Now think about the value of your time. You get ~100 years here on Earth and that's all. You are wired to spend about a third of that time unconscious. An entire third of your life will be spent not doing or experiencing anything.
The question is: would going without sleep make you live (say) 50 years less? Far better to focus on life extension, and interfering with a process that rebuilds the body is unlikely to do that...
I get NASTY migraines if I have so much as a cup of coffee
Heh, I'm the opposite way. A cup of coffee usually gets rid of the headache when I wake up with a migraine. Maybe I have low blood pressure or something.
He can do everything except the actual feeding (and even that, if she's saved some or they're using formula at least some of the time.)
I thought it doesn't really work that way easily. That a baby sucks on a human nipple and a rubber nipple in a very different manner, and if s/he "knows" how to extract milk from one, s/he often can't extract milk from the other.
So no, Marie Curie would have died a lot sooner had she carried plutonium around. As it happened, what she did carry around killed her by 1934.
Actually, the most common (and useful in bombs) isotope of plutonium is Pu-239. This is primarily an alpha emitter. Unless you eat it or inhale particles of it, it's unlikely to kill you terribly quickly unless you put a neutron reflector around it and cause it to rapidly fission (as happened to a few unfortunate experimenters at Los Alamos in the 40s).
So it's OK to catch a hit and run driver if he is spotted and his number plate rememembered by a member of the public but it's not OK if his number is recognised by a camera system ?
Wholesale tracking and recording of movements is not ok. Even if it catches a few hit and run drivers. BTW, I'm not sure if the congestion charge system would catch hit and run drivers, since it recognized plate numbers - doesn't necessarily store the images long term.
To use another example: shooting the entire population of NYC would lower the murder rate there to zero.
What is up with all the new laptops having that? My 4 year old $1000 laptop runs a 1400x1050 on a 15" screen but I can't find anything like that anymore that isn't over 2 grand.
1400x1050 on a 15" screen (for that matter anything above 1024x768) is useless on a 15" screen unless you have bionic eyesight. For us mortals, 800x600 is sufficient. If you need finer resolution, you're better off with an external monitor.
I would previously recommend ThinkPads, but even before moving to Levono the quality was waning. The only thing the ThinkPad has that is superior is a longer warranty.
Just pick up a T23 or T41. Should run Linux fine and you'll pay under $300 used for the first, under $500 for the second on EBay. If it conks out, replace it with another $300 notebook.
I don't mean to be a dickhead but what part of giving every car a unique license plate ever led you to believe that you'd be anonymous driving it ?
There's a difference between having license plates that can be recognized by a human after (say) a hit-and-run accident and wholesale recording of the plate numbers of every car passing a given point.
in the next few years as video-cameraphones become more ubiquitous, and ways for sharing the resulting video
The "ways of sharing" is more important. You need to be able to stream the video to a server where it is kept for at least 2 weeks before any deletion is even possible. That way, even if you're arrested, the phone is smashed, and they find out your password, they won't be *able* to delete the video without your consent.
Ours will have full-sized VHS cameras aquired from late 80's overstock. They will be located in the abdominal region. Invisible to the naked eye.
Actually, the CIA is working on a project to replace all American cops with Fembots(tm). One nipple will shoot laser beams. The other will be a camera.
I'm still reeling that you took me as being serious enough to warrant a reply...
Sorry, man, but there are a lot of bigoted asshats on Slashdot who automatically assume that the USA is the Source of Everything That's Evil(tm) and that we're some sort of despotic shithole. There are a lot of Ugly Americans, true, but there are also plenty of bigoted non-Americans. Every nation has its good and bad points and the grass isn't always greener on the other side of the pond.
Britain doesn't even have a Constitution, so I don't know how they'll protect that privacy.
They do, sort of. The Magna Charta.
But after they'd played around with this tech and these rights for a while, we in the US will have even more reason to add a Privacy Amendment to our Constitution to protect ourselves.
That part of town probably has a population equal to a decent sized American state with roads that were built for traffic levels of 200 years ago.
So enforce the congestion charge in an anonymous way, not with automatic number plate recognition. Sell RFID cards, either passive or active, that are refillable for cash at stores or kiosks. When a card is detected in the zone on a given day, deduct #8 from the balance on the card. Only photo the plate number if the card is empty or no card is detected on a vehicle. Sort of like anonymous EZ-Pass. There are ways to have the (dubious) benefits from the congestion charge while preserving privacy. The London council just chose not to do it that way. And before you say that it wasn't doable with the technology of the time, the charge was instituted in 2003 and RFID systems like EZPass have been working since the mid-90s in the US.
By the way, I've heard accusations of manipulation of traffic statistics in favor of the congestion charge. In particular, starting lots of construction projects the year before the charge was to go into effect (including work on bus stops that forced buses to stop in travel lanes). When the charge went into effect, the construction evaporated within a few weeks. Funny, that.
First it scares the crap out of you, but once fear subsides, you want to get even.
A kick in the door usually works well, especially if you're on a motorcycle and have steel toed motorcycle boots on. I've had some guy try to squeeze me out when I was commuting by bicycle and I was moving faster on the shoulder than the line of cages on the road. I put a nice ding in the assprick's door.
And, in the US, you have to pay $8 every 10 frigging feet to use a congested road between the glorified strip malls you call cities. We win! Ahahahahahaha!
Glorified strip malls? Depends on what city, I guess, but NYC, Boston, Philly, and DC certainly don't really fit that definition. As far as paying tolls, many Interstate highways are toll-free since the stipulation is that in order to get Federal funding for the construction of a *new* Interstate highway, the road must be toll-free. This has been true since the early 1960s - most of the tolled roads are earlier freeways, built in the 1930s to the 1950s. But even then, the tolls are not particularly onerous for passenger cars. In NJ, the Turnpike is about $4 end-to-end (about 120 miles), and some of the tolls can be bypassed by using a parallel freeway. I think the Garden State Parkway (coastal north-south route) is about the same for a ~180 mile trip. Tolls to enter New York City from NJ are usually $6 for cars and $5 for motorcycles. They can even be thought of as a congestion charge of sorts, but less expensive.
And our Interstate highways are pretty straight and very suitable for high speeds. Average speed even in congested NJ is on the order of 75-80 mph. Probably higher out West.
There are still tons of programs that do not operate properly on UFS partitions, in particular those whose logic depends on case insensitivity because the programmers are chumps.
Right. But you still can't say that Apple isn't trying to preserve compatibility. Imagine trying to run Windows off of an ext3 or ufs partition:). I suppose Apple could have gone further and made their interface with UFS case-preserving.
This is a non-issue for me, because I have used a mac extensively in recent weeks and decided that windows is more consistent and reliable.
Older Powerbooks aside, I've found Macs and OS X to be pretty damn reliable, at least for home/small business use. The main problems, IMHO, are: (a) integration with various directory services. Not 100% there yet. (b) Spotlight being broken for shared volumes in 10.4 without resorting to shell scripting and Finder trickery. (c) The stupid dichotomy between what's visible in the Finder and the underlying UNIX system. NeXTSTEP was much cleaner and more "honest" but I guess the mass of ex-OS9 users have to be appeased.
The only reason I can't just move the disk to any wintel machine is that Apple has deliberately made it incompatible.
If you're worried about that, choose UFS instead of HFS+ when initially installing the OS. UFS is readable by a lot of BSD and Linux boxes. If you ask me, Apple has bent over backwards to make things compatible - they could have just locked everyone into their proprietary HFS+ system. But not only will OS X read UFS volumes, it will even boot from them.
.. are disconnected from reality by at least one level. They come in with their parents looking to buy a computer so they can see and speak to their friends two streets away over the webcam. What's wrong with going round to someone's house and asking if someone can out to play, as I did when I was a kid?
They might (OMG!) get hit by a car. Or they might get stolen by an Evil Pedo(tm). Far better to lock them in their room with a computer and throw away the keys.
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The question is: would going without sleep make you live (say) 50 years less? Far better to focus on life extension, and interfering with a process that rebuilds the body is unlikely to do that...
-b.
Heh, I'm the opposite way. A cup of coffee usually gets rid of the headache when I wake up with a migraine. Maybe I have low blood pressure or something.
-b.
I thought it doesn't really work that way easily. That a baby sucks on a human nipple and a rubber nipple in a very different manner, and if s/he "knows" how to extract milk from one, s/he often can't extract milk from the other.
-b.
Caffeine? Unpleasant?
-b.
Actually, the most common (and useful in bombs) isotope of plutonium is Pu-239. This is primarily an alpha emitter. Unless you eat it or inhale particles of it, it's unlikely to kill you terribly quickly unless you put a neutron reflector around it and cause it to rapidly fission (as happened to a few unfortunate experimenters at Los Alamos in the 40s).
-b.
Probably desirable from the server owner's standpoint. Video is still a storage intensive article.
-b.
Wholesale tracking and recording of movements is not ok. Even if it catches a few hit and run drivers. BTW, I'm not sure if the congestion charge system would catch hit and run drivers, since it recognized plate numbers - doesn't necessarily store the images long term.
To use another example: shooting the entire population of NYC would lower the murder rate there to zero.
-b.
-1 Juvenile.
1400x1050 on a 15" screen (for that matter anything above 1024x768) is useless on a 15" screen unless you have bionic eyesight. For us mortals, 800x600 is sufficient. If you need finer resolution, you're better off with an external monitor.
-b.
This video took about a minute from "smoking" to "apeshit." My laptop would be flying across the room by that point, no longer on my lap...
-b.
Just pick up a T23 or T41. Should run Linux fine and you'll pay under $300 used for the first, under $500 for the second on EBay. If it conks out, replace it with another $300 notebook.
-b.
There's a difference between having license plates that can be recognized by a human after (say) a hit-and-run accident and wholesale recording of the plate numbers of every car passing a given point.
-b.
The "ways of sharing" is more important. You need to be able to stream the video to a server where it is kept for at least 2 weeks before any deletion is even possible. That way, even if you're arrested, the phone is smashed, and they find out your password, they won't be *able* to delete the video without your consent.
-b.
Actually, the CIA is working on a project to replace all American cops with Fembots(tm). One nipple will shoot laser beams. The other will be a camera.
-b.
Sorry, man, but there are a lot of bigoted asshats on Slashdot who automatically assume that the USA is the Source of Everything That's Evil(tm) and that we're some sort of despotic shithole. There are a lot of Ugly Americans, true, but there are also plenty of bigoted non-Americans. Every nation has its good and bad points and the grass isn't always greener on the other side of the pond.
-b.
They do, sort of. The Magna Charta.
But after they'd played around with this tech and these rights for a while, we in the US will have even more reason to add a Privacy Amendment to our Constitution to protect ourselves.
As they say in Parliament, Hear, Hear!
-b.
Nah, "caught" as in "caught in traffic." Stuck against his will without too much control over the deplorable situation.
-b.
So enforce the congestion charge in an anonymous way, not with automatic number plate recognition. Sell RFID cards, either passive or active, that are refillable for cash at stores or kiosks. When a card is detected in the zone on a given day, deduct #8 from the balance on the card. Only photo the plate number if the card is empty or no card is detected on a vehicle. Sort of like anonymous EZ-Pass. There are ways to have the (dubious) benefits from the congestion charge while preserving privacy. The London council just chose not to do it that way. And before you say that it wasn't doable with the technology of the time, the charge was instituted in 2003 and RFID systems like EZPass have been working since the mid-90s in the US.
By the way, I've heard accusations of manipulation of traffic statistics in favor of the congestion charge. In particular, starting lots of construction projects the year before the charge was to go into effect (including work on bus stops that forced buses to stop in travel lanes). When the charge went into effect, the construction evaporated within a few weeks. Funny, that.
-b.
A kick in the door usually works well, especially if you're on a motorcycle and have steel toed motorcycle boots on. I've had some guy try to squeeze me out when I was commuting by bicycle and I was moving faster on the shoulder than the line of cages on the road. I put a nice ding in the assprick's door.
-b.
Overlapping fields of view for 3D capability?
-b.
-b.
Glorified strip malls? Depends on what city, I guess, but NYC, Boston, Philly, and DC certainly don't really fit that definition. As far as paying tolls, many Interstate highways are toll-free since the stipulation is that in order to get Federal funding for the construction of a *new* Interstate highway, the road must be toll-free. This has been true since the early 1960s - most of the tolled roads are earlier freeways, built in the 1930s to the 1950s. But even then, the tolls are not particularly onerous for passenger cars. In NJ, the Turnpike is about $4 end-to-end (about 120 miles), and some of the tolls can be bypassed by using a parallel freeway. I think the Garden State Parkway (coastal north-south route) is about the same for a ~180 mile trip. Tolls to enter New York City from NJ are usually $6 for cars and $5 for motorcycles. They can even be thought of as a congestion charge of sorts, but less expensive.
And our Interstate highways are pretty straight and very suitable for high speeds. Average speed even in congested NJ is on the order of 75-80 mph. Probably higher out West.
-b.
Right. But you still can't say that Apple isn't trying to preserve compatibility. Imagine trying to run Windows off of an ext3 or ufs partition :). I suppose Apple could have gone further and made their interface with UFS case-preserving.
This is a non-issue for me, because I have used a mac extensively in recent weeks and decided that windows is more consistent and reliable.
Older Powerbooks aside, I've found Macs and OS X to be pretty damn reliable, at least for home/small business use. The main problems, IMHO, are: (a) integration with various directory services. Not 100% there yet. (b) Spotlight being broken for shared volumes in 10.4 without resorting to shell scripting and Finder trickery. (c) The stupid dichotomy between what's visible in the Finder and the underlying UNIX system. NeXTSTEP was much cleaner and more "honest" but I guess the mass of ex-OS9 users have to be appeased.
-b.
If you're worried about that, choose UFS instead of HFS+ when initially installing the OS. UFS is readable by a lot of BSD and Linux boxes. If you ask me, Apple has bent over backwards to make things compatible - they could have just locked everyone into their proprietary HFS+ system. But not only will OS X read UFS volumes, it will even boot from them.
-b.
They might (OMG!) get hit by a car. Or they might get stolen by an Evil Pedo(tm). Far better to lock them in their room with a computer and throw away the keys.
-b.