8-bit PNG serves pretty well as a replacement under many circumstances, but it's not supported as ubiquitously, nor does it support animation
Good. There's few Web features I hate as much as moving, flashing things in a page of text. They draw the eye towards themselves, and make concentrating on text harder. The only ones who use them are ad banner makers and web "designers" who are too young to shave.
I wonder what Sony is doing with all of their unexploded batteries? I hope they aren't stored too close to each other. Sending them into space would be a good way to dispose of them...
Sell them to terrorists, of course. "Nobody move, he has a Sony battery! Now calm down, son..."
Don't project the problems of desktop software onto this situation. There is a whole field of provable reliability in coding, which the avionics industry is very familiar with.
Which is all fine and good for fly-by-fire control systems, but that's not what we're talking here. We're talking about complete automatic control, which will need to perceive its environment in order to make decisions. It is (literally) impossible to create software that can perceive the situation correctly in every possible situation, and (practically) impossible to create software that can always make the correct (accident-avoiding) decisions based on this information (and it is literally impossible to prove it correct, since there is no limit to the possible combinations of variables). Add crowded airspace (think rush hour) and the fact that any craft that gets into accident won't slide to a stop, but will instead fall like a rock and smash all vechiles below it - unless they manage to make desperate last-second evasions, which will likely just put them into incoming lines and widen the chaos - and total lack of ability to react to anything unexpected (by the programmer / designer) in a reasonable manner, and you have a mass accident waiting to happen - one which will rain burning metal to the city below and send cars smashing through 20th story windows, I might add.
The avionics industry has nothing that comes even close to handling this kind of thing.
Compared to full automatic control of a flying vechile, desktop software is simple and works in a standardized environment.
In any event, they'd have to do an awfully slipshod job for the casualty rates to come anywhere close to what we see now on the roads. Nearly every major city has at least one fatality during the typical rush-hour.
Which says absolutely nothing about how dangerous driving is, since you didn't say how many cars are driving and how far during the rush hour.
In any case, this gets us to a little problem: what happens when there's more moving objects in the nearby airspace than the vechile's computer can track ? And what happens when radar becomes useless due to the white noise generated by other flying cars radars ?
There is an economy of scale here, that NASA doesn't have.
Yeah. And it calls for reusing libraries and other components from other programs, leading to the negation of the "voting" system.
4. Therefore you might as well just kill people at random, because you are anyway.
No, since killing more people is even worse.
Which, of course, is an illogical conclusion, therefore proving, by contradiction, that helping others is pointless.
The chain of reasoning up to point 3 is logical, just unpleasant since it disturbs consumeristic hedonism. Point 4 is wrong, as I stated above. But even if it was all illogical, it wouldn't prove that "helping others is pointless", because "don't lift a finger to help anyone" and "give every last penny to the poor" aren't the only alternatives. Proof by contradiction only works if there's no third alternative, which there is - give some, but not all, of your money to the poor, or go to sites like Hungersite which are ad-funded and give some of the money to the poor.
The question is: were you trying to be sarcastic or are you one of those people who keep on claiming that altruism is evil - Rayndists, or whatever they were called ?
An intermediate step would be suborbital transcontinental flight. Imagine traveling between EU and US via something like this. You'd get the 1 hour ride to 50,000 feet and then a short (long compared to this) rocket ride across the ocean, followed by a glide into the local spaceport.
And a 17-hour wait in the start airport while your DNA is checked to make sure you aren't really an evil terrorist trying take over and crash the craft to some large building.
Fast travel between countries is problematic in more than just the technical aspects.
I can send you 10,000 spam mails each day, but I cannot put 10,000 ads on a webpage.
Quite a few webpages are so full of ads that they drown each other out, becoming nothing but incomprehensible mass of color and motion. 100 or 10,000, who can tell the difference ? 10,000 blinking ads in a webpage could propably even pass for modern art, especially if the HTML is shitty enough that they partially or completely overlay one another and/or the actual text of the page...
The Wiki article gives the one I found most often - the lowest altitude that one can place an object in a stable orbit (personally I would have gone with one of the 'spheres and a harder altitude - personally I see "space" as a lack of atmosphere not ability to orbit the planet).
These two are connected: it's the air friction that destabilizes low orbits. Otherwise you'd just need to clear all the mountains under your path.
Besides, the ability to stay in freefall without falling back to the planet is the practical requirement for a region of space to be useful. Without this qualification, a spacecraft is going to have to use its engines to stay in space, and that is not practical with anything short of nuclear drives, and not very smart even then.
Hey! The US President threatened Pakistan and they are a neclear power! Just what are you trying to say?
I haven't seen any US troops actually attacking Pakistan, have you ? Threats and an actualy attack aren't the same thing.
That said, the current US President is an idiot who's giving Iran and North Korea no choice but to become nuclear powers, since he's making it so clear that otherwise they're going to be next targets in his crusade. That, or an extremely intelligent and cynical man who's trying to whip the enemy into shape, to make them a more credible threat he can use to justify more draconian laws and measures, as well as breaking those laws whenever he wans.
Which brings us to another issue: fusion bombs. All the distructive power, none of the long-lasting ill effects. "Clean" nuclear weapons, so to speak. I wonder how their entrance into widespread use, which will happen at some point, will change our view on nuclear weapons.
A fusion bomb is triggered with a fission bomb, and they've been used by at least the US and USSR for decades, being much more powerful than fission-only bombs.
It has been concluded quite a few decades ago that nuclear weapons are pretty much the only thing that can keep China's potentially huge army (in terms of numbers) in check. China knows that as well. In their place, would you really give up the only thing that restores or overtips the balance? Wouldn't you keep at least one nuclear launch site functional, hidden somewhere, capable of retaliation? One is all it takes.
Of course. But I wouldn't make this a secret; quite on contrary, I'd publicize the existence (if not location) of this site and made sure that all my enemies knew that if they try to nuke me, they'll get the same in return.
Nuclear weapons are too destructive to be usefull in an actual war. If your opponent doesn't have them, using them in an attack would mean you'd conquer burned-down ruins, while using them in defense is unlikely to be neccessary since no one's likely to be stupid enough to attack a nuclear power. They're only really useful in pushing non-nuclear powers around with threat of destruction, and keeping yourself from being among the pushed.
So yeah, if I was China I'd keep nukes ready to launch at any time, but I'd also make sure that everyone knew I had them, since they'd do me no good if no one knew about them.
The current cost of energy generation would be the same if you had one or ten power plants.
As long as all resources needed to run them are available in sufficient quantities, yes. But 10 power plants burn 10 times as much fuel as 1 power plant, and I'm not at all sure that production of coal and oil - and, in the case of nuclear power, disposal of waste - can be scaled by an order of magnitude, not to mention the people needed to run and maintain them.
As soon as those 10 power plants need to start competing from resources, prices start going up.
From my reading, the "innovation" is supposed to come in tuning the game's difficulty automatically to the user's performance, not merely the idea that a game should be between "frustrating" and "boring".
This can be a good idea,
It isn't. When I learn the game, I want to be able to breeze past the levels I previously had to struggle through, and take on new levels. I don't want the enemies to mysteriously develop resistance to bullets.
A game that automatically adapts the difficulty level to the player risks negating any rewards from learning.
Or, conventionally cited as "you can't judge a book by its cover."
You can and do. That's why most books have covers that try to be interesting without causing an information overload. That second points is what most web designers seem to have a problem with, and the problem is made worse by the advert-driven nature of the Webs economics.
That, and most web pages are designed either by kids who don't have any sense of style or old-school designers who can't get it through their heads that the Web page is not paper and can be viewed at any resolution by any browser, making exact placement impossible.
Anyhow, the software would be supplied by at least three vendors for any one vehicle; the separate implementations would vote on every control decision. It would be highly unlikely for the same failure mode to affect code written by separate developers.
Except power surges, magnetic pulses or other phenomenon that disturbs electronics. Or two vendors using a same library or OS. Or, because this is software written to certain specification, the specification itself having bugs.
NASA can afford to get error-free software. Automakers, who have to supply different software for each model (since they have different charasteristics), can't.
But the basis for any just government (and really, the only reason we have them) is to protect the weak from the strong. In the end, if those that cannot defend their rights are given no rights, how are we any better than warlords or dictators?
Do we have just governments ? It seems to me that every one of them is perfectly happy to do whatever evil it can get away with... And no, such governments aren't any different from any other tyranny.
In any case, I'm not arguing that the law shouldn't protect children's rights, I'm saying that it doesn't do so.
An adult being spanked has several options: physically fight back or repond using the law (police, lawyers, etc). For the child, since they are (on average) physically less strong than their parents he would only have the second choice, the legal system. If the spanking was not physically damaging then most governments just chalk it up to diciplining a child. On the other hand, if the spanking does beyond diciplin and is physically hurtful (broken bones, scares, bruises, etc), then the law will step in to protect the child.
That's exactly my point. Things that would have everyone screaming bloody murder if done to an adult are ignored when done to a child. A child is physically weaker, far less experienced and skilled and less mature - and thus less able to deal with emotional traumas - than an adult and should thus receive more protection by law; however, in reality he gets less. This is justified with parent's right to rise their child as they see fit, essentially treating a child as the property of his parents.
And yet, if you remove this power from parents, you aren't doing the kid any favors. Then he's at the tender mercies of people who in all likelihood don't know him and don't have time to get to know him, and are likely way overworked; in the worst case scenario, the whole thing is outsourced from government to a private corporation, which will do its job as cheap as possible.
All of this leads to my conclusion that a child doesn't have any rights, but is at the mercy of whoever happens to be his keeper.
Basicly, even children have rights that the government protects, but most are only conserned with physical protection. Your example of spanking is not proof against this, as parents have been arrested for such actions.
Were they arrested for hitting their child, or for using "excessive force" ? But I guess it proves me wrong nonetheless.
Ok now on a more serious note, he could of been a bit more objective by not flinging the Anti-M$ FUD back the other way.
What "Anti-M$ FUD" ? FUD stands for "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt", while even you admitted that the claim "income for Microsoft and its chums is a cost for the rest of Europe" is a fact:
Wow, imagine that. For a company to make money, it costs consumers money. Thank goodness we have guys like this to point out these secrets of the Economy.
So tell me. What is this "Anti-M$ FUD" you are talking about ?
But a nice attempt to discredit a factual statement with an appeal to ridicule nonetheless.
All this system can do is compare letters, words and sentence length. It cannot compare ideas.
What ideas ? It's a school paper. The teacher gives you a subject and then assigns a completely subjective grade to it - I'm assuming that if you have a chance to plagiarize, then you also have a chance to run a spell checker and consequently your paper will be flawless technically. Since the teacher is a human, he is more likely to give high grades to ideas he agrees with, because those he doesn't agree with are incorrect as far as he's concerned (alternatively he might want ideas he finds "challenging", that is, does not agree with but does not find too offensive either). Also, it is very likely that he had some idea of what kind of ideas he'd get back when giving the assignment; miss one, and the grade goes down.
All this means that the students job is to guess what the teacher wants to hear and then tell it to him while pretending to agree. That's good practice for your working life, certainly, but it also makes comparing ideas in papers completely pointless - of course many top-rated paper is going to have similar pattern of ideas, since there's only a few patterns that can become top-rated, for a given combination of assignment and teacher.
I think we are seeing the start of a new legal debate: what rights do minors have or not have, and who can take them away?
Minors, just like everyone else, have the rights that they or others can and will defend against those who would violate them. Since the longstanding tradition is that the law does not enforce any such rights - for example, it is legal to spank a minor while doing the same to an adult would get you jailed for torture - and since the minors themselves are incapable of defending against such violations, due to their lack of resources, I'd say that the minors have no rights, period.
If some 17 year old comes up with the next great business idea while sitting in his computer programming class in high school, does the school have legal rights to the idea? Does his parents since they are legally responsible for him? Or, since the school is a public school, does the State/Federal government have first rights?
I guess this is just another good reason not to think while in school, and if you can't help it, pretend you didn't;).
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I'd better go patent it then. How does it work ?
Good. There's few Web features I hate as much as moving, flashing things in a page of text. They draw the eye towards themselves, and make concentrating on text harder. The only ones who use them are ad banner makers and web "designers" who are too young to shave.
Sell them to terrorists, of course. "Nobody move, he has a Sony battery! Now calm down, son..."
Which is all fine and good for fly-by-fire control systems, but that's not what we're talking here. We're talking about complete automatic control, which will need to perceive its environment in order to make decisions. It is (literally) impossible to create software that can perceive the situation correctly in every possible situation, and (practically) impossible to create software that can always make the correct (accident-avoiding) decisions based on this information (and it is literally impossible to prove it correct, since there is no limit to the possible combinations of variables). Add crowded airspace (think rush hour) and the fact that any craft that gets into accident won't slide to a stop, but will instead fall like a rock and smash all vechiles below it - unless they manage to make desperate last-second evasions, which will likely just put them into incoming lines and widen the chaos - and total lack of ability to react to anything unexpected (by the programmer / designer) in a reasonable manner, and you have a mass accident waiting to happen - one which will rain burning metal to the city below and send cars smashing through 20th story windows, I might add.
The avionics industry has nothing that comes even close to handling this kind of thing.
Compared to full automatic control of a flying vechile, desktop software is simple and works in a standardized environment.
Which says absolutely nothing about how dangerous driving is, since you didn't say how many cars are driving and how far during the rush hour.
In any case, this gets us to a little problem: what happens when there's more moving objects in the nearby airspace than the vechile's computer can track ? And what happens when radar becomes useless due to the white noise generated by other flying cars radars ?
Yeah. And it calls for reusing libraries and other components from other programs, leading to the negation of the "voting" system.
No, since killing more people is even worse.
The chain of reasoning up to point 3 is logical, just unpleasant since it disturbs consumeristic hedonism. Point 4 is wrong, as I stated above. But even if it was all illogical, it wouldn't prove that "helping others is pointless", because "don't lift a finger to help anyone" and "give every last penny to the poor" aren't the only alternatives. Proof by contradiction only works if there's no third alternative, which there is - give some, but not all, of your money to the poor, or go to sites like Hungersite which are ad-funded and give some of the money to the poor.
The question is: were you trying to be sarcastic or are you one of those people who keep on claiming that altruism is evil - Rayndists, or whatever they were called ?
And a 17-hour wait in the start airport while your DNA is checked to make sure you aren't really an evil terrorist trying take over and crash the craft to some large building.
Fast travel between countries is problematic in more than just the technical aspects.
Quite a few webpages are so full of ads that they drown each other out, becoming nothing but incomprehensible mass of color and motion. 100 or 10,000, who can tell the difference ? 10,000 blinking ads in a webpage could propably even pass for modern art, especially if the HTML is shitty enough that they partially or completely overlay one another and/or the actual text of the page...
These two are connected: it's the air friction that destabilizes low orbits. Otherwise you'd just need to clear all the mountains under your path.
Besides, the ability to stay in freefall without falling back to the planet is the practical requirement for a region of space to be useful. Without this qualification, a spacecraft is going to have to use its engines to stay in space, and that is not practical with anything short of nuclear drives, and not very smart even then.
I haven't seen any US troops actually attacking Pakistan, have you ? Threats and an actualy attack aren't the same thing.
That said, the current US President is an idiot who's giving Iran and North Korea no choice but to become nuclear powers, since he's making it so clear that otherwise they're going to be next targets in his crusade. That, or an extremely intelligent and cynical man who's trying to whip the enemy into shape, to make them a more credible threat he can use to justify more draconian laws and measures, as well as breaking those laws whenever he wans.
A moron or a monster, who can say ?
A fusion bomb is triggered with a fission bomb, and they've been used by at least the US and USSR for decades, being much more powerful than fission-only bombs.
Of course. But I wouldn't make this a secret; quite on contrary, I'd publicize the existence (if not location) of this site and made sure that all my enemies knew that if they try to nuke me, they'll get the same in return.
Nuclear weapons are too destructive to be usefull in an actual war. If your opponent doesn't have them, using them in an attack would mean you'd conquer burned-down ruins, while using them in defense is unlikely to be neccessary since no one's likely to be stupid enough to attack a nuclear power. They're only really useful in pushing non-nuclear powers around with threat of destruction, and keeping yourself from being among the pushed.
So yeah, if I was China I'd keep nukes ready to launch at any time, but I'd also make sure that everyone knew I had them, since they'd do me no good if no one knew about them.
As long as all resources needed to run them are available in sufficient quantities, yes. But 10 power plants burn 10 times as much fuel as 1 power plant, and I'm not at all sure that production of coal and oil - and, in the case of nuclear power, disposal of waste - can be scaled by an order of magnitude, not to mention the people needed to run and maintain them.
As soon as those 10 power plants need to start competing from resources, prices start going up.
Space race, cultural, or conquest ?
It isn't. When I learn the game, I want to be able to breeze past the levels I previously had to struggle through, and take on new levels. I don't want the enemies to mysteriously develop resistance to bullets.
A game that automatically adapts the difficulty level to the player risks negating any rewards from learning.
You can and do. That's why most books have covers that try to be interesting without causing an information overload. That second points is what most web designers seem to have a problem with, and the problem is made worse by the advert-driven nature of the Webs economics.
That, and most web pages are designed either by kids who don't have any sense of style or old-school designers who can't get it through their heads that the Web page is not paper and can be viewed at any resolution by any browser, making exact placement impossible.
Clearly, this is just a capitalist plot to make China dependant from IBM !
Except power surges, magnetic pulses or other phenomenon that disturbs electronics. Or two vendors using a same library or OS. Or, because this is software written to certain specification, the specification itself having bugs.
NASA can afford to get error-free software. Automakers, who have to supply different software for each model (since they have different charasteristics), can't.
No. An aircraft that a drunk, child or a sober evil genius cannot use unsafely no matter how hard he tries.
Just a little bit of difference there.
Unless the matter forming the soap somehow avoided Big Bang, it was indeed very warm at some time in the past.
Do we have just governments ? It seems to me that every one of them is perfectly happy to do whatever evil it can get away with... And no, such governments aren't any different from any other tyranny.
In any case, I'm not arguing that the law shouldn't protect children's rights, I'm saying that it doesn't do so.
That's exactly my point. Things that would have everyone screaming bloody murder if done to an adult are ignored when done to a child. A child is physically weaker, far less experienced and skilled and less mature - and thus less able to deal with emotional traumas - than an adult and should thus receive more protection by law; however, in reality he gets less. This is justified with parent's right to rise their child as they see fit, essentially treating a child as the property of his parents.
And yet, if you remove this power from parents, you aren't doing the kid any favors. Then he's at the tender mercies of people who in all likelihood don't know him and don't have time to get to know him, and are likely way overworked; in the worst case scenario, the whole thing is outsourced from government to a private corporation, which will do its job as cheap as possible.
All of this leads to my conclusion that a child doesn't have any rights, but is at the mercy of whoever happens to be his keeper.
Were they arrested for hitting their child, or for using "excessive force" ? But I guess it proves me wrong nonetheless.
So even PETA will be happy ;).
What "Anti-M$ FUD" ? FUD stands for "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt", while even you admitted that the claim "income for Microsoft and its chums is a cost for the rest of Europe" is a fact:
So tell me. What is this "Anti-M$ FUD" you are talking about ?
But a nice attempt to discredit a factual statement with an appeal to ridicule nonetheless.
What ideas ? It's a school paper. The teacher gives you a subject and then assigns a completely subjective grade to it - I'm assuming that if you have a chance to plagiarize, then you also have a chance to run a spell checker and consequently your paper will be flawless technically. Since the teacher is a human, he is more likely to give high grades to ideas he agrees with, because those he doesn't agree with are incorrect as far as he's concerned (alternatively he might want ideas he finds "challenging", that is, does not agree with but does not find too offensive either). Also, it is very likely that he had some idea of what kind of ideas he'd get back when giving the assignment; miss one, and the grade goes down.
All this means that the students job is to guess what the teacher wants to hear and then tell it to him while pretending to agree. That's good practice for your working life, certainly, but it also makes comparing ideas in papers completely pointless - of course many top-rated paper is going to have similar pattern of ideas, since there's only a few patterns that can become top-rated, for a given combination of assignment and teacher.
My, didn't that come out cynical...
Minors, just like everyone else, have the rights that they or others can and will defend against those who would violate them. Since the longstanding tradition is that the law does not enforce any such rights - for example, it is legal to spank a minor while doing the same to an adult would get you jailed for torture - and since the minors themselves are incapable of defending against such violations, due to their lack of resources, I'd say that the minors have no rights, period.
I guess this is just another good reason not to think while in school, and if you can't help it, pretend you didn't ;).
Since the main new feature of Vista is an UI that uses 3D accelerated special effects, I'd say "everyone".