it'll be a success. If a movie has no big names, there's always the possibility it means none of Hollywood's darlings want their names attached to a steaming pile of crap. Definately not always the case, but it is sometimes.
Too true. In general, I play casters as females and other classes as males. Why? Because robes look good on female avatars, and not on males. Purely an aesthetic thing on my part.
You're missing the whole point of customer call centres. They aren't there to help customers; they're there to get customers to go away. Call centre workers are evaluated based on how long they spend on each call, not on how satisfied the customer is when they've finished. That should give you an idea of the call centres' priority. For the most part, they exist only so they can tell a customer how the company they represent is not liable for whatever fault the customer finds with their product or service.
Companies that take their call centers seriously provide people who are informed about their particular industry, and their company's products in particular. You don't get that sort of familiarity by sending over a bunch of scripts to a generic Indian call centre. You get it by making your customer support team an integral part of your business.
Computers and the biologically world handle data differently. Computers use digital data. Humans perceive the world in an analog fashion. So we can view a picture at roughly the same speed as you can transfer it across a network. Now change that to text, and I'll bet your calculations are way off; ethernet will transmit text many times faster than the human eye can read it. There's no point to figuring out how many "bits" the human eye can read in a second, because the human eye doesn't read bits. This is just like measuring the size of the internet in terms of Libraries of Congress.
If you assume that greatness equals power, and remove from the concept any notion of morality or ethics, then the statement makes perfect sense. That's not necessarily a dig at Microsoft, I think that's an increasingly-common interpretation of greatness these days.
WoW has a ton of money sinks. Repairs, ammunition and pet food (for hunters), poisons, vanishing powder and blinding powder (for rogues), reagants for many spell-casting classes. Crafting could be considered a money-sink, since you have to use a tonne of resources before you get the ability to make anything useful/saleable. Then there's mounts. 100g for your first mount isn't too bad, but it's still a considerable amount at the level you can first get it. The epic mount available at 60 is 1,000g, which is a huge amount of money. The new flying mount introduced in the expansion is rumoured to be 10,000g. The problem with this is that the money sinks are so insane, it's just more of an incentive to buy farmed gold, especially as those particular costs are set in-game and don't inflate with gold-farming.
If the government put a hydrogen fueling station in every city and built a few power plants (which don't need to be anywhere near populated areas, and thus can easily be nuclear, solar, wind, or some other form of non-polluting type) dedicated to large-scale hydrogen production via electrolysis of water, I'd wager that the auto companies would work out the technological kinks of hydrogen cars on their own and the "social" issues would be non-existent in the face of 1. Saving money and 2. running 100% non-polluting cars.
You still have the problem of transporting the hydrogen between the production plants and the distributors. That is a large barrier, as leakage is still a significant problem when transporting hydrogen. There's your technological barrier. Then, even if the auto-industry gets a hydrogen-enabled car, you've got to get people to upgrade their cars to a hydrogen model. Good luck with that. Petroleum is going to have to have a severe price increase to get people to shell out for a non-petroleum car. There's your social problem. And, because of all that, no government is going to shell out money for infrastructure now that is just going to sit there and do nothing until all those problems are solved. Call that political or economic, it could fit in either one. That's even assuming the government would want to build refueling stations, when they aren't traditionally involved in that market.
If one hydrogen refueling station were to cost $10 million each, each city on the continent could have at least one built by the government itself. Even adding the need for new electricity generation, it would still cost less than the "war on terror"
That's cool, you'd have a whole lot of hydrogen fuel stations. But what are you going to pump? How are you going to produce hydrogen in an energy-efficient manner? And where are you going to be getting the fuel that's needed to process the hydrogen? Then once you've got the hydrogen, how are you going to get it to the fuel stations? Current infrastructure can't handle hydrogen because it's a much smaller size than your petroleum atom, and needs much tighter containment to keep it leaking away. And once you've got it there, what are you going to do with it? There is nothing that needs it yet. And even if there were hydrogen-powered cars available, how many people are going to immediatly dump their current car and buy a new one.
There are a lot more barriers in the way of the "hydrogen economy" than mere dollars. There's technological, social, political, and yes, economic factors that all need to be addressed before there's any chance of it happening. The conversion process itself, if it happens, is likely to take decades (since it also involves consumers replacing all their petroleum-fueled motors) and building refueling stations is likely to be the very last part of the process.
And if for some reason the western world dropped the debts to the poorer countries, those countries would of course divert those funds into feeding their populace. The politicians who, by and large, aren't and never have been at the starvation line would never use those monies to fund their own pet projects rather than the citizens of their country, would they?
If you're going to go down that road, it'd be better to campaign for western countries to use the income from foreign debts to provide support to those poor countries. That way at least the money would be spent on aid, although you'll still end up with many poorer nations addicted to international welfare, and never having any impetus to actually develop and stand on their own.
Because changing national infrastructure that was originally designed to transport a large-molecule liquid into one that can transport a gas with the smallest atomic weight is a trivial problem that can be solved and implemented overnight. While I sincerely doubt big oil's good intentions, it's not them who needs to get a clue.
The conclusion is probably correct, assuming the dictator is benevolent, which is what the machines in Asimov's story were programmed to be. The debate that Asimov was trying to discuss wasn't necessarily whether the machines would do a good job, but whether the loss of humanity's ability to determine its own future was worth the utopia the machines offered.
As such, most people who seriously consider working on this stuff advocate a goal based higher level of functioning with "friendliness" to humans as being the primary goal and improve yourself as a secondary subgoal. That way, even if the beast gets out of control, the worst it will do is solve world hunger.
Isaac Asimov discusses that concept in one of his short stories; The Evitable Conflict. In that short story, there were huge computers that could assimilate vast amounts of information in order to determine the best course. Because of their reliability, the machines had been put in charge of things like food production and distribution. In the end, the machines began manipulating events to ensure that anyone who disagreed with the machines control was removed from a position of influence. They did this because obviously what was best for mankind was to be guided by the machines, who didn't start wars or squandor resources like they did. In order to maintain what was best for humanity, they had to act against individual humans and, in short, ensure that humanity was never ever the master of its own destiny.
It's fiction, yes, but even such simple goals as the one you suggested need to be interpreted. How should one weigh up the needs of the many against the needs of the few?
It's not a tool for programmers, I'd imagine. It's a tool for animators/illustrators/writers who don't have the first clue about basic, but still might want to make a piece of interactive art. So no, it's probably not targetted at any of the slashdot audience. And the quote about Visual Novels not necessarily being hentai might be moronic, but if it is, it's because it's debunking a moronic attitude that's quite prevelant - that Visual Novels (and I've heard the same thing said about anime/manga) are nothing but porn.
Firstly, summary says more than five years, secondly that it began in the 1990s, and thirdly, just because the suit is being brought in 2006 doesn't mean that's when the price-fixing ended.
First Post: Unless Debian is doing something very stupid like keeping passwords in clear text, hashing passwords reversibly, hashing passwords to their original length, or something else equally amateurish(sp).... Then the vulnerability is in fact in the Debian system, in their management's soul, & they have some pretty bad techs...
Second Post: And I was not knocking the Debian code, just the management errors that led to this particular problem.
Who cares whether it's frozen or not? It's the effect that's important, not the temperature. If they can achieve suspended animation at room temperature, I'm all for that.
Price-fixing is when multiple companies collaborate to set the price for their products or services. This makes them, together, essentially a monopoly. Since monopolies are not subject to market forces, this tends to be a bad thing. Thus price-fixing is illegal.
Price-fixing does not mean lowering the prices of your products to squeeze your competitors out of the market. That is normal behaviour, even encouraged behaviour. If both parties engage in a price war, the end result is that both end up selling their products at the lowest possible price for the company to remain viable (unless they make a miscalculation and go belly-up). What Intel is doing is responding to normal market forces, and it's the best thing for them to do, both for themselves and the consumer.
Slashdot Mirror
The school exists to teach children the subjects - math, physics, etc. If the parent wants the kid to eat healthy, school needs to help.
How exactly do these two claims connect? If it's the school's job just to teach their material, they should keep their noses out of the student's lunches. If they're supposed to help parents enforce healthy eating, then obviously their sphere of responsibility is larger than just reading, writing and arithmetic.
I hear so many people talk about how Americans eat too much, how kids are too fat, and how it's always the parents' fault if a kid is fat. Now here's a way for parents to control what their kids eat, and people are screaming about how it's invasive and controlling.
Because having people control what you eat doesn't mean you will never get fat. It means you'll be tempted by the forbidden fruit until such time as the controls are released, and then you'll go nuts, having never had the need for self-discipline before.
Do you think this will actually prevent people getting fat and reduce the occurance of diabetes? Or, when they leave home and are suddenly able to eat all the things their parents prevented them from ever having, will they go nuts and show no restraint, because the only restraint they had previously was externally enforced and they never developed the ability to restrain themselves?
I agree with your point, but damn, please use punctuation in the future. It really does make your comments easier to read.
Imagine twenty 1 gig flash memory cards in a row ... less space then the equivelent hard drive.
Now imagine 500 1 gig flash memory cards in a row - I bet the 500GB HDs beat them out on form-factor quite considerable. Not to mention the other problems with flash as a replacement for harddrives - read/write times and the relatively low write-limit are the things that jump to mind.
As I understand it, embryonic stem cells are better to do research with because they are less differentiated than adult stem cells. An embryonic stem cell can progress into any other type of cell; skin, hair, bone, muscle, whatever. Adult stem cells have a more limited range of cells they can develop into, based on where they were harvested. Embyronic stem cells have a greater potential. I have also heard that because of this, they are easier to perform research on. It may be possible to discover something more quickly researching on embryonic cells, and then translate this discovery over to adult stem cells for use in therepeutics.
However, in current therepeutic terms, adult stem cells are better. For one, embryonic stem cells have had a tendancy to develop into tumors. For another, adult stem cells can be harvested from the patient himself, meaning there is no chance of the patients immune system rejecting the therapy. Since current techniques for harvesting embryonic stem cells involve the destruction of the embryo, its not likely you'll be able to be treated with cells from yourself.
For the record, I disagree with embryonic stem cell research.
I've met sadly too many people (and most of this group seems to be women) whose main concern about whether to see a movie is "who's in it?" The idea of a movie as an artform to tell a story is utterly alien to them.
Instead of insulting them, you ever think about why they do this? Could it be, perhaps, that actors tend to take roles on similar sorts of movies? Have a look at Julia Roberts back catalogue and see if you can find any similarity between her movies. If you like one of hers, chances are you'll like the others. Ditto for people like Robin Williams (his comedies anyway), or Adam Sandler. These are actors who put a lot of themselves into their characters; if you like Adam Sandler's brand of comedy, chances are you'll like any movie he's in. If you liked Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, you'll probably like My Best Friend's Wedding. If Vin Diesel's in a movie, it's likely to be action, so if you like action movies, it's probably a good bet.
Then too, big names attached to a movie means they think there's a chance it'll be a success. If a movie has no big names, there's always the possibility it means none of Hollywood's darlings want their names attached to a steaming pile of crap. Definately not always the case, but it is sometimes.
Too true. In general, I play casters as females and other classes as males. Why? Because robes look good on female avatars, and not on males. Purely an aesthetic thing on my part.
You're missing the whole point of customer call centres. They aren't there to help customers; they're there to get customers to go away. Call centre workers are evaluated based on how long they spend on each call, not on how satisfied the customer is when they've finished. That should give you an idea of the call centres' priority. For the most part, they exist only so they can tell a customer how the company they represent is not liable for whatever fault the customer finds with their product or service.
Companies that take their call centers seriously provide people who are informed about their particular industry, and their company's products in particular. You don't get that sort of familiarity by sending over a bunch of scripts to a generic Indian call centre. You get it by making your customer support team an integral part of your business.
Computers and the biologically world handle data differently. Computers use digital data. Humans perceive the world in an analog fashion. So we can view a picture at roughly the same speed as you can transfer it across a network. Now change that to text, and I'll bet your calculations are way off; ethernet will transmit text many times faster than the human eye can read it. There's no point to figuring out how many "bits" the human eye can read in a second, because the human eye doesn't read bits. This is just like measuring the size of the internet in terms of Libraries of Congress.
If you assume that greatness equals power, and remove from the concept any notion of morality or ethics, then the statement makes perfect sense. That's not necessarily a dig at Microsoft, I think that's an increasingly-common interpretation of greatness these days.
WoW has a ton of money sinks. Repairs, ammunition and pet food (for hunters), poisons, vanishing powder and blinding powder (for rogues), reagants for many spell-casting classes. Crafting could be considered a money-sink, since you have to use a tonne of resources before you get the ability to make anything useful/saleable. Then there's mounts. 100g for your first mount isn't too bad, but it's still a considerable amount at the level you can first get it. The epic mount available at 60 is 1,000g, which is a huge amount of money. The new flying mount introduced in the expansion is rumoured to be 10,000g. The problem with this is that the money sinks are so insane, it's just more of an incentive to buy farmed gold, especially as those particular costs are set in-game and don't inflate with gold-farming.
If the government put a hydrogen fueling station in every city and built a few power plants (which don't need to be anywhere near populated areas, and thus can easily be nuclear, solar, wind, or some other form of non-polluting type) dedicated to large-scale hydrogen production via electrolysis of water, I'd wager that the auto companies would work out the technological kinks of hydrogen cars on their own and the "social" issues would be non-existent in the face of 1. Saving money and 2. running 100% non-polluting cars.
You still have the problem of transporting the hydrogen between the production plants and the distributors. That is a large barrier, as leakage is still a significant problem when transporting hydrogen. There's your technological barrier. Then, even if the auto-industry gets a hydrogen-enabled car, you've got to get people to upgrade their cars to a hydrogen model. Good luck with that. Petroleum is going to have to have a severe price increase to get people to shell out for a non-petroleum car. There's your social problem. And, because of all that, no government is going to shell out money for infrastructure now that is just going to sit there and do nothing until all those problems are solved. Call that political or economic, it could fit in either one. That's even assuming the government would want to build refueling stations, when they aren't traditionally involved in that market.
If one hydrogen refueling station were to cost $10 million each, each city on the continent could have at least one built by the government itself. Even adding the need for new electricity generation, it would still cost less than the "war on terror"
That's cool, you'd have a whole lot of hydrogen fuel stations. But what are you going to pump? How are you going to produce hydrogen in an energy-efficient manner? And where are you going to be getting the fuel that's needed to process the hydrogen? Then once you've got the hydrogen, how are you going to get it to the fuel stations? Current infrastructure can't handle hydrogen because it's a much smaller size than your petroleum atom, and needs much tighter containment to keep it leaking away. And once you've got it there, what are you going to do with it? There is nothing that needs it yet. And even if there were hydrogen-powered cars available, how many people are going to immediatly dump their current car and buy a new one.
There are a lot more barriers in the way of the "hydrogen economy" than mere dollars. There's technological, social, political, and yes, economic factors that all need to be addressed before there's any chance of it happening. The conversion process itself, if it happens, is likely to take decades (since it also involves consumers replacing all their petroleum-fueled motors) and building refueling stations is likely to be the very last part of the process.
And if for some reason the western world dropped the debts to the poorer countries, those countries would of course divert those funds into feeding their populace. The politicians who, by and large, aren't and never have been at the starvation line would never use those monies to fund their own pet projects rather than the citizens of their country, would they? If you're going to go down that road, it'd be better to campaign for western countries to use the income from foreign debts to provide support to those poor countries. That way at least the money would be spent on aid, although you'll still end up with many poorer nations addicted to international welfare, and never having any impetus to actually develop and stand on their own.
Because changing national infrastructure that was originally designed to transport a large-molecule liquid into one that can transport a gas with the smallest atomic weight is a trivial problem that can be solved and implemented overnight. While I sincerely doubt big oil's good intentions, it's not them who needs to get a clue.
The conclusion is probably correct, assuming the dictator is benevolent, which is what the machines in Asimov's story were programmed to be. The debate that Asimov was trying to discuss wasn't necessarily whether the machines would do a good job, but whether the loss of humanity's ability to determine its own future was worth the utopia the machines offered.
As such, most people who seriously consider working on this stuff advocate a goal based higher level of functioning with "friendliness" to humans as being the primary goal and improve yourself as a secondary subgoal. That way, even if the beast gets out of control, the worst it will do is solve world hunger.
Isaac Asimov discusses that concept in one of his short stories; The Evitable Conflict. In that short story, there were huge computers that could assimilate vast amounts of information in order to determine the best course. Because of their reliability, the machines had been put in charge of things like food production and distribution. In the end, the machines began manipulating events to ensure that anyone who disagreed with the machines control was removed from a position of influence. They did this because obviously what was best for mankind was to be guided by the machines, who didn't start wars or squandor resources like they did. In order to maintain what was best for humanity, they had to act against individual humans and, in short, ensure that humanity was never ever the master of its own destiny.
It's fiction, yes, but even such simple goals as the one you suggested need to be interpreted. How should one weigh up the needs of the many against the needs of the few?
It's not a tool for programmers, I'd imagine. It's a tool for animators/illustrators/writers who don't have the first clue about basic, but still might want to make a piece of interactive art. So no, it's probably not targetted at any of the slashdot audience. And the quote about Visual Novels not necessarily being hentai might be moronic, but if it is, it's because it's debunking a moronic attitude that's quite prevelant - that Visual Novels (and I've heard the same thing said about anime/manga) are nothing but porn.
Obviously they had 3.5 faults last year.
Firstly, summary says more than five years, secondly that it began in the 1990s, and thirdly, just because the suit is being brought in 2006 doesn't mean that's when the price-fixing ended.
When was the last time you saw a Slashdot article blasting Windows for a user having weak passwords?
First Post: Unless Debian is doing something very stupid like keeping passwords in clear text, hashing passwords reversibly, hashing passwords to their original length, or something else equally amateurish(sp).... Then the vulnerability is in fact in the Debian system, in their management's soul, & they have some pretty bad techs...
Second Post: And I was not knocking the Debian code, just the management errors that led to this particular problem.
see here - take special note of definition 3.
Who cares whether it's frozen or not? It's the effect that's important, not the temperature. If they can achieve suspended animation at room temperature, I'm all for that.
Price-fixing is when multiple companies collaborate to set the price for their products or services. This makes them, together, essentially a monopoly. Since monopolies are not subject to market forces, this tends to be a bad thing. Thus price-fixing is illegal.
Price-fixing does not mean lowering the prices of your products to squeeze your competitors out of the market. That is normal behaviour, even encouraged behaviour. If both parties engage in a price war, the end result is that both end up selling their products at the lowest possible price for the company to remain viable (unless they make a miscalculation and go belly-up). What Intel is doing is responding to normal market forces, and it's the best thing for them to do, both for themselves and the consumer.