I probably read that Heinlein book before you were born!
First, that's impossible. Second, judging from your level of maturity displayed above, I strongly doubt you were reading anything before I received my BS. It's likely that I read SIASL before you were born.
I find it amusing that you think accusing someone of homosexuality is an insult. How very parochial. I bet you're getting a lot of mileage out of that one in high school right now, but a real insult either takes knowledge of a shameful truth or true creativity. You have displayed neither.
A wise geek once said, "It is better to be silent and be thought a lamer, than to post and remove all doubt." But coming across it probably would have had no effect; if you'd stumbled across that wisdom in your short time on this earth, I suspect that you'd have picked yourself up and gone on. Something like the other six thousand times you've been offered a clue. At the very least, do something about your minuscule vocabulary before you try insulting anyone in the future. Yours shows the poverty of a fourth-rate mind. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
"grok" has been in use in geek circles a lot longer than terms like "1337" or "404". If you were ignorant of the meaning, you no longer have an excuse; here's the Jargon File entry for it. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
2. Usually when you have numbered bullet points it implies more than one item in the list.
You can't see the rest of it because the "see the rest of this response" link is broken. Seems to be a glitch in the Slashcode. It shouldn't be doing that to me at all (I have my comment size limit set to 100,000 bytes!), but it's happening anyway.
Bad Slashcode. Bad, BAD Slashcode! Sit! Stay. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
The parent site for this article is one of the most obnoxious I've seen in a long, long time. It keeps re-loading a file from "globalelements.ft.com" every couple of seconds, and demands to set a cookie every time it loads. I had to shut cookies off to read the article.
Note to Taco, Hemos et al: Please don't link articles from ft.com any more. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Google pulled it right up in the first page, from an organization you should know about. Try this: http://www.norml.org/medica l/I OM_Report/iom2.htm#endog. I first learned of these things from Science News, but a search there turned up no hits (wonder why?).
The human body doesn't produce alcohol...
... but many of our gut bacteria do. Don't make the mistake that those bugs aren't part of us. If you get infected by a bacteriophage virus which kills off a large fraction of the E. Coli in your large intestine, you'll get diarrhea even though "your body" is not suffering any damage nor mounting a response.
The human ability to tolerate and detoxify alcohol appears to be associated strongly with the historical use of alcohol in different parts of the world; Native Americans have a notoriously poor resistance to alcohol and alcoholism, for example. This is likely associated with the lack of selection in their history. On the other hand, I've heard nothing about geographic disparities in cannabinoid receptors (though it would not surprise me should something turn up).
This is a general principle. We've either acquired or exaggerated the ability to detoxify nitrosamines and other carcinogens which are often formed when meat is cooked. The conclusion to be drawn is that humans and/or the ancestors of humans have been living on cooked meat for a long, long time.
If you want to continue this conversation in a little more real-time environment...
Sorry, no, I'm neglecting too much as it is. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Charities, especially large ones, are notoriously inefficient and spend a large percentage of their money on supporting their own bureacracy. I am not arguing that charities are useless, but Brin himself points out that Europeans contribute vastly smaller amounts to charity than Americans...
No doubt due to the fact that most Europeans pay more in extra taxes to their bloated, inefficient, bureaucratic governments for those same functions than Americans do via charity. This has the further benefit that Americans can tell a poorly-run charity to go to hell, and send their money elsewhere (or keep it); Europeans can't do that to their governments. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
But the liver certainly is not equipped to handle the huge quantities of alcohol that some people throw at it...
Very good, we're getting somewhere. Now are you ready to generalize this flash of insight to cannabinoids?;) --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Cannabinoids binds to receptors which don't accept anything else...
You seem to have missed the news about the natural cannabinoids, which are exactly analagous to endorphins. Ergo, you cannot argue from the fact that we have such receptors that cannabis should be legal, unless you also argue that every other substance which activates receptors should be legal. As I said, it does not follow.
Little fact of biology: if the human body didn't produce something to fit those receptors, we wouldn't have those receptors. Selection would stop removing the defective mutations and the unused receptor system would eventually become non-functional. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
But your liver wasn't designed to handle alcohol, either.
The hell it wasn't. It produces a bunch of enzymes, including alcohol dehydrogenase, which are specific to the function of handling alcohol. Since the digestive system produces alcohol in the normal course of business (some of our symbiotic bugs like to make ethanol), and there's some methanol in various foods including grape juice, you simply cannot make that claim. Western culture has made alcohol into a social substance, and we've co-evolved with it for hundreds of generations. The long and short of it is, we are adapted to alcohol.
Unlike some of the other posters, I will not accuse you of making this error because you're a stoner. On the other hand, I hope that you'll study the matter before repeating this claim, and hopefully learn that it's false and try to spread the truth whenever you find someone making it in the future. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Also, just recently researchers have found cannabinoid receptors in the human brain (sorry, I don't have a URL handy). These receptors don't bind to anything but various chemicals which are found in marijuana. So it seems kind of odd to make marijuana illegal when the human brain was designed to take these chemicals.
The human brain has receptors for opiates (endorphins), amphetamines, cocaine and a lot of other things. So what's your point?
If these substances were inert they wouldn't have any psychoactive properties, would they? Most of them are dangerous if misused and certainly merit some degree of regulation (even if not the prohibition we currently have).
And in the spirit of the current fortune at the bottom of the page ("Quod erat demonstrandum. [Thus it is proven. For those who wondered WTF QED means.]"), I offer my own: non-sequitur is literally "does not follow". In other words, you can't get there from here using logic. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
To pass them by so that Mr. Goldshorts can afford to buy his daughter another Lear jet strikes me as simply cruel.
What do you mean, "pass them by"? I see two implicit assumptions in that sentence alone, and I don't think either one of them is justified:
The assumption that government, specifically the Federal government, is the proper vehicle for guaranteeing subsistence needs.
The assumption that all income belongs to the government, to dispose of wherever it can find a "need"; the desires of the people who made that income have no special status.
In response I remind you: the power to tax is the power to destroy. The power of taxation is also one of the most insidious anti-productive forces in the economy, because it focusses efforts on the avoidance of taxes instead of on productive pursuits. This is one reason why I find Al Gore's "targets" so repugnant, because it substitutes Al's priorities for those of the people who are actually affected and who might have better ideas of what to do with their money.
And I don't care if the rich don't need it as much. The truly poor pay 0% income tax. If you really want to make things fair, you should be taking away the Social Security benefits of rich retirees. Remember, the poverty rate among seniors is the lowest among all age cohorts, and the Social Security system is one of our biggest fiscal time-bombs. Take away the hand outs from the people who don't need them; that's fair. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
I can do it in one sentence: "That's how they've done it in my area for as long as I can remember, so everyone should take the same abu... er, treatment and not complain."
My response is equally simple: Just because MD's are expected to jepoardize their sanity with such punishing schedules, and also their patients' health by trying to perform tasks requiring the finest of judgement when their facilities are working at far below par, does not make it a model for the rest of the world. Quite the opposite. The 24-hour shifts and other ridiculous stretches expected of doctors should have been banned at the same time that minimum rest breaks were specified for truck drivers (hint, that was sixty-plus years ago). --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Actually there is a very fundermental problem. "How do you have a democratic society which can filter out lobbying from corporate and extremist groups, without ignoring the views of ordinary people?" Companies and political/religious extreamists [sic] can lobby far better than ordinary people.
Maybe the way to do it is to require lobbyists to carry proxies from the people they allegedly represent. If a lobbyist only represents twenty well-heeled people in a district or a few hundred radicals at the fundamentalist church, you could justify voting against their issue pretty easily.
It's far from a perfect idea, but it might have some promise. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
I am told that it has already passed the full House, on a voice vote rammed through by good ol' Dennis Hastert.
Those of you in Hastert's district, please WRITE HARD-COPY LETTERS (they count more) demanding to know why he put his weight behind such a ridiculous and un-Constitutional bill. I suppose that we're unlikely to get a veto at this date; Clinton never saw a government power he didn't like either. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
The only problem with this is that you're using Memory Sticks, which are a proprietary technology. Sony may decide to implement things like access controls on Memory Sticks (to do SDMI, for example) and creating a market for this product just improves their ability to screw us later. Do everyone a favor, don't buy anything that uses Memory Sticks. Use a non-proprietary system like Compact Flash instead. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
An aircraft can easily be 20% or more fuel by weight at takeoff. Suppose you can raise that to 30% for your electric aircraft, and the batteries hold 20 WH/pound; the net aircraft energy-to-weight is 6 WH/pound.
Compare this to something as creaky and ancient as a Cessna 152 carrying 25 gallons of gasoline and a 25% efficient engine. Gasoline yields about 119,000 BTU/gallon, or 30000 BTU/gallon at the crankshaft. That 25 gallons of gas would yield 750,000 BTU or 220 KWH of work; divided by the aircraft's 1670 pound gross weight, that's 132 watt-hours per pound.
Even the NEC battery is about a factor of 20 behind what you need to power a real heavier-than-air personal transport. Airplanes will not be electric any time soon. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
The text had no capacity listing, but the battery was labelled (this is what I get for browsing with images off).
The battery looks to be about 3 by 2 by 1 inches, or 6 cubic inches. If it's got a density of 1.4, that would make it 138 grams or just about 1/4 pound. At 2.4 watt-hours for the package at the nominal voltage, that's about 9.5 watt-hours a pound; not too bad. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
There's oxygen in the electrolyte (H2SO4), so the battery as a whole has something a bit closer to the elements of life. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
does your laptop use 200mA? I think not. A small motor uses about that much. And even then, it'd only power that 200mA motor for one hour.
Bunch of misconceptions in this response.
A 200 mAH cell does not have to be discharged at 200 mA or less. The press release said "in a 200mAh device, 9A in 10 seconds" (whatever that means).
Nothing in the press release mentioned how big this 200 mAH cell is, how much it weighs, or the voltage. That 200 mAH cell might be the size of the end of your pinky finger, in which case a decent-sized battery would be umpteen amp-hours. I can't tell from what's given.
One can make some educated guesses of the density from the description of the materials; the plastic electrodes probably have a density of less than 1.5, and the sulfuric acid electrolyte is probably 1.2 or less. Contrast this with metallic lead's density of (11.3.)
The energy density is comparable to lead-acid, but the power density is far higher. If surge discharges can be done at a rate of 45C for 10 seconds, this implies a peak power output of 450 KW from a 10 KWH battery pack. This is equivalent to about 600 horsepower. With the proper power electronics and motors, an electric car with these batteries could eat Corvettes for breakfast. Taking a full charge in 5 minutes means that regenerative braking is a lot easier, and so is quick charging.
This battery is looking like a good part of the death of the non-hybrid internal combustion engine car. With this kind of thing, it won't make sense to use non-electric powertrains any more. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
I've had services "crammed" onto my phone bill before. Worse, the phone company would not remove them; I had to go through the so-called "supplier" to get the charges taken off. (It took me several months, and they never did refund the last $5.) What really irked me is that the name of the person who allegedly signed me up for the "service" bore no resemblance to mine, and yet the billing went through. There are no checks in the system to prevent false billing, and you pay a heavy (and unrecoverable) penalty of your time to get rid of these fees.
It is time to have statutory damages for cramming, like $200 if the bill was obviously wrong (like the wrong name on the account). That would make it worthwhile for people to spend their time to get the crammed services removed, and hurt the crammers enough to make the practice uneconomical. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
The correct thing to say is "Put me on your do-not-call list." Asking to be taken off a list may not meet the statutory requirements, and doesn't keep them from putting you back on.
Unfortunately, that may not work. Since MediaOne is now part of AT&T, and you have a business relationship with MediaOne, they may be able to pester you regardless (though I hope not). I haven't studied the law, so I can't say. Hope there's something that works. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
So you're saying that the ignorant clerk at the deli counter, who doesn't even know that "1/4" isn't the same as "0.4" can: ...
3) Know a 486 from Ru486
Until said clerk does know the difference, a monthly dose of the latter (assuming said clerk is female) might help improve the world. Parents are the first and most important teachers, and it's mighty hard to teach what you don't know. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
So, how come this kind of filtering/moderation system is never discussed? Is it too computationally difficult to implement on a large scale?
I like this idea, but it runs into a couple of issues:
Scaling issues, because the number of possible correlations between users increases as O(n^2).
Privacy issues, because the system has to keep track of how thousands of users rate things. (This would be a bonanza for market-research people, and perhaps political operatives.)
If you use a "representative" system and try to group people by a general agreement of taste, the scaling problem is vastly reduced (to O(n*R), where the number of representative profiles R << n). The problem there is that people's tastes drift and differentiate over time, and it might be very difficult to create new representative profiles once the individual ranking information has been obliterated. There is the additional problem of the system being more vulnerable to skewing by proxy mis-moderation, because a representative profile representing a smaller number of viewers is easier to throw off-kilter than one which includes the entire user population.
I like the idea of trying to restrict moderation to verifiable people as opposed to robots, but I don't see any way to make this feasible that does not involve collecting a lot of information that a discussion site has no business asking for. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
What they got is a bunch of pissed-off freedom advocates, a few hardware hackers and trolls having fun, and a whole lot of people who either have already or are about to:
Go down to Radio Shack,
Pick up a CueCat and lie about their name and address, and
Either never use it with the Windoze client, hack the EEPROM before doing anything with it, or both.
All of these people are going to give DC no revenue for their outlay. The publicity alone has given DC a huge hit in their current expenses and future revenue, and frankly they're a bunch of morons to have bet their business on such a lousy business plan.
Let me predict the next cycle of the arms race.
DC produces a new version of the scanner which truly encrypts the scan output, and fails to operate if the EEPROM is disconnected or altered.
Some embedded hacker (like, maybe, me?) writes some code for a pin-compatible microcontroller to make their new scanner produce the same output (for ISBN, UPC, etc. codes) as the old CueCat... only without the serialization. Said code is distributed for free, or you can buy a pre-programmed microcontroller for a few bucks and an SASE.
Either way, Digital Convergence can kiss its corporate ass goodbye. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it amusing that you think accusing someone of homosexuality is an insult. How very parochial. I bet you're getting a lot of mileage out of that one in high school right now, but a real insult either takes knowledge of a shameful truth or true creativity. You have displayed neither.
A wise geek once said, "It is better to be silent and be thought a lamer, than to post and remove all doubt." But coming across it probably would have had no effect; if you'd stumbled across that wisdom in your short time on this earth, I suspect that you'd have picked yourself up and gone on. Something like the other six thousand times you've been offered a clue. At the very least, do something about your minuscule vocabulary before you try insulting anyone in the future. Yours shows the poverty of a fourth-rate mind.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
"grok" has been in use in geek circles a lot longer than terms like "1337" or "404". If you were ignorant of the meaning, you no longer have an excuse; here's the Jargon File entry for it.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Bad Slashcode. Bad, BAD Slashcode! Sit! Stay.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Note to Taco, Hemos et al: Please don't link articles from ft.com any more.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
The human ability to tolerate and detoxify alcohol appears to be associated strongly with the historical use of alcohol in different parts of the world; Native Americans have a notoriously poor resistance to alcohol and alcoholism, for example. This is likely associated with the lack of selection in their history. On the other hand, I've heard nothing about geographic disparities in cannabinoid receptors (though it would not surprise me should something turn up).
This is a general principle. We've either acquired or exaggerated the ability to detoxify nitrosamines and other carcinogens which are often formed when meat is cooked. The conclusion to be drawn is that humans and/or the ancestors of humans have been living on cooked meat for a long, long time.
Sorry, no, I'm neglecting too much as it is.--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Little fact of biology: if the human body didn't produce something to fit those receptors, we wouldn't have those receptors. Selection would stop removing the defective mutations and the unused receptor system would eventually become non-functional.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Unlike some of the other posters, I will not accuse you of making this error because you're a stoner. On the other hand, I hope that you'll study the matter before repeating this claim, and hopefully learn that it's false and try to spread the truth whenever you find someone making it in the future.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
If these substances were inert they wouldn't have any psychoactive properties, would they? Most of them are dangerous if misused and certainly merit some degree of regulation (even if not the prohibition we currently have).
And in the spirit of the current fortune at the bottom of the page ("Quod erat demonstrandum. [Thus it is proven. For those who wondered WTF QED means.]"), I offer my own: non-sequitur is literally "does not follow". In other words, you can't get there from here using logic.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
- The assumption that government, specifically the Federal government, is the proper vehicle for guaranteeing subsistence needs.
- The assumption that all income belongs to the government, to dispose of wherever it can find a "need"; the desires of the people who made that income have no special status.
In response I remind you: the power to tax is the power to destroy. The power of taxation is also one of the most insidious anti-productive forces in the economy, because it focusses efforts on the avoidance of taxes instead of on productive pursuits. This is one reason why I find Al Gore's "targets" so repugnant, because it substitutes Al's priorities for those of the people who are actually affected and who might have better ideas of what to do with their money.And I don't care if the rich don't need it as much. The truly poor pay 0% income tax. If you really want to make things fair, you should be taking away the Social Security benefits of rich retirees. Remember, the poverty rate among seniors is the lowest among all age cohorts, and the Social Security system is one of our biggest fiscal time-bombs. Take away the hand outs from the people who don't need them; that's fair.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
My response is equally simple: Just because MD's are expected to jepoardize their sanity with such punishing schedules, and also their patients' health by trying to perform tasks requiring the finest of judgement when their facilities are working at far below par, does not make it a model for the rest of the world. Quite the opposite. The 24-hour shifts and other ridiculous stretches expected of doctors should have been banned at the same time that minimum rest breaks were specified for truck drivers (hint, that was sixty-plus years ago).
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
It's far from a perfect idea, but it might have some promise.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Those of you in Hastert's district, please WRITE HARD-COPY LETTERS (they count more) demanding to know why he put his weight behind such a ridiculous and un-Constitutional bill. I suppose that we're unlikely to get a veto at this date; Clinton never saw a government power he didn't like either.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
The only problem with this is that you're using Memory Sticks, which are a proprietary technology. Sony may decide to implement things like access controls on Memory Sticks (to do SDMI, for example) and creating a market for this product just improves their ability to screw us later. Do everyone a favor, don't buy anything that uses Memory Sticks. Use a non-proprietary system like Compact Flash instead.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Compare this to something as creaky and ancient as a Cessna 152 carrying 25 gallons of gasoline and a 25% efficient engine. Gasoline yields about 119,000 BTU/gallon, or 30000 BTU/gallon at the crankshaft. That 25 gallons of gas would yield 750,000 BTU or 220 KWH of work; divided by the aircraft's 1670 pound gross weight, that's 132 watt-hours per pound.
Even the NEC battery is about a factor of 20 behind what you need to power a real heavier-than-air personal transport. Airplanes will not be electric any time soon.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
The battery looks to be about 3 by 2 by 1 inches, or 6 cubic inches. If it's got a density of 1.4, that would make it 138 grams or just about 1/4 pound. At 2.4 watt-hours for the package at the nominal voltage, that's about 9.5 watt-hours a pound; not too bad.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
There's oxygen in the electrolyte (H2SO4), so the battery as a whole has something a bit closer to the elements of life.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
- A 200 mAH cell does not have to be discharged at 200 mA or less. The press release said "in a 200mAh device, 9A in 10 seconds" (whatever that means).
- Nothing in the press release mentioned how big this 200 mAH cell is, how much it weighs, or the voltage. That 200 mAH cell might be the size of the end of your pinky finger, in which case a decent-sized battery would be umpteen amp-hours. I can't tell from what's given.
- One can make some educated guesses of the density from the description of the materials; the plastic electrodes probably have a density of less than 1.5, and the sulfuric acid electrolyte is probably 1.2 or less. Contrast this with metallic lead's density of (11.3.)
- The energy density is comparable to lead-acid, but the power density is far higher. If surge discharges can be done at a rate of 45C for 10 seconds, this implies a peak power output of 450 KW from a 10 KWH battery pack. This is equivalent to about 600 horsepower. With the proper power electronics and motors, an electric car with these batteries could eat Corvettes for breakfast. Taking a full charge in 5 minutes means that regenerative braking is a lot easier, and so is quick charging.
This battery is looking like a good part of the death of the non-hybrid internal combustion engine car. With this kind of thing, it won't make sense to use non-electric powertrains any more.--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
It is time to have statutory damages for cramming, like $200 if the bill was obviously wrong (like the wrong name on the account). That would make it worthwhile for people to spend their time to get the crammed services removed, and hurt the crammers enough to make the practice uneconomical.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Unfortunately, that may not work. Since MediaOne is now part of AT&T, and you have a business relationship with MediaOne, they may be able to pester you regardless (though I hope not). I haven't studied the law, so I can't say. Hope there's something that works.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
(Why the hell isn't this "+4, Insightful"?)
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
- Scaling issues, because the number of possible correlations between users increases as O(n^2).
- Privacy issues, because the system has to keep track of how thousands of users rate things. (This would be a bonanza for market-research people, and perhaps political operatives.)
If you use a "representative" system and try to group people by a general agreement of taste, the scaling problem is vastly reduced (to O(n*R), where the number of representative profiles R << n). The problem there is that people's tastes drift and differentiate over time, and it might be very difficult to create new representative profiles once the individual ranking information has been obliterated. There is the additional problem of the system being more vulnerable to skewing by proxy mis-moderation, because a representative profile representing a smaller number of viewers is easier to throw off-kilter than one which includes the entire user population.I like the idea of trying to restrict moderation to verifiable people as opposed to robots, but I don't see any way to make this feasible that does not involve collecting a lot of information that a discussion site has no business asking for.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
- Go down to Radio Shack,
- Pick up a CueCat and lie about their name and address, and
- Either never use it with the Windoze client, hack the EEPROM before doing anything with it, or both.
All of these people are going to give DC no revenue for their outlay. The publicity alone has given DC a huge hit in their current expenses and future revenue, and frankly they're a bunch of morons to have bet their business on such a lousy business plan.Let me predict the next cycle of the arms race.
- DC produces a new version of the scanner which truly encrypts the scan output, and fails to operate if the EEPROM is disconnected or altered.
- Some embedded hacker (like, maybe, me?) writes some code for a pin-compatible microcontroller to make their new scanner produce the same output (for ISBN, UPC, etc. codes) as the old CueCat... only without the serialization. Said code is distributed for free, or you can buy a pre-programmed microcontroller for a few bucks and an SASE.
Either way, Digital Convergence can kiss its corporate ass goodbye.--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.