"It isn't that hard to make more people. In fact its kind of fun.
yeah except the 9 months of pregnancy and the several years of training required before you can strap a bomb to it and have it crawl somewhere to blow up.
I'd be willing to guess it's probably more efficient to use robots. Much cheaper and less waiting. Even if you could recruit someone willing to kill themselves what's the cost of recruiters these days? Better to just pay chinese children to build cheap robots, even the article says "that a small GPS guided drone with autopilot could be made for about $200." That's a hellva deal compared to recruiters or birthing your own suicide bombers.
"Some people I know have heated driveways so they don't need to shovel snow in the winter, but in my opinion, that's completely ridiculous."
if i still lived in chicago I'd have a heated driveway. What's ridiculous is having to get up a hour early 3 times a week for 3 months so you can use the snow blower on the driveway to get to work. It's about $10/sq ft if you have it installed or you can diy for a quarter of that.
"Most people give work 8-10 hours+ of their life every day. It's not too much to ask companies to stay away from the few free waking hours people have remaining."
Fine, then he should do what thousands of other writers in the past have done when writing about a controversial subject: use a pen name.
He could have said he was Micheal Adams and used a different picture and never been caught and had his job until the day he died. But no, he decided to go online and basically say "Hi I'm (insert his name) and I'm a producer for CNN and this is what I think of the world and screw my boss if he don't agree!"
And he was fired over it and then he cried about it. Why? If I did that I'd expect to be fired, wouldn't you?
i have a lot of opinions (if you can't tell) and I never express them online unless it's not directly associated with me. For example, my myspace and facebook are very sterile, I don't express my opinions. Instead I reserve opinions for/. and digg.
"snow? I challenge your nanotech with my ICE SCRAPER!"
surely they planned for that, right? How much water can these windshields repel? Semi drives by and throws tons of water on my windshield and it'll automatically clear it instantly at highway speeds? My wipers can hardly keep up, i have my doubts about this technology.
You do know it only works for 4 hours before you have to raise the weights again, right? "The light output will be 600-800 lumens - roughly equal to a 40-watt incandescent bulb over a period of four hours."
4 hours just isn't enough. Make it 12 hours and a way to "turn it off" and I'd be interested. Also consider allowing the weights to charge a couple of small batteries (10 LEDs don't need that many batteries) and I'd buy one.
how difficult would it be to DIY one of these? Few LEDs, electric motor and some weights aren't that expensive. $50? $100 tops? Hmm...
"In any case, after reading that blog post, I'm never, ever watching one second of CNN again.."
Say it with me now: never mix your real life with your internet life.
That's what this guy did, and he got fired for it and he'll probably never get a another news job unless it's for online news blog site. You can't go online and blog under your real name and be shocked when your bosses find out and may not like what you're writing about, especially when you're working for a big firm like CNN.
The idiot actually put on his blog that he's in the TV business, lists off all the places he's worked, that he has two emmys and a golden mic award, and that he lives in New York with his wife, and goes by "Chez", and on the link to his myspace he puts his age as 38. Gee, wouldn't take much to figure out who you are, and soon as the internet does and that you work for CNN every link to your page will read "CNN producer said this today". Think your boss would like that?
then he says: "I'm an insufferable wise-ass who doesn't mind being an occasional nuisance to authority figures." -- wow, I'm sure your bosses love that "I wake up every morning baffled as to why America hasn't deported George Bush and Dick Cheney" -- Sure CNN producer, bash the president, your bosses won't care. --and I bet that's just the start, I'm sure if I bothered to read his blog their would be plenty of other BS opinions that CNN doesn't want to be associated with.
And he wonders why he doesn't have a job anymore??
I do not feel sorry for this guy and don't think anyone should, you can't be stupid and expect my sympathy. If he hasn't figured out how the world works at 38 he never will and if I was his wife I'd leave his stupid ass.
The only "job/school/etc fired me over blog/facebook/myspace" person I feel sorry for is this woman, who, at 25, was denied her college degree because she had a picture of herself in a pirate outfit drinking from a plastic cup and the title "drunken pirate" on her myspace page. If you can't have a picture of yourself taking a drink at 25 then when can you??
"Just go to Radio Shack and buy an ohmmeter. They're a lot cheaper."
Or put it on craigslist. Ebay isn't the only place to sell things, and craigslist items show up on google searches within days and no auction fees. Much better way to sell things than ebay IMHO.
"Problem in this: What if you have the greatest idea since sliced bread, but to implement it, you'd have to invest a ton of money, more money than you could raise or any sensible investor would give you?"
Actually the problem is the fucktards at the patent office allowed these assholes to patent sliced bread even though slice bread already existed everywhere, so now they've been given free reign to run around raping the banks.
The real question is what can't you patent? Has anyone tried patenting doorknobs or wheels lately?
go ahead, mod me down, i've been on/. for 10 yrs and ooze karma. You know I'm right.
"Whatever happened to the glory days of Video Home System, Compact Disc, and Digital Versatile Disc?"
Not to be a troll but... Sony actually won a format war?! This is big news! After all those years of trying to push Betamax, Digital Audio Tape (DAT), and Minidisc down our throats Sony actually won a format war!
I don't know if I should congratulated Sony or ask if hell froze over.
"Anything that moves can produce energy. The point is how much and at what cost to capture and reuse or store."
Mod parent up. He's exactly right. I'm tired of hearing about all these hairbrained schemes to find new sources of power, only to read it costs thousands to implement and only creates a couple kilowatt an hour (if that much!), compared to just buying it at the rate of 7 to 10 cents per kWh.
That's why we don't have water wheels on all our drain spouts because you'd never recoup the initial investment even though water wheels have been around for over a thousand years. You have to store the energy in batteries and convert it to work with a standard AC household. All of that is very expensive.
"It also says that the patent was granted in '98, so I think they (WARF) were being pretty fair about things thus far."
And let's not forget it's extremely expensive to file lawsuits. If anything it's in the best interest of the patent holder to come to some agreement rather than go to court. Sure they'll get their court costs back if they win, but who can afford to drop tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a few years?
Trust me, unless they're incredibly wealthy no one wants to go to court, especially against someone with $$$$. I've filed lawsuits and even when what they did is obviously illegal and I'll easily win in court I still have to decide if it's worth paying thousands of dollars in attorney fees and court costs over the course of a few months just to get several thousand back in the end. They really need to up small claims to $10,000+ because everything seems to be over 3 grand now days.
"How does it dick over the sellers to not be able to retaliate? "
speaking as someone with two accounts on ebay, one for selling and one for buying, with ~70% feedback rating on my buying account, I would say it would help me quite a bit knowing I could leave any feedback I wanted for sellers and they couldn't do anything about it... not that they really could before, I mean if I paid for the item what's a seller to do, not send it to me because of my feedback? But I did have many sellers not want me to bid on their items if I asked them a question about it before the end of the auction because of my poor feedback, but the only reason it was poor is because sellers almost always retaliated whenever I filed negative feedback.
Maybe now I can finally get rid of my buying account and just have one ebay account
Light-weight (under 2 lbs), smaller than a standard mouse-pad so you can carry it everywhere, capable of running XP or whatever OS you prefer from solid-state media (no hard drive).
However we're not really provided enough information to successfully answer the question asked because one of the requirements is "burn DVD photo backups to mail home". Why DVD? 4.7 gigabytes worth of photos? Are you taking 10 megapixel uncompressed photos? I mean sure if you're trying to send 100 gigabytes worth of photos home it's far cheaper to burn 22 DVDs than buy 100 gigabytes of flash memory, but why so much storage for just photos? I thought at first you were taking digital video, which I could easily understand the DVD requirement, but you should be able to get a few 2gb USB thumb drives for $20 each (or less once you reach China;) that'll handle all your photo needs and store them all in your pocket rather than lugging around an external DVD-RW and DVD-Rs.
"At the very least you could intercept it with another large object, not to mention any other mechanism built into the train/track for such an event."
You can do everything you mentioned with today's standard trains. Sure they don't do 400 mph, but it's still 100 tons traveling 60mph and how many devastating train accidents do you hear about? Besides, other countries already have high-speed trains and I haven't heard of any hijackings.
I think a high-speed train would be a welcomed change-of-pace from airplanes, I'd be more willing to take a train than a plane any day.
"So how much are the set top boxes to the goverenment? Eh, a 100 million dollars or so. How much is the radio spectrum going to sell for? Eh, up to 20 BILLION. Thats right, B, as in 20 freekin BILLION."
Great! That 20 billion will buy 2 or 3 NASA toilet seats!
"What if, for a few thousand dollars, you could believe you had a hot girlfriend who loved you, but the only catch is you have to trust that it's true?"
People do this all the time, it's called "900 numbers".
"Besides, alcohol is a drug; are you going to disqualify a babysitter because you've seen a picture of her drinking beer, despite her never being drunk while on the job ?"
It's my money I'm giving her to watch my kids, I can hire and fire whoever I want for any reason I choose as long as it's not discrimination. If I want to fire her because she has the poor judgment to publish pictures of herself drinking online that I'm actually able to find then maybe I will fire her and find someone else.
"Now what video? I don't know - I certainly didn't take any, let alone give it to him. Turns out that somebody else was shooting some video of their friends.. I don't know them, they don't know me, but I sure was in the background of their video."
That situation hasn't come up yet in reality, all I've heard about is idiots allowing comments about smoking pot on their myspace page or that 25 yr old wannabe teacher who had pictures of her drinking on her myspace with the title "drunken pirate".
"What you see is a bunch of companies that think they are so powerful that they can tell you to do and think as they say, 24/7."
Imagine you hired a babysitter to watch your kids and she's great with the kids and everything, but one day you find their myspace and there's blogs about doing drugs and all kinds of stuff you just wouldn't want your kids around, what would you do? Think you'd trust her anymore? Think you might keep an eye out for a new babysitter? Why should a company do something different?
if you think what you do in your free time has absolutely no impact on your work performance you're wrong.
The solution is simple: stop puttin' frinkin' pictures, videos and blogs on the net! I'm tired of people thinking they should publicize videos of every druggie drunkin rave they're involved with, then crying when their boss finds it!
"...VOTED for the ARM mortgages. That sure has worked out well, didn't it?"
ARM mortgages aren't bad. It put people into houses that couldn't have bought a house any other way. The problem is those people didn't try to improve their credit and find more steady employment before the rate started adjusting in 2 years. Had they improved their credit and got a better job they could have refinanced within 2 years to a 30 year fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
"It isn't that hard to make more people. In fact its kind of fun.
yeah except the 9 months of pregnancy and the several years of training required before you can strap a bomb to it and have it crawl somewhere to blow up.
I'd be willing to guess it's probably more efficient to use robots. Much cheaper and less waiting. Even if you could recruit someone willing to kill themselves what's the cost of recruiters these days? Better to just pay chinese children to build cheap robots, even the article says "that a small GPS guided drone with autopilot could be made for about $200." That's a hellva deal compared to recruiters or birthing your own suicide bombers.
"Some people I know have heated driveways so they don't need to shovel snow in the winter, but in my opinion, that's completely ridiculous."
if i still lived in chicago I'd have a heated driveway. What's ridiculous is having to get up a hour early 3 times a week for 3 months so you can use the snow blower on the driveway to get to work. It's about $10/sq ft if you have it installed or you can diy for a quarter of that.
"Most people give work 8-10 hours+ of their life every day. It's not too much to ask companies to stay away from the few free waking hours people have remaining."
/. and digg.
Fine, then he should do what thousands of other writers in the past have done when writing about a controversial subject: use a pen name.
He could have said he was Micheal Adams and used a different picture and never been caught and had his job until the day he died. But no, he decided to go online and basically say "Hi I'm (insert his name) and I'm a producer for CNN and this is what I think of the world and screw my boss if he don't agree!"
And he was fired over it and then he cried about it. Why? If I did that I'd expect to be fired, wouldn't you?
i have a lot of opinions (if you can't tell) and I never express them online unless it's not directly associated with me. For example, my myspace and facebook are very sterile, I don't express my opinions. Instead I reserve opinions for
"snow? I challenge your nanotech with my ICE SCRAPER!"
surely they planned for that, right? How much water can these windshields repel? Semi drives by and throws tons of water on my windshield and it'll automatically clear it instantly at highway speeds? My wipers can hardly keep up, i have my doubts about this technology.
"If the price were right, I'd buy a bunch,"
You do know it only works for 4 hours before you have to raise the weights again, right?
"The light output will be 600-800 lumens - roughly equal to a 40-watt incandescent bulb over a period of four hours."
4 hours just isn't enough. Make it 12 hours and a way to "turn it off" and I'd be interested. Also consider allowing the weights to charge a couple of small batteries (10 LEDs don't need that many batteries) and I'd buy one.
how difficult would it be to DIY one of these? Few LEDs, electric motor and some weights aren't that expensive. $50? $100 tops? Hmm...
"Any behavior comes with a risk of psychological addiction. "
/. will have a warning label on it!
exactly. Next thing you know
"I can't wait an hour when my rubber breaks :("
/., you're not having sex with anyone anyway.
why not? You're on
"In any case, after reading that blog post, I'm never, ever watching one second of CNN again.."
Say it with me now: never mix your real life with your internet life.
That's what this guy did, and he got fired for it and he'll probably never get a another news job unless it's for online news blog site. You can't go online and blog under your real name and be shocked when your bosses find out and may not like what you're writing about, especially when you're working for a big firm like CNN.
The idiot actually put on his blog that he's in the TV business, lists off all the places he's worked, that he has two emmys and a golden mic award, and that he lives in New York with his wife, and goes by "Chez", and on the link to his myspace he puts his age as 38. Gee, wouldn't take much to figure out who you are, and soon as the internet does and that you work for CNN every link to your page will read "CNN producer said this today". Think your boss would like that?
then he says:
"I'm an insufferable wise-ass who doesn't mind being an occasional nuisance to authority figures."
-- wow, I'm sure your bosses love that
"I wake up every morning baffled as to why America hasn't deported George Bush and Dick Cheney"
-- Sure CNN producer, bash the president, your bosses won't care.
--and I bet that's just the start, I'm sure if I bothered to read his blog their would be plenty of other BS opinions that CNN doesn't want to be associated with.
And he wonders why he doesn't have a job anymore??
I do not feel sorry for this guy and don't think anyone should, you can't be stupid and expect my sympathy. If he hasn't figured out how the world works at 38 he never will and if I was his wife I'd leave his stupid ass.
The only "job/school/etc fired me over blog/facebook/myspace" person I feel sorry for is this woman, who, at 25, was denied her college degree because she had a picture of herself in a pirate outfit drinking from a plastic cup and the title "drunken pirate" on her myspace page. If you can't have a picture of yourself taking a drink at 25 then when can you??
"Just go to Radio Shack and buy an ohmmeter. They're a lot cheaper."
Or put it on craigslist. Ebay isn't the only place to sell things, and craigslist items show up on google searches within days and no auction fees. Much better way to sell things than ebay IMHO.
"Problem in this: What if you have the greatest idea since sliced bread, but to implement it, you'd have to invest a ton of money, more money than you could raise or any sensible investor would give you?"
/. for 10 yrs and ooze karma. You know I'm right.
Actually the problem is the fucktards at the patent office allowed these assholes to patent sliced bread even though slice bread already existed everywhere, so now they've been given free reign to run around raping the banks.
The real question is what can't you patent? Has anyone tried patenting doorknobs or wheels lately?
go ahead, mod me down, i've been on
"Whatever happened to the glory days of Video Home System, Compact Disc, and Digital Versatile Disc?"
Not to be a troll but... Sony actually won a format war?! This is big news! After all those years of trying to push Betamax, Digital Audio Tape (DAT), and Minidisc down our throats Sony actually won a format war!
I don't know if I should congratulated Sony or ask if hell froze over.
"If the probe were made out of 100% gasoline, that would cost $30,000,000 per gallon..."
yep that's about what gas costs right now. Someone call Bush, we're heading to Ira... er, Saturn!
"I think we chose the wrong planet for a mission. We need to go to Saturn.."
so how long before we find WMDs on Saturn and we invade?
"Anything that moves can produce energy. The point is how much and at what cost to capture and reuse or store."
Mod parent up. He's exactly right. I'm tired of hearing about all these hairbrained schemes to find new sources of power, only to read it costs thousands to implement and only creates a couple kilowatt an hour (if that much!), compared to just buying it at the rate of 7 to 10 cents per kWh.
That's why we don't have water wheels on all our drain spouts because you'd never recoup the initial investment even though water wheels have been around for over a thousand years. You have to store the energy in batteries and convert it to work with a standard AC household. All of that is very expensive.
"It also says that the patent was granted in '98, so I think they (WARF) were being pretty fair about things thus far."
And let's not forget it's extremely expensive to file lawsuits. If anything it's in the best interest of the patent holder to come to some agreement rather than go to court. Sure they'll get their court costs back if they win, but who can afford to drop tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a few years?
Trust me, unless they're incredibly wealthy no one wants to go to court, especially against someone with $$$$. I've filed lawsuits and even when what they did is obviously illegal and I'll easily win in court I still have to decide if it's worth paying thousands of dollars in attorney fees and court costs over the course of a few months just to get several thousand back in the end. They really need to up small claims to $10,000+ because everything seems to be over 3 grand now days.
"How does it dick over the sellers to not be able to retaliate? "
speaking as someone with two accounts on ebay, one for selling and one for buying, with ~70% feedback rating on my buying account, I would say it would help me quite a bit knowing I could leave any feedback I wanted for sellers and they couldn't do anything about it... not that they really could before, I mean if I paid for the item what's a seller to do, not send it to me because of my feedback? But I did have many sellers not want me to bid on their items if I asked them a question about it before the end of the auction because of my poor feedback, but the only reason it was poor is because sellers almost always retaliated whenever I filed negative feedback.
Maybe now I can finally get rid of my buying account and just have one ebay account
"I second the eeePC"
;) that'll handle all your photo needs and store them all in your pocket rather than lugging around an external DVD-RW and DVD-Rs.
I third the Eee PC
Light-weight (under 2 lbs), smaller than a standard mouse-pad so you can carry it everywhere, capable of running XP or whatever OS you prefer from solid-state media (no hard drive).
However we're not really provided enough information to successfully answer the question asked because one of the requirements is "burn DVD photo backups to mail home". Why DVD? 4.7 gigabytes worth of photos? Are you taking 10 megapixel uncompressed photos? I mean sure if you're trying to send 100 gigabytes worth of photos home it's far cheaper to burn 22 DVDs than buy 100 gigabytes of flash memory, but why so much storage for just photos? I thought at first you were taking digital video, which I could easily understand the DVD requirement, but you should be able to get a few 2gb USB thumb drives for $20 each (or less once you reach China
"At the very least you could intercept it with another large object, not to mention any other mechanism built into the train/track for such an event."
You can do everything you mentioned with today's standard trains. Sure they don't do 400 mph, but it's still 100 tons traveling 60mph and how many devastating train accidents do you hear about? Besides, other countries already have high-speed trains and I haven't heard of any hijackings.
I think a high-speed train would be a welcomed change-of-pace from airplanes, I'd be more willing to take a train than a plane any day.
"So how much are the set top boxes to the goverenment? Eh, a 100 million dollars or so. How much is the radio spectrum going to sell for? Eh, up to 20 BILLION. Thats right, B, as in 20 freekin BILLION."
Great! That 20 billion will buy 2 or 3 NASA toilet seats!
"What if, for a few thousand dollars, you could believe you had a hot girlfriend who loved you, but the only catch is you have to trust that it's true?"
People do this all the time, it's called "900 numbers".
"Besides, alcohol is a drug; are you going to disqualify a babysitter because you've seen a picture of her drinking beer, despite her never being drunk while on the job ?"
It's my money I'm giving her to watch my kids, I can hire and fire whoever I want for any reason I choose as long as it's not discrimination. If I want to fire her because she has the poor judgment to publish pictures of herself drinking online that I'm actually able to find then maybe I will fire her and find someone else.
"Now what video? I don't know - I certainly didn't take any, let alone give it to him. Turns out that somebody else was shooting some video of their friends.. I don't know them, they don't know me, but I sure was in the background of their video."
That situation hasn't come up yet in reality, all I've heard about is idiots allowing comments about smoking pot on their myspace page or that 25 yr old wannabe teacher who had pictures of her drinking on her myspace with the title "drunken pirate".
"It's true that homebrew stuff invariably winds up getting used for software piracy."
Yeah like Nintendo needs to worry about software piracy, since they only have the top selling console for the past year, having outsold both PS3 and Xbox360 consoles by factors of 2:1, and they're the only console maker that actually makes a profit from the consoles, $49 for every console sold in the US.
So no matter how much software someone pirated Nintendo still made $49 off that Wii bought in the US.
"What you see is a bunch of companies that think they are so powerful that they can tell you to do and think as they say, 24/7."
Imagine you hired a babysitter to watch your kids and she's great with the kids and everything, but one day you find their myspace and there's blogs about doing drugs and all kinds of stuff you just wouldn't want your kids around, what would you do? Think you'd trust her anymore? Think you might keep an eye out for a new babysitter? Why should a company do something different?
if you think what you do in your free time has absolutely no impact on your work performance you're wrong.
The solution is simple: stop puttin' frinkin' pictures, videos and blogs on the net! I'm tired of people thinking they should publicize videos of every druggie drunkin rave they're involved with, then crying when their boss finds it!
"...VOTED for the ARM mortgages. That sure has worked out well, didn't it?"
ARM mortgages aren't bad. It put people into houses that couldn't have bought a house any other way. The problem is those people didn't try to improve their credit and find more steady employment before the rate started adjusting in 2 years. Had they improved their credit and got a better job they could have refinanced within 2 years to a 30 year fixed.