This case is not about the university offering the kindle.
No.
Instead this is about the university PUSHING a product that has intentionally sabotaged it's capacity to help the blind.
Assume for example that you are 4'2". Then assume that the company building houses in the areas put the door knob at the TOP of the door. Note, there is no need to do this, but they have done it.
Would you sue?
OF COURSE you would.
Same thing here. You have electronic devices that have the capacity to do text to voice. But to turn this on, you have to READ THE MENUS. Not once, but EVERY time they turn the device on.
This is a simple fix. Just put in a setting that tells the text to voice software to workon the device's own menus, activating when it turns on. Kindle says they will do it. Why do they say they will do it? BECAUSE THEY GOT SUED.
Without this very lawsuit, kindle would still be screwing over the blind with a poorly designed product that requires a sighted person to turn it on, instead of a well designed product that doesn't.
This is a very good example of how the law should be used - to fix moronic decisions made by companies for no good reason.
P.S. - why sue the university instead of Amazon? The students have more legal rights against the university than against Amazon because of the nature of the business.
Wow, so full of hate. You see there are these things called BRAILLE TEXTBOOKS.
But when the school starts pushing kindle (with real cost savings for sighted people), and at the same time refuses to use a DIFFERENT READER that has TEXT TO VOICE, then YES the blind people got a case.
This is not about the school offering an ebook reader. It is about the school PUSHING an ebook reader that does NOT have the same capacities that other existing ebook readers do have.
Yeah, I know you are full of your self and insisting that other people MUST be suing for no reasons. But if you had a brain you would realize that sometimes law suits are actually about real discrimination.
Like this one.
Blind people can easily read... braille. Kindle on the other hand has sabotaged their text to voice capabilities.
Now consider if their existed a car that came with auto-drive functionality that a blind person could use and then someone disabled it. You bet blind people would sue the car companies.
There are quite a few studies showing low level radiation may be helpfull. Most of the scientists involved think the effects are related to cellular suicide. That is, each cell has a suicide mechanism that lets it kill itself if it 'thinks' (I use that word to represent some form biological test that evolution created that effectively make a decision) it is about to become a tumer.
So in effect, our cells have evolved to suicide if they dectect mutations. Tumers and many other problems are caused when the mutations are just below the suicide threshold. The radiation adds just a bit more mutations, of the easily detectable kind, pushing borderline cells into suicide, while leaving healthy cells with a relatively minor, low level damage not suffecient to cause problems.
This theory might support the idea that Alzheimers is some kind of low-level mutation.
The human eye can dectect 30
on
Framerates Matter
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The human eye can clearly detect frame rates far greater than 30. So can the human brain.
HOWEVER
The human mind is evolutionary designed to make instant assumptions. Cat in mid air facing us = DANGER. No "Is it dead and being thrown at us?" No "Is it a picture?" As such, video games can quite easily take advantage of this evolutionary assumptions and trick the MIND, if not the brain. into thinking something is real.
So while a higher frame rate will increase the quality of the game, it is not essential. It's like getting gold plated controls on your car's dashboard. Yes it is a real increase in quality, but most people would rather spend the money on a GPS device, real leather, plug-in-hybrid engines before you get around to putting gold in the car.
It is not the price but the COMMONNESS that is important.
If temp detection becomes so common that people expect their neighbors to be doing it, then and only then would it be OK for the police to do it. That would require some kind of strange fad like CB became.
Similarly, it is not the price of high end audio espeionage equiptment that makes it illegal, but instead the fact that I would be shocked if I found out my neighbors were hooking them up to their wall and listening to me.
1. You can not under ANY circumstances provide 100% security for an airplane for a blow it up scenario. Remember, the terrorist can always buy a Rocket launchers and set it up in the parking lot. They might even manage to get away alive. The incredibly excessive and stupid idea of stopping people from taking explosive devices onto a plane is moronic. So you force the terrorists to spend $20,000 instead of $5,000 for an underware bomb. Big deal, you do it by spending billions on scanners. Worse, the terrorists can afford it. They paid more than that to teach all the 911 pilots how to fly. But they don't need to do that, there are a hundred other ways to sneak explosives on board a plane and there is nothing anyone can do about several of them. To stop that we would require excessive measures - passengers traveling without any luggage, using loaner clothing, phone and PC provided by the airline - at a profit - for the duration of their trip, travelling while sedated by airline provided drugs.
2. The real problem is stopping another hijacking, not an explosion. Hijacking is much CHEAPER to defend against with a reinforced titanium door (light weight and strong) and the willingness to blow up the plane ourselves rather than let terrorists turn it into a weapon against a ground target.
The moronic TSA crap does not and can never stop terrorists, but it can delay, annoy and cost the flying public huge amounts of cash in an attempt to 'look like we are doing something'.
In my opinion, the terrorists have won. They destroyed our airline industry and convinced too many scared fools to willing give up their freedom in the 5 years directly after 9/11.
I agree that computing has become something closer to the building maintance job, rather than a profession.
But you can still make a reasonable job as a plumber, even if you are mostly dealing with broken toilets.
The other side is that there ARE still high end jobs available. But the low barrier to entry and lack of a solid union/accreditation procedure means there is little obviously different (to an outsider) joe shmoe working in IT support (plumber) at a corporation and a $300k/year job at Microsoft/Google (engineer job).
The key difference to me is do you say "I'm in IT", or do you say "I build X for Y company."
If you are saying "IT", you are the plumber, not an engineer.
Because of the distances, missiles won't work. Too easy to stop them. They need some kind of sensor to detect their target, a laser should be able to blind whatever sensor they are using, even if the laser can't destroy the missile.
Has to be some speed of light weapon, laser being the most obvious one. The hard part will be predicting where the target is
going to be, when the laser arrives
. Even if you are 3 light seconds away, that is more than enough time to zig zag your way to safety.
How much is a bullet to the brain of the General commanding the war? But you need a trained sniper and an awfully good insertion to get that bullet there.
Counting the cheapest part of the machine is silly.
Software is often free. $26 is a lot for software. The radio reception, etc. and knowing where to aim are all much more expensive and require skill.
I am shocked, shocked I say, to learn that the United Kingdom is going to continue it's policy of invading the privacy of every single person inside their border.
From cameras used to trace every car's position, to arresting men for being too violent when capturing the thug that kidnapped their wife & children.
Yes it would. There are over 50,000 power plants in the world, there is no way we could afford that kind of drain (and it would be a drain, we could not use more than 0.01% of that energy, as energy does not store or transport easily.)
That is way out of line with our current capacity
The problem is not the depth. It is the amount of energy.
Quite simply, the last super-eruption contained more than 10 times the force of all the nuclear bombs ever created.
The ENTIRE US consumes about 400 petajoules of energy each year.
But the Yellowstone explosion that formed the crater used up 3,661,000 petajoules. That's over 9 thousand times the energy. So lets say we really go all out and find a way to safely handle ALL the energy the US normally uses in a year. We drain 400 petajoules each year from yellowstone. Granted, most of that power would be wasted as you lose energy when you transport it long distances, but lets pretend we care more about removing the energy than using it. I doubt we COULD drain that much energy, but lets assume we could.
So, each year we drain about 1/9000th of the energy. Assuming it is about to blow (as it has been a VERY long time since it has blown), in 4,500 years, we will have halved the size of the explosion.
The basic problem is that a product should not need a warranty. The producers originally include them for free as 'proof' that their product is not a piece of crap. People don't buy a warranty for clothing.
Warranties/insurance for expensive items make sense. If your home burns down or your car breaks, you might not be able to afford to fix them. But it doesn't make sense for cheap things. You see the companies selling them (as opposed to giving them away for free) are making a profit. So the money everyone gives them exceeds the money the money they will give out. PLUS you have the rather large inconvenience of attempting to get your money if the product breaks. Not easy.
So the idea of paying for a warranty for something less than a month's salary, seems extremely counterproductive. You can afford to replace it if it breaks down due to bad luck. The only reason to do so is if you think the chances of the piece of crap breaking down is GREATER than the warrant-er thinks + the inconvenience of dealing with them.
Especially considering you probably buy more than 10 pieces of 'warrantable' items a year. It makes FAR more sense to simply put an extra 10% of the cost of each item into a 'warranty jar'/bank account and when something breaks, take the cash out of that.
A megaton (of TNT) is 4.184 × 1015 joules = 4.184 petajoules . You average Hydrogen bomb has about one megaton. The world has only about 70,000 nuclear bombs (rough estimate, USSR has about 16,000, the USA has about 33,000 - and most are much less powerful than an Hydrogen bomb). So the previous eruption was equal to more than 10 times ALL the existing nuclear bombs.
I agree. As someone that bought a netbook simply because I wanted something I could carry on and use on an airplane, size (and weight, as mentioned in the article) matters a lot.
Think Geek has a bacteria science kit that I thought looked fun. More for the >12 group.
Particularly good if you are trying to get them to wash up more.
Probably less lives, energy and money that these weapons saved us from.
Fear of Nuclear war prevented the US from going to war directly with Russia. The USA-Russia cold war may in fact be the first time that the two most powerful national enemies NEVER fought a war.
Slashdot Mirror
No.
Instead this is about the university PUSHING a product that has intentionally sabotaged it's capacity to help the blind.
Assume for example that you are 4'2". Then assume that the company building houses in the areas put the door knob at the TOP of the door. Note, there is no need to do this, but they have done it.
Would you sue?
OF COURSE you would.
Same thing here. You have electronic devices that have the capacity to do text to voice. But to turn this on, you have to READ THE MENUS. Not once, but EVERY time they turn the device on.
This is a simple fix. Just put in a setting that tells the text to voice software to workon the device's own menus, activating when it turns on. Kindle says they will do it. Why do they say they will do it? BECAUSE THEY GOT SUED.
Without this very lawsuit, kindle would still be screwing over the blind with a poorly designed product that requires a sighted person to turn it on, instead of a well designed product that doesn't.
This is a very good example of how the law should be used - to fix moronic decisions made by companies for no good reason.
P.S. - why sue the university instead of Amazon? The students have more legal rights against the university than against Amazon because of the nature of the business.
Wow, so full of hate. You see there are these things called BRAILLE TEXTBOOKS. But when the school starts pushing kindle (with real cost savings for sighted people), and at the same time refuses to use a DIFFERENT READER that has TEXT TO VOICE, then YES the blind people got a case. This is not about the school offering an ebook reader. It is about the school PUSHING an ebook reader that does NOT have the same capacities that other existing ebook readers do have. Yeah, I know you are full of your self and insisting that other people MUST be suing for no reasons. But if you had a brain you would realize that sometimes law suits are actually about real discrimination. Like this one.
Blind people can easily read ... braille. Kindle on the other hand has sabotaged their text to voice capabilities.
Now consider if their existed a car that came with auto-drive functionality that a blind person could use and then someone disabled it. You bet blind people would sue the car companies.
Textbooks come in BRAILLE versions. Kindle does not. (Their voice to text has been sabotaged.)
So in effect, our cells have evolved to suicide if they dectect mutations. Tumers and many other problems are caused when the mutations are just below the suicide threshold. The radiation adds just a bit more mutations, of the easily detectable kind, pushing borderline cells into suicide, while leaving healthy cells with a relatively minor, low level damage not suffecient to cause problems.
This theory might support the idea that Alzheimers is some kind of low-level mutation.
Reduces corrosion. Gold does not oxidate.
HOWEVER
The human mind is evolutionary designed to make instant assumptions. Cat in mid air facing us = DANGER. No "Is it dead and being thrown at us?" No "Is it a picture?" As such, video games can quite easily take advantage of this evolutionary assumptions and trick the MIND, if not the brain. into thinking something is real.
So while a higher frame rate will increase the quality of the game, it is not essential. It's like getting gold plated controls on your car's dashboard. Yes it is a real increase in quality, but most people would rather spend the money on a GPS device, real leather, plug-in-hybrid engines before you get around to putting gold in the car.
From this point on I will always wonder - is this an advertisement event to give money to Nigeria, or a nigerian scam sent by advertisement
If temp detection becomes so common that people expect their neighbors to be doing it, then and only then would it be OK for the police to do it. That would require some kind of strange fad like CB became.
Similarly, it is not the price of high end audio espeionage equiptment that makes it illegal, but instead the fact that I would be shocked if I found out my neighbors were hooking them up to their wall and listening to me.
2. The real problem is stopping another hijacking, not an explosion. Hijacking is much CHEAPER to defend against with a reinforced titanium door (light weight and strong) and the willingness to blow up the plane ourselves rather than let terrorists turn it into a weapon against a ground target.
The moronic TSA crap does not and can never stop terrorists, but it can delay, annoy and cost the flying public huge amounts of cash in an attempt to 'look like we are doing something'.
In my opinion, the terrorists have won. They destroyed our airline industry and convinced too many scared fools to willing give up their freedom in the 5 years directly after 9/11.
You can split to a per month, no termination, no contract, rather easily.
Because if they don't, they may not have any players at all.
But you can still make a reasonable job as a plumber, even if you are mostly dealing with broken toilets.
The other side is that there ARE still high end jobs available. But the low barrier to entry and lack of a solid union/accreditation procedure means there is little obviously different (to an outsider) joe shmoe working in IT support (plumber) at a corporation and a $300k/year job at Microsoft/Google (engineer job).
The key difference to me is do you say "I'm in IT", or do you say "I build X for Y company."
If you are saying "IT", you are the plumber, not an engineer.
Has to be some speed of light weapon, laser being the most obvious one. The hard part will be predicting where the target is
. Even if you are 3 light seconds away, that is more than enough time to zig zag your way to safety.
Counting the cheapest part of the machine is silly.
Software is often free. $26 is a lot for software. The radio reception, etc. and knowing where to aim are all much more expensive and require skill.
I am shocked, shocked I say, to learn that the United Kingdom is going to continue it's policy of invading the privacy of every single person inside their border. From cameras used to trace every car's position, to arresting men for being too violent when capturing the thug that kidnapped their wife & children.
Yes it would. There are over 50,000 power plants in the world, there is no way we could afford that kind of drain (and it would be a drain, we could not use more than 0.01% of that energy, as energy does not store or transport easily.) That is way out of line with our current capacity
Quite simply, the last super-eruption contained more than 10 times the force of all the nuclear bombs ever created.
The ENTIRE US consumes about 400 petajoules of energy each year.
But the Yellowstone explosion that formed the crater used up 3,661,000 petajoules. That's over 9 thousand times the energy. So lets say we really go all out and find a way to safely handle ALL the energy the US normally uses in a year. We drain 400 petajoules each year from yellowstone. Granted, most of that power would be wasted as you lose energy when you transport it long distances, but lets pretend we care more about removing the energy than using it. I doubt we COULD drain that much energy, but lets assume we could.
So, each year we drain about 1/9000th of the energy. Assuming it is about to blow (as it has been a VERY long time since it has blown), in 4,500 years, we will have halved the size of the explosion.
10% of the cost of your TV
10% of the cost of your Nintendo Wii
10% of the cost of your mobile phone
10% of the cost of your PC
10% of the cost of your mobile entertainment device (Ipod/kindle/etc.)
10% of the cost of your GPS/digital camera/camcorder
10% of the cost of your DVD player
10% of the cost of your sound system
Now for the non-electronics
10% of the cost of the add ons you bought for your mobile entertainment (Ipod music, e-books)
10% of the costs of all your home add ons (Wii games/DVDs/etc.)
10% of the cost of your most expensive worn item (jewelry/winter jacket, etc.)
Now, add back in the cost you saved by NOT buying that crappy over-priced 'warranty'.
Does this pay for a new TV? It does for me.
Frankly, unless you are really clumsy/unlucky, it makes more sense not to buy those warranties.
Warranties/insurance for expensive items make sense. If your home burns down or your car breaks, you might not be able to afford to fix them. But it doesn't make sense for cheap things. You see the companies selling them (as opposed to giving them away for free) are making a profit. So the money everyone gives them exceeds the money the money they will give out. PLUS you have the rather large inconvenience of attempting to get your money if the product breaks. Not easy.
So the idea of paying for a warranty for something less than a month's salary, seems extremely counterproductive. You can afford to replace it if it breaks down due to bad luck. The only reason to do so is if you think the chances of the piece of crap breaking down is GREATER than the warrant-er thinks + the inconvenience of dealing with them.
Especially considering you probably buy more than 10 pieces of 'warrantable' items a year. It makes FAR more sense to simply put an extra 10% of the cost of each item into a 'warranty jar'/bank account and when something breaks, take the cash out of that.
A megaton (of TNT) is 4.184 × 1015 joules = 4.184 petajoules . You average Hydrogen bomb has about one megaton. The world has only about 70,000 nuclear bombs (rough estimate, USSR has about 16,000, the USA has about 33,000 - and most are much less powerful than an Hydrogen bomb). So the previous eruption was equal to more than 10 times ALL the existing nuclear bombs.
Maybe in 400 to 500 years we will have developed the science. Right now, all we can do is pray.
I agree. As someone that bought a netbook simply because I wanted something I could carry on and use on an airplane, size (and weight, as mentioned in the article) matters a lot.
Think Geek has a bacteria science kit that I thought looked fun. More for the >12 group. Particularly good if you are trying to get them to wash up more.
Probably less lives, energy and money that these weapons saved us from. Fear of Nuclear war prevented the US from going to war directly with Russia. The USA-Russia cold war may in fact be the first time that the two most powerful national enemies NEVER fought a war.