This is an interesting idea, but it's not a lightsaber.
I do not disagree at all. However, this is not a plastic tube with a christmas tree light in it. That was my point. It is a 'saber' made solely of light.
Now, I've hit a new problem with it - pictures. As it turns out, you can't take pictures of it with a normal digital camera because the picture is taken so quickly that you see the base unit and a small wisp of light - but no beam. I'm going to have to go get a real camera that will allow me to hold the aperture open for more than a split second. Damn technology.
Care to explain how you're accomplishing a single short beam of light?
Disclaimer: THIS IS NOT MY IDEA.
I saw a Magic Stage presentation in North Carolina back about 1994. When you cross two laser pointers, they make a point of light. Try it - get two laser pointers and cross the beams. I mount one straight up and move the other beam up and down. You get a short visible streak of light. Move it up and down faster than 60 times a second and it looks like a glowing beam. I'm working on mounting three of the beams on a spinner inside a flashlight case. The trouble is that small parts break quickly when moving that fast, so I'm redesigning it to use less moving parts by using a spinning curved mirror to move the second beam up and down.
Warning: when laser pointers cross, it barely makes a warm dot. When lasers cross, they can create a lot of heat. The method has been used to pinpoint tumors and burn them inside the body without cutting it open. So, I was intending the remark about using real lasers as a joke.
Just build a lightsaber. A real one. That's all. What's that...you can't? Don't have suitable raw materials, you say?
I *am* building a real lightsaber. I already have a single short beam of light using your basic galium arsenide diodes. It is warm, but it won't cause and real harm to anyone. I'm in the process of mounting three beams on a rotating disk so I can create a more realistic lightsaber look and feel. Then, I'll look into the cost of real lasers:)
...and they're not going to release a patch for it.
I read the article. They claimed that Microsoft wasn't going to fix the problem. The article linked to the advisory from Microsoft. I read the advisory from Microsoft. Nowhere in the advisory was there any mention about Microsoft's position on fixing or not fixing the problem. So, I wonder where the news.com article got the scoop that Microsoft isn't going to fix it?
Are you more prone to being attacked by feral monkeys if you keep bananas in the house?
Seriously, someone answer the monkey question for me. I am scared now.
Well, when I was in Columbia, we had some fruit, including bananas that we picked up in Panama. The locals told us that we had to keep the fruit boxed up tight or the animals would come in and steal it. I didn't believe them though. I was sure it was the Incan gods that snuck in at night and stole all my baby swiss cheese from my backpack - and then pooped right in the middle of our table. Damn Incan gods.
In case you are like me and you just want to know how they targetted the cancer cells, this is a very brief rundown:
All cells require folate to survive. Cancer cells suck up folate like it's crack. They put the poison in the folate. All cells absorb some of the poisoned folate. Cancer cells absorb most of it.
Pretty nice idea, but it made me wonder about the push to get expectent mothers to take excessive amounts of folic acid (folate). Does that make them more prone to cancer by giving the cancer cells extra food?
If the USA Patriot Act is not a anti-terror act, as you claim, then what do you make of these statements by Justice Dept. and the Act's supporters? Are they lying? What's the story?
Yes. They are lying because they are telling a half-truth. I call a half-truth a lie when it is intentionally a half-truth. The real story is that "terrorism" is a buzz word. As I said in my comment, just 2 minutes at Wikipedia will clear it all up for you.
I suspected the article of half-truth when it referred to the USA PATRIOT Act as an "Anti-Terrorism Act". It takes about 2 minutes of reading the USA PATRIOT Act on Wikipedia to realize that terrorism is only a small part of it. So, I went to house.gov and did a little research.
The bill that it is referring to is:
An amendment numbered 15 printed in the Congressional Record to prohibit funds in the bill from being used to implement provisions of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act which permits searches of library circulation records, library patron lists, book sales records, or book customer lists under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
There are some key points to mention here. First, this is limiting a section of FISA, which was absorbed by the USA PATRIOT Act. FISA was passed in 1978. So, all that stuff in the article about the "terrorism bill" being passed in 2001 is garbage. This is referring to a law passed in 1978.
Second, this isn't ammending FISA or the USA PATRIOT Act. This is ammending a funding bill to ensure that the funds provided by the bill cannot be used by this one section of FISA. So, it is still legal, you just can't use those special funds for it.
Third, who is paying this writer to write articles designed specifically to fan the anti-patriot act flames? If he had written what the vote was really about, it would have been news. As it is, it is propoganda.
They do tend to have a lot of problems with their DNS servers, though.
I called Comcast and found that the DNS sent with DHCP for the cable modems is actually the testing DNS server. I had set the DNS server IP address manually and I've had no DNS problems since. Unfortunatly, I'm at work, so I have no clue what the IP address is.
In effect all you're doing is using a supply of oxygen as a jump starter for the plant's own metabolism, which will then return the expended oxygen as well as supply an excess.
That does not take into account the original question: On Mars, with less sunlight to convert CO2 to O2, will you need to pick and choose which plants give you a surplus. Some plants might not create a whole hell of a lot of surplus on Earth and barely break even on Mars.
Another nifty side effect of farming would be the oxygen created from the plant's metabolic process.
My rudimentary understanding is that the green in plants comes from chlorophyl. Chlorophyl reacts with the photons from the sun and creates Oxygen as a by-product. That is just one reaction. In the rest of the plant, the biochemistry is your basic oxygen-sucking carbon-based lifeform. Plants do create more oxygen than the suck up, but the point most people miss is that they do consume oxygen.
The point here is that the chlorophyl requires the sun's light or artificial sunlight to create oxygen. Artificial sunlight will require fuel of somekind. So, that's a waste of time to pursue. Real sunlight on Mars is less powerful than on Earth. So, a plant on Mars will create less oxygen than it will here on Earth.
Finally, explaining my possible misunderstanding of biology, I think my question can be understood: Even if we cover Mars with plants, will they produce enough oxygen to make a difference?
My wife is a librarian and she brought home a few Reader's Digests when the library was throwing them out. "Cool," I thought. I can read summaries of a wide variety of interesting stories.
I appears that I mistakenly thought that the Reader's Digest was a collection of popular books in brief summary form. It is actually just an ordinary magazine. I looked through three issues. There was nothing more about books than Life, People, or even Playboy. They had home maintenance sections, celebrity gossip sections, letters (bitching) to the editor sections... The same garbage in every other magazine.
Was I completely off? Didn't Reader's Digest used to be all about short stories?
I prefer to think of Slashdot as a meta-blog. The primary distinction is that Slashdot editors don't make up stories on their own. They post links to stories found in other sources. Normal blogs attempt to be the news source, not a link to other news sources.
I've thought about using the Slashdot commenting system on something like CNN. I figured it wouldn't work. When AOL let the world in on newsgroups, the newsgroups crumbled under the idiocy. If CNN let the same people in on this commenting system, I expect that it would crumble as well.
/. is not a normal blog. It is more of a meta-blog. It collects stories from the general Internet (not always news stories, just some interesting websites at times). Then, the geeks comment about the stories.
A normal blog consists of one person (or a few buddies) posting what they think is news. If you are lucky, you get to add your comments about what they have posted. Usually, you don't. If you are luckier, you can disagree with them without being banned. Usually, you get banned. If you are extremely lucky, you can post stories that you have found that others may like. That almost never happens. If you are in a utopian blog, others will moderate the posts so you can easily ignore the idiots. Moderation hardly ever works./. is unique in that the self-moderation has functioned pretty well. Contrary to what many say, it is very easy to modded up or down. If you post a message in clear, concise, and polite text, you will probably get modded up. If you use loaded words, curse words, and rant about something that nobody else cares about, you get modded down.
I proved this point to a friend. He posted "Fedora and all the other Linux crap will never be as dependable as Windows 98 for power users like me!" Guess what - modded down. I posted, "I have used both Fedora and Windows 98. I am a developer, so I abuse the OS pretty badly. I've found that Windows 98 handles the abuse better than Fedora." Guess what - modded up.
I pay little attention to blogs because there is no accountability. Here is an example:
On/. a while back was a 'story' that Congress had passed a bill that made some law that the/. crowd was sure to be upset about. I went to the story - it was on a blog. It was supported by links to three other stories - all on other blogs. Those stories cross-linked to one another to support themselves. Finally, I went to the Congress' website and searched for the law. The true story: A subcomittee passed a resolution to send the bill to the general floor for discussion.
I am NOT claiming that print or video media is better. Once a story gets in a newspaper, it quickly becomes fact. I am also NOT claiming that the public is incapable of having accountability. Look at Wikipedia. There is plenty of accountability with peer oversight. Blogs, on the other hand, do not have any oversight. They don't have to get past an editor or fact-checker. Then, the general public is too lazy to check the facts. You end up with a large group of people believing some idiot's blog-rant to be fact.
I think that is truly it for me - idiots becoming dumber by getting their facts from bigger idiots.
Re:Actually I can argue with it
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
Java and Python blow it away in ability to create easy to maintain and efficient data structures.
You are making a great assumption that any and all programming projects depend on data structures. Just in case you dropped in on the planet recently, you might find it interesting to note that programming based on data structures is only one way of doing things. It isn't necessarily the best way.
I do data mining. Oh - data structures!!! No. If I were to focus on data structures, my programs would take forever. I focus on the functions and let the data structures fall in as necessary. It is hard for the average just-out-of-school programmer to understand, but it works, whereas a data structure-based approach does not.
I know that this is hard, if not impossible, or many programmers to accept. I ask our new employees to learn using ML. It is sort of like Lisp, so they can get used to it. When that is done, they can work on our PHP scripts that make no use of data structures, data types, data... well anything. Or, they can be like any of the dozens of guys who come in and claim that they can do it better in [insert programming language here] and then fail miserably with a simply data mining tool that takes 6-8 years to pull up a report.
Google is truly a remarkable company. Innovation at its best... There's probably not a day in my life that I don't use Google at least ten times. I don't know where I'd be without it. One day, I aspire to work for Google myself... Keep up the good work, guys.
Don't listen to him. I love Google more. Just ten times a day!? I use Google 100 times a day! In fact, I'm going to legally change my name to Google. Please, please, Google, hire me instead!
(Somewhere, a professional comedian cries. There is a great disturbance in the comedy force.)
It'll be those Indian guys complaining about outsourcing next
They already are. There has been past articles here on/. about Chinese and Indian workers complaining about outsourcing to Indonesia and Africa. It seems that no matter where you are, there is someone willing to do your job for less pay.
Not to troll, but why? Are you running a website in China that might be restricted by this? If your website is somewhere like, Ohio, then this has nothing to do with you. So, why does it annoy you? Perhaps your favorite website is a Chinese website that might get shut down? If so, can't you work with the owners to move it to an American server?
It just seems to me that the/. crowd always says that no nation can make laws to control the Internet, but then gets annoyed when a country does make a law that controls the Internet inside their country.
If attorneys can successfully bring up the issue of false negatives then THAT is the real problem
I doubt it is available online, but an actual case that backs up your statement took place in Beaufort County, SC in 1992. The county brings people in for a a breathalyzer. They don't do it in the field. So, one and only one machine is used. One night (and who knows how much longer than that) everyone blew a 0.21 - over the legal limit. After a while, the officers realized the ongoing pattern and tried it on themselves. They all blew a 0.21.
I remember this case, not because of the broken machine, but because of the problem of maintaining order in a prison. They knew they were going to drop the DUI charges on everyone who used the machine that day. It didn't take much time to get a list of names and realize that they had been patrolling Hilton Head (a rich, mostly white, tourist area) heavily. So, out of the couple hundred people in jail, they were going to releast pretty much all of the white people. Knowing this would cause a huge problem, they decided to wait until morning when everyone went into processing to see the judge. They just explained the situation to the people being let go and hoped for the best. Of course, it didn't work out that well. The rich whites got a lawyer and sued the county for holding them in jail overnight.
I got two gut feelings about this case. First, it is stupid that rules have to bent to keep people happy about race relations. Second, you had to be doing something wrong to get pulled over for DUI, make the officer feel that you certainly are drunk, and then be taken into jail for a breathalyzer. That doesn't deserve a big cash reward. Of course, most people say I'm an idiot.
I had an Intellivision and then an Atari 2600. After that, I felt that if it deserved to be a computer game, it deserved to be on a computer. Then, over the past few years, it became a headache. My wife would buy some new game and I knew that I would have to spend a few hours downloading updates and configuring it to work properly. I just got sick of it and bought a PS2. Now, you just pop in the disk and play - no driver updates and no configuration. I think that the ease-of-use will be a major factor in getting people to move from PC to console.
Not everyone who uses a library frequently has the $$$ to plop down on a book
This isn't a matter of just not having the money - you'd think that the geeks on/. would be able to take a couple minutes out of their day to search for library history on Google. Originally, libraries were private. Then, many went 'public', but charged a membership fee. After many years of fighting for equal rights, the membership fees were abolished so that even the poorest Americans would be allowed to use the resources at the public library.
I know the idiotic/. solution is that the poor people who can't afford to plop down cash can just get an old card - one that isn't anonymous. Toss equal rights right out the window. The rich get to be anonymous. The poor get tracked.
Isn't there some old phrase about learning your history so it doesn't repeat itself?
Re:$42.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda
on
Photoshop for DNA
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Mark me as a FOB (Fan of Bill), but kudos to him and his foundation for their contribution to science...
Of course, he has a motive. He's donating money to help develop a user-friendly gene manipulation tool in hopes that it will cut into the market of the Open Source gene manipulation. Then, when people become dependent on the new gene manipulation, Microsoft will buy the company and merge it with their next version of windows, leaving geeks as the only ones doing gene manipulation the old way (by hand at the console). It always the same with that guy.
That may very well be it. I remember starting in England with the Royal Marines, then going to Norway, then Sweden, then it is all a blur. I got a jacket along the way with a Polish tag in it. I mailed myself a case of beer from Germany. I flew home from Denmark. So, Finland is in the middle of all that.
I'm surprised you didn't crack on my typo. I was going to type "in Northern Europe". Then, I thought I'd say "off Northern England". I ended up saying "in Northern England." But, who'd be surprised to think a Yank is referring to 'country' in Northern England?
When I was in the Marines, I was in some frozen country in northern England for about two weeks. I stayed pretty drunk the whole time as the beer there was far better than in the U.S. What I do remember is that cell phones worked on everything. Wanted to pay at McDonalds, ring up a number on the cell phone. Need a coke from the machine, ring up a number on the cell phone. A short hairy guy in a furry coat explained that they had one nationalized cell phone company, so it was easy to make a standard that everyone had to follow. In other countries, with competing cell phone companies, you can't get them to all agree on a standard for transactions.
The problem is that I hit well over 10 countries in three months at that time, so I have no clue where I was. I'm left wondering if I was just drunk enough to imagine that everyone was paying for stuff with their cell phones.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an interesting idea, but it's not a lightsaber.
I do not disagree at all. However, this is not a plastic tube with a christmas tree light in it. That was my point. It is a 'saber' made solely of light.
Now, I've hit a new problem with it - pictures. As it turns out, you can't take pictures of it with a normal digital camera because the picture is taken so quickly that you see the base unit and a small wisp of light - but no beam. I'm going to have to go get a real camera that will allow me to hold the aperture open for more than a split second. Damn technology.
Care to explain how you're accomplishing a single short beam of light?
Disclaimer: THIS IS NOT MY IDEA.
I saw a Magic Stage presentation in North Carolina back about 1994. When you cross two laser pointers, they make a point of light. Try it - get two laser pointers and cross the beams. I mount one straight up and move the other beam up and down. You get a short visible streak of light. Move it up and down faster than 60 times a second and it looks like a glowing beam. I'm working on mounting three of the beams on a spinner inside a flashlight case. The trouble is that small parts break quickly when moving that fast, so I'm redesigning it to use less moving parts by using a spinning curved mirror to move the second beam up and down.
Warning: when laser pointers cross, it barely makes a warm dot. When lasers cross, they can create a lot of heat. The method has been used to pinpoint tumors and burn them inside the body without cutting it open. So, I was intending the remark about using real lasers as a joke.
Just build a lightsaber. A real one. That's all. What's that...you can't? Don't have suitable raw materials, you say?
:)
I *am* building a real lightsaber. I already have a single short beam of light using your basic galium arsenide diodes. It is warm, but it won't cause and real harm to anyone. I'm in the process of mounting three beams on a rotating disk so I can create a more realistic lightsaber look and feel. Then, I'll look into the cost of real lasers
...and they're not going to release a patch for it.
I read the article. They claimed that Microsoft wasn't going to fix the problem. The article linked to the advisory from Microsoft. I read the advisory from Microsoft. Nowhere in the advisory was there any mention about Microsoft's position on fixing or not fixing the problem. So, I wonder where the news.com article got the scoop that Microsoft isn't going to fix it?
Are you more prone to being attacked by feral monkeys if you keep bananas in the house?
Seriously, someone answer the monkey question for me. I am scared now.
Well, when I was in Columbia, we had some fruit, including bananas that we picked up in Panama. The locals told us that we had to keep the fruit boxed up tight or the animals would come in and steal it. I didn't believe them though. I was sure it was the Incan gods that snuck in at night and stole all my baby swiss cheese from my backpack - and then pooped right in the middle of our table. Damn Incan gods.
In case you are like me and you just want to know how they targetted the cancer cells, this is a very brief rundown:
All cells require folate to survive. Cancer cells suck up folate like it's crack. They put the poison in the folate. All cells absorb some of the poisoned folate. Cancer cells absorb most of it.
Pretty nice idea, but it made me wonder about the push to get expectent mothers to take excessive amounts of folic acid (folate). Does that make them more prone to cancer by giving the cancer cells extra food?
If the USA Patriot Act is not a anti-terror act, as you claim, then what do you make of these statements by Justice Dept. and the Act's supporters? Are they lying? What's the story?
Yes. They are lying because they are telling a half-truth. I call a half-truth a lie when it is intentionally a half-truth. The real story is that "terrorism" is a buzz word. As I said in my comment, just 2 minutes at Wikipedia will clear it all up for you.
I suspected the article of half-truth when it referred to the USA PATRIOT Act as an "Anti-Terrorism Act". It takes about 2 minutes of reading the USA PATRIOT Act on Wikipedia to realize that terrorism is only a small part of it. So, I went to house.gov and did a little research.
The bill that it is referring to is:
An amendment numbered 15 printed in the Congressional Record to prohibit funds in the bill from being used to implement provisions of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act which permits searches of library circulation records, library patron lists, book sales records, or book customer lists under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
There are some key points to mention here. First, this is limiting a section of FISA, which was absorbed by the USA PATRIOT Act. FISA was passed in 1978. So, all that stuff in the article about the "terrorism bill" being passed in 2001 is garbage. This is referring to a law passed in 1978.
Second, this isn't ammending FISA or the USA PATRIOT Act. This is ammending a funding bill to ensure that the funds provided by the bill cannot be used by this one section of FISA. So, it is still legal, you just can't use those special funds for it.
Third, who is paying this writer to write articles designed specifically to fan the anti-patriot act flames? If he had written what the vote was really about, it would have been news. As it is, it is propoganda.
They do tend to have a lot of problems with their DNS servers, though.
I called Comcast and found that the DNS sent with DHCP for the cable modems is actually the testing DNS server. I had set the DNS server IP address manually and I've had no DNS problems since. Unfortunatly, I'm at work, so I have no clue what the IP address is.
In effect all you're doing is using a supply of oxygen as a jump starter for the plant's own metabolism, which will then return the expended oxygen as well as supply an excess.
That does not take into account the original question: On Mars, with less sunlight to convert CO2 to O2, will you need to pick and choose which plants give you a surplus. Some plants might not create a whole hell of a lot of surplus on Earth and barely break even on Mars.
Another nifty side effect of farming would be the oxygen created from the plant's metabolic process.
My rudimentary understanding is that the green in plants comes from chlorophyl. Chlorophyl reacts with the photons from the sun and creates Oxygen as a by-product. That is just one reaction. In the rest of the plant, the biochemistry is your basic oxygen-sucking carbon-based lifeform. Plants do create more oxygen than the suck up, but the point most people miss is that they do consume oxygen.
The point here is that the chlorophyl requires the sun's light or artificial sunlight to create oxygen. Artificial sunlight will require fuel of somekind. So, that's a waste of time to pursue. Real sunlight on Mars is less powerful than on Earth. So, a plant on Mars will create less oxygen than it will here on Earth.
Finally, explaining my possible misunderstanding of biology, I think my question can be understood: Even if we cover Mars with plants, will they produce enough oxygen to make a difference?
My wife is a librarian and she brought home a few Reader's Digests when the library was throwing them out. "Cool," I thought. I can read summaries of a wide variety of interesting stories.
I appears that I mistakenly thought that the Reader's Digest was a collection of popular books in brief summary form. It is actually just an ordinary magazine. I looked through three issues. There was nothing more about books than Life, People, or even Playboy. They had home maintenance sections, celebrity gossip sections, letters (bitching) to the editor sections... The same garbage in every other magazine.
Was I completely off? Didn't Reader's Digest used to be all about short stories?
Slashdot is just a blog, after all,
I prefer to think of Slashdot as a meta-blog. The primary distinction is that Slashdot editors don't make up stories on their own. They post links to stories found in other sources. Normal blogs attempt to be the news source, not a link to other news sources.
I've thought about using the Slashdot commenting system on something like CNN. I figured it wouldn't work. When AOL let the world in on newsgroups, the newsgroups crumbled under the idiocy. If CNN let the same people in on this commenting system, I expect that it would crumble as well.
/. is not a normal blog. It is more of a meta-blog. It collects stories from the general Internet (not always news stories, just some interesting websites at times). Then, the geeks comment about the stories.
/. is unique in that the self-moderation has functioned pretty well. Contrary to what many say, it is very easy to modded up or down. If you post a message in clear, concise, and polite text, you will probably get modded up. If you use loaded words, curse words, and rant about something that nobody else cares about, you get modded down.
A normal blog consists of one person (or a few buddies) posting what they think is news. If you are lucky, you get to add your comments about what they have posted. Usually, you don't. If you are luckier, you can disagree with them without being banned. Usually, you get banned. If you are extremely lucky, you can post stories that you have found that others may like. That almost never happens. If you are in a utopian blog, others will moderate the posts so you can easily ignore the idiots. Moderation hardly ever works.
I proved this point to a friend. He posted "Fedora and all the other Linux crap will never be as dependable as Windows 98 for power users like me!" Guess what - modded down. I posted, "I have used both Fedora and Windows 98. I am a developer, so I abuse the OS pretty badly. I've found that Windows 98 handles the abuse better than Fedora." Guess what - modded up.
I pay little attention to blogs because there is no accountability. Here is an example:
/. a while back was a 'story' that Congress had passed a bill that made some law that the /. crowd was sure to be upset about. I went to the story - it was on a blog. It was supported by links to three other stories - all on other blogs. Those stories cross-linked to one another to support themselves. Finally, I went to the Congress' website and searched for the law. The true story: A subcomittee passed a resolution to send the bill to the general floor for discussion.
On
I am NOT claiming that print or video media is better. Once a story gets in a newspaper, it quickly becomes fact. I am also NOT claiming that the public is incapable of having accountability. Look at Wikipedia. There is plenty of accountability with peer oversight. Blogs, on the other hand, do not have any oversight. They don't have to get past an editor or fact-checker. Then, the general public is too lazy to check the facts. You end up with a large group of people believing some idiot's blog-rant to be fact.
I think that is truly it for me - idiots becoming dumber by getting their facts from bigger idiots.
Java and Python blow it away in ability to create easy to maintain and efficient data structures.
You are making a great assumption that any and all programming projects depend on data structures. Just in case you dropped in on the planet recently, you might find it interesting to note that programming based on data structures is only one way of doing things. It isn't necessarily the best way.
I do data mining. Oh - data structures!!! No. If I were to focus on data structures, my programs would take forever. I focus on the functions and let the data structures fall in as necessary. It is hard for the average just-out-of-school programmer to understand, but it works, whereas a data structure-based approach does not.
I know that this is hard, if not impossible, or many programmers to accept. I ask our new employees to learn using ML. It is sort of like Lisp, so they can get used to it. When that is done, they can work on our PHP scripts that make no use of data structures, data types, data... well anything. Or, they can be like any of the dozens of guys who come in and claim that they can do it better in [insert programming language here] and then fail miserably with a simply data mining tool that takes 6-8 years to pull up a report.
Google is truly a remarkable company. Innovation at its best... There's probably not a day in my life that I don't use Google at least ten times. I don't know where I'd be without it. One day, I aspire to work for Google myself... Keep up the good work, guys.
Don't listen to him. I love Google more. Just ten times a day!? I use Google 100 times a day! In fact, I'm going to legally change my name to Google. Please, please, Google, hire me instead!
(Somewhere, a professional comedian cries. There is a great disturbance in the comedy force.)
It'll be those Indian guys complaining about outsourcing next
/. about Chinese and Indian workers complaining about outsourcing to Indonesia and Africa. It seems that no matter where you are, there is someone willing to do your job for less pay.
They already are. There has been past articles here on
This just annoys me.
/. crowd always says that no nation can make laws to control the Internet, but then gets annoyed when a country does make a law that controls the Internet inside their country.
Not to troll, but why? Are you running a website in China that might be restricted by this? If your website is somewhere like, Ohio, then this has nothing to do with you. So, why does it annoy you? Perhaps your favorite website is a Chinese website that might get shut down? If so, can't you work with the owners to move it to an American server?
It just seems to me that the
If attorneys can successfully bring up the issue of false negatives then THAT is the real problem
I doubt it is available online, but an actual case that backs up your statement took place in Beaufort County, SC in 1992. The county brings people in for a a breathalyzer. They don't do it in the field. So, one and only one machine is used. One night (and who knows how much longer than that) everyone blew a 0.21 - over the legal limit. After a while, the officers realized the ongoing pattern and tried it on themselves. They all blew a 0.21.
I remember this case, not because of the broken machine, but because of the problem of maintaining order in a prison. They knew they were going to drop the DUI charges on everyone who used the machine that day. It didn't take much time to get a list of names and realize that they had been patrolling Hilton Head (a rich, mostly white, tourist area) heavily. So, out of the couple hundred people in jail, they were going to releast pretty much all of the white people. Knowing this would cause a huge problem, they decided to wait until morning when everyone went into processing to see the judge. They just explained the situation to the people being let go and hoped for the best. Of course, it didn't work out that well. The rich whites got a lawyer and sued the county for holding them in jail overnight.
I got two gut feelings about this case. First, it is stupid that rules have to bent to keep people happy about race relations. Second, you had to be doing something wrong to get pulled over for DUI, make the officer feel that you certainly are drunk, and then be taken into jail for a breathalyzer. That doesn't deserve a big cash reward. Of course, most people say I'm an idiot.
I had an Intellivision and then an Atari 2600. After that, I felt that if it deserved to be a computer game, it deserved to be on a computer. Then, over the past few years, it became a headache. My wife would buy some new game and I knew that I would have to spend a few hours downloading updates and configuring it to work properly. I just got sick of it and bought a PS2. Now, you just pop in the disk and play - no driver updates and no configuration. I think that the ease-of-use will be a major factor in getting people to move from PC to console.
Not everyone who uses a library frequently has the $$$ to plop down on a book
/. would be able to take a couple minutes out of their day to search for library history on Google. Originally, libraries were private. Then, many went 'public', but charged a membership fee. After many years of fighting for equal rights, the membership fees were abolished so that even the poorest Americans would be allowed to use the resources at the public library.
/. solution is that the poor people who can't afford to plop down cash can just get an old card - one that isn't anonymous. Toss equal rights right out the window. The rich get to be anonymous. The poor get tracked.
This isn't a matter of just not having the money - you'd think that the geeks on
I know the idiotic
Isn't there some old phrase about learning your history so it doesn't repeat itself?
Mark me as a FOB (Fan of Bill), but kudos to him and his foundation for their contribution to science...
Of course, he has a motive. He's donating money to help develop a user-friendly gene manipulation tool in hopes that it will cut into the market of the Open Source gene manipulation. Then, when people become dependent on the new gene manipulation, Microsoft will buy the company and merge it with their next version of windows, leaving geeks as the only ones doing gene manipulation the old way (by hand at the console). It always the same with that guy.
That may very well be it. I remember starting in England with the Royal Marines, then going to Norway, then Sweden, then it is all a blur. I got a jacket along the way with a Polish tag in it. I mailed myself a case of beer from Germany. I flew home from Denmark. So, Finland is in the middle of all that.
I'm surprised you didn't crack on my typo. I was going to type "in Northern Europe". Then, I thought I'd say "off Northern England". I ended up saying "in Northern England." But, who'd be surprised to think a Yank is referring to 'country' in Northern England?
When I was in the Marines, I was in some frozen country in northern England for about two weeks. I stayed pretty drunk the whole time as the beer there was far better than in the U.S. What I do remember is that cell phones worked on everything. Wanted to pay at McDonalds, ring up a number on the cell phone. Need a coke from the machine, ring up a number on the cell phone. A short hairy guy in a furry coat explained that they had one nationalized cell phone company, so it was easy to make a standard that everyone had to follow. In other countries, with competing cell phone companies, you can't get them to all agree on a standard for transactions.
The problem is that I hit well over 10 countries in three months at that time, so I have no clue where I was. I'm left wondering if I was just drunk enough to imagine that everyone was paying for stuff with their cell phones.