The United Nations is not a government and does not have the ability to levy taxes even if they wanted to. The debate about taxes happened in a U.N. forum, but the U.N. itself would have no role in collecting taxes. It would be the U.S. and European countries that would collect and keep the money.
I had taken some programming classes when i was younger. First in C and then in Java but it was only by fooling around with JavaScript that I really got the concepts of coding down.
With JavaScript all you need is a text editor and a web browser, no compiler. And the feedback you get is so immediate that debugging is much quicker and less frustrating than with other languages.
All the instruction is free on the Web, and with HTML5 gaining traction, JavaScript is again a useful language to know.
Agreed, there is potential to actually communicate a message/story that has meaning using what is there. It's almost like a cartoon where you have to fill in the caption yourself.
A shame that with all the hype and the quality graphics that the narrative is so opaque.
Using Google Maps is totally gratuitous here. Zooming in to get more detailed terrain actually inhibits gameplay rather than enhances it.
A really good free, online, multiplayer game of this sort is Conqueror! - which is not Risk, but takes some of the ideas of Risk and Axis & Allies and uses them in the context of Medieval Europe.
Split the group into two teams: 'oss' and 'proprietary'.
Give everybody equal number of supplies (paper, pens, rubber bands).
Give one member of each team instructions for some simple task, eg. making an origami crane.
Everyone has the goal of accruing as many cranes and as many other supplies as possible
The OSS group is able to share or copy the instructions among themselves (and even with the other team), while ithe proprietary team cannot copy the instructions and only person may look at them at any time.
Players build cranes and buy supplies by selling the cranes they make, and in the case of the proprietary team, the current owner of the instructions may choose to sell them for an inordinate amount of supplies.
After an hour of fun mayhem, see which team was able to build more cranes, and see which team has more diffuse dispersal of resources.
This story shows how ephemeral digital data are. I applied for a business license today, and while waiting, browsed through the collection of licenses issued during the 1890s. These are obsolete documents recorded on ancient technology, yet well-preserved and easily stored.
Any information not recorded on paper cannot be considered truly preserved.
Can any astrogeologists explain why the assumption is that the Moon is a result of debris from a two-planet crash as opposed to regular accretion of debris the way moons were formed on the other planets?
Billions of years ago, each planet was a gradually coalescing disc, and the jovian planets still have evidence of this in their rings. The closer planets instead have moons - I assume because the Sun's gravity is stronger at our closer distance from the Sun, and caused the rings of the closer planets to aggregate as the debris rotated around the Earth more quickly when approaching the Sun and more slowly when moving away.
I know our Moon is rather large compared to many others, but the idea of a two-planet crash seems unlikely given how the planets seemed to have found their natural distances from each other without some missing rogue planet threatening to collide.
In New York City, WasteMatch (http://www.wastematch.org/) can send you an email everytime an office tosses out old equipment. This often includes desks, chairs, refrigerators, (there's a working soda vending machine on their list now), and every few weeks a bunch of computers and monitors.
If you don't mind a box that's a couple of years old it's a great way to get (usually) working machines without having to dumpster-dive.
It would be nice for this to be a success, given New York's history as the location of the first electric company.
Regarding the East River, a suitcase full of human limbs was found floating a few years ago, and a cop on the news said, "This is a very rare event. I've been working here 15 years and I've only seen maybe 40 cases like this."
If it were me, I would forget about a gas engine and a spinning blade, and start with a set of electric hair clippers - the kind with a pair of bladed combs where one vibrates over the other, creating the same effect as about a dozen pairs of tiny scissors.
Grass is bigger than hair, so you'd need to replace the blades with larger ones - something on the scale of those on electric hedge trimmers, but maybe not that big.
Then attach it to a remote-control car - preferably one with big tires.
And change the power supply to a big solar panel and large capacitor. It will probably only be able to go several meters a day, depending on available sunlight (but this is a summertime-only device) but that should be adequate for a small lawn.
For the obstacle avoidance, you could use almost any simple robotics kit or plan to have it always turn left 90 when it hits an obstacle.
You certainly won't get a perfect lawn, but I would start with this as an inexpensive prototype first.
Asimov's Three Laws are elegantly profound, but may not be adequate in themselves to cover all issues regarding human-robot interaction.
What might be some amendments to this 'Robot Constitution'?
On the other hand, the laws are descriptive of an ideal, not prescriptive of how to acheive it. if you look at the basic laws that govern human behavior (eat, sleep, mate, avoid predators, protect offspring) a law such as 'be good to your neighbor' had to be added after the fact, since it is evidently not hard-wired into human beings.
So then, are the three laws of robotics all we need, not enough, or not realy addressing the issue? Might the socially-reinforcing behaviors that the laws describe be a natural result of other more fundamental ones?
There seem to be two general schools of thought regarding robot intelligence. The first looks at AI as a software problem that, once 'solved', can be inserted into any sort of machine equipped with an IC. The second, promoted by followers of Mark Tilden, is more of a bottom-up approach that expects behavior to emerge naturally from complexities in hardware.
Given how animals evolved (with 'hardware' issues such as internal organs, nervous systems, etc. being 'solved' before intelligence rose up in human beings) which approach (top-down/mind-first vs bottom-up/body-first) is most likely to result in truly intelligent machines?
Just from my own experience, looking at the referrers in the log files of the 4 sites I operate, Google delivers right around 4.5 times the traffic to my sites that MSN does. In fact Google gives a little more than all the other search engines put together. This is anecdotal (x4, though, and the logs generally agree in this regard) but it seems like MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and the rest of them have a ways to go before they're used as commonly as Google.
At any time during the past 50 years, we could have been using TV/radio combination devices rather than the separate components we use now.
Combinations only make sense when one component is used exclusively with another. TV/VCR combos work because there will never be a situation when you would need the VCR independently.
But how many times have you had the radio and TV on at the same time? Or the TV, computer, and game system on at the same time? If those things were combined, you would have to interupt the game to IM your friend - and instead of just turning your head toward the TV to see what's going on, you'd have to switch modes on your one screen.
In general, I think people want more screen real
estate, not less, yet combining these devices means reduces the area.
It seems more 'efficient' to have devices that do double- or triple-duty, but in reality it's as practical as those combination salt/pepper/sugar shakers that some people have.
Having worked there as a programmer for a few years:
The UN and its branches cannot be sued, which gives it protection from litigation but also frees it from any kind of accountability. This is why the UN has done so little since it was founded 50 years ago.
Part of Kofi Annan's plan for updating the way the UN works (in terms of peacekeeping issues) is to hand off military authority to a selected 'sponsor state' (eg Australia during the East Timor war with Indonesia).
If this same method is used for Internet issues, then one country, probably the US, would be in charge and have pretty much the same role it has now. If this method is not used, then absolutely nothing will ever happen.
The UN is too bureaucratic and slow to manage anything that is evolving as rapidly as the Internet. Just look at their site, they haven't even done the work to demand their own domain suffix, they still use.org.
When I was there, many of the server apps were 5 or 6 years out of date.
Also they are 100% pro-Microsoft. All their servers and desktops are Windows and they are reluctant to change or upgrade. I would rather see an Internet authority that is able to embrace other standards, Mac, Unix or whatever.
Similar experience in which I said, "The problem is that we just aren't able to discriminate well enough..."
The angry glares were from people who thought I meant 'be prejudiced' while I simply meant 'distinguish'.
I was in a group of people of various races, and the subject of race came up. I mentioned that I was bi-racial, waited a moment, and then said, "I'm half-Anglo and half-Saxon."
Only the black people laughed. The whites and Asians all gave me stern looks.
About 15 years ago my town (Ithaca, NY) started recycling paper and every school had two bins in each classroom, one labeled 'white only' and one labeled 'colored' - since, at the time, the recyclers didn't want the two mixed when pulped.
As a joke, a kid scrawled the word 'racist' on one of the bins, and the administration freaked out. Within a few days the labels were changed to 'bleached' and 'dyed'.
Around the same time the city was exploring alternative names for 'manhole' and 'manhole cover'. Many suggestions were submitted, but none were euphonious to be adopted ('sewer hole', 'conduit entry point') and in the end nothing happened.
So, sometimes offense can be avoided when simple and obvious alternatives can be found, but sometimes it can't. In the case of 'master'/'slave', the nomenclature is too established and there is no obvious alternative, so I doubt anything would come of this.
(In the case of 'male'/'female' cable connectors, we could just as easily get along with plug/socket|jack)
Ithaca is the same town where there were serious debates about eliminating the word HIStory, as it was gender-biased. A simple counter of the bias of the word HERitage was enough to stop that.
Slashdot Mirror
The United Nations is not a government and does not have the ability to levy taxes even if they wanted to. The debate about taxes happened in a U.N. forum, but the U.N. itself would have no role in collecting taxes. It would be the U.S. and European countries that would collect and keep the money.
I had taken some programming classes when i was younger. First in C and then in Java but it was only by fooling around with JavaScript that I really got the concepts of coding down. With JavaScript all you need is a text editor and a web browser, no compiler. And the feedback you get is so immediate that debugging is much quicker and less frustrating than with other languages. All the instruction is free on the Web, and with HTML5 gaining traction, JavaScript is again a useful language to know.
The numerous grammatical errors in the article make me suspicious. You can read the original research paper here: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1004/1004.2047.pdf It clarifies many points
...is likely to get you flogged and/or hung.
You will surely get hanged. Alas, none of us here are, or ever will be, hung.
National Geographic had a piece about this in 2007: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html It does seem to be compelling evidence that the global warming trend is outside the scope of human activity
Agreed, there is potential to actually communicate a message/story that has meaning using what is there. It's almost like a cartoon where you have to fill in the caption yourself. A shame that with all the hype and the quality graphics that the narrative is so opaque.
Using Google Maps is totally gratuitous here. Zooming in to get more detailed terrain actually inhibits gameplay rather than enhances it. A really good free, online, multiplayer game of this sort is Conqueror! - which is not Risk, but takes some of the ideas of Risk and Axis & Allies and uses them in the context of Medieval Europe.
This article http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=sh owpage&pid=209
covers the subject of VoIP security nicely
This story shows how ephemeral digital data are. I applied for a business license today, and while waiting, browsed through the collection of licenses issued during the 1890s. These are obsolete documents recorded on ancient technology, yet well-preserved and easily stored. Any information not recorded on paper cannot be considered truly preserved.
This article: http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=sh owpage&pid=53 includes a lot more info about the history of tivo, specifically in regard to how it relies on open source software
Can any astrogeologists explain why the assumption is that the Moon is a result of debris from a two-planet crash as opposed to regular accretion of debris the way moons were formed on the other planets? Billions of years ago, each planet was a gradually coalescing disc, and the jovian planets still have evidence of this in their rings. The closer planets instead have moons - I assume because the Sun's gravity is stronger at our closer distance from the Sun, and caused the rings of the closer planets to aggregate as the debris rotated around the Earth more quickly when approaching the Sun and more slowly when moving away. I know our Moon is rather large compared to many others, but the idea of a two-planet crash seems unlikely given how the planets seemed to have found their natural distances from each other without some missing rogue planet threatening to collide.
In New York City, WasteMatch (http://www.wastematch.org/) can send you an email everytime an office tosses out old equipment. This often includes desks, chairs, refrigerators, (there's a working soda vending machine on their list now), and every few weeks a bunch of computers and monitors. If you don't mind a box that's a couple of years old it's a great way to get (usually) working machines without having to dumpster-dive.
It would be nice for this to be a success, given New York's history as the location of the first electric company.
Regarding the East River, a suitcase full of human limbs was found floating a few years ago, and a cop on the news said, "This is a very rare event. I've been working here 15 years and I've only seen maybe 40 cases like this."
If it were me, I would forget about a gas engine and a spinning blade, and start with a set of electric hair clippers - the kind with a pair of bladed combs where one vibrates over the other, creating the same effect as about a dozen pairs of tiny scissors.
Grass is bigger than hair, so you'd need to replace the blades with larger ones - something on the scale of those on electric hedge trimmers, but maybe not that big.
Then attach it to a remote-control car - preferably one with big tires.
And change the power supply to a big solar panel and large capacitor. It will probably only be able to go several meters a day, depending on available sunlight (but this is a summertime-only device) but that should be adequate for a small lawn.
For the obstacle avoidance, you could use almost any simple robotics kit or plan to have it always turn left 90 when it hits an obstacle.
You certainly won't get a perfect lawn, but I would start with this as an inexpensive prototype first.
Asimov's Three Laws are elegantly profound, but may not be adequate in themselves to cover all issues regarding human-robot interaction. What might be some amendments to this 'Robot Constitution'? On the other hand, the laws are descriptive of an ideal, not prescriptive of how to acheive it. if you look at the basic laws that govern human behavior (eat, sleep, mate, avoid predators, protect offspring) a law such as 'be good to your neighbor' had to be added after the fact, since it is evidently not hard-wired into human beings. So then, are the three laws of robotics all we need, not enough, or not realy addressing the issue? Might the socially-reinforcing behaviors that the laws describe be a natural result of other more fundamental ones?
There seem to be two general schools of thought regarding robot intelligence. The first looks at AI as a software problem that, once 'solved', can be inserted into any sort of machine equipped with an IC. The second, promoted by followers of Mark Tilden, is more of a bottom-up approach that expects behavior to emerge naturally from complexities in hardware. Given how animals evolved (with 'hardware' issues such as internal organs, nervous systems, etc. being 'solved' before intelligence rose up in human beings) which approach (top-down/mind-first vs bottom-up/body-first) is most likely to result in truly intelligent machines?
Just from my own experience, looking at the referrers in the log files of the 4 sites I operate, Google delivers right around 4.5 times the traffic to my sites that MSN does. In fact Google gives a little more than all the other search engines put together. This is anecdotal (x4, though, and the logs generally agree in this regard) but it seems like MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and the rest of them have a ways to go before they're used as commonly as Google.
At any time during the past 50 years, we could have been using TV/radio combination devices rather than the separate components we use now.
Combinations only make sense when one component is used exclusively with another. TV/VCR combos work because there will never be a situation when you would need the VCR independently.
But how many times have you had the radio and TV on at the same time? Or the TV, computer, and game system on at the same time? If those things were combined, you would have to interupt the game to IM your friend - and instead of just turning your head toward the TV to see what's going on, you'd have to switch modes on your one screen.
In general, I think people want more screen real estate, not less, yet combining these devices means reduces the area.
It seems more 'efficient' to have devices that do double- or triple-duty, but in reality it's as practical as those combination salt/pepper/sugar shakers that some people have.
Having worked there as a programmer for a few years: .org.
The UN and its branches cannot be sued, which gives it protection from litigation but also frees it from any kind of accountability. This is why the UN has done so little since it was founded 50 years ago.
Part of Kofi Annan's plan for updating the way the UN works (in terms of peacekeeping issues) is to hand off military authority to a selected 'sponsor state' (eg Australia during the East Timor war with Indonesia).
If this same method is used for Internet issues, then one country, probably the US, would be in charge and have pretty much the same role it has now. If this method is not used, then absolutely nothing will ever happen.
The UN is too bureaucratic and slow to manage anything that is evolving as rapidly as the Internet. Just look at their site, they haven't even done the work to demand their own domain suffix, they still use
When I was there, many of the server apps were 5 or 6 years out of date.
Also they are 100% pro-Microsoft. All their servers and desktops are Windows and they are reluctant to change or upgrade. I would rather see an Internet authority that is able to embrace other standards, Mac, Unix or whatever.
Beautifully (HU) of balls and impulses
XXX
XXX means: not intended dates
If nevertheless still someone liked to hold gladly additionally a VL: ask following the last VL on Thursday!
Similar experience in which I said, "The problem is that we just aren't able to discriminate well enough..."
The angry glares were from people who thought I meant 'be prejudiced' while I simply meant 'distinguish'.
You should be weeping for the poor guy with the nickname "Manhole".
I was in a group of people of various races, and the subject of race came up. I mentioned that I was bi-racial, waited a moment, and then said, "I'm half-Anglo and half-Saxon."
Only the black people laughed. The whites and Asians all gave me stern looks.
About 15 years ago my town (Ithaca, NY) started recycling paper and every school had two bins in each classroom, one labeled 'white only' and one labeled 'colored' - since, at the time, the recyclers didn't want the two mixed when pulped. As a joke, a kid scrawled the word 'racist' on one of the bins, and the administration freaked out. Within a few days the labels were changed to 'bleached' and 'dyed'.
Around the same time the city was exploring alternative names for 'manhole' and 'manhole cover'. Many suggestions were submitted, but none were euphonious to be adopted ('sewer hole', 'conduit entry point') and in the end nothing happened.
So, sometimes offense can be avoided when simple and obvious alternatives can be found, but sometimes it can't. In the case of 'master'/'slave', the nomenclature is too established and there is no obvious alternative, so I doubt anything would come of this.
(In the case of 'male'/'female' cable connectors, we could just as easily get along with plug/socket|jack)
Ithaca is the same town where there were serious debates about eliminating the word HIStory, as it was gender-biased. A simple counter of the bias of the word HERitage was enough to stop that.