The VB/assembler analogy doesn't make sense. The only hazard (that by your argument forces one to be a better photographer) of film is losing twenty cents on shooting and developing a practice frame of film, hardly analogous to wiping out a disk.
Rather, it's more like saying musicians who only perform live and never make studio recordings are better musicians, or stage actors are better than film actors. Or that a painter gets better only by painting on the canvas and shouldn't make charcoal sketches. And that's just not true. Photography is not a performance art, it's a studio art; there is no "practice" and "live", it's all the same, so each shot is both practice and "product". The skill comes from judging and comparing the results, understanding what makes the good stuff good, and applying that to the next work. Needless to say, the more opportunity you have to do that, the more skillful you become.
I've used film cameras for several decades, and being a thrifty guy, have ended up feeling hindered by the cost. I went on a ten-week trip through Europe and took a total of only 150 photos, even though I carried the camera (a low-end Olympus SLR, but way heavier than any SLR sold today) everywhere I went. And I really wish I had taken more photos. If I had swallowed the cost and shot 1,000 photos I would have had more crappy shots of course, but more good shots, and more opportunity to see what makes the crappy shots crappy and the good shots good -- it would have made me a better photographer.
Now with a digital, as with many pople I regularly shoot over 100 shots a month, and I can tell (much more quickly and conveniently) which shots are good and bad. I almost never delete shots no matter how they turn out. And with the EXIF info, I can see how the settings affect the image, which of course you can do with meticulous notetaking on a film camera, but is way too much trouble for me.
As for the "the thrill of waiting", I suppose having your kernel finish compiling in 45 seconds is just a letdown, eh? A 133Mhz Pentium provides much more "thrill"...
International holiday? What does that mean? I would venture (without any numbers to support it, but nonetheless) that Christmas is not celebrated by the majority of people in the world, nor is it an official holiday in the majority of nations in the world.
The only international holiday is probably New Year's Day. And May Day (International Workers' Day) is also specifically intended to be international and not specific to any culture.
Yes, perhaps, such drugs will remain unused. In industrialized countries where treatment is available only in the form of manufactured and commercially sold drugs.
But they will remain in use, as they always have been, in the form of "traditional" cures, in the countries where they originated (India in this case), for practically no cost, available to many many more people, who gain to benefit much more from their use.
Allowing the medicines to be patentable will allow the first at the expense of the latter.
There's a very important word in the article, and it appears in the story description as well: significantly.
Every time there's a story about technologies like this, people chime up with "But what about this case? What about that case? How accurately can it detect the conditions?"
That is, how will it prevent false positives on borderline conditions?
Any decently designed system ignores such cases. It's not going to lock in as soon as you cross the border from a 35mph zone to a 50mph. But if you're going 100 in an 80 zone for 5 minutes straight, it will.
"Todd Ripley, a real estate investor in Asheville, North Carolina, noticed the problem on Tuesday morning after he uploaded photos of his 2-year-old daughter Jasmine onto his Google Base page. He planned to direct his family to the page but decided against it after a search for "Jasmine" turned up some unsavoury results despite the use of the SafeSearch filter."
If he'd just named his daughter Phyllis, or Martha, or Gertrude...
And why did he need to search for "Jasmine" to tell his family where to find photos? Couldn't he just use a URL? And did he think that there was any chance that a search for "Jasmine" would actually find his daughter's photos from the mounds of other info out there???
>>> Un-related but funny story. I have some aquiantances (sp?) here in L.A. that write scripts and they actually get evaluated (paid too) by people who can get movies made. The latest overwhelming reply to their work has been, "It's a great script, but we're really looking for something based on a video game.." >>>
Well then why don't we just get rid of all records: criminal records, driving records, school grades, employee evaluation records?
All you're saying is that chronological records of past events can be used to predict future behavior, and these predictions can be abused to assume, without justification, that such predictions _will_ come true.
And so what if one malicious worker has exclusive rights to view several hundred children? It doesn't matter if they have access to the whole database or not, even a "small pecentage" could be several hundred or thousand children. This is a pedaphile's ultimate dream.
The hypothetical pedophile has always been able to do that. The number of records available to any one person or any number of people has always been limited to that one database, and yes, it probably does number in the hundreds. So what?
They're creating a unified database whose purpose is to commonly identify children whose records are currently in different databases in different agencies and districts. People won't have access to any more records than before, they will have access to more information in each record.
And how long exactly will these records be kept? Also, this would be a good way to usher in a country-wide database of this sortfor every citizen. Start with the children, saying its "for the good of the kids", and then slowly introduce a more inclusive database, which would go under some other guise. It would seem that a database of children "for their safety" might be easier to pull of then a citizenry-wide database at first.
It says so right in the story description: cradle to grave.
>>> The people of China and Korea (both of them) will never forgive the Japanese for what they did in World War II during their totally unjustified quest to create the "East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere" i.e. the Japanese Empire. >>> If they will never forgive, they ought to stop demanding apologies. And both sides can remain enemies forever.
Neither side should ever _forget_. But I believe the way it works is perpetrator apologizes, victim accepts apology and forgives, and both sides move on.
As for civilian casualties, there are no such thing as innocent civilians in an enemy country... This makes them targets for death and destruction, and rightly so; whether death comes in the form of a bullet, an airstrike, or a nuclear missile is entirely irrelevent.
You forgot to mention "airliners flown into buildings" and "time bombs on subways". Now then, go back and make your argument one more time, loud and clear.
And no one has any business demanding that Americans be ashamed about the bombs that were dropped on Japan, anymore than they have any business demanding that Americans be ashamed of the firebombing of Tokyo.
Those who criticize or are ashamed of the first have reason to be ashamed of the second as well. I believe arguments of this sort are supposed to raise a similar and opposing position, along the lines of "And no one has any business demanding that Americans be ashamed about the bombs that were dropped on Japan, anymore than they have any business demanding that Japanese (had Japan won the war) be ashamed of the attack on Pearl Harbor."
Once again, if this is what you want to say, go ahead and say it loud and clear.
>> For example, your assessment of the psychological effects of the trauma is completely incorrect. The human damage was still being only roughly assessed long after the surrender, and in particular, the radiation effects were far from apparent for some weeks. They didn't even have a name for radiation sickness. It took the doctors years just to figure out how to calibrate the received dosages. >> And it's because we didn't know about fallout and radiation sickness back then, but do now, that we can look back now and say bombing Fuji would have been a bad idea, and it's a good thing we didn't do it in our ignorance, because the long term effects probably would have caused more human suffering.
>> They could not have blown off the top of the mountain, though they could have made a visible crater and even disfigured the lip of the crater from certain perspectives. >> All right, so we are not talking about blowing off the top of the mountain. So then what is the point of a demonstration of the bomb, if not to show its destructive power in the most dramatic fashion? A chip off the lip would have had no "shock-and-awe" effect. Flattening a city did. Partially vaporizing Tokyo Bay might have.
>> You seem to have completely missed the irony of the last part. >> So you would prefer the atomic bomb memorial to be a permanent scar, always visible, on nature, for eternity? No thanks. If I want to be reminded, I'll visit the dome in Hiroshima and pay my respects then and there.
>> The amazing thing is that Belo is still in business. (Papers and TV station) >>
Belo wasn't a dot-com, it's one of the largest media conglomerates in the U.S., with 150 years of history. There's no reason it would crash and burn just from a dinky $100 million bad investment.
I could hardly imagine a worse idea. For two reasons: first, it would risks the demonstrative effects of the bomb, and second, it would be the ugliest, most barbaric act comitted by mankind against the planet.
Suppose the bomb had blown the top off the mountain. Impressive in terms of explosive power, but it would not have had the horrible effects of human destruction - burning skin, instant vaporization - that served to shock the nation into surrender. For a "non-destructive" demonstration, Tokyo Bay, as proposed, would have had more effect. More people would have seen it immediately.
A low-level blast planned to create the maximum visual scarring of Mount Fuji would have also kicked up an enormous amount of fallout, and the long-term fatalities would probably have been very high, though the immediate deaths would have been reduced. Of course, part of our ignorance at that time included ignorance of radiation sickness and fallout.
So then, and assuming things then went as they did in fact with the Japanese population being open and accepting to the occupation, the numbers and time scale of subsequent deaths would have been much greater than Hiroshima. In effect, it would be the killing, by radiation poisoning, of all those people who had survived the war, accepted the surrender and occupation, and were by then supposedly allies.
Worst of all, in my opinion, it would have been a horrible, ugly act against the planet and everyone who lives on it. The U.S. was willing to spare Kyoto for the sake of its cultural heritage. To destroy a true natural wonder, the most perfectly-formed conical volcano in the world, by human aggression would be something that we could never live down. We couldn't ever rebuild Mt. Fuji. And suppose things went a bit differently and Japan eventually became a U.S. territory. Then, whose mountain would have been destroyed?
Every August 6, we can contemplate the effects of the A-bombing, and the monuments will always be there in Hiroshima. It's part of history, in its own time and place. But would you want to see a scarred, radioactive symbol of human destruction every time you walk to the train station?
I've seen them at Gusto (which is part of Skylark group, so others may have them too).
The way I see it, "entertainment" at a restaurant is a sign that slow service is expected. Though the terminals legitimately are aimed at impatient kids.
Slashdot Mirror
The VB/assembler analogy doesn't make sense. The only hazard (that by your argument forces one to be a better photographer) of film is losing twenty cents on shooting and developing a practice frame of film, hardly analogous to wiping out a disk.
Rather, it's more like saying musicians who only perform live and never make studio recordings are better musicians, or stage actors are better than film actors. Or that a painter gets better only by painting on the canvas and shouldn't make charcoal sketches. And that's just not true. Photography is not a performance art, it's a studio art; there is no "practice" and "live", it's all the same, so each shot is both practice and "product". The skill comes from judging and comparing the results, understanding what makes the good stuff good, and applying that to the next work. Needless to say, the more opportunity you have to do that, the more skillful you become.
I've used film cameras for several decades, and being a thrifty guy, have ended up feeling hindered by the cost. I went on a ten-week trip through Europe and took a total of only 150 photos, even though I carried the camera (a low-end Olympus SLR, but way heavier than any SLR sold today) everywhere I went. And I really wish I had taken more photos. If I had swallowed the cost and shot 1,000 photos I would have had more crappy shots of course, but more good shots, and more opportunity to see what makes the crappy shots crappy and the good shots good -- it would have made me a better photographer.
Now with a digital, as with many pople I regularly shoot over 100 shots a month, and I can tell (much more quickly and conveniently) which shots are good and bad. I almost never delete shots no matter how they turn out. And with the EXIF info, I can see how the settings affect the image, which of course you can do with meticulous notetaking on a film camera, but is way too much trouble for me.
As for the "the thrill of waiting", I suppose having your kernel finish compiling in 45 seconds is just a letdown, eh? A 133Mhz Pentium provides much more "thrill"...
He's an old guy who performs weird and boring music that was popular waaaay before you were born.
OK?
Then the Kreation team will submit some patches to Evolution for a "mail creation wizard", but it will be named the Intelligent Designer.
International holiday? What does that mean? I would venture (without any numbers to support it, but nonetheless) that Christmas is not celebrated by the majority of people in the world, nor is it an official holiday in the majority of nations in the world.
The only international holiday is probably New Year's Day. And May Day (International Workers' Day) is also specifically intended to be international and not specific to any culture.
"...most people can't comprehend."
You mean this stuff?
Yes, perhaps, such drugs will remain unused. In industrialized countries where treatment is available only in the form of manufactured and commercially sold drugs.
But they will remain in use, as they always have been, in the form of "traditional" cures, in the countries where they originated (India in this case), for practically no cost, available to many many more people, who gain to benefit much more from their use.
Allowing the medicines to be patentable will allow the first at the expense of the latter.
There's a very important word in the article, and it appears in the story description as well: significantly.
Every time there's a story about technologies like this, people chime up with "But what about this case? What about that case? How accurately can it detect the conditions?"
That is, how will it prevent false positives on borderline conditions?
Any decently designed system ignores such cases. It's not going to lock in as soon as you cross the border from a 35mph zone to a 50mph. But if you're going 100 in an 80 zone for 5 minutes straight, it will.
The functional programming community has been literally screaming for years that functional programming languages that...
Literally screaming for years, eh? Maybe that's why they get ignored.
From the article:
"Robert A. van de Geijin, a computer scientist who works with Mr. Goto at the Texas Center,..."
All right, a Japanese programmer named Goto, working with a non-Japanese guy name Geijin. That's too much.
>>
The possibility that our weapons might prove a threat
>>
But can't we still still match them with our superior intellect?
From TFA:
"Todd Ripley, a real estate investor in Asheville, North Carolina, noticed the problem on Tuesday morning after he uploaded photos of his 2-year-old daughter Jasmine onto his Google Base page. He planned to direct his family to the page but decided against it after a search for "Jasmine" turned up some unsavoury results despite the use of the SafeSearch filter."
If he'd just named his daughter Phyllis, or Martha, or Gertrude...
And why did he need to search for "Jasmine" to tell his family where to find photos? Couldn't he just use a URL? And did he think that there was any chance that a search for "Jasmine" would actually find his daughter's photos from the mounds of other info out there???
Sorry, but I do think of videogames as a childish pastime. Along with football, baseball, basketball, auto racing, ice hockey, poker, billiards...
>> ...
So anyway, we finally have a story where Digg.com rants are not offtopic. Well, I'll fire the opening salvo:
>>
Over the bow, I presume. (And I'll gaze at the shell flying through the air.)
Someone set up them the bomb.
>>>
Un-related but funny story. I have some aquiantances (sp?) here in L.A. that write scripts and they actually get evaluated (paid too) by people who can get movies made. The latest overwhelming reply to their work has been, "It's a great script, but we're really looking for something based on a video game.."
>>>
bash or perl?
Well then why don't we just get rid of all records: criminal records, driving records, school grades, employee evaluation records?
All you're saying is that chronological records of past events can be used to predict future behavior, and these predictions can be abused to assume, without justification, that such predictions _will_ come true.
And so what if one malicious worker has exclusive rights to view several hundred children? It doesn't matter if they have access to the whole database or not, even a "small pecentage" could be several hundred or thousand children. This is a pedaphile's ultimate dream.
The hypothetical pedophile has always been able to do that. The number of records available to any one person or any number of people has always been limited to that one database, and yes, it probably does number in the hundreds. So what?
They're creating a unified database whose purpose is to commonly identify children whose records are currently in different databases in different agencies and districts. People won't have access to any more records than before, they will have access to more information in each record.
And how long exactly will these records be kept? Also, this would be a good way to usher in a country-wide database of this sortfor every citizen. Start with the children, saying its "for the good of the kids", and then slowly introduce a more inclusive database, which would go under some other guise. It would seem that a database of children "for their safety" might be easier to pull of then a citizenry-wide database at first.
It says so right in the story description: cradle to grave.
It is how vowel sounds are made, and occasionally constanants.
Say what?
>>>
The people of China and Korea (both of them) will never forgive the Japanese for what they did in World War II during their totally unjustified quest to create the "East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere" i.e. the Japanese Empire.
>>>
If they will never forgive, they ought to stop demanding apologies. And both sides can remain enemies forever.
Neither side should ever _forget_. But I believe the way it works is perpetrator apologizes, victim accepts apology and forgives, and both sides move on.
As for civilian casualties, there are no such thing as innocent civilians in an enemy country ... This makes them targets for death and destruction, and rightly so; whether death comes in the form of a bullet, an airstrike, or a nuclear missile is entirely irrelevent.
You forgot to mention "airliners flown into buildings" and "time bombs on subways". Now then, go back and make your argument one more time, loud and clear.
And no one has any business demanding that Americans be ashamed about the bombs that were dropped on Japan, anymore than they have any business demanding that Americans be ashamed of the firebombing of Tokyo.
Those who criticize or are ashamed of the first have reason to be ashamed of the second as well. I believe arguments of this sort are supposed to raise a similar and opposing position, along the lines of "And no one has any business demanding that Americans be ashamed about the bombs that were dropped on Japan, anymore than they have any business demanding that Japanese (had Japan won the war) be ashamed of the attack on Pearl Harbor."
Once again, if this is what you want to say, go ahead and say it loud and clear.
>>
For example, your assessment of the psychological effects of the trauma is completely incorrect. The human damage was still being only roughly assessed long after the surrender, and in particular, the radiation effects were far from apparent for some weeks. They didn't even have a name for radiation sickness. It took the doctors years just to figure out how to calibrate the received dosages.
>>
And it's because we didn't know about fallout and radiation sickness back then, but do now, that we can look back now and say bombing Fuji would have been a bad idea, and it's a good thing we didn't do it in our ignorance, because the long term effects probably would have caused more human suffering.
>>
They could not have blown off the top of the mountain, though they could have made a visible crater and even disfigured the lip of the crater from certain perspectives.
>>
All right, so we are not talking about blowing off the top of the mountain. So then what is the point of a demonstration of the bomb, if not to show its destructive power in the most dramatic fashion? A chip off the lip would have had no "shock-and-awe" effect. Flattening a city did. Partially vaporizing Tokyo Bay might have.
>>
You seem to have completely missed the irony of the last part.
>>
So you would prefer the atomic bomb memorial to be a permanent scar, always visible, on nature, for eternity? No thanks. If I want to be reminded, I'll visit the dome in Hiroshima and pay my respects then and there.
>>
The amazing thing is that Belo is still in business. (Papers and TV station)
>>
Belo wasn't a dot-com, it's one of the largest media conglomerates in the U.S., with 150 years of history. There's no reason it would crash and burn just from a dinky $100 million bad investment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belo_Corporation
I could hardly imagine a worse idea. For two reasons: first, it would risks the demonstrative effects of the bomb, and second, it would be the ugliest, most barbaric act comitted by mankind against the planet.
Suppose the bomb had blown the top off the mountain. Impressive in terms of explosive power, but it would not have had the horrible effects of human destruction - burning skin, instant vaporization - that served to shock the nation into surrender. For a "non-destructive" demonstration, Tokyo Bay, as proposed, would have had more effect. More people would have seen it immediately.
A low-level blast planned to create the maximum visual scarring of Mount Fuji would have also kicked up an enormous amount of fallout, and the long-term fatalities would probably have been very high, though the immediate deaths would have been reduced. Of course, part of our ignorance at that time included ignorance of radiation sickness and fallout.
So then, and assuming things then went as they did in fact with the Japanese population being open and accepting to the occupation, the numbers and time scale of subsequent deaths would have been much greater than Hiroshima. In effect, it would be the killing, by radiation poisoning, of all those people who had survived the war, accepted the surrender and occupation, and were by then supposedly allies.
Worst of all, in my opinion, it would have been a horrible, ugly act against the planet and everyone who lives on it. The U.S. was willing to spare Kyoto for the sake of its cultural heritage. To destroy a true natural wonder, the most perfectly-formed conical volcano in the world, by human aggression would be something that we could never live down. We couldn't ever rebuild Mt. Fuji. And suppose things went a bit differently and Japan eventually became a U.S. territory. Then, whose mountain would have been destroyed?
Every August 6, we can contemplate the effects of the A-bombing, and the monuments will always be there in Hiroshima. It's part of history, in its own time and place. But would you want to see a scarred, radioactive symbol of human destruction every time you walk to the train station?
>>>
It's the same attitude which made people be angry with the "long" bowl-cuts the Beatles sported when they came to the USA.
>>>
Dammit, I'm still angry with them.
I've seen them at Gusto (which is part of Skylark group, so others may have them too).
The way I see it, "entertainment" at a restaurant is a sign that slow service is expected. Though the terminals legitimately are aimed at impatient kids.