I was expecting to see plenty of debate around this when I saw the article but no, most people were focused on hiding their mp3's and pr0n
Which is odd, because only certain mp3s are illegal and only certain types of porn, and a border guard has no business even looking for the illegal kinds of either of those.
Frankly, I can't think of anything that could go on a laptop that would have any chance of being caught in any kind of cursory search. What are the odds of finding the terrorist handbook on a 60GB laptop in a 10 minute search. Do you think they would name it "terrorist handbook.doc"? Or would it more likely be "I love apple pie and baseball.doc"? Considering that anybody with internet access could download that same terrorist handbook from the internet once entering the country renders the search useless anyway. The only reason to search a laptop is to make sure it is not physically crammed with explosives or drugs (and some here would undoubtedly disagree with that, too.)
It depends where you live. I live in the south, where the cost of living is relatively low. I have no credit card debt, one car payment, one mortgage and one line of credit. I make significantly more then the $60k mentioned by the GP, buy almost no "toys", my wife doesn't buy jewelry or fancy clothes. We have four kids. We were going to have two, but got a surprise that turned out to be twins. We are able to make ends meet, but make very little forward progress. My estimate of how much I should be making in order to support my family and sock away a little each month is about $150k.
I once put together a spreadheet of all the costs of raising my family with minimal entertainment or toys budgeted in, and worked back to find out how much monthly housing budget I could afford. It was less than zero.
These are from 1933.
Do you think it we have reclaimed any of that lost land?
Are you asking if we have recovered from the dust bowl? Yes, we have. And we have also learned new techniques in farming that prevent the possibility of another particularly dry and windy couple of years from causing such a disaster again.
Nuclear pollution is not permanent. Nuclear radiation occurs because the atoms in question are slowly decaying to a stable state. It is the decay itself which releases the radiation and is harmful to us. So essentially, it is the very fact that nuclear particles clean themselves up that is dangerous to us.
The cautious buyer will note that this "flying car" is neither street legal nor approved for flight. Therefore it is not a flying car. It is in fact a "".
Oklahoma Gas and Electric offers 100 KwH blocks for $0.10 in addition to the normal energy charge. According to the website, I can save money by using Wind Power when the gas prices rise, but this doesn't make much sense to me if the wind power cost is in addition to the gas charge, which is what their site says. They even have a neat little flash calculator that lets me calculate how much money I can save by paying an additional $.001 per KwH. Very confusing.
I once purchased a home in a subdivision that had a homeowners association in it. The laws of the state required them to inform me that there was a homeowner's association , but unfortunately, the homeowner's association rules required that you sign the document at closing, but that you weren't allowed to view the rules before closing. So you either have to assume the rules are reasonable and go ahead and buy a house, or assume the rules are unreasonable and not sign a contract.
Anyway, I actually play a little guitar, and I still loved guitar hero. If I wanted to play a real guitar, I would. You might as well ask why people play driving games when there's a real car in their garage.
I think a more appropriate analogy is to ask why people play driving games with the dual shock controller, instead of with a wheel and pedals.
In my mind the guitar controller is a complete poser. It has one whole dimension missing. I mean, it has only five frets, and then there's a "pluck string" gizmo. Which string? On a real guitar there are 6 (sometimes 7)!
Every one of those 8400 breakthroughs got front page billing.
On slashdot, breakthroughs are lauded no matter how trivial. It is considered a breakthrough for the space elevator when they reach a consensus on what muzak will be playing over the elevators speakers.
My favourite (not stupid) take off of computer security is in Demolition Man where W/Snipes uses the guys plucked eyeball to get access out of the building.;) very choice. (NP: This wouldn't work in real life (well shouldn't;) ))
Well, of course it wouldn't work. Because you would still have to enter the four or five digits secret code into the keypad which the biometrics system uses as a "backup" to make sure it is really you.
Is it better that people spend less of their own time fixing cars, or worse? Does it really matter?
I'd say it is worse. Since people don't know anything about their vehicles, they are unable to tell when something is beginning to go wrong, and end up waiting until the "too late to fix it" light turns on. Of course, this costs much more money. Although it is always better for people to specialize in different areas, it is also beneficial and individually less costly if people have a general idea how things work.
There was no Windows versus Mac subplot going on. Macs are used in much higher percentages in movies than they are in the real world. This may be due to Apple being willing to provide donated computers.
Why not apply my test above to this as well? Find me a peer reviewed source suggesting that the world is going to freeze, optionally with an environmental wacko slant to it.
Yes, it should be no problem to find that on the internet, as everybody was putting their articles on the internet back in the mid '70s.
Interestingly, I never heard an outcry in the '70s from outraged scientists saying that the New Ice Age theory was bunk because it wasn't peer reviewed. Are there any articles out there from the '70s done by peer reviewed scientists debunking the New Ice Age Theory?
In 20 years, when the global warming thing doesn't happen and there is a new pet theory, will all of the scientist apologists be poo-pooing the global warming movement and declaring that it wasn't "triple dog dare" peer reviewed?
Why can't scientists just admit they have been wrong in the past? I guess for one because then that would tend to imply that they could be wrong in the future as well. I guess that is a good enough reason not to admit to being wrong. But hey, economists are wrong all them time, and just write it off as having not taken into consideration one variable or another. People still respect and trust them.
The thing about science is that scientists are ALWAYS WRONG. Their whole job is just to try to explain how the universe works. You can never do this absolutely correctly. Instead, they are constantly trashing old theories that worked 99.9% of the time with a new one that works 99.99% of the time. It's not their job to be right. So they shouldn't be ashamed that they had to throw out the New Ice Age theory in favor of the now more popular Global Warming Theory.
One of the biggest problems I had with that movie was how you could convince the low density air in the upper troposhere to get "sucked down" into the quite dense lower troposhere. And of course, even if you could do that, at the pressures found near the surface of the Earth the air from higher would heat up tremendously (pv=nrt).
Humankind is more like a virus. It started small, grew quickly and started using all system resources to the point where the system can barely sustain itself.
But this is exactly what every species does, given the opportunity. Why should we be any different?
In order for the bernoulli affect to work, wouldn't there have to be airflow under the roof as well as over? Or by this point are we assuming the windows have blown out?:)
In America, you can easily be in 9th grade and test past the required level to graduate high school and then you can take college courses.
Wow, things have changed since I grew up. When I grew up, high school was high school, and it didn't matter what level you tested at. I got 12.9s on the Califoria Achievement tests starting in 6th grade on most subjects. The trouble is, we had requirements on the number of maths and english classes you had to take to graduate, and if you took a full schedule every year, you might be barely able to skip the last semester of your senior year. I took band, so I didn't have the opportunity to take extra classes, and skip the last part of my senior year (nor would I have wanted to), and even if I had skipped it, there was no way to take college courses until you had graduated from high school.
I could have gone to Vo-tech and learned how to repair cars and air conditioners, but not a real college.
I started with zero credits, and I took all of the intro level classes even though I found them very easy. It did help my GPA, when things got tougher in the fourth year. Its hard to remember way back then, but it seems like I actually got a C in one class my senior year.
I also wouldn't change a thing if I could go back.
Slashdot Mirror
I was expecting to see plenty of debate around this when I saw the article but no, most people were focused on hiding their mp3's and pr0n
Which is odd, because only certain mp3s are illegal and only certain types of porn, and a border guard has no business even looking for the illegal kinds of either of those.
Frankly, I can't think of anything that could go on a laptop that would have any chance of being caught in any kind of cursory search. What are the odds of finding the terrorist handbook on a 60GB laptop in a 10 minute search. Do you think they would name it "terrorist handbook.doc"? Or would it more likely be "I love apple pie and baseball.doc"? Considering that anybody with internet access could download that same terrorist handbook from the internet once entering the country renders the search useless anyway. The only reason to search a laptop is to make sure it is not physically crammed with explosives or drugs (and some here would undoubtedly disagree with that, too.)
It depends where you live. I live in the south, where the cost of living is relatively low. I have no credit card debt, one car payment, one mortgage and one line of credit. I make significantly more then the $60k mentioned by the GP, buy almost no "toys", my wife doesn't buy jewelry or fancy clothes. We have four kids. We were going to have two, but got a surprise that turned out to be twins. We are able to make ends meet, but make very little forward progress. My estimate of how much I should be making in order to support my family and sock away a little each month is about $150k.
I once put together a spreadheet of all the costs of raising my family with minimal entertainment or toys budgeted in, and worked back to find out how much monthly housing budget I could afford. It was less than zero.
These are from 1933. Do you think it we have reclaimed any of that lost land?
Are you asking if we have recovered from the dust bowl? Yes, we have. And we have also learned new techniques in farming that prevent the possibility of another particularly dry and windy couple of years from causing such a disaster again.
Nuclear pollution is not permanent. Nuclear radiation occurs because the atoms in question are slowly decaying to a stable state. It is the decay itself which releases the radiation and is harmful to us. So essentially, it is the very fact that nuclear particles clean themselves up that is dangerous to us.
The cautious buyer will note that this "flying car" is neither street legal nor approved for flight. Therefore it is not a flying car. It is in fact a "".
Oklahoma Gas and Electric offers 100 KwH blocks for $0.10 in addition to the normal energy charge. According to the website, I can save money by using Wind Power when the gas prices rise, but this doesn't make much sense to me if the wind power cost is in addition to the gas charge, which is what their site says. They even have a neat little flash calculator that lets me calculate how much money I can save by paying an additional $.001 per KwH. Very confusing.
I'd let the power company put one on my property, in excahnge for all the free power I care to use.
I once purchased a home in a subdivision that had a homeowners association in it. The laws of the state required them to inform me that there was a homeowner's association , but unfortunately, the homeowner's association rules required that you sign the document at closing, but that you weren't allowed to view the rules before closing. So you either have to assume the rules are reasonable and go ahead and buy a house, or assume the rules are unreasonable and not sign a contract.
Anyway, I actually play a little guitar, and I still loved guitar hero. If I wanted to play a real guitar, I would. You might as well ask why people play driving games when there's a real car in their garage.
I think a more appropriate analogy is to ask why people play driving games with the dual shock controller, instead of with a wheel and pedals.
In my mind the guitar controller is a complete poser. It has one whole dimension missing. I mean, it has only five frets, and then there's a "pluck string" gizmo. Which string? On a real guitar there are 6 (sometimes 7)!
There are 279 million of us and 2 million of them.
I hate to burst your bubble, but them IS us.
Every one of those 8400 breakthroughs got front page billing.
On slashdot, breakthroughs are lauded no matter how trivial. It is considered a breakthrough for the space elevator when they reach a consensus on what muzak will be playing over the elevators speakers.
The first 2G surgery was ALSO a success.
My favourite (not stupid) take off of computer security is in Demolition Man where W/Snipes uses the guys plucked eyeball to get access out of the building. ;) very choice. (NP: This wouldn't work in real life (well shouldn't ;) ))
Well, of course it wouldn't work. Because you would still have to enter the four or five digits secret code into the keypad which the biometrics system uses as a "backup" to make sure it is really you.
Is it better that people spend less of their own time fixing cars, or worse? Does it really matter?
I'd say it is worse. Since people don't know anything about their vehicles, they are unable to tell when something is beginning to go wrong, and end up waiting until the "too late to fix it" light turns on. Of course, this costs much more money. Although it is always better for people to specialize in different areas, it is also beneficial and individually less costly if people have a general idea how things work.
I had an AT&T acoutsic coupling modem that you didn't have to dial manually.
There was no Windows versus Mac subplot going on. Macs are used in much higher percentages in movies than they are in the real world. This may be due to Apple being willing to provide donated computers.
they weren't asked in which classes they cheated
The business students were probably cheating in Ethics class.
Why not apply my test above to this as well? Find me a peer reviewed source suggesting that the world is going to freeze, optionally with an environmental wacko slant to it.
Yes, it should be no problem to find that on the internet, as everybody was putting their articles on the internet back in the mid '70s.
Interestingly, I never heard an outcry in the '70s from outraged scientists saying that the New Ice Age theory was bunk because it wasn't peer reviewed. Are there any articles out there from the '70s done by peer reviewed scientists debunking the New Ice Age Theory?
In 20 years, when the global warming thing doesn't happen and there is a new pet theory, will all of the scientist apologists be poo-pooing the global warming movement and declaring that it wasn't "triple dog dare" peer reviewed?
Why can't scientists just admit they have been wrong in the past? I guess for one because then that would tend to imply that they could be wrong in the future as well. I guess that is a good enough reason not to admit to being wrong. But hey, economists are wrong all them time, and just write it off as having not taken into consideration one variable or another. People still respect and trust them.
The thing about science is that scientists are ALWAYS WRONG. Their whole job is just to try to explain how the universe works. You can never do this absolutely correctly. Instead, they are constantly trashing old theories that worked 99.9% of the time with a new one that works 99.99% of the time. It's not their job to be right. So they shouldn't be ashamed that they had to throw out the New Ice Age theory in favor of the now more popular Global Warming Theory.
Control of what? It's not even there anymore. It was clear for only a couple of weeks.
One of the biggest problems I had with that movie was how you could convince the low density air in the upper troposhere to get "sucked down" into the quite dense lower troposhere. And of course, even if you could do that, at the pressures found near the surface of the Earth the air from higher would heat up tremendously (pv=nrt).
Humankind is more like a virus. It started small, grew quickly and started using all system resources to the point where the system can barely sustain itself.
But this is exactly what every species does, given the opportunity. Why should we be any different?
Of course, our wooden houses would last forever in what passes for "weather" in the UK.
In order for the bernoulli affect to work, wouldn't there have to be airflow under the roof as well as over? Or by this point are we assuming the windows have blown out? :)
In America, you can easily be in 9th grade and test past the required level to graduate high school and then you can take college courses.
Wow, things have changed since I grew up. When I grew up, high school was high school, and it didn't matter what level you tested at. I got 12.9s on the Califoria Achievement tests starting in 6th grade on most subjects. The trouble is, we had requirements on the number of maths and english classes you had to take to graduate, and if you took a full schedule every year, you might be barely able to skip the last semester of your senior year. I took band, so I didn't have the opportunity to take extra classes, and skip the last part of my senior year (nor would I have wanted to), and even if I had skipped it, there was no way to take college courses until you had graduated from high school.
I could have gone to Vo-tech and learned how to repair cars and air conditioners, but not a real college.
I started with zero credits, and I took all of the intro level classes even though I found them very easy. It did help my GPA, when things got tougher in the fourth year. Its hard to remember way back then, but it seems like I actually got a C in one class my senior year.
I also wouldn't change a thing if I could go back.