When was the last time you read about new photoreactive products that used semiconductors NOT based on silicon, germanium, indium, gallium, or cadmium? Sure, technically there's a long list that includes more abundant elements like aluminum and even carbon (diamond), but in practice those materials just don't find widespread use because their semi' properties are too narrow and specific.
Any other compounds they might try are likely to be based upon elements even more scarce than cadmium. Did you notice that only toxicity was mentioned as a justification, not scarcity? Gallium, indium... all the other choices are just as scarce or moreso. Silicon, by comparison, is the second most abundant element, and the amount produced each year is about the same as the total estimated reserves of cadmium.
How plentiful is cadmium relative to silicon? Not so much, right? Isn't cadmium already pretty much spoken-for in other industrial and consumer electronics applications?
Leave it to engineers not to consider the ugly realities of supply-and-demand economics.
If you've never done this, so you haven't thought it through well enough to recognize why it would be useful. A big part of the benefit comes comes being able to quickly exclude and delete what is obviously not false positives... thus quickly winnowing the list to something manageable to find those that actually might be. This is possible because, for instance:
I never send mail to myself
my actual GMail address contains periods, but GMail has a well-known bug that deposits mail addressed to my address without periods into my account as well, and so virtually ALL of that is spam, and
messages addressed to a phonetic variation of my name or alphabetic neighbor of it are also always spam.
Getting rid of that crap shortens the list of hundreds to something a bit more manageable to actually hunt for false positives. Without doing that, my eyes glaze over trying to stare at a list of hundreds.
Again, your suggested search filtering wouldn't help that process, but list ordering/sorting is of enormous help, especially when re-ordered several different ways to quickly remove several obvious spam types.
That's irrelevant: you'd have to KNOW who it was from in order to employ a SEARCH like that. That's not useful at all when you aren't looking for something specific.
It doesn't work, at least not in the global way you suggest. Been there, tried that. Actually what it did do was screw up some of my other non-spam filters.
I wanted to disable it so I could use local spam filtering again (PopFile), which was 99.96% accurate for me once upon a time... before I sold my soul to Google.
Have you noticed? GMail gives one no way at all to sort the captured spam. Since I still endure false positives from the system and there is NO way to disable or bypass it, having means to sort all of it by From:, To:, and other criteria would make it easier to identify the false positives and rescue them from the trash bin.
Well, I'll take that back, in part: that applies to the Webmail interface, but if ones uses IMAP with a local IMAP client, then the spam folder could be subscribed and sorted within the client. God only knows how GMail's system interprets the dragging of a message from Spam to Inbox via IMAP: does that automatically whitelist that sender in the future, or do I have to still log into the Web site and identify it as Not Spam manually?
That would certainly add another facet to the cliche "tourist trap", wouldn't it, if they're gouging visitors using wi-fi to pay for their own use of the system?
... because the city residents have paid - and will be paying - for the infrastructure and the service through taxes or other levied fees. It's only "free" in the sense that there's no per-minute or per-hour charges; there's still a cost for it, and the city has to pay for it all somehow. That somehow is most likely higher municipal taxes, whether higher property tax or something else. I'm not saying that's a bad thing... far from it, if it's being done efficiently. This is collectivism at its best, hopefully. It's just not truly free.
... nor do they really care. What Microsoft DOES know is what IT wants: knowledge of your buttons and which ones they can press to make money flow out. Isn't that what so-called behavioral marketing is all about?
See, you're really nothing more than a human slot machine to Microsoft, and Bing is just one of their attempts at a "system" to let them cash in more often than the house does.
Devour the history of gaming, ALL of it. That means acquiring and playing all of the games in your chosen genre for the last two decades. In the case of so-called 3X/4X games, that would even include an old fashioned cardboard board game or three that preceded the computer games. And I do mean playing, including scaling the games up to their maximum extent and seeing what breaks, what no longer works. It could very well take the better part of two decades to manage all that, so if you're not at least thirty already you might be too inexperienced yet for this profession.;-)
Why is that history important? A lot of mistakes have been made, a lot of lessons have been learned AND FORGOTTEN, a lot of innovations have been made AND FORGOTTEN over those two decades. There's a cliche about history - you know the one - and it definitely applies here.
I see the consequences of this failure to achieve depth/breath of knowledge in 3X/4X games (given that they are my enduring favorite) in particular. The same mistakes are made, earlier innovations aren't replicated, game after game, year after year; one development team fails to learn from those that have preceded it. Is this because everyone is too young and haven't "been around the block" as I described above? Is it because they're careless or arrogant? Is it perhaps even something more pre-meditated and conspiratorial, like deliberately repeating various combinations of the same flawed designs so as to keep people buying "next year's sequel", because if they ever produced the perfect game there'd be no market for next year?
Whatever the cause, don't do that. Learn from gaming history, so you don't repeat your predecessors' mistakes and overlook their innovations.
It also happens to smell just as bad coming out as it does going in: have you ever been in the bathroom when someone who has eaten a lot of tuna recently is taking a piss?
Wanna know where Gene Roddenberry got his inspiration for the Borg? Look no further than the Argentine ants in California. These critters ARE the Borg. They won't need to build spaceships to own the stars... we'll build them and they'll stow away on them. Next stop, the Gamma Quadrant.
I have a guilty confession to make: I just installed Windows XP this month, after so many years of staunchly rejecting it. I bought Windows 2000 on the day XP was launched, as a protest. I wonder if anyone reading this now even remembers the big issue with XP? Millions of people have already adopted Vista now, even those people who might have griped at first. At least I managed to carry on for a decade! (I didn't do it so much for myself as to please a friend, who wants us to play a game that only runs in XP, not 2000.)
I'm putting my foot down this time, though! It's my last Windows upgrade, period... seriously! No, really! Next time it'll be Linux with a wine chaser.
The people at NASA, USGS, and other government science agencies really do want their data to be free and accessible by anyone.
My point was predicated on that fact! Since in fact the creators of the data do place it in the public domain, people who aggregate and manipulate that data should NOT be charging their customers as if they had to pay to get it. It's not uncommon that they do. I was voicing pre-emptory cynicism.:-)
If the charge is proportional to that value added, I might not have a beef. Sometimes it's not. Mine was a cautionary tale, in the case of the latter. Consumers of the manipulated data should know that they shouldn't be paying for that data when the manipulators didn't have to fork over a cent.
NASA and its collaborators expended far more cumulative effort to generate this data in the first place, and yet THEY aren't charging for it. If the creators of the data aren't charging for it, why should we be eager to pay someone else who manipulates said data, when they had to pay nothing to obtain it? The price had better be commensurate and proportional to their actual "value added". Sometimes it's not.
What we collectively pay Google may be well obscured, but you might as well be paying it a monthly subscription, for all it matters; the (inter)net result is the same. Google IS making money from Google Earth and Maps and its other services, whether you explicitly cut it a check every month or not. Your remark was rather disingenuous because you knew that as you wrote it, and you're a/. regular.
What's likely to happen with this "free" data is that Navteq, TeleAtlas, and Google will grab it for free, but then the rest of us will have to pay dearly for the privilege of using their commercialized derivative. NASA's license for it should include clauses demanding fees for any commercial uses, and then donate the fees to the FSF or some other org that benefits the Greater Good.
... when employees of the TSA are allowed to be so completely full of themselves and their imagined importance that abuses like this routinely happen. There's nothing more malicious and mean-spirited than the BOTTOM RUNG of an authoritarian regime (like the TSA): the people on that lowest rung act out that authoritarian schtick in the worst possible way with people who are, if not completely innocent, certainly not deserving of the abuse of power.
What exactly will be the consequences of this abuse of power for the TSA employees involved? You already know the answer, don't you? NOTHING. No consequences at all... unless it becomes a huge public scandal and scapegoats must be habeas-corpused. That's a key tenet of a police state: the authorities and enforcers are not held to the same standards of behavior as those they are tasked to judge. We see the same thing in the corporate world as well in many cases.
So yeah, this really is the early stages of a police state. What are we gonna DO about it? Hint: electing a smooth talker like Obama isn't doing something about it.
The meaning of "groupthink" is NOT synonymous with "majority", so your comment is non sequitur. The tyrannical majority isn't always wrong, but it's not relevant when groupthink isn't predicated by one. In fact, groupthink is MORE likely to occur in minority groupings.
Slashdot Mirror
When was the last time you read about new photoreactive products that used semiconductors NOT based on silicon, germanium, indium, gallium, or cadmium? Sure, technically there's a long list that includes more abundant elements like aluminum and even carbon (diamond), but in practice those materials just don't find widespread use because their semi' properties are too narrow and specific.
Not too many. The cadmium will run dry before they can paint the whole town red.
Any other compounds they might try are likely to be based upon elements even more scarce than cadmium. Did you notice that only toxicity was mentioned as a justification, not scarcity? Gallium, indium... all the other choices are just as scarce or moreso. Silicon, by comparison, is the second most abundant element, and the amount produced each year is about the same as the total estimated reserves of cadmium.
How plentiful is cadmium relative to silicon? Not so much, right? Isn't cadmium already pretty much spoken-for in other industrial and consumer electronics applications?
Leave it to engineers not to consider the ugly realities of supply-and-demand economics.
If you've never done this, so you haven't thought it through well enough to recognize why it would be useful. A big part of the benefit comes comes being able to quickly exclude and delete what is obviously not false positives... thus quickly winnowing the list to something manageable to find those that actually might be. This is possible because, for instance:
Getting rid of that crap shortens the list of hundreds to something a bit more manageable to actually hunt for false positives. Without doing that, my eyes glaze over trying to stare at a list of hundreds.
Again, your suggested search filtering wouldn't help that process, but list ordering/sorting is of enormous help, especially when re-ordered several different ways to quickly remove several obvious spam types.
Whose brain-cell-murdering Kool-Aid have you been sipping, hmmm?
That's irrelevant: you'd have to KNOW who it was from in order to employ a SEARCH like that. That's not useful at all when you aren't looking for something specific.
It doesn't work, at least not in the global way you suggest. Been there, tried that. Actually what it did do was screw up some of my other non-spam filters.
I wanted to disable it so I could use local spam filtering again (PopFile), which was 99.96% accurate for me once upon a time... before I sold my soul to Google.
Have you noticed? GMail gives one no way at all to sort the captured spam. Since I still endure false positives from the system and there is NO way to disable or bypass it, having means to sort all of it by From:, To:, and other criteria would make it easier to identify the false positives and rescue them from the trash bin.
Well, I'll take that back, in part: that applies to the Webmail interface, but if ones uses IMAP with a local IMAP client, then the spam folder could be subscribed and sorted within the client. God only knows how GMail's system interprets the dragging of a message from Spam to Inbox via IMAP: does that automatically whitelist that sender in the future, or do I have to still log into the Web site and identify it as Not Spam manually?
That would certainly add another facet to the cliche "tourist trap", wouldn't it, if they're gouging visitors using wi-fi to pay for their own use of the system?
If taking the profiteering out of it is done efficiently, then you're probably right. I said that. It's just not "free".
... because the city residents have paid - and will be paying - for the infrastructure and the service through taxes or other levied fees. It's only "free" in the sense that there's no per-minute or per-hour charges; there's still a cost for it, and the city has to pay for it all somehow. That somehow is most likely higher municipal taxes, whether higher property tax or something else. I'm not saying that's a bad thing... far from it, if it's being done efficiently. This is collectivism at its best, hopefully. It's just not truly free.
... that MAGAZINES are not sufficiently unique from books in this context, and there are MOUNTAINS of prior art for inserting advertising into them.
... nor do they really care. What Microsoft DOES know is what IT wants: knowledge of your buttons and which ones they can press to make money flow out. Isn't that what so-called behavioral marketing is all about?
See, you're really nothing more than a human slot machine to Microsoft, and Bing is just one of their attempts at a "system" to let them cash in more often than the house does.
Devour the history of gaming, ALL of it. That means acquiring and playing all of the games in your chosen genre for the last two decades. In the case of so-called 3X/4X games, that would even include an old fashioned cardboard board game or three that preceded the computer games. And I do mean playing, including scaling the games up to their maximum extent and seeing what breaks, what no longer works. It could very well take the better part of two decades to manage all that, so if you're not at least thirty already you might be too inexperienced yet for this profession. ;-)
Why is that history important? A lot of mistakes have been made, a lot of lessons have been learned AND FORGOTTEN, a lot of innovations have been made AND FORGOTTEN over those two decades. There's a cliche about history - you know the one - and it definitely applies here.
I see the consequences of this failure to achieve depth/breath of knowledge in 3X/4X games (given that they are my enduring favorite) in particular. The same mistakes are made, earlier innovations aren't replicated, game after game, year after year; one development team fails to learn from those that have preceded it. Is this because everyone is too young and haven't "been around the block" as I described above? Is it because they're careless or arrogant? Is it perhaps even something more pre-meditated and conspiratorial, like deliberately repeating various combinations of the same flawed designs so as to keep people buying "next year's sequel", because if they ever produced the perfect game there'd be no market for next year?
Whatever the cause, don't do that. Learn from gaming history, so you don't repeat your predecessors' mistakes and overlook their innovations.
It also happens to smell just as bad coming out as it does going in: have you ever been in the bathroom when someone who has eaten a lot of tuna recently is taking a piss?
I'm definitely in favor of pubic safety, as you said. I should be the only person allowed to take a razor to my crotch.
Wanna know where Gene Roddenberry got his inspiration for the Borg? Look no further than the Argentine ants in California. These critters ARE the Borg. They won't need to build spaceships to own the stars... we'll build them and they'll stow away on them. Next stop, the Gamma Quadrant.
I have a guilty confession to make: I just installed Windows XP this month, after so many years of staunchly rejecting it. I bought Windows 2000 on the day XP was launched, as a protest. I wonder if anyone reading this now even remembers the big issue with XP? Millions of people have already adopted Vista now, even those people who might have griped at first. At least I managed to carry on for a decade! (I didn't do it so much for myself as to please a friend, who wants us to play a game that only runs in XP, not 2000.)
I'm putting my foot down this time, though! It's my last Windows upgrade, period... seriously! No, really! Next time it'll be Linux with a wine chaser.
My point was predicated on that fact! Since in fact the creators of the data do place it in the public domain, people who aggregate and manipulate that data should NOT be charging their customers as if they had to pay to get it. It's not uncommon that they do. I was voicing pre-emptory cynicism. :-)
If the charge is proportional to that value added, I might not have a beef. Sometimes it's not. Mine was a cautionary tale, in the case of the latter. Consumers of the manipulated data should know that they shouldn't be paying for that data when the manipulators didn't have to fork over a cent.
NASA and its collaborators expended far more cumulative effort to generate this data in the first place, and yet THEY aren't charging for it. If the creators of the data aren't charging for it, why should we be eager to pay someone else who manipulates said data, when they had to pay nothing to obtain it? The price had better be commensurate and proportional to their actual "value added". Sometimes it's not.
What we collectively pay Google may be well obscured, but you might as well be paying it a monthly subscription, for all it matters; the (inter)net result is the same. Google IS making money from Google Earth and Maps and its other services, whether you explicitly cut it a check every month or not. Your remark was rather disingenuous because you knew that as you wrote it, and you're a /. regular.
What's likely to happen with this "free" data is that Navteq, TeleAtlas, and Google will grab it for free, but then the rest of us will have to pay dearly for the privilege of using their commercialized derivative. NASA's license for it should include clauses demanding fees for any commercial uses, and then donate the fees to the FSF or some other org that benefits the Greater Good.
... when employees of the TSA are allowed to be so completely full of themselves and their imagined importance that abuses like this routinely happen. There's nothing more malicious and mean-spirited than the BOTTOM RUNG of an authoritarian regime (like the TSA): the people on that lowest rung act out that authoritarian schtick in the worst possible way with people who are, if not completely innocent, certainly not deserving of the abuse of power.
What exactly will be the consequences of this abuse of power for the TSA employees involved? You already know the answer, don't you? NOTHING. No consequences at all... unless it becomes a huge public scandal and scapegoats must be habeas-corpused. That's a key tenet of a police state: the authorities and enforcers are not held to the same standards of behavior as those they are tasked to judge. We see the same thing in the corporate world as well in many cases.
So yeah, this really is the early stages of a police state. What are we gonna DO about it? Hint: electing a smooth talker like Obama isn't doing something about it.
The meaning of "groupthink" is NOT synonymous with "majority", so your comment is non sequitur. The tyrannical majority isn't always wrong, but it's not relevant when groupthink isn't predicated by one. In fact, groupthink is MORE likely to occur in minority groupings.