Speaking of US-centism, this kind of political spectacle is something which Soviet Union was constantly accused (wrongly) by the US. But to me it looks that the United States today looks worse than the very worst caricature of the Soviet Union.
I read a story (from 7.05.2005) today in "Red Star" (an army newspaper in Soviet Union/Russia) about their relationship with Stalin (who was the Chief of Staff). For example, in 1943 a journalist (E. Gekhman, "Red Star") found that food supply of the army on Kalininsky front was appalling. He was asked by the editor to send a report to Stalin, the information was checked and the order N3425 of the Chief Defence Committee (24.05.1943) was issued to fix the problems. During the 2-day discussion of this problem in the CDC Stalin concluded "Only the reporter told the truth.
Do you think that Bush Jr. would react similarly to a reporter sending him a report saying "New Orleans is not prepared adequately for the flood, do something"? I don't.
In Soviet Union the very idea of pre-approving the questions to an official for a town-hall meeting would be completely against all rules and principles. And the press was tasked with ensuring that people are well informed, not just entertained. The propaganda was there, but what's wrong with propaganda if it is true?
I suggest you find transcripts of such leaders as Aleksander Lukashenko, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chaves. If you value honesty, integrity, oratory skills and intelligence, you would definitely enjoy them (unfortunately, they usually don't talk in English, so you have to rely on translated transcripts). Leaders of socialist countries, those who aren't driven by big money and their corporate buddies (aka ruling class) usually do a much better job (that is almost never reported - another HUGE bias of the Western media) managing countries that elect them.
That said, its an open question whether this means British politicians actually make better decisions for all their streetfighting smarts.
It's a very common approach to politics - to beleive that they don't matter. That things just magically do themselves, regardless of how stupid politicians are. That nothing really matters... Well, this disillusioned view is always welcomed by the elites, because they don't need to do their job if people believe this. However, the reality is very different. Just like writing code, building houses, making widgets in an assembly line, doing surgery, running a business and every single job in the world, governing a country is also a job that can be done well or poorly, in direct relation to the skills of the governors.
I am not aware of any possible reason why politicians who discuss their actions with critical audiences more would (all other things equal) do worse job than those who discuss it less.
Remove the profit motive and the problem almost solves itself. There was almost no "bad science" reporting in Soviet Union, there were no horoscopes in newspapers, there were no mediums, white/black wizards and extrasenses on TV, there was no "yellow press".
And before someone says it, the argument "But they didn't have freedom of press" doesn't hold water. Soviet papers relied on the judgement of the journalists and editors, just like everywhere else, not on instructions from Kremlin. What they wanted to print, they printed, the coverage of controversial topics was better than in the USA, although media can never be completely free from outside influence. And in any case the positive factors outshine all concerns about censorship. As a bonus, workers (i.e. those people who actually make stuff) were covered in the press as well (when was the last time that a major US newspaper had a positive story about some worker's professional achievements? 100 years ago?).
If you can't tell a difference between a conspiracy and a tendency for a complex system to behave in a certain way, that's too bad. You should be able to.
There is a complex set of independent agents, institutions, sets of values, monetary incentives and so on and so forth. When combined in a modern American society, these factors produce bad reporting of science. Trying to dismiss any argument that something is rotten with "it's just a conspiracy theory" is ridiculous and outlandish.
Your reasoning is deeply flawed. You approach design with the assumption that sensors, actuators and various electronics is expensive and limited. This is how it was in the past and how it is to a large extent today. But we can already see that this assumption becomes increasingly less true and in the future will be totally bogus.
There is no reason why you should NOT have electronics and sensors in every cubic centimetre of the space ship. Once you remove the considerations of costs, the default decision becomes to have them. And this project is exploring how you can make these smart blocks communicate with each other. It doesn't ask the question whether we should do it, because the answer is so obvious.
It's not overkill at all. As computing units become cheaper and smaller, it becomes increasingly more attractive to design a system of simple smart cells instead of a limited number of more complex processors. With 3 processors and 3 busses (sic!) you need to make connections to each of the surface sensors and what not. This isn't a problem when you've got barely a dozen surface sensors on the ship, but when you have 1000s of them, wiring every sensor up (not to mention doing this with 3 busses (sic!) ) becomes a design nightmare. And BTW, I don't see how having 3 busses (sic!)helps at all. If one skin tile is destroyed, all the busses (sic!) will be destroyed too or at least the segments that were going through that patch.
The answer is dynamic reconfiguration. With smart cells you can have much greater flexibility. Consider M-Tran, a self-reconfigurable modular robot. These designs are (potentially) much better than centralised systems, because you can reconfigure them any way you want. Want to add a new antenna on your spaceship. Ask some cells to prepare for holding it, passing over their current functions to some neighbouring cells.
Yes, you can have a central database, but then you need to waste a lot of system resources on communications. Waste, because for many functions/decisions you don't need to consult the central authority. This isn't a problem when you only have 10-100 smart units (sensors or actuators), but what when you have 10000-100000 of them? Design of such system is a choice between computing and communications. When the number of units is small, you choose a centralised design, when it's huge, you distribute the processing.
Think again what they are designing. They are designing skin. Do skin cells in your body consult the brain (or the spinal cord) to decide whether and how to heal a scratch? Would that make sense? Does that make sense for a spacecraft?
Does CNN expect us to know such weird units as Empire Sstate Buldings/minute for printed works? For similarly confused by the article, in more familiar units, the new printer achives speeds of about 1 LOC/year.
I have 420Gb of space on 3 HDDs combined. And there is essentially no free space left. I don't think every user needs 500Gb yet, but these are only top of the line now, so most applications are not designed to use that much space for something yet.
There is no such thing as "necessity". Is it necessary for you to store anything on a computer? I don't think so, you could use cassettes/floppies in the past just fine.:) The correct concept to use here is "usefulness". Is it useful to store a few tens of films on a HDD? Yes. How about your whole e-mail archieve? Yes, kind of useful too. How about all the photos you ever took with your digital camera? Yes, this too. What about bigger, better and more immersive games? Sure. A lot of great things can be done with large HDDs. Now that we have 0.5Tb ones, applications will come. And if you want to limit people to necessities, why would they need a computer anyway?
Personally I have about 200Gb of movies (from P2P, mostly stuff I can't easily get on DVD), 15Gb of photos, 40Gb of games installed, 20Gb of music, 20Gb of applications, 4Gb used as cache for various applications, 4Gb of e-mail, 8Gb of various lectures (MIT World, TLC, IT Conversations, that kind of stuff), 17Gb of assorted shit from the Net, a few Gb of porn (well, more than a few Gb, I am ashamed to say), 5Gb of work-related files, 2Gb of project-related files...
I know I could easily do with at least 2Tb of diskspace in the foreseeable future. And then some.
Same recommendation here. I started using their drives on a recommendation from a guy who worked in a service-centre. I have 3 of their HDDs installed in my primary computer right now and a few more sticked inside various PCs around home. The oldest one is 3-years old and I haven't had any problems (except when I fucked the filesystems up a bit by disabling support for large drives in the OS:] A profoundly bad idea. I also forgot I did that and took the drives to repair technicians, who managed to restore some of the files. I haven't lost any valuable data and it's backed up regularly - just a bunch of DivX films).
Anyway, Samsung does in fact makes pretty reliable hard drives.
Ah. No keyboard peeking... Right. I can type special characters without peeking at the keyboard too. Here is one%. And another #.. & % \ ' "]@ &... Get it! I remember all of them and can type without looking.:) Not always sure what I will get though...
For the record, no screen peeking was done when typing this message either. A double blind typing, so to speak...
YOU DON'T HAVE A FUCKING CLUE!!!! Do you know that the lists of the Memorial Society include everyone, who was ever accused of anti-soviet activities during the whole history of the Soviet Russia/Soviet Union? FUCKING LIAR! You imply that these are lists of innocent murdered victims, but it also includes people who were jailed and even includes people who were accused and released 2 weeks after!!! Like Ivan Abakumov - arrested 25.01.1919, accused as a member of a counter-revolutionary mutiny. The case stopped on 06.02.1919. Rehabilitated in 2002. This is just a random example.
ALL YOU FUCKING IMPERIALIST PIGS LIE ABOUT THE SOVIET UNION. You are trying to inflate the numbers and fake them in any way you can, only to present the Soviet Union in a bad lie. You can't do it without fabricating evidence. THE 100 MILLION FUGURE IS A LIE, THE 40 MILLION FIGURE IS A LIE. They are based on fabrications, twisted evidence and have nothing to do with reality. And Solzhenitsyn is a fucking scum, an anti-semite, he was an informer in the camps and his books are 1) labeled as fiction 2) fucking lies. I can't say anything good about Robert Conquest either, in case you were wondering. Real figures say nothing at all like that shit hawaii.edu site says, but who cares about real figures, when you can repeat some government-sanctioned anti-communist propaganda.
And if you are going to count people who died in a famine as victims of communism, would you please count the 24000 who die every day (according to UN reports) as victims of imperialism/capitalism. That would make it about 130 million since Soviet Union has collapsed. You can also add 200 million dead during that period from easily preventable deseases and lack of clean water. Capitalism is more responsible for the deaths of these people than communism for those who died in 1930s from hunger. Because, you know, Soviet communists actually stopped hunger, which was a regular (every 5 years or so) occurrence in Tsarist Russia. After 1940s there was no hunger in Soviet Union and many nutrition figures per capita were even better than in Europe or US.
I've backed up my statements with citations traceable directly back to their original sources. You, on the other hand, present nothing but ad-hominem attacks.
FUCKING MORON - I TOLD YOU ARE. FUCKING INCOMPETENT BRAINWASHED MORON. The original sources don't say anything like you think they do. The Memorial lists do not list 1345796 people killed, you moron, no matter what lies your beloved hawaii.edu site want to tell you. All the claims that Soviet Union was bad are based on twisted or fabricated evidence. When you get to the real data, the real figures, the real facts, there is nothing at all like the horrible fantasy presented by anti-communists. But morons like you are unlikely to ever get deep enough to see it, so your corporate masters feel very confident in continuing to lie to you.
The whole post is wrong and the real problem is ignored... You accuse me (!) of being arrogant and having cognitive bias... oh, irony. You made me smile, or "smarter than everyone". In your special-ed school, may be...:)
You aren't qualified to talk on technical issues (BTW, a relativistic rocket is a rocket travelling with relativistic speeds, that is fast enough to feel the relativistic effects - time slowing down, mass increasing; a non-relativistic rocket is a rocket travelling slowly enough not to feel this effect to any significan degree). I suspect that you aren't qualified to comment on political issues either. The fact that you have the right to vote doesn't give your opinions any weight.
You talk about "sticky fingers", which shows that you heard something about nanotechnology, but you are not qualified, because you haven't been following the Drexler-Sculley debate, you don't know what is the established consensus. You are completely clueless and yet you arrogantly assume that you can make confident statements on the state of things. You can't, you don't know jack shit. Your estimates such as "at least 50 years out" are not worth shit. You can't master reality, unless you learn something. Go to school, read a book, listen to someone who is smarter and more knowledgeable. But please, for Universe's sake, stop insulting people's intelligence with your ignorant opinions.
I am sure that's the logic of the mouse makers. Or, more precisely - it has never been done, therefore it's not possible. Or "we always did things this way, why change?"
Are you saying that with all the technological advances of the past 2 decades we can't make better cables than 20 years ago? Or that headphones cables never get bent or have stuff placed on them, etc.? Either way, you are wrong.
I wish that Slashdot required a license to post. Migth have cut down on stupid uninformed posts...
If you really think that other planets will NEVER be colonised, you are a MORON. Period.
The fact that you liked some other articles and chose to believe them and not this one doesn't matter. You are not qualified to speak about this topic. In the good old days people were not afraid to say "I don't know" or "I don't have an opinion on this matter". But now every moron feels he's an expert and can speak in all caps about what will and what will not happen in this solar system.
Look, Mr. Smartypants, do you know how the mass of the propellant decreases in a relativistic rocket in hyperbolic motion? How does the ratio between the hyperbolic uniform proper acceleration and the proper speed of the ejected radioactive fragments propelling the probe in the opposite direction change?
What? Don't feel so smart now about space exploration, do you? If you can't answer such a trivial question, how the heck are you qualified to speak about planetary exploration in the infinite future? The answer is - you are not qualified to do so. So shut you mouth.
Now that we have silence in the class, kids, your task is to find out how having some form of molecular manufacturing (not universal replicator/assembler, but close) and some form of advanced AI (not human-level, but intelligent) around 2020-2025 will affect the viability of the 4Frontiers's plans.
I don't think so. My headphones have cables that is 3 times thinner (in diameter) - about 1 mm. If it's good enough to send analog audio without any problems, it's good enough to send mouse movement information. Also, mouse cables don't have shielding (cut it and see) and they don't have insulation either. We aren't talking military-grade or industrial-strength mice, we are talking normal computer mouse that would be sitting on a relatively clean desk in a relatively clean room (though not a "clean room").
There is absolutely no reason why they can't make mice with super-flexible 0.5mm-thick cables. It's just that they are morons.
It is extremely likely that eventually you will hit diminishing returns and all those hundreds of millions of dollars will not help getting further performance gains. Or may be the performance will continue to improve at the placid pace of Moore's law (meaning as fast as all other computational hardware). It is extremely likely that it will be at just that point that it would make monetary sense to try other, non-triangular approaches to rendering. This happens with technologies all the time, they are replaced with better ones, with the next-generation.
I obviously can't tell you what it will be - if I could, I would be busy making it.:) It's possible that splines, voxels or fractals will make a comeback, but may be it will be something else. Most likely, it will be a totally different technology, not a triangle-replacement, but a different approach alltogether.
So, even though triangles still have a lot of potential and I personally look forward to playing the photo-realistic games in 2015, I am not sure that they will be triangle-based. And I am even less sure about the ultra-realistic VR in 2025.
OK, why do they need a [relatively] thick cable? Why not a 1mm-thick ultra-flexible thread? That would have almost all the benefits of wireless without any drawbacks. Why does my 2005 mouse have essentially the same cable as my 1985 rat?
I don't understand manager's fascination with firing people. It doesn't make any sense, it's like cutting off your hand when it tickles.
Isn't there any other way to teach these women a lesson? Make them work without lunch for a week. Don't give them a bonus. Reprimand them. But firing? Do the managers expect a random new hire to work better than these experienced (though easily excitable) employees? If yes, why haven't these two been fired years ago? If no, why do managers waste company's money while trying to save face in some idiotic way?
they [citizens of capitalist countries] see their own leaders as paragons of integrity...
It's sarcasm. Which you apparently didn't get, even though you realised something strange was going on...
First, I don't want to be explaining to you what exactly is difficult about discussing race. There are thousands of Americans who already explained it better than I ever can. Google and ye shall find. Second, do you really believe that Communist societies were based on dogma? Do you really think that national power grid, supersonic jet airliners, space ships, high-yield crops, new subways and everything else was created just by following dogma? Must have been pretty good dogma then...
You are a victim of lies. Right after the WW2 some forces in the US started to create and spread anti-Soviet myths. One of the most prominent lies is this article by X. Almost every paragraph in that article is either an outright lie or a crocked and twisted half-truth. This created the basis for large-scale propaganda. Millions of American (and to a large extent European) citizens were told these lies and they believed them, because they couldn't go and check it for themselves and they saw no reason not to trust their government. The American government routinely lies to its citizens, but they still believe it by default...
Almost everything that you think you know about Soviet Union is a lie fabricated by anti-communist forces. Soviet Union was not an evil empire, a totalitarian nightmare, a corrupt Marx-worshiping economic failure or any other propagandist fantasy. It was a normal country with normal people ruled by normal leaders. And as far as countries go, it was a pretty damn successful one and a nice one to live in. It was a country where you could fly a supersonic jet from Moscow to Alma-Ata for 64 roubles (about 100 dollars, I guess), not for 3000 dollars it would take you to fly on a Concord from London to New-York.
Communism is a wonderful idea, Soviet Union was a good (though not perfect) implementation of this idea and as a country it was much better than any alternative. Despite what your media tells you (do you still believe it?), people there were generally happy and most people in post-socialist countries either wouldn't mind going back or would give anything to go back. Ask people of Georgia (not the US state, the country), whether they would prefer to live in 1950s under Stalin or in today's "independent" "democratic" Georgia. I am sure more than half wouldn't hesitate for a second before chosing the first option.
I don't know whether porn is good or bad. One thing I know - if there was a safe, quick and easy way to completely eliminate my sexual drive without any significant side effects and in a reversible way, I would do it gladly.
Having said that, while my sex drive is still non-zero, I very much prefer wasting time jerking off to porn to trying to get a "relationship".
I can understand those who oppose both sex and porn for morality reasons, I can understand those who embrace both in their hedonism. But I can't understand people who accept sex, but argue that porn is bad. It's only as bad as our sexuality is. Porn (even when easily available) doesn't make people waste time masturbating.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of US-centism, this kind of political spectacle is something which Soviet Union was constantly accused (wrongly) by the US. But to me it looks that the United States today looks worse than the very worst caricature of the Soviet Union.
I read a story (from 7.05.2005) today in "Red Star" (an army newspaper in Soviet Union/Russia) about their relationship with Stalin (who was the Chief of Staff). For example, in 1943 a journalist (E. Gekhman, "Red Star") found that food supply of the army on Kalininsky front was appalling. He was asked by the editor to send a report to Stalin, the information was checked and the order N3425 of the Chief Defence Committee (24.05.1943) was issued to fix the problems. During the 2-day discussion of this problem in the CDC Stalin concluded "Only the reporter told the truth.
Do you think that Bush Jr. would react similarly to a reporter sending him a report saying "New Orleans is not prepared adequately for the flood, do something"? I don't.
In Soviet Union the very idea of pre-approving the questions to an official for a town-hall meeting would be completely against all rules and principles. And the press was tasked with ensuring that people are well informed, not just entertained. The propaganda was there, but what's wrong with propaganda if it is true?
I suggest you find transcripts of such leaders as Aleksander Lukashenko, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chaves. If you value honesty, integrity, oratory skills and intelligence, you would definitely enjoy them (unfortunately, they usually don't talk in English, so you have to rely on translated transcripts). Leaders of socialist countries, those who aren't driven by big money and their corporate buddies (aka ruling class) usually do a much better job (that is almost never reported - another HUGE bias of the Western media) managing countries that elect them.
That said, its an open question whether this means British politicians actually make better decisions for all their streetfighting smarts.
It's a very common approach to politics - to beleive that they don't matter. That things just magically do themselves, regardless of how stupid politicians are. That nothing really matters... Well, this disillusioned view is always welcomed by the elites, because they don't need to do their job if people believe this. However, the reality is very different. Just like writing code, building houses, making widgets in an assembly line, doing surgery, running a business and every single job in the world, governing a country is also a job that can be done well or poorly, in direct relation to the skills of the governors.
I am not aware of any possible reason why politicians who discuss their actions with critical audiences more would (all other things equal) do worse job than those who discuss it less.
Remove the profit motive and the problem almost solves itself. There was almost no "bad science" reporting in Soviet Union, there were no horoscopes in newspapers, there were no mediums, white/black wizards and extrasenses on TV, there was no "yellow press".
And before someone says it, the argument "But they didn't have freedom of press" doesn't hold water. Soviet papers relied on the judgement of the journalists and editors, just like everywhere else, not on instructions from Kremlin. What they wanted to print, they printed, the coverage of controversial topics was better than in the USA, although media can never be completely free from outside influence. And in any case the positive factors outshine all concerns about censorship. As a bonus, workers (i.e. those people who actually make stuff) were covered in the press as well (when was the last time that a major US newspaper had a positive story about some worker's professional achievements? 100 years ago?).
If you can't tell a difference between a conspiracy and a tendency for a complex system to behave in a certain way, that's too bad. You should be able to.
There is a complex set of independent agents, institutions, sets of values, monetary incentives and so on and so forth. When combined in a modern American society, these factors produce bad reporting of science. Trying to dismiss any argument that something is rotten with "it's just a conspiracy theory" is ridiculous and outlandish.
Do I need to explain to you the difference between an analogy and a metaphor?
Your reasoning is deeply flawed. You approach design with the assumption that sensors, actuators and various electronics is expensive and limited. This is how it was in the past and how it is to a large extent today. But we can already see that this assumption becomes increasingly less true and in the future will be totally bogus.
There is no reason why you should NOT have electronics and sensors in every cubic centimetre of the space ship. Once you remove the considerations of costs, the default decision becomes to have them. And this project is exploring how you can make these smart blocks communicate with each other. It doesn't ask the question whether we should do it, because the answer is so obvious.
It's not overkill at all. As computing units become cheaper and smaller, it becomes increasingly more attractive to design a system of simple smart cells instead of a limited number of more complex processors. With 3 processors and 3 busses (sic!) you need to make connections to each of the surface sensors and what not. This isn't a problem when you've got barely a dozen surface sensors on the ship, but when you have 1000s of them, wiring every sensor up (not to mention doing this with 3 busses (sic!) ) becomes a design nightmare. And BTW, I don't see how having 3 busses (sic!)helps at all. If one skin tile is destroyed, all the busses (sic!) will be destroyed too or at least the segments that were going through that patch.
The answer is dynamic reconfiguration. With smart cells you can have much greater flexibility. Consider M-Tran, a self-reconfigurable modular robot. These designs are (potentially) much better than centralised systems, because you can reconfigure them any way you want. Want to add a new antenna on your spaceship. Ask some cells to prepare for holding it, passing over their current functions to some neighbouring cells.
Yes, you can have a central database, but then you need to waste a lot of system resources on communications. Waste, because for many functions/decisions you don't need to consult the central authority. This isn't a problem when you only have 10-100 smart units (sensors or actuators), but what when you have 10000-100000 of them? Design of such system is a choice between computing and communications. When the number of units is small, you choose a centralised design, when it's huge, you distribute the processing.
Think again what they are designing. They are designing skin. Do skin cells in your body consult the brain (or the spinal cord) to decide whether and how to heal a scratch? Would that make sense? Does that make sense for a spacecraft?
Does CNN expect us to know such weird units as Empire Sstate Buldings/minute for printed works? For similarly confused by the article, in more familiar units, the new printer achives speeds of about 1 LOC/year.
I have 420Gb of space on 3 HDDs combined. And there is essentially no free space left. I don't think every user needs 500Gb yet, but these are only top of the line now, so most applications are not designed to use that much space for something yet.
:) The correct concept to use here is "usefulness". Is it useful to store a few tens of films on a HDD? Yes. How about your whole e-mail archieve? Yes, kind of useful too. How about all the photos you ever took with your digital camera? Yes, this too. What about bigger, better and more immersive games? Sure. A lot of great things can be done with large HDDs. Now that we have 0.5Tb ones, applications will come. And if you want to limit people to necessities, why would they need a computer anyway?
There is no such thing as "necessity". Is it necessary for you to store anything on a computer? I don't think so, you could use cassettes/floppies in the past just fine.
Personally I have about 200Gb of movies (from P2P, mostly stuff I can't easily get on DVD), 15Gb of photos, 40Gb of games installed, 20Gb of music, 20Gb of applications, 4Gb used as cache for various applications, 4Gb of e-mail, 8Gb of various lectures (MIT World, TLC, IT Conversations, that kind of stuff), 17Gb of assorted shit from the Net, a few Gb of porn (well, more than a few Gb, I am ashamed to say), 5Gb of work-related files, 2Gb of project-related files...
I know I could easily do with at least 2Tb of diskspace in the foreseeable future. And then some.
Same recommendation here. I started using their drives on a recommendation from a guy who worked in a service-centre. I have 3 of their HDDs installed in my primary computer right now and a few more sticked inside various PCs around home. The oldest one is 3-years old and I haven't had any problems (except when I fucked the filesystems up a bit by disabling support for large drives in the OS :] A profoundly bad idea. I also forgot I did that and took the drives to repair technicians, who managed to restore some of the files. I haven't lost any valuable data and it's backed up regularly - just a bunch of DivX films).
Anyway, Samsung does in fact makes pretty reliable hard drives.
Ah. No keyboard peeking... Right. I can type special characters without peeking at the keyboard too. Here is one%. And another #.. & % \ ' "]@ &... Get it! I remember all of them and can type without looking. :) Not always sure what I will get though...
For the record, no screen peeking was done when typing this message either. A double blind typing, so to speak...
YOU DON'T HAVE A FUCKING CLUE!!!! Do you know that the lists of the Memorial Society include everyone, who was ever accused of anti-soviet activities during the whole history of the Soviet Russia/Soviet Union? FUCKING LIAR! You imply that these are lists of innocent murdered victims, but it also includes people who were jailed and even includes people who were accused and released 2 weeks after!!! Like Ivan Abakumov - arrested 25.01.1919, accused as a member of a counter-revolutionary mutiny. The case stopped on 06.02.1919. Rehabilitated in 2002. This is just a random example.
ALL YOU FUCKING IMPERIALIST PIGS LIE ABOUT THE SOVIET UNION. You are trying to inflate the numbers and fake them in any way you can, only to present the Soviet Union in a bad lie. You can't do it without fabricating evidence. THE 100 MILLION FUGURE IS A LIE, THE 40 MILLION FIGURE IS A LIE. They are based on fabrications, twisted evidence and have nothing to do with reality. And Solzhenitsyn is a fucking scum, an anti-semite, he was an informer in the camps and his books are 1) labeled as fiction 2) fucking lies. I can't say anything good about Robert Conquest either, in case you were wondering. Real figures say nothing at all like that shit hawaii.edu site says, but who cares about real figures, when you can repeat some government-sanctioned anti-communist propaganda.
And if you are going to count people who died in a famine as victims of communism, would you please count the 24000 who die every day (according to UN reports) as victims of imperialism/capitalism. That would make it about 130 million since Soviet Union has collapsed. You can also add 200 million dead during that period from easily preventable deseases and lack of clean water. Capitalism is more responsible for the deaths of these people than communism for those who died in 1930s from hunger. Because, you know, Soviet communists actually stopped hunger, which was a regular (every 5 years or so) occurrence in Tsarist Russia. After 1940s there was no hunger in Soviet Union and many nutrition figures per capita were even better than in Europe or US.
I've backed up my statements with citations traceable directly back to their original sources. You, on the other hand, present nothing but ad-hominem attacks.
FUCKING MORON - I TOLD YOU ARE. FUCKING INCOMPETENT BRAINWASHED MORON. The original sources don't say anything like you think they do. The Memorial lists do not list 1345796 people killed, you moron, no matter what lies your beloved hawaii.edu site want to tell you. All the claims that Soviet Union was bad are based on twisted or fabricated evidence. When you get to the real data, the real figures, the real facts, there is nothing at all like the horrible fantasy presented by anti-communists. But morons like you are unlikely to ever get deep enough to see it, so your corporate masters feel very confident in continuing to lie to you.
The whole post is wrong and the real problem is ignored... You accuse me (!) of being arrogant and having cognitive bias... oh, irony. You made me smile, or "smarter than everyone". In your special-ed school, may be... :)
You aren't qualified to talk on technical issues (BTW, a relativistic rocket is a rocket travelling with relativistic speeds, that is fast enough to feel the relativistic effects - time slowing down, mass increasing; a non-relativistic rocket is a rocket travelling slowly enough not to feel this effect to any significan degree). I suspect that you aren't qualified to comment on political issues either. The fact that you have the right to vote doesn't give your opinions any weight.
You talk about "sticky fingers", which shows that you heard something about nanotechnology, but you are not qualified, because you haven't been following the Drexler-Sculley debate, you don't know what is the established consensus. You are completely clueless and yet you arrogantly assume that you can make confident statements on the state of things. You can't, you don't know jack shit. Your estimates such as "at least 50 years out" are not worth shit. You can't master reality, unless you learn something. Go to school, read a book, listen to someone who is smarter and more knowledgeable. But please, for Universe's sake, stop insulting people's intelligence with your ignorant opinions.
I am sure that's the logic of the mouse makers. Or, more precisely - it has never been done, therefore it's not possible. Or "we always did things this way, why change?"
Are you saying that with all the technological advances of the past 2 decades we can't make better cables than 20 years ago? Or that headphones cables never get bent or have stuff placed on them, etc.? Either way, you are wrong.
I wish that Slashdot required a license to post. Migth have cut down on stupid uninformed posts...
If you really think that other planets will NEVER be colonised, you are a MORON. Period.
The fact that you liked some other articles and chose to believe them and not this one doesn't matter. You are not qualified to speak about this topic. In the good old days people were not afraid to say "I don't know" or "I don't have an opinion on this matter". But now every moron feels he's an expert and can speak in all caps about what will and what will not happen in this solar system.
Look, Mr. Smartypants, do you know how the mass of the propellant decreases in a relativistic rocket in hyperbolic motion? How does the ratio between the hyperbolic uniform proper acceleration and the proper speed of the ejected radioactive fragments propelling the probe in the opposite direction change?
What? Don't feel so smart now about space exploration, do you? If you can't answer such a trivial question, how the heck are you qualified to speak about planetary exploration in the infinite future? The answer is - you are not qualified to do so. So shut you mouth.
Now that we have silence in the class, kids, your task is to find out how having some form of molecular manufacturing (not universal replicator/assembler, but close) and some form of advanced AI (not human-level, but intelligent) around 2020-2025 will affect the viability of the 4Frontiers's plans.
I don't think so. My headphones have cables that is 3 times thinner (in diameter) - about 1 mm. If it's good enough to send analog audio without any problems, it's good enough to send mouse movement information. Also, mouse cables don't have shielding (cut it and see) and they don't have insulation either. We aren't talking military-grade or industrial-strength mice, we are talking normal computer mouse that would be sitting on a relatively clean desk in a relatively clean room (though not a "clean room").
There is absolutely no reason why they can't make mice with super-flexible 0.5mm-thick cables. It's just that they are morons.
the longer we go on optimizing algorithms and hardware for these triangle based systems the more unlikely such a revolution will come.
:) It's possible that splines, voxels or fractals will make a comeback, but may be it will be something else. Most likely, it will be a totally different technology, not a triangle-replacement, but a different approach alltogether.
Ever heard of S-curves?
It is extremely likely that eventually you will hit diminishing returns and all those hundreds of millions of dollars will not help getting further performance gains. Or may be the performance will continue to improve at the placid pace of Moore's law (meaning as fast as all other computational hardware). It is extremely likely that it will be at just that point that it would make monetary sense to try other, non-triangular approaches to rendering. This happens with technologies all the time, they are replaced with better ones, with the next-generation.
I obviously can't tell you what it will be - if I could, I would be busy making it.
So, even though triangles still have a lot of potential and I personally look forward to playing the photo-realistic games in 2015, I am not sure that they will be triangle-based. And I am even less sure about the ultra-realistic VR in 2025.
OK, why do they need a [relatively] thick cable? Why not a 1mm-thick ultra-flexible thread? That would have almost all the benefits of wireless without any drawbacks. Why does my 2005 mouse have essentially the same cable as my 1985 rat?
Get TweakUI and prohibit applications from stealing focus. Should solve your task bar problem
I don't understand manager's fascination with firing people. It doesn't make any sense, it's like cutting off your hand when it tickles.
Isn't there any other way to teach these women a lesson? Make them work without lunch for a week. Don't give them a bonus. Reprimand them. But firing? Do the managers expect a random new hire to work better than these experienced (though easily excitable) employees? If yes, why haven't these two been fired years ago? If no, why do managers waste company's money while trying to save face in some idiotic way?
they [citizens of capitalist countries] see their own leaders as paragons of integrity...
It's sarcasm. Which you apparently didn't get, even though you realised something strange was going on...
First, I don't want to be explaining to you what exactly is difficult about discussing race. There are thousands of Americans who already explained it better than I ever can. Google and ye shall find. Second, do you really believe that Communist societies were based on dogma? Do you really think that national power grid, supersonic jet airliners, space ships, high-yield crops, new subways and everything else was created just by following dogma? Must have been pretty good dogma then...
You are a victim of lies. Right after the WW2 some forces in the US started to create and spread anti-Soviet myths. One of the most prominent lies is this article by X. Almost every paragraph in that article is either an outright lie or a crocked and twisted half-truth. This created the basis for large-scale propaganda. Millions of American (and to a large extent European) citizens were told these lies and they believed them, because they couldn't go and check it for themselves and they saw no reason not to trust their government. The American government routinely lies to its citizens, but they still believe it by default...
Almost everything that you think you know about Soviet Union is a lie fabricated by anti-communist forces. Soviet Union was not an evil empire, a totalitarian nightmare, a corrupt Marx-worshiping economic failure or any other propagandist fantasy. It was a normal country with normal people ruled by normal leaders. And as far as countries go, it was a pretty damn successful one and a nice one to live in. It was a country where you could fly a supersonic jet from Moscow to Alma-Ata for 64 roubles (about 100 dollars, I guess), not for 3000 dollars it would take you to fly on a Concord from London to New-York.
Communism is a wonderful idea, Soviet Union was a good (though not perfect) implementation of this idea and as a country it was much better than any alternative. Despite what your media tells you (do you still believe it?), people there were generally happy and most people in post-socialist countries either wouldn't mind going back or would give anything to go back. Ask people of Georgia (not the US state, the country), whether they would prefer to live in 1950s under Stalin or in today's "independent" "democratic" Georgia. I am sure more than half wouldn't hesitate for a second before chosing the first option.
I don't know whether porn is good or bad. One thing I know - if there was a safe, quick and easy way to completely eliminate my sexual drive without any significant side effects and in a reversible way, I would do it gladly.
Having said that, while my sex drive is still non-zero, I very much prefer wasting time jerking off to porn to trying to get a "relationship".
I can understand those who oppose both sex and porn for morality reasons, I can understand those who embrace both in their hedonism. But I can't understand people who accept sex, but argue that porn is bad. It's only as bad as our sexuality is. Porn (even when easily available) doesn't make people waste time masturbating.