Does Japan suffer from the same sort of "girls are terrible, we only want boys" prejudice that's supposed to leave China with an extra 30+ million men by the end of the decade?
I disagree. I think community projects such as these are justified in expecting contributions from those who benefit from it. Resorting to coercion via license is a poor way of enforcing it, though; licenses can present a big pain in the legal department even for people who are otherwise friendly and willing to give back to the community, and a hostile entity can usually comply with the license while remaining completely unhelpful.
Moreover, whining about "omg, whiners" is kinda tacky too, you know?
What, is this a global-warming remark? All that oil was destined for burning anyway. It's doing a hell of a lot less harm being burnt than it is choking off marine life.
But nuance is dead in the climate-change "debate"; go figure.
I hope work on that technology is progressing (despise the fact that Bush once endorsed it),
See? SEE?! This is what happens when we politicize Science to Hell and back: some unpopular politician endorses it and we assume by default that this is grounds to discredit it. This is Slashdot, people. Evaluating the merits of the technology irrespective of politics should be the rule and not the exception.
But two wrongs don't make a right. Philadelphia has been losing population since the 1950s, partly with shit like this. In fact, all of PA has budget troubles, but not because the government doesn't rake enough cash in, but in both cases because of having too many union workers, ridiculous pensions, and spending too much.
Mmm. Back in the 80s when I was like 2 years old and we were poor (not quite "crisco sandwiches" poor or anything, but "bum on the street offers you a subway token" poor) and I was helping my mother in the kitchen kneading dough for baked goods we could sell, we didn't have to pay no stinkin' $300/yr business license. It's come to this now? Sad.
(And that was also a bit of a recession like we have now, mind you, so it's not like she could have just gone out and expected to have a job to drop into her lap or anything.)
Seriously, way to put a damper on entrepreneurship and small businesses.
I dunno. It won't be a big deal in your wallet, but if you're taking it out for a moment anyone could take a picture of it; at least the RFID requires some fancy equipment to exploit.
What would really be secure is some sort of smart electronic device for payments that does, like, real cryptography over RFID. Part of your next-gen Japan-style mobile phone, perhaps. Which is already as trackable as its GSM and 802.11 radios.
I make $N million a year selling hard drives. But wait! Flash drives are the future! I don't need to spend any money making my hard drives better; I'll just sit out the last 5-10 years' worth of profits in that business. Someone else can have them; I don't mind. Really. No worries at all. It's only money, after all.
It's hard to effectively test after you've written code, because it is really boring. So I like the "test driven development" approach. You write the test first (or shortly after some very skeletal code) and when it passes, you know that you're done. (Well, or that you need to write more tests.) The time spent writing tests doubles as time to review and internalize the requirements of the task ahead of you. Benefits of the approach include extensive unit test coverage (which provides cover for you when you're refactoring) and uncovering (or sometimes even anticipating) boatloads of small bugs, long before they even hit QA.
Capitalism is a system. Systems hate it when you anthromorphize them.
Monopoly profits may be the goal of capitalists, but when they're not colluding (or when there are low enough barriers to entry that it doesn't matter, which may not be the case here, especially with patents involved) other capitalists just stab each other in the back (business-wise) so they can get their share. Eventually, they're just making normal profits, and it's not all that interesting, so they can go off and do other things with their money.
Some of the criticism of the wikileaks dump is that they did a lousy job redacting anything about Afghan civilians who helped the US military and may now be targets of Taliban retaliation. Here:
The Times of London noted, "In just two hours of searching the WikiLeaks archive, The Times found the names of dozens of Afghans credited with providing detailed intelligence to U.S. forces. Their villages are given for identification and also, in many cases, their fathers' names." In some cases, their precise GPS locations were included.
What happens if you find such a device on your car? Sure, you can call the police because there's a suspicious item on your car (which may be dangerous!! what if it exploded?) but do you think they would say something like "oh no, that's ours!" -- or could they tell you to leave it there?
What happens when you run a packet dump and notice a government spyware program? whee!...
Sounds like an awesome opportunity for some speculation. Get $investor_money and a small company together, buy all the helium you can now, store it for N years, sell it off when it becomes expensive later. Everybody wins.
However, more density also provides a way to higher capacity 3.5" drives, which means that Samsung is now able to build 2.7 GB and 3.3 GB hard drives with four or five disks, respectively. Such drives are rather unlikely however, as we would expect the density to grow to 750 GB per disk, which could enable 4-disk 3 GB drives.
Oh, wow, a 3-gigabyte drive! How futuristic!
Seriously, what sort of monkey messed the article up this badly?
It's one thing to say "This book will cost $14.99 from our store." It's quite another to say "All the books we sell will be $14.99, and if you let us sell your book you're not allowed to sell this book anywhere else for cheaper."
They didn't succeed in killing the tax programs, but they did kill funding for domestic violence shelters, police and fire departments, and prevention of swine flu outbreaks.
In all fairness, spending cuts, especially with regards to the police and fire department funding situation in California, are far from uncontroversial. There are definitely major pension shortfalls right now because of generally unrealistic expectations for growth in these pension plans being compounded by the market crash. A standard Republican line would be that the unions, especially the fire and police unions, are busy bankrupting the state. (In case you haven't noticed, California's in a budget crisis, and had to use IOUs to pay tax refunds for a while last year).
Whether or not providing funding to those departments is the right thing to do (in the short term or the long one) is a matter of significant political contention; they're hardly just sacrificing orphaned firemen on the altar of personal greed, like TFS implies. So please excuse me if I'm hesitant to join in the two minutes' hate just because a blurb on Slashdot tells me they're evil.
The fact that it is twice as efficient as a PV system is completely irrelevant, given that it will be competing with solar concentrators not PV systems.
That depends on whether it can be deployed on a smaller scale or with different resource constraints than a regular solar concentrator. The standard solar-concentrator of an array of mirrors pointed at a central tower takes a certain amount of space, and there considerations about how the typically steam-powered generation process using that heat uses water (which is scarce enough in places like Arizona that some have decried solar energy plans as mandating unsustainable water exports). The alternative to that at present is, in fact, PV or solar chimneys.
Now, if you could put up a single parabolic mirror that focuses on one of these, small scattered deployments on random hillsides or flat rooftops might still be feasible, and would have a footprint similar to a windmill (with fewer concerns about noise and dead birds). It's just not going to sit on top of the average attic.
The goal is not to play the right notes in the right order; that's the starting point. Then you have to adjust the timing of every single note, listening and re-listening, making sure that it doesn't sound mechanical. You have to add movement, energy, and emphasis... You need fermatas and ornaments... The amount of work that goes into programming the computer will never be less than the work that a traditional performer would put into studying the same piece of music.
While in theory I agree that machine-read music is feasible, I'm skeptical as to the extent which it's going to be good, even from a quality synthesizer.
Um, WTF does that have to do with anything? Cutting taxes on the super-rich probably isn't really going to affect the demand for higher education substantially: after your first ten million dollars or so, you're probably planning to send your kids to the nicest school they can get into, one way or another, period. If trickle-down economics did affect the price of higher education, it would be because they had a material effect on the economy at large (one way or the other).
Forget the direct revenues: football teams attract rich students willing to pay higher tuition rates because the football team is cool. The university then charges more tuition. This is great for the university, stupid for the rich students, and it stinks for the not-so-rich students.
(I was lucky enough to have a faculty dependent tuition concession.)
Slashdot Mirror
Does Japan suffer from the same sort of "girls are terrible, we only want boys" prejudice that's supposed to leave China with an extra 30+ million men by the end of the decade?
choo choo!
I disagree. I think community projects such as these are justified in expecting contributions from those who benefit from it. Resorting to coercion via license is a poor way of enforcing it, though; licenses can present a big pain in the legal department even for people who are otherwise friendly and willing to give back to the community, and a hostile entity can usually comply with the license while remaining completely unhelpful.
Moreover, whining about "omg, whiners" is kinda tacky too, you know?
What, is this a global-warming remark? All that oil was destined for burning anyway. It's doing a hell of a lot less harm being burnt than it is choking off marine life.
But nuance is dead in the climate-change "debate"; go figure.
See? SEE?! This is what happens when we politicize Science to Hell and back: some unpopular politician endorses it and we assume by default that this is grounds to discredit it. This is Slashdot, people. Evaluating the merits of the technology irrespective of politics should be the rule and not the exception.
Where are our values?
Mmm. Back in the 80s when I was like 2 years old and we were poor (not quite "crisco sandwiches" poor or anything, but "bum on the street offers you a subway token" poor) and I was helping my mother in the kitchen kneading dough for baked goods we could sell, we didn't have to pay no stinkin' $300/yr business license. It's come to this now? Sad.
(And that was also a bit of a recession like we have now, mind you, so it's not like she could have just gone out and expected to have a job to drop into her lap or anything.)
Seriously, way to put a damper on entrepreneurship and small businesses.
What would really be secure is some sort of smart electronic device for payments that does, like, real cryptography over RFID. Part of your next-gen Japan-style mobile phone, perhaps. Which is already as trackable as its GSM and 802.11 radios.
I make $N million a year selling hard drives. But wait! Flash drives are the future! I don't need to spend any money making my hard drives better; I'll just sit out the last 5-10 years' worth of profits in that business. Someone else can have them; I don't mind. Really. No worries at all. It's only money, after all.
You're right. The analogy should be an immersion heater in the Volga river.
The one that heats the ionosphere, and has an effect on the scale of an immersion heater in the Yukon river. That HAARP. Of course it's to blame.
It's hard to effectively test after you've written code, because it is really boring. So I like the "test driven development" approach. You write the test first (or shortly after some very skeletal code) and when it passes, you know that you're done. (Well, or that you need to write more tests.) The time spent writing tests doubles as time to review and internalize the requirements of the task ahead of you. Benefits of the approach include extensive unit test coverage (which provides cover for you when you're refactoring) and uncovering (or sometimes even anticipating) boatloads of small bugs, long before they even hit QA.
Monopoly profits may be the goal of capitalists, but when they're not colluding (or when there are low enough barriers to entry that it doesn't matter, which may not be the case here, especially with patents involved) other capitalists just stab each other in the back (business-wise) so they can get their share. Eventually, they're just making normal profits, and it's not all that interesting, so they can go off and do other things with their money.
That's the "everyman" take-away, anyway.
What happens if you find such a device on your car? Sure, you can call the police because there's a suspicious item on your car (which may be dangerous!! what if it exploded?) but do you think they would say something like "oh no, that's ours!" -- or could they tell you to leave it there?
What happens when you run a packet dump and notice a government spyware program? whee! ...
Sounds like an awesome opportunity for some speculation. Get $investor_money and a small company together, buy all the helium you can now, store it for N years, sell it off when it becomes expensive later. Everybody wins.
Oh, wow, a 3-gigabyte drive! How futuristic!
Seriously, what sort of monkey messed the article up this badly?
When the only tool you have is a HAMR, everything looks like a nail.
No, I'm pretty sure it's just you.
Dude. Have you ever volunteered to maintain Wikipedia? That's one of the least zany of the questions that people ask, Trust me.
It's one thing to say "This book will cost $14.99 from our store." It's quite another to say "All the books we sell will be $14.99, and if you let us sell your book you're not allowed to sell this book anywhere else for cheaper."
In all fairness, spending cuts, especially with regards to the police and fire department funding situation in California, are far from uncontroversial. There are definitely major pension shortfalls right now because of generally unrealistic expectations for growth in these pension plans being compounded by the market crash. A standard Republican line would be that the unions, especially the fire and police unions, are busy bankrupting the state. (In case you haven't noticed, California's in a budget crisis, and had to use IOUs to pay tax refunds for a while last year).
Whether or not providing funding to those departments is the right thing to do (in the short term or the long one) is a matter of significant political contention; they're hardly just sacrificing orphaned firemen on the altar of personal greed, like TFS implies. So please excuse me if I'm hesitant to join in the two minutes' hate just because a blurb on Slashdot tells me they're evil.
That depends on whether it can be deployed on a smaller scale or with different resource constraints than a regular solar concentrator. The standard solar-concentrator of an array of mirrors pointed at a central tower takes a certain amount of space, and there considerations about how the typically steam-powered generation process using that heat uses water (which is scarce enough in places like Arizona that some have decried solar energy plans as mandating unsustainable water exports). The alternative to that at present is, in fact, PV or solar chimneys.
Now, if you could put up a single parabolic mirror that focuses on one of these, small scattered deployments on random hillsides or flat rooftops might still be feasible, and would have a footprint similar to a windmill (with fewer concerns about noise and dead birds). It's just not going to sit on top of the average attic.
While in theory I agree that machine-read music is feasible, I'm skeptical as to the extent which it's going to be good, even from a quality synthesizer.
Um, WTF does that have to do with anything? Cutting taxes on the super-rich probably isn't really going to affect the demand for higher education substantially: after your first ten million dollars or so, you're probably planning to send your kids to the nicest school they can get into, one way or another, period. If trickle-down economics did affect the price of higher education, it would be because they had a material effect on the economy at large (one way or the other).
(I was lucky enough to have a faculty dependent tuition concession.)