I don't need a hammer that gets me. I need one I can accurately use. Natural language is very imprecise, a set list of commands makes things more precise.
I find this comment fascinating, and probably helps differentiate geek tools from mass-market tools. Most people prefer accuracy, but I think a lot of geeks really would prefer precision.
But it accurately represents at least a significant part of the Slashdot demographic. I find Siri to be almost completely useless because it isn't designed for precision - it seems to default to a socially acceptable / funny / warm answer. It's often like talking to an Alzheimer's patient - you get a human response, it's just not associated logically with your question. I would much prefer it if Siri could be placed in a 'computer' mode that gave you a more structured syntax.
It's all in good fun. Seriously, Siri is just fun to use, and that's important in a gadget intended to be a part of your daily life. It's kind of like when Slashdotters in years past were criticizing Windows and OS X for having fading animations, translucency effects, and other visuals. Well, now Linux desktops have all that. Because it's fun and pleasant to use.
Helicopters take a LOT of practice before you become proficient in flying them and it takes your full attention to flying, not sight-seeing. Also just as importantly, they can only fly for about five to ten minutes before needing to come down to refuel or swap batteries.
What SpaceX is doing is more along the lines of the US Gemini program in the 1960's. Not Apollo, not the Shuttle. In fact, SpaceX actually proves my point. The best that we've been able to do so far is to spend a decade re establishing a system first created half a century ago.
That's a good point but it needs to be balanced by the sensitivity of the payload. I would not send anything really sensitive by email under any circumstance. But an 'encrypted' PDF is like a lock on a house or a glue seal on a letter - good enough to keep most people from casually going after the data.
The other point that people are missing is that dissecting an aged, formaldehyde soaked human body is NOT the primary source of anatomical training for surgeons. Gross Anatomy (that's what it's called) is just another first year medical student course done the same way it's always been because it's been done the same way since the 18th century. Further it is a rite of passage (I had to fry my brain with formaldehyde, so do you). Third, anatomy is one of those core courses in Medicine since humans tend to have to be able to describe something before they can go on to understand it. So you have to teach it somehow.
That said, there is little that cannot be taught using textbooks, lectures, computers etc. A medical cadaver neither looks nor feels nor acts like an alive human body, Zombie movies notwithstanding. Yes you learn a lot in gross anatomy (it's on the test, you had better) but there are other ways of learning it. A good video of a surgical procedure is much more realistic than 'ol Fred in the morgue.
...but I might attach encrypted file(s) if I really wanna keep something super-secret!.
Yes, this. If I'm sending anything semi sensitive, I just encrypt a file, usually a PDF, and send the password via another method. I wouldn't use this for anything extremely sensitive such as my recurring fantasy to nuke Washington DC from orbit - but for routine stuff it's fine.
And other people can deal with it. PGP encrypted emails - no way.
Not only is the cost prohibitive but restarting Shuttle Operations would require, in essence, taking virtually all the support personnel (the thousands of them), hire them off of whatever they are doing now and re organize them back in the Shuttle team. The system is incredibly complicated and relied on a truly enormous ground team to manage it. That's what I don't get about Dittmar - she was the lead for that group. Unless she felt she really could hire everybody or come up with a smaller, more 'efficient' group, it was never going to fly.
It isn't just the hardware. The wetware is probably more important.
Same reason we couldn't restart the Saturn V - by the time you rebuild the engineering team, you might as well start with a new design.
I remember sitting around the family dinner table, commenting on the flavor and tenderness of particular steaks. "Pretty good. Very tender. But remember Wilfred? He was amazingly tender and flavorful.' To which someone might reply: "Wilfred was good, buy I preferred Roscoe."
Our citified cousins tended not to join the conversation...
Could the reason for that be that Wilfred and Roscoe were your cousins?
Slashdot seems almost unusable without noscript, what is going on?
Right now, slashdot is unusable with noscript, there's some sort of 503 server error over and over again.
It's those damned hard drives again. Can't get good ones anymore. Back in my day when Slashdot was run off of 10 megabyte MFM drives, we didn't have this problem.
Why would anyone rely on warranties for data? That's just a roulette wheel with a big house advantage. Backup. Backup. Unless you're running some huge drive farm, in which case you should have a backup / RAID / replacement strategy in place, just pull the drives out after three years and replace them. Use the old ones for cold backup or whatever.
I just replaced three 750 GB drives in my MacPro with a 60 GB SSD (for a swap drive) and a pair of 2 TB WD's. Fortunately I bought them before the flood. Fortunately I bought 4 so when one was DOA I could finish the project and send the dead one back. I just don't expect hard drives to last longer than three years. Given the perfectly reasonable price per gigabyte these days, even with the flood, it's a pretty easy decision.
Little or no problems? You need to read up on things a bit more. There were lots of problems with opium / heroin / cocaine addiction when the drugs where essentially available over the counter. It's just that making them illegal didn't improve anything. I don't think that the cure was any better than the disease, which is pretty much what I believe you're trying to say, but don't minimize the issue.
Until we face up to the fact that humans like to use recreational drugs and deal with that in a compassionate, intelligent and not putative fashion, we're going to have these little problems.
That and patients don't understand methadone kinetics (not too surprising). There is a tendency to 1) take extra doses to help dull the pain (or deal with withdrawal issues) and 2) medicate with something else. Typically the something else is alcohol. The combination of alcohol and methadone is especially dangerous. Two potent respiratory depressants with very different kinetics.
Methadone is the poster child for all that is screwed up with pain control and addiction in this country. As usual, it is popular to shoot the 'messenger'. Until the ability to deal with narcotic addiction is wrestled away from the DEA and until patients in general feel like their problem is more of a medical one than a legal one it's just going to get worse. As an ER doc, I'm seeing methadone in a lot of urine drug screens these days. Talking to patients (the ones that will talk, anyway) they are mostly taking it to deal with withdrawal symptoms when they can't get their drug of choice. Of course, that leads them to manage their problem on their own with a very dangerous drug. Not a terribly safe nor effective combination.
I was just wondering this the other day...it seems to me that for a handset manufacturer it would make sense to put all of CDMA/TDMA/GSM/LTE/HSPA+ etc onto one chip, and define the frequencies and protocol by some BIOS settings. That way the same phone could be sold to every mobile carrier. I would think it should also be possible to include many antennae or fractal antennae.
Is this already going on? Or are handset manufacturers really putting different chips in the same handset destined for different carriers?
That's hard to do with the frequencies being significantly different. LTE spectrum ranges from 850 mHz to 2500 mHz - a wide spread to handle in a tiny radio. It's possible to do but then you have the annoying engineering tradeoffs of size, battery efficiency and cost.
third world country.... They still execute the mentally ill there, and have you seen the nutjobs that come from there? Just look at GW Bush and Rick Perry...
I thought you said they executed the mentally ill.
Actually, satellites suck for observation. People know where they are, it is very well known when they pass overhead of a sensitive area, and retasking them is a huge undertaking that can be done only a limited number of times. If there'd be something that the military could put up at a moments notice, keep up for a near infinite time and control in real-time what it is looking at, they'd do so in a heartbeat.
But when you look at technologies like LFTR, then all those problems magically vanish.
Because no one has built a commercial Thorium reactor so everything about them is magic and fairy dust. Yes, it's nice that a couple of small ones were were built in the 1960's, that doesn't imply that it's a viable technology.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't need a hammer that gets me. I need one I can accurately use. Natural language is very imprecise, a set list of commands makes things more precise.
I find this comment fascinating, and probably helps differentiate geek tools from mass-market tools. Most people prefer accuracy, but I think a lot of geeks really would prefer precision.
But it accurately represents at least a significant part of the Slashdot demographic. I find Siri to be almost completely useless because it isn't designed for precision - it seems to default to a socially acceptable / funny / warm answer. It's often like talking to an Alzheimer's patient - you get a human response, it's just not associated logically with your question. I would much prefer it if Siri could be placed in a 'computer' mode that gave you a more structured syntax.
Other folks, not so much....
It's all in good fun. Seriously, Siri is just fun to use, and that's important in a gadget intended to be a part of your daily life. It's kind of like when Slashdotters in years past were criticizing Windows and OS X for having fading animations, translucency effects, and other visuals. Well, now Linux desktops have all that. Because it's fun and pleasant to use.
"Your plastic pal who's fun to be with."
Did you really just go there?
who's going to stop us from watching them?
The cop with the shotgun that blows your $1000 toy out of the air because it's a "public hazard".
Or me with a shotgun that blows your $1000 toy out of the air because it's a "public nuisance".
Helicopters take a LOT of practice before you become proficient in flying them and it takes your full attention to flying, not sight-seeing. Also just as importantly, they can only fly for about five to ten minutes before needing to come down to refuel or swap batteries.
Then we just need to train more seagulls
What SpaceX is doing is more along the lines of the US Gemini program in the 1960's. Not Apollo, not the Shuttle. In fact, SpaceX actually proves my point. The best that we've been able to do so far is to spend a decade re establishing a system first created half a century ago.
Progress as promised!
That's a good point but it needs to be balanced by the sensitivity of the payload. I would not send anything really sensitive by email under any circumstance. But an 'encrypted' PDF is like a lock on a house or a glue seal on a letter - good enough to keep most people from casually going after the data.
The other point that people are missing is that dissecting an aged, formaldehyde soaked human body is NOT the primary source of anatomical training for surgeons. Gross Anatomy (that's what it's called) is just another first year medical student course done the same way it's always been because it's been done the same way since the 18th century. Further it is a rite of passage (I had to fry my brain with formaldehyde, so do you). Third, anatomy is one of those core courses in Medicine since humans tend to have to be able to describe something before they can go on to understand it. So you have to teach it somehow.
That said, there is little that cannot be taught using textbooks, lectures, computers etc. A medical cadaver neither looks nor feels nor acts like an alive human body, Zombie movies notwithstanding. Yes you learn a lot in gross anatomy (it's on the test, you had better) but there are other ways of learning it. A good video of a surgical procedure is much more realistic than 'ol Fred in the morgue.
donate the body of Congress for vivisection study!
They already said they weren't going to dissect rats anymore.
...but I might attach encrypted file(s) if I really wanna keep something super-secret!.
Yes, this. If I'm sending anything semi sensitive, I just encrypt a file, usually a PDF, and send the password via another method. I wouldn't use this for anything extremely sensitive such as my recurring fantasy to nuke Washington DC from orbit - but for routine stuff it's fine.
And other people can deal with it. PGP encrypted emails - no way.
Not only is the cost prohibitive but restarting Shuttle Operations would require, in essence, taking virtually all the support personnel (the thousands of them), hire them off of whatever they are doing now and re organize them back in the Shuttle team. The system is incredibly complicated and relied on a truly enormous ground team to manage it. That's what I don't get about Dittmar - she was the lead for that group. Unless she felt she really could hire everybody or come up with a smaller, more 'efficient' group, it was never going to fly.
It isn't just the hardware. The wetware is probably more important.
Same reason we couldn't restart the Saturn V - by the time you rebuild the engineering team, you might as well start with a new design.
Not to mention a can of Spam....
Wouldn't be difficult, just take a picture of the floor of the slaughterhouse.
I remember sitting around the family dinner table, commenting on the flavor and tenderness of particular steaks. "Pretty good. Very tender. But remember Wilfred? He was amazingly tender and flavorful.' To which someone might reply: "Wilfred was good, buy I preferred Roscoe."
Our citified cousins tended not to join the conversation...
Could the reason for that be that Wilfred and Roscoe were your cousins?
Slashdot seems almost unusable without noscript, what is going on?
Right now, slashdot is unusable with noscript, there's some sort of 503 server error over and over again.
It's those damned hard drives again. Can't get good ones anymore. Back in my day when Slashdot was run off of 10 megabyte MFM drives, we didn't have this problem.
Why would anyone rely on warranties for data? That's just a roulette wheel with a big house advantage. Backup. Backup. Unless you're running some huge drive farm, in which case you should have a backup / RAID / replacement strategy in place, just pull the drives out after three years and replace them. Use the old ones for cold backup or whatever.
I just replaced three 750 GB drives in my MacPro with a 60 GB SSD (for a swap drive) and a pair of 2 TB WD's. Fortunately I bought them before the flood. Fortunately I bought 4 so when one was DOA I could finish the project and send the dead one back. I just don't expect hard drives to last longer than three years. Given the perfectly reasonable price per gigabyte these days, even with the flood, it's a pretty easy decision.
I have no trouble both underpaying them more and reducing the onerous training requirements for being a doctor.
'Here, put this one in your mouth and this one in your asshole.' ... '
'Sorry, other way around
Little or no problems? You need to read up on things a bit more. There were lots of problems with opium / heroin / cocaine addiction when the drugs where essentially available over the counter. It's just that making them illegal didn't improve anything. I don't think that the cure was any better than the disease, which is pretty much what I believe you're trying to say, but don't minimize the issue.
Until we face up to the fact that humans like to use recreational drugs and deal with that in a compassionate, intelligent and not putative fashion, we're going to have these little problems.
That and patients don't understand methadone kinetics (not too surprising). There is a tendency to 1) take extra doses to help dull the pain (or deal with withdrawal issues) and 2) medicate with something else. Typically the something else is alcohol. The combination of alcohol and methadone is especially dangerous. Two potent respiratory depressants with very different kinetics.
Methadone is the poster child for all that is screwed up with pain control and addiction in this country. As usual, it is popular to shoot the 'messenger'. Until the ability to deal with narcotic addiction is wrestled away from the DEA and until patients in general feel like their problem is more of a medical one than a legal one it's just going to get worse. As an ER doc, I'm seeing methadone in a lot of urine drug screens these days. Talking to patients (the ones that will talk, anyway) they are mostly taking it to deal with withdrawal symptoms when they can't get their drug of choice. Of course, that leads them to manage their problem on their own with a very dangerous drug. Not a terribly safe nor effective combination.
I was just wondering this the other day...it seems to me that for a handset manufacturer it would make sense to put all of CDMA/TDMA/GSM/LTE/HSPA+ etc onto one chip, and define the frequencies and protocol by some BIOS settings. That way the same phone could be sold to every mobile carrier. I would think it should also be possible to include many antennae or fractal antennae.
Is this already going on? Or are handset manufacturers really putting different chips in the same handset destined for different carriers?
That's hard to do with the frequencies being significantly different. LTE spectrum ranges from 850 mHz to 2500 mHz - a wide spread to handle in a tiny radio. It's possible to do but then you have the annoying engineering tradeoffs of size, battery efficiency and cost.
third world country.... They still execute the mentally ill there, and have you seen the nutjobs that come from there? Just look at GW Bush and Rick Perry...
I thought you said they executed the mentally ill.
Actually, satellites suck for observation. People know where they are, it is very well known when they pass overhead of a sensitive area, and retasking them is a huge undertaking that can be done only a limited number of times. If there'd be something that the military could put up at a moments notice, keep up for a near infinite time and control in real-time what it is looking at, they'd do so in a heartbeat.
We've already got one, you see.
Oh, and it's very nice.
And even if they didn't use CarrierIQ, what's to say that they don't have a homegrown version of software that does the exact same thing?
If Verizon tried to home brew software as complex as CarrierIQ, their phones wouldn't even boot up.
Not a chance.
They do. If you want a phone like that, buy a Nexus.
I tried, but Sean Young isn't for sale.
XKCD called. They want their joke back.
Nah, Randall's cool with it.
But when you look at technologies like LFTR, then all those problems magically vanish.
Because no one has built a commercial Thorium reactor so everything about them is magic and fairy dust. Yes, it's nice that a couple of small ones were were built in the 1960's, that doesn't imply that it's a viable technology.
Bikini Atoll still has warning bouys 100 miles out all the way around it.
What? According to the ubiquitous Wikipedia article you can walk on the islands (just not eat the food).