Restaurants and diners have been salting stale bitter coffee for years to remove the bitter taste of coffee that has sat too long on the pot warmer waiting for customers. Often salt would accumulate throughout the day as each waitress salted it a bit more, and by evening the larger coffee dispensers would be quite salty.
Our only real defense against terrorists is that terrorists are A) stupid and B) incompetent. Only where something new and radical is tried do they tend to have success, and that generally isn't repeatable. We adapt. They don't.
Wrong on all counts. Read the news just once in a while. All the 9/11 terrorists were college educated. Pretty competent for what they planned to do. There are terrorist bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan almost weekly. The toll is seldom less than 50 people. Pretty repeatable if you ask me.
If two people with makeshift bombs can cause a major city to go on lockdown, isn't the message to terrorists thatmedia multi-city disruption -- say, shutting down from Boston to Philly -- wouldn't take very many people or that much coordination?
Where are my mod points!?
Regardless of constitutional issues, this is the central lesson learned by terrorist wannabes due to this event.
It wouldn't take much imagination to see even small two man teams in different population centers to disrupt the entire eastern seaboard by bombing Christmas shopping or major sports events or campaign rallies or whatever.
"Shelter in Place" could become a phrase we come to detest. Especially if the nanny statists decided to let social media solve all crimes in the future.
They've already built up their own networks, and the protocols are open source and free for all. This isn't about infrastructure, its about regulation.
If police see a cell phone anywhere in a crashed car they check the box on the accident form and list it as a contributing factor. There is a great deal of political pressure to do so.
Same thing if they find a cyclist not wearing a helmet crushed under the wheels of a semi that jumped the curb and sidewalk. They check the box.
Most accidents are caused by someone picking something up they dropped, looing the wrong way at the time, changing the radio station, etc. or inibriation.
Really? I'd like to see the source of your assertion.
Granted distracted driving is the darling of the press these days. But that doesn't make it the major contributor to fatalities.
In fact, fatalities by all causes are on a steady year by year decline and have been for 15 years.
Drunk driving still accounts for a great deal, 31% of the overall traffic fatalities in 2010. One-half of traffic deaths ages 21 to 25 were drinking drivers.
The bill also raises wages for H-1B workers to make them more competitive, although the amount wasn't specified.
So they can encourage foreign outsourcing? Doesn't anyone see this as having a negative impact on domestic unemployment? (as well as a trade deficit effect as they ship their US$ off to India)
Why is this necessary???
Well it might have a positive effect on domestic employment as well.
If it makes US firms use of foreign workers very visible people (and congress) will be able to see to what extent these companies are using H1B workers in place of US workers laid off.
Right now this is pretty well a hidden level of replacement that no one agency has a good handle on. Immigration may know the numbers, but Dept of Labor only knows about the unemployed.
By making a public website where these jobs are listed, it can be used for in-country job search as well. Expect the H1B employers to fight this tooth and nail.
Or a buggy automated system under the direction of a buggy human?
The manufacturers will never assume all responsibility, and no one would even suggest that as a viable business model. Some things (like our current cars, guns, stairways, electricity, etc) carry inherent dangers. Product liability law does not mandate that there be zero risk.
There are design standards, that if adhered to, pretty much absolve the manufacturer of responsibility. There is no reason to believe something like this will not be incorporated in automobiles.
I know all of us think we're above-average drivers, but there are a lot of really bad drivers out there, and even a flawed automatic system could do a better job.
That depends entirely on the failure mode.
"Fail to Death" is actually acceptable to society as a whole as long as the dead person held his fate in his own hands at some point in the process. This is why we get so incensed about drunk drivers that kill others. A person doing everything right is still dead because of the actions of another. But if you drive under that railroad train by yourself, people regard it as "your own damn fault".
When the driverless car crosses the tracks in front of an oncoming train it will be regarded differently. Doesn't matter that the driver was a poor driver, and had a lot of fender benders. Most of those aren't fatal
In spite of that, I believe Google is far closer than the author gives them credit for. They have covered a lot of miles without accidents.
Granted, we don't know how many times there were errors in the Google cars, where one part of the system says there is nothing coming so change lanes, and the human or another part of the system notices the road is striped for no-passing and prevents it. Google is still playing a great deal of this pretty close to the vest.
You apparently didn't read the link I posted. Bitcoin has an absolute maximum number of coins. After that there is exactly ZERO point or need for mining.
It will actually become uneconomical well before the last Bitcoin is mined. It gets progressively harder as you get close to the last coins.
retty soon it's hard to see why anyone would seriously consider bitcoin mining for profit unless they have (free) access to many idle machines
Exactly. And it is designed to be that way.
Its a short term problem at worst. Soon no one will bother to mine bitcoins. There will be easier ways to acquire them, such as actually producing a good or service. Mining will become less important in the future (as it becomes less profitable). https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply
Worse yet, (and bringing the discussion back home to humans), could a human be charged a license fee for reproducing (having children) simply because they paid for a medical treatment that involved gene therapy which becomes part of their DNA?
Its time to end this silliness before it becomes a pervasive a cell phone patents and software patents. If doing so turns off all research into genetic medicine so be it. (It won't, but that's what the drug companies will claim, and its long past time to call their bluff). Someone else will step up and provide it on more agreeable terms.
If you're calling CSIRO a patent troll, I think you need to have a closer look. As a govt research body, the money they actually make from patents goes into MORE research (unlike actual patent trolls).
You would think an organization that guards its patents so aggressively would at least honor other peoples IP.
Especially when actually getting those jobs with NSA means offering up your entire life for continuous monitoring, not only on the job but every minute of every day for the rest of your life.
Odd that Utah is so interested in the jobs that they offer up their universities to this purpose.
because that is what the customers want. What? You thought you were the customer? Sorry, you are renting it from the REAL customers: the telco's.
All the rest will be around how good they can track you and how easy they can take money from you.
The telcos don't give a fig about rooting. They just don't want to back the warranty for people who root phones. Simple solution: Forbid telco's from selling phones. We don't see comcast selling TVs, and we don't see power companies selling Toasters and Lamps, or ISPs selling Computers.
So why do phone companies sell handsets?
The sooner that Retailing handsets is take away from the carriers the better.
When you can bring all the powerfulness of your PC in your pocket
Really? Other than the dual 30 inch displays and full keyboard, what can your desktop PC do that your phone can't? Oh right, run full powered graphics while plugged into the wall. I think I'll skip the extension cord if you don't mind.
Money transfers via phone already exist, however they have been effectively road blocked in the US by the carriers. Its much more common in Japan.
Why carriers get a veto over payment by phone is beyond me. Its just TCP/IP and a short range transceiver. Google introduced NFC payments only to have every network except one step up and block it, even if your phone is properly equipped.
I want my car keys, house keys embedded into my phone, with a separate battery that lasts as long as the battery in my Car's Keyless Fob. I want the phone to stop being anything except a phone when its outside of my reach. Shut it all down if it can't see me or the ring on my finger.
Why they track you of course. What else? Look, nobody needs to have their phone tell them the humidity or air pressure.
What is that all about?
Its for crowd sourcing local weather, (or at least the weather in your pocket or purse). But all of that is for someone else's benefit, not the phone owner. If you were able to legislatively forbid the transmission of temperature, pressure, humidity across the network, would there still be any rational reason to include these sensors? I would say probably not.
Slashdot Mirror
Its been my experience that religious blessings of salt make no difference in its effectiveness.
Restaurants and diners have been salting stale bitter coffee for years to remove the bitter taste of coffee that has sat too long on the pot warmer waiting for customers. Often salt would accumulate throughout the day as each waitress salted it a bit more, and by evening the larger coffee dispensers would be quite salty.
The practice came into disfavor with the overreaction to salt in the diet.
Our only real defense against terrorists is that terrorists are A) stupid and B) incompetent. Only where something new and radical is tried do they tend to have success, and that generally isn't repeatable. We adapt. They don't.
Wrong on all counts.
Read the news just once in a while.
All the 9/11 terrorists were college educated. Pretty competent for what they planned to do.
There are terrorist bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan almost weekly. The toll is seldom less than 50 people. Pretty repeatable if you ask me.
It doesn't have to Work out Well, in your definition of well.
None of these terrorists expect to get out alive, settle down and raise a family. In their mind it worked out exactly as they expected.
If two people with makeshift bombs can cause a major city to go on lockdown, isn't the message to terrorists thatmedia multi-city disruption -- say, shutting down from Boston to Philly -- wouldn't take very many people or that much coordination?
Where are my mod points!?
Regardless of constitutional issues, this is the central lesson learned by terrorist wannabes due to this event.
It wouldn't take much imagination to see even small two man teams in different population centers to disrupt the entire eastern seaboard by bombing Christmas shopping or major sports events or campaign rallies or whatever.
"Shelter in Place" could become a phrase we come to detest. Especially if the nanny statists decided to let social media solve all crimes in the future.
They've already built up their own networks, and the protocols are open source and free for all.
This isn't about infrastructure, its about regulation.
And they say Americans dont get irony.
Boy you got that right....
From the story
the only government that should have its hands on the underpinnings of the Internet is the U.S.
I could name a dozen countries I would trust to manage the web more than the U.S.
You've got it exactly backwards.
If police see a cell phone anywhere in a crashed car they check the box on the accident form and list it as a contributing factor. There is a great deal of political pressure to do so.
Same thing if they find a cyclist not wearing a helmet crushed under the wheels of a semi that jumped the curb and sidewalk. They check the box.
Most accidents are caused by someone picking something up they dropped, looing the wrong way at the time, changing the radio station, etc. or inibriation.
Really? I'd like to see the source of your assertion.
Granted distracted driving is the darling of the press these days. But that doesn't make it the major contributor to fatalities.
In fact, fatalities by all causes are on a steady year by year decline and have been for 15 years.
Drunk driving still accounts for a great deal, 31% of the overall traffic fatalities in 2010. One-half of traffic deaths ages 21 to 25 were drinking drivers.
Distracted driving hovers around 16% of fatal crashes by comparison.
Drunk driving is about 4 times as deadly as distraction.
So they can encourage foreign outsourcing? Doesn't anyone see this as having a negative impact on domestic unemployment? (as well as a trade deficit effect as they ship their US$ off to India)
Why is this necessary???
Well it might have a positive effect on domestic employment as well.
If it makes US firms use of foreign workers very visible people (and congress) will be able to see to what
extent these companies are using H1B workers in place of US workers laid off.
Right now this is pretty well a hidden level of replacement that no one agency has a good handle on. Immigration may know the numbers, but Dept of Labor only knows about the unemployed.
By making a public website where these jobs are listed, it can be used for in-country job search as well.
Expect the H1B employers to fight this tooth and nail.
What road do you know of where a human hasn't driven the route at least once?
The street view cars have driven the bulk of roads in most major US cities at least once documenting everything along the way.
Left unsaid by Google is how many human interventions were required, (for what ever reason).
Most governments limit taxi services to control safety.
Its the Taxi companies (and unions) themselves that lobby long and loud for control of quantity.
Or a buggy automated system under the direction of a buggy human?
The manufacturers will never assume all responsibility, and no one would even suggest that as a viable business model. Some things (like our current cars, guns, stairways, electricity, etc) carry inherent dangers. Product liability law does not mandate that there be zero risk.
There are design standards, that if adhered to, pretty much absolve the manufacturer of responsibility. There is no reason to believe something like this will not be incorporated in automobiles.
I know all of us think we're above-average drivers, but there are a lot of really bad drivers out there, and even a flawed automatic system could do a better job.
That depends entirely on the failure mode.
"Fail to Death" is actually acceptable to society as a whole as long as the dead person held his fate in his own hands at some point in the process. This is why we get so incensed about drunk drivers that kill others. A person doing everything right is still dead because of the actions of another. But if you drive under that railroad train by yourself, people regard it as "your own damn fault".
When the driverless car crosses the tracks in front of an oncoming train it will be regarded differently. Doesn't matter that the driver was a poor driver, and had a lot of fender benders. Most of those aren't fatal
In spite of that, I believe Google is far closer than the author gives them credit for. They have covered a lot of miles without accidents.
Granted, we don't know how many times there were errors in the Google cars, where one part of the system says there is nothing coming so change lanes, and the human or another part of the system notices the road is striped for no-passing and prevents it. Google is still playing a great deal of this pretty close to the vest.
You apparently didn't read the link I posted.
Bitcoin has an absolute maximum number of coins. After that there is exactly ZERO point or need for mining.
It will actually become uneconomical well before the last Bitcoin is mined. It gets progressively harder as you get close to the last coins.
retty soon it's hard to see why anyone would seriously consider bitcoin mining for profit unless they have (free) access to many idle machines
Exactly. And it is designed to be that way.
Its a short term problem at worst. Soon no one will bother to mine bitcoins. There will be easier ways to acquire them, such as actually producing a good or service.
Mining will become less important in the future (as it becomes less profitable).
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply
Worse yet, (and bringing the discussion back home to humans), could a human be charged a license fee for reproducing (having children) simply because they paid for a medical treatment that involved gene therapy which becomes part of their DNA?
Its time to end this silliness before it becomes a pervasive a cell phone patents and software patents. If doing so turns off all research into genetic medicine so be it. (It won't, but that's what the drug companies will claim, and its long past time to call their bluff). Someone else will step up and provide it on more agreeable terms.
Instead of pinning your hopes on a silly cell phone, why not see a specialist?
How would that help you?
Pressure is going to change anyway.
If you're calling CSIRO a patent troll, I think you need to have a closer look. As a govt research body, the money they actually make from patents goes into MORE research (unlike actual patent trolls).
You would think an organization that guards its patents so aggressively would at least honor other peoples IP.
Please click the third link in the story.
Especially when actually getting those jobs with NSA means offering up your entire
life for continuous monitoring, not only on the job but every minute of every day for
the rest of your life.
Odd that Utah is so interested in the jobs that they offer up their universities to this purpose.
because that is what the customers want. What? You thought you were the customer? Sorry, you are renting it from the REAL customers: the telco's.
All the rest will be around how good they can track you and how easy they can take money from you.
The telcos don't give a fig about rooting. They just don't want to back the warranty for people who root phones.
Simple solution: Forbid telco's from selling phones. We don't see comcast selling TVs, and we don't see power
companies selling Toasters and Lamps, or ISPs selling Computers.
So why do phone companies sell handsets?
The sooner that Retailing handsets is take away from the carriers the better.
When you can bring all the powerfulness of your PC in your pocket
Really?
Other than the dual 30 inch displays and full keyboard, what can your desktop PC do that your phone can't?
Oh right, run full powered graphics while plugged into the wall. I think I'll skip the extension cord if you
don't mind.
Money transfers via phone already exist, however they have been effectively road blocked in the US by the carriers. Its much more common
in Japan.
Why carriers get a veto over payment by phone is beyond me. Its just TCP/IP and a short range transceiver. Google introduced NFC payments only to have every network except one step up and block it, even if your phone is properly equipped.
I want my car keys, house keys embedded into my phone, with a separate battery that lasts as long as the battery in my Car's Keyless Fob. I want the phone to stop being anything except a phone when its outside of my reach. Shut it all down if it can't see me or the ring on my finger.
Depends what they do with the sensors.
Why they track you of course. What else? Look, nobody needs to have their phone tell them the humidity or air pressure.
What is that all about?
Its for crowd sourcing local weather, (or at least the weather in your pocket or purse). But all of that is for someone
else's benefit, not the phone owner. If you were able to legislatively forbid the transmission of temperature, pressure,
humidity across the network, would there still be any rational reason to include these sensors? I would say probably not.