I totally agree, re: HFCS isn't the devil from a scientific / metabolic standpoint, but it did happen to enter the food supply in a big way at the same time that "big tobacco" diversified and took over most of the processed foods. It is guilty by association, a great many things it appears in have been engineered by the same people who pioneered the science of addiction.
My conspiracy theory is that the corn subsidy is supported in large part by the processed food lobby who just want free raw materials to put into their boxes, so they are dominant in the price domain. Then, they engineer their foods to make them highly palatable - so they're cheap and they taste good, so good that it's hard to quit eating and buying them, especially since they're so darn cheap...
Can we really blame Mr. Pickens for trying to turn his billions into trillions with a sweetheart deal like water rights on free land? After all, think of all the jobs he would have created for all those folks clearing his land, erecting his windmills, maintaining all this infrastructure, hell, I bet he'd have shared almost 10% of the profits with the little people, if he was forced to.
Right wingers like to think that the rich don't look for handouts - but really they just go about it differently, instead of hitting you up for a buck at a stoplight, they think longer term.
Price is the only thing that has kept the Segway back.
Not only price of the device, but also price of rethinking the infrastructure that the Segway operates in - too fast for sidewalks, too vulnerable for car lanes, and too damn annoying to integrate into bike path traffic.
Yeah, I did software systems at a company for a decade, then we had a problem come along that just didn't want any software in it's controller, it was much better suited to analog control - 2 variables, inherently stable mechanics, the marketing guys still wanted a flat screen display on the controller to make it "look like a $30K device."
When you've only got one or two control loops, a microprocessor based solution is a lot more complex, costly and failure prone.
I agree with the article summary author - I can't believe that 29% of tweets get tangible responses - that's an astoundingly high number to me. How many highway billboards get tangible responses? Or paid political advertisements on television? We're a passive media consumer society, just because "media" is now being generated by your friends, I don't expect people to change and actually start engaging with every message that's flashed in front of their face.
I was thinking in terms of an easily planted bug-like device, one lump that you stick on and go. I have a LoJack tracking device installed in my car, it's tapping the battery power and well hidden, it also took the installer over 30 minutes to get it in. (It also uses lower frequency radio than GPS, and, so, can be hidden deeper inside.)
Airflow - the more visually hidden portions of exhaust pipes that might get a good GPS signal I would think are on top of the pipe, just under the (usually plastic) bumper cover. There's great airflow under the middle of the car, but I'm not sure how well you can lock 4 satellites from that position.
So, yes, you could stick a peltier power unit on the bottom of the exhaust pipe and run a wire up to a receiver that's far enough away that it won't get fried, but exhaust pipes tend to move a lot relative to the rest of the body, so the wire will need some slack (not to mention unusual heat tolerance in the insulation), and I think a rig like that would be a lot more obvious than something scotch-locked onto a wire somewhere with a pin through body-metal for ground return.
Kind of over-kill, anyplace the exhaust is "visible" to GPS signals, it's also fairly visible to casual observers. You'd also need a fair bit of airflow over the peltier device to provide a "cold side" for power, and getting GPS receive ICs that operate at 400F would not be cheap.
I think a button battery could probably provide tracking info every 10 minutes for at least a month.
The hardware can actually be quite cheap, the connection service plans cost more than most cell-phone data plans, and I'm sure it's a great deal more expensive if you need it to operate outside of cell tower coverage areas.
Unsolicited items sent to you in the mail are yours, free of charge. I believe that's a federal law.
So, if the FBI is delivering something to your vehicle... I'd be very tempted to remove it and re-gift it to a random semi-truck, but that would probably make me "more interesting" to them, which is probably a bad idea.
He's got every right (IMO) to do what he damn well pleased with it.
Yeah, and I have every right to put my 7 year old in a T-Shirt that says "Islam is of the Devil" and send him to school. Doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Two "infections" after 26 person-years of active web surfing isn't too bad. Compared to 26 years of suffering from the trials and tribulations of running active protection software, I think the two virus cleanings were much easier.
hard and crunchy on the outside, and soft and chewy on the inside is not security
Maybe not, but it has protected my home network since 1997, with 2 breaches, one in 2000, the other last week, both of which would have passed a desktop firewall too - it's hard to protect against user-launched malware. If something really nasty had gotten in, it could have been worse - those two breaches didn't spread within the internal network.
Considering that we actually have the technology now to 1) locate, observe, and track Earth-crossing asteroids, 2) launch spacecraft to intercept asteroids, and 3) change the course of asteroids (thanks to the thermonuclear bomb), keeping our heads in the sand because we're too lazy to watch out for and deal with exterior threats is inexcusable.
BBC filmed some penguins fighting off seal attacks, the pitiful little black flipper trying to slap away the oncoming hungry seal looks like it has a better chance than we do of redirecting a direct hit, such as might come from a close approach redirection from Mars or even Ceres or similar planetoids. Those rocks have been orbiting for billions of years, so most of the radical restructuring of their orbits has happened already, the cloud is mostly stable, but once in awhile one of them does get flung in a crazy new direction.
If we've got tens of years to avert a near miss, we might pull that off with chemical rockets and H-bombs, but redirecting a K-T sized rock that's on a solid strike course within 90 days, sorry, no, should have built those lunar colonies sooner.
Sad thought #2, a successful redirection of a significantly sized rock could possibly de-stabilize the local cloud...
What I worry about in the gene pool competition is that I, and my neuro-similar homo sapiens, tend to only father as many children as we can responsibly provide for and raise to adulthood.
Just now, I'm thinking of an alcoholic loser I once knew with two ex-wives and four children... he's winning the gene pool competition vs me with just two offspring, even if he looks like a train wreck while doing it.
Boskop Man didn't do so well in the long run - autism seems to be a milder version, but considering the common threads about dating on/., I wonder whether autistics will be able to reproduce copiously enough to compete in the gene pool.
What I'm reading there is that, in addition to skin color, we are sub-speciated by brain structure, and 4.5% of the "structurally different" population is having such severe challenges integrating into society that they're getting labels, therapies, etc.
People are (sometimes) upset about the fact that a disproportionate number of blacks end up in prison - but I don't think the number is anywhere near 4.5%.
"Therapy" taken too far is ostracizing in and of itself. Not being allowed into normal classrooms, spending many out of school hours locked in a room with therapists, etc. does not provide any opportunity to "learn past" the mind blindness. Theory goes that the professionals will "fix it" with their therapies. Yeah, OT is kinda fun, but I haven't seen that it's any more effective at teaching life skills than actually living life.
A lot depends on how you define "the condition." There's a (fairly large) population of people with brains structurally similar to the autistic population who are not diagnosed autistic because they can function without problems in society at large.
It doesn't mean that their brains are structurally the same as society at large.
Part of the official diagnosis criteria of any mental disorder is that it needs to cause a significant problem with normal functioning. If it does not cause a problem for you, you wont fit the criteria.
This is what I think is great about the brain scan test - it can show that people with "significant problems with normal functioning" have marked structural similarities to many unusual people who do not have significant problems, or are high performers. Rather than chucking the kids in a dark closet because they got a label that only applies to failures, you can identify them as someone with potential to do well, _if_ they can get past the developmental challenges.
I think part of what makes humans so dominant on the planet is our fragility and need for care during development, it selects for those who can, and gives tremendous advantages in other areas.
1. Technology is growing exponentially
2. The brain isn't some magical soul-endowed jesus box. It's a function of physics
PZ Myers threw a red herring there. What Kurzweil says is pretty reasonable, he used the total amount of information in the genome to get an upper limit estimate of the amount of library code.
First flaw I saw was the assumption that the genome data is not compressed. Natural selection favors compression of data due to reduced copying costs.
Myers was mostly on about the fact that the genetic code only tells how to start building a brain, not how a fully formed brain functions.
Kurzweil's bottomless optimism comes from an early belief in Moore's law and living to see that belief demonstrated as "truth." I can't say when non-singularity day will come, but somebody needs to tell him about the "past performance is no guarantee of future returns" clause in life's terms of use.
Civil disobedience is not a free activity. Sometimes it's worth paying the price for standing up for what you believe in. Rosa Parks was found guilty and assessed a fine. Does that mean she shouldn't have done what she did?
And what did she gain? As far as I can tell, by my experience, black people still sit in the back of the bus.
Yes, of course, they don't have to sit there, but most of them seem to.
You, not having these kinds of rules enforced on you, may not appreciate the difference. The difference is huge when you do if by choice instead of lack of choice.
I have a friend whose mother walked out of Poland to far western Germany for fear of similar things happening, 40 years earlier. So much for progress. Think they'll be any better by 2020?
Slashdot Mirror
I totally agree, re: HFCS isn't the devil from a scientific / metabolic standpoint, but it did happen to enter the food supply in a big way at the same time that "big tobacco" diversified and took over most of the processed foods. It is guilty by association, a great many things it appears in have been engineered by the same people who pioneered the science of addiction.
My conspiracy theory is that the corn subsidy is supported in large part by the processed food lobby who just want free raw materials to put into their boxes, so they are dominant in the price domain. Then, they engineer their foods to make them highly palatable - so they're cheap and they taste good, so good that it's hard to quit eating and buying them, especially since they're so darn cheap...
Can we really blame Mr. Pickens for trying to turn his billions into trillions with a sweetheart deal like water rights on free land? After all, think of all the jobs he would have created for all those folks clearing his land, erecting his windmills, maintaining all this infrastructure, hell, I bet he'd have shared almost 10% of the profits with the little people, if he was forced to.
Right wingers like to think that the rich don't look for handouts - but really they just go about it differently, instead of hitting you up for a buck at a stoplight, they think longer term.
Price is the only thing that has kept the Segway back.
Not only price of the device, but also price of rethinking the infrastructure that the Segway operates in - too fast for sidewalks, too vulnerable for car lanes, and too damn annoying to integrate into bike path traffic.
Yeah, I did software systems at a company for a decade, then we had a problem come along that just didn't want any software in it's controller, it was much better suited to analog control - 2 variables, inherently stable mechanics, the marketing guys still wanted a flat screen display on the controller to make it "look like a $30K device."
When you've only got one or two control loops, a microprocessor based solution is a lot more complex, costly and failure prone.
Silly mortals, wasting your puny lives on the time sink of debugging when you could be doing something real instead.
I agree with the article summary author - I can't believe that 29% of tweets get tangible responses - that's an astoundingly high number to me. How many highway billboards get tangible responses? Or paid political advertisements on television? We're a passive media consumer society, just because "media" is now being generated by your friends, I don't expect people to change and actually start engaging with every message that's flashed in front of their face.
I was thinking in terms of an easily planted bug-like device, one lump that you stick on and go. I have a LoJack tracking device installed in my car, it's tapping the battery power and well hidden, it also took the installer over 30 minutes to get it in. (It also uses lower frequency radio than GPS, and, so, can be hidden deeper inside.)
Airflow - the more visually hidden portions of exhaust pipes that might get a good GPS signal I would think are on top of the pipe, just under the (usually plastic) bumper cover. There's great airflow under the middle of the car, but I'm not sure how well you can lock 4 satellites from that position.
So, yes, you could stick a peltier power unit on the bottom of the exhaust pipe and run a wire up to a receiver that's far enough away that it won't get fried, but exhaust pipes tend to move a lot relative to the rest of the body, so the wire will need some slack (not to mention unusual heat tolerance in the insulation), and I think a rig like that would be a lot more obvious than something scotch-locked onto a wire somewhere with a pin through body-metal for ground return.
Then it ends up on the news, and people will actually hear about it.
As opposed to being buried in a /. story?
Kind of over-kill, anyplace the exhaust is "visible" to GPS signals, it's also fairly visible to casual observers. You'd also need a fair bit of airflow over the peltier device to provide a "cold side" for power, and getting GPS receive ICs that operate at 400F would not be cheap.
I think a button battery could probably provide tracking info every 10 minutes for at least a month.
The hardware can actually be quite cheap, the connection service plans cost more than most cell-phone data plans, and I'm sure it's a great deal more expensive if you need it to operate outside of cell tower coverage areas.
Unsolicited items sent to you in the mail are yours, free of charge. I believe that's a federal law.
So, if the FBI is delivering something to your vehicle... I'd be very tempted to remove it and re-gift it to a random semi-truck, but that would probably make me "more interesting" to them, which is probably a bad idea.
He's got every right (IMO) to do what he damn well pleased with it.
Yeah, and I have every right to put my 7 year old in a T-Shirt that says "Islam is of the Devil" and send him to school. Doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Two "infections" after 26 person-years of active web surfing isn't too bad. Compared to 26 years of suffering from the trials and tribulations of running active protection software, I think the two virus cleanings were much easier.
hard and crunchy on the outside, and soft and chewy on the inside is not security
Maybe not, but it has protected my home network since 1997, with 2 breaches, one in 2000, the other last week, both of which would have passed a desktop firewall too - it's hard to protect against user-launched malware. If something really nasty had gotten in, it could have been worse - those two breaches didn't spread within the internal network.
Scary thing about the GPS scheme is it's lower cost. Now, instead of locking up 1% of the population, we can afford to "tag" 25%.
Considering that we actually have the technology now to 1) locate, observe, and track Earth-crossing asteroids, 2) launch spacecraft to intercept asteroids, and 3) change the course of asteroids (thanks to the thermonuclear bomb), keeping our heads in the sand because we're too lazy to watch out for and deal with exterior threats is inexcusable.
BBC filmed some penguins fighting off seal attacks, the pitiful little black flipper trying to slap away the oncoming hungry seal looks like it has a better chance than we do of redirecting a direct hit, such as might come from a close approach redirection from Mars or even Ceres or similar planetoids. Those rocks have been orbiting for billions of years, so most of the radical restructuring of their orbits has happened already, the cloud is mostly stable, but once in awhile one of them does get flung in a crazy new direction.
If we've got tens of years to avert a near miss, we might pull that off with chemical rockets and H-bombs, but redirecting a K-T sized rock that's on a solid strike course within 90 days, sorry, no, should have built those lunar colonies sooner.
Sad thought #2, a successful redirection of a significantly sized rock could possibly de-stabilize the local cloud...
Take comfort in the fact that the dots on the video are thousands, perhaps millions, times scale size for the space they are presented in.
Space is big, really big. Still a scary video, though.
What I worry about in the gene pool competition is that I, and my neuro-similar homo sapiens, tend to only father as many children as we can responsibly provide for and raise to adulthood.
Just now, I'm thinking of an alcoholic loser I once knew with two ex-wives and four children... he's winning the gene pool competition vs me with just two offspring, even if he looks like a train wreck while doing it.
Boskop Man didn't do so well in the long run - autism seems to be a milder version, but considering the common threads about dating on /., I wonder whether autistics will be able to reproduce copiously enough to compete in the gene pool.
What I'm reading there is that, in addition to skin color, we are sub-speciated by brain structure, and 4.5% of the "structurally different" population is having such severe challenges integrating into society that they're getting labels, therapies, etc.
People are (sometimes) upset about the fact that a disproportionate number of blacks end up in prison - but I don't think the number is anywhere near 4.5%.
"Therapy" taken too far is ostracizing in and of itself. Not being allowed into normal classrooms, spending many out of school hours locked in a room with therapists, etc. does not provide any opportunity to "learn past" the mind blindness. Theory goes that the professionals will "fix it" with their therapies. Yeah, OT is kinda fun, but I haven't seen that it's any more effective at teaching life skills than actually living life.
A lot depends on how you define "the condition." There's a (fairly large) population of people with brains structurally similar to the autistic population who are not diagnosed autistic because they can function without problems in society at large.
It doesn't mean that their brains are structurally the same as society at large.
Part of the official diagnosis criteria of any mental disorder is that it needs to cause a significant problem with normal functioning. If it does not cause a problem for you, you wont fit the criteria.
This is what I think is great about the brain scan test - it can show that people with "significant problems with normal functioning" have marked structural similarities to many unusual people who do not have significant problems, or are high performers. Rather than chucking the kids in a dark closet because they got a label that only applies to failures, you can identify them as someone with potential to do well, _if_ they can get past the developmental challenges.
I think part of what makes humans so dominant on the planet is our fragility and need for care during development, it selects for those who can, and gives tremendous advantages in other areas.
PZ Myers threw a red herring there. What Kurzweil says is pretty reasonable, he used the total amount of information in the genome to get an upper limit estimate of the amount of library code.
First flaw I saw was the assumption that the genome data is not compressed. Natural selection favors compression of data due to reduced copying costs.
Myers was mostly on about the fact that the genetic code only tells how to start building a brain, not how a fully formed brain functions.
Kurzweil's bottomless optimism comes from an early belief in Moore's law and living to see that belief demonstrated as "truth." I can't say when non-singularity day will come, but somebody needs to tell him about the "past performance is no guarantee of future returns" clause in life's terms of use.
Civil disobedience is not a free activity. Sometimes it's worth paying the price for standing up for what you believe in. Rosa Parks was found guilty and assessed a fine. Does that mean she shouldn't have done what she did?
And what did she gain? As far as I can tell, by my experience, black people still sit in the back of the bus.
Yes, of course, they don't have to sit there, but most of them seem to.
You, not having these kinds of rules enforced on you, may not appreciate the difference. The difference is huge when you do if by choice instead of lack of choice.
I have a friend whose mother walked out of Poland to far western Germany for fear of similar things happening, 40 years earlier. So much for progress. Think they'll be any better by 2020?