As vix86 points out, it's not the electrical signals that matter. The human nervous system is not based on electricity, but on ions; the application of electricity to the skin will cause those ions to move, since they're charged particles, but the nervous system itself is purely chemical. For one thing, it doesn't have any closed circuits - the nerve system is entirely radiative, pointing outwards but with no equivalents of wires that come back. What matters here is the synapses. When these are ripped out of place by medical trauma, it's damn hard to fit them back together again - in the rest of the body, it works, but in the spinal cord there's other cells present that effectively inhibit this healing.
Nerves outside the spinal cord/brain have always had the capacity to regrow. I was run over 10 days ago, and suffered severe bruising down my left wrist; over the last week the bruise has been incredibly itchy at times. I've never had itchy bruises before, so I looked it up; apparently it's the regrowth of the nerves that were smashed up. I mentioned this to a colleague of mine who studied some bio at uni, and he agreed with it and cited a better example - he'd had a bad cut to the outside edge of his hand, and lost the feeling in his little finger. Over the year it took to heal, he would occasionally get itching and even burning sensations as the nerves regrew - as mentioned in TFA, it's the cells in the spinal system that inhibit the regrowth there, and it's the treatment of this inhibition that's being focused on here.
Just because the second law of thermodynamics is violated doesn't mean time breaks too. If I have two connected boxes with only 5 particles in each, on average and by the second law of thermodynamics you will see 5 particles in each box. Sometimes it'll be 6-4, occasionally 7-3. Once in a while, you'll get 10 particles in one and none in the other (barrack is a game that plays on this in a way, I just realised) - applying the second law of thermodynamics, your energy has moved to heat one box more than the other. Violation! At no point did time stand still, go backwards, or go round in circles. This doesn't work at higher scales because of probability - there's simply too much likelihood that the energy will tend to equalise. Nevertheless, it is physically possible for the energy to fluctuate contrary to the second law; the second law is statistical, not physical.
I can picture these 14-inch robots holding 12-inch knives, and toppling gently forwards because of the vast forwards weight; as added bonus you'd probably get the knives stuck in the ground. Only plain scary if you have *really* expensive flooring or carpets...;)
Have you ever come across someone under 14 online? The greater chance is that they will fit the greater internet fuckwad theory. Sure, you can learn to work with others, have good social skills, and so on. But nuance and so on are things that have to be learnt elsewhere and can only be vaguely applied to online interactions; the only way my italics work is because you can hear me emphasising that word in your head. Your click-of-a-button is a great idea if it can be made to work - but secondary socialisation (as soon as everyone knows that they're on this other irc channel too in another window) becomes completely and utterly invisible to the teacher. The mind of a child is not geared towards vast interest in learning - it's geared towards play. Straight off the top of my head, we've got: A few kids being able to provide the answers in the background to others, completely invisible to the teacher; the teacher believes the class all understand the subject and moves on. Kids find it a great trick, and only a few need to understand. Granted, that exists in some form in the classroom at the moment - mouthing answers, etc. But computers make it completely and utterly opaque; unless you want to go to the lengths of installing VNC on each computer to watch them to the same level as at school. You'll get the "invasion of privacy omg" crowd at you right away on that. Any lesser solution that only monitors a part of the screen doesn't solve the problem at all.
I know I'm being overdramatic to illustrate my point, but my experience of kids on the web is by and large hugely negative. Perhaps that'll be lessened by keeping them in a controlled environment and not letting them interact with the rest of us until they can prove they have the right social skills; perhaps it won't. And I know there's also fuckwards of all ages around; it's just disproportionately biased towards younger users.
Fortunately for us, Nostradamus' dates for the apocalypse have gone by without anyone noticing. 26th July 1999 was the major one; and there was also one around a month ago I believe? that was supposed to be the alternate date if you read one of the bits in the prophecy in a different way. Hey, we're still alive! (Unless we're now a variation on sinfest's brains in a vat;). His next prediction seems to be the year 3797...
Wha?! Just because one thing is 100 times more likely to kill you doesn't mean the other is trivial. If it can kill you, it can kill you. I'm probably 100 times more likely to get killed while riding my bike than while walking along the road. That doesn't mean I don't still take care while I'm walking - I'm 100 times less likely to be killed, but like hell am I going to stop looking both ways. The same is true for this - if they manage to get it into space, then having taken no measures to stop the station getting smashed by space junk seems like an incredibly stupid idea.
Of course the stock market can "lose" money, when people pull their money out. How do you think the money got there in the first place? People put money in. People pull money out all the time; if your share price doubles, you slice a little off the top and buy yourself something new. People also put money in - end of year bonus, or accumulation of salary, sure, I'll put some more in. The problem happens when everyone realises or thinks at once that their stocks are slipping, and quickly sell. They get their money, and pull it out of the market. The price drops. Normally that's just part of trading; but in slides, where everyone is trying to pull out before they devalue, then hell yes the stock market loses. Technically there's still the same amount of money around, it's just relocated to the hands of the investors - but that means it has been pulled out of the companies and the shares they are trading. The money from shares is what companies spend to build up and invest in labour, machinery, training - the company tells the investor it intends to make far more money back. But - unfortunately - when the investors sell their shares, some of those are - by law - bought back by the company as a return on their promise. The company then has a lower budget to play with; and if there's a slide on, the company has to pay out too much to stay alive, considering half of the money is already sunk into wages, training, capex, etc. This is also recognised by traders - even if the stock price drops by nn% the company might go bust!
So no - the stock market can indeed lose 'anything'. It's true that it's a zero sum game, since the money has just moved around - BUT in a stock market slide or crash, the money is moving round in a disastrous way.
If it wasn't important to them, why did they start in the first place?
What on earth are you talking about? Just because someone declines an adminship or other position doesn't render their edits worthless. The whole point of WP is that it just looks for contribution of knowledge. If you edit anonymously or are spotted as a vandal, then your edits will be treated with suspicion, but past that an editor's 100th edit is equal to their 100,000th, ignoring better control of the syntax. It doesn't matter if someone is an admin, arbitrator, whatever. Me? I don't care to be an admin; the only tool I'd use is blocking vandals, for which there is a place to report vandals to admins; therefore the post of admin is near useless to me. Therefore, paraphrasing your words, the role is not important to me. Why did I start in the first place? The question is utterly and totally irrelevant. My contributions to WP are still useful. There is no obligation on me to continue editing, nor any guilt when I take holidays and don't edit for a couple of weeks. Admins are so numerous that one stepping down out of choice is accepted as a choice; there is no pressure for an individual to hold that role, because there's enough people around who are able to take up the slack, not to mention the influx of additional admins each week.
The only sentence of yours I haven't picked apart yet is the one in the middle - accepting roles that you wouldn't otherwise take, to justify the time spent so far. I haven't picked on it because I find the thought near incomprehensible, and only from the following line can I understand what you seem to mean. That's answered above; but for the most part you seem to be completely and simply wrong. If it was a corporate environment, with salary and bonuses and options derivative of a position, then yes, there is a pressure to take a job you might not feel comfortable with. Wikipedia? It's free. None of the contributors get paid for it; there's a handful of people doing back-end stuff like server maintenance, and beyond that I believe the main drain for the money that is contributed by editors in the fundraising cycles is to pay for hardware and bandwidth.
My contributor ID there is in the 116xxx range, iirc. The only 'hierarchy' in what must be nearer 200k users now are the various positions such as adminship and the various moderation positions, and the only privileges granted are more powerful tools - simply because the power of those tools is enough that they can be severely misweilded, and the voting structure set up is in place to get an overview of whether the community believes an individual capable of holding those tools. Any user can vote for or against the acceptance of a user's nomination for adminship. It's not picked by admins. And even when someone is given that mop and bucket or those keys, the only reward for those positions is job satisfaction and the occasional compliment. The only reward for editing the article namespace is satisfaction that the project is getting better, and the occasional compliment. Implying that a user must advance through the different levels of responsibility to be satisfied is... just wrong.
I can't find any inkling of truth in your post. Please try again.
Handed? Offered. As you must know, adminship and so on on wikipedia are granted by nomination and acceptance, pending a majority of community trust. Anyone can turn down that nomination for any reason they want, including "I just don't want to".
If you're reliable, trustworthy, competent, and are happy to wear those hats, you will get your hats. The reward for a job well done is the offer of another three jobs, which don't affect your current job if you decline them. It's not like a company, with an upwards hierarchy. When it comes down to it, an anonIP's edits are as valid as yours, with the only difference being that you've accepted other tools to handle the misedits and issues from other users. Adminship on Wikipedia is not glorious - it's a janitor role. That's embodied in the 'you have been entrusted with the mop and bucket'. Both that and the bunches of keys you get later with other positions are your own choice, and utterly rejectable if you don't like it. Don't make out like it's a chore that was forced onto you for doing good edits.
How often do you see cities created? For the greatest part, they arise out of towns; the single counterexample I can think of in the UK is Milton Keynes, which was built because labour was cheap and houses were needed at the same time. Your idea - while nominally good - requires the creation of a city, and would be incredibly expensive to apply to any current one, since you'd have to dig up the entire city to install it. Perhaps if you just converted any section that needed redoing anyway; it is a nice idea, but it's just very difficult to implement.
crap, I forgot my first/b. Sorry for the bad bolding.
Re:And this is indeed a serious problem with EBay.
on
How to Win on Ebay: Snipe
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What? No. If I will pay up to $100 for an item on eBay, but the current bid is $10, then I'll enter $100. My bid will show as $12 or whatever minimum increment it is. If someone bids $20, my $100 bid trumps them and becomes listed as $22. If someone snipes in the last second at $50, I'll win the bid with $52 - without having had to pay any attention to the auction past my original bide. If someone snipes $102 in the last second, then they're paying more than I was willing to pay for the item anyway, and so should win the auction.
Why on earth do people bid over and over again, or wake up at a specific time? The eBay system is set up so you can put down the single bid you are willing to pay for an item. The automatic system does it for you. It doesn't show anyone what your maximum amount is; in fact the system is set up to the advantage of the buyer, because if I'm willing to pay $100 but the second bidder only bids $20, then the seller only gets $22 of what I was willing to pay and I keep the rest in my pocket. The problem with eBay is that people treat it as a conventional bid, believing for some reason that you should bid over and over again, just above the opposition. This is actually bad for the buyer, because it tends to draw people into bidding higher than they would originally peg as their maximum.
If you use the system as it is designed, then you cannot be "sniped". You can be outbid by someone who was willing to pay more than you, and it doesn't actually matter whether that happens a second after you bid or a second before the auction closes. If you're outbid, then someone was willing to pay more than you were; simple. However the masses simply do not comprehend this and continue bidding by the rules from another system, which are simply wrong here.
Sniping works against those who don't understand eBay.
If you put a wire with no current in a fluctuating electromagnetic field, it will register a tiny signal. I call utter bullcrap that it'll effect the flight controls; if my lights wavered while I played games over my home wifi, or if *anything at all* changed when I send or recieve big files, I'd be slightly inclined to believe you. Wired systems carrying current simply have far to great a signal to noise ratio to be affected at all by this stuff; that holds true for the thousands of radio stations, hundreds of millions of cell phones and the supporting equipment. The only thing you see any effect from is when a phone is very close to a speaker. If anyone used analog electrical signals, this might be a reasonable worry - but for the digital technology of today, it's just plain wrong.
How on earth did they manage to spend a *billion* on wifi? The systems in the plan are still wired, so you should only need to shield the cockpit and any more backwards-mounted instruments if you're worried that wifi operation at a completely different frequency to aircraft systems will affect the instruments, autopilot or ILS in any way. I'm astounded that it even cost a few million, let alone a billion. What the heck have they been doing with all that money?
And so we would see the swing back from capitalism towards communism...
It's difficult to use the word 'communism' here - I expect there'll probably be a reply of something along the old lines of "filthy commies" or whatever biased crud they came up with when the cold war was on and more leverage was needed - but the base concepts of communism, of sharing the wealth to those who need it, are becoming interestingly intermingled. It turns capitalism into more of a game - whee I made more money than Mr. Xyzzy, but in the end we're all sharing it out again so we can play again. Granted, there's too much complexity and that analogy is too simple, but there's definitely a glimmer of community there. I'm too young to know and too politically apathetic to really care what was wrong with communism 30 years ago; maybe there was too much enforcement or disbalance of power, that seems to be the main image; maybe it was something else. But there's too much residual resistance to the word 'communism' - remember that other outstems of the word are 'community' or 'communal'.
I'm not sure that the parent post meant it that way; and most posts in the thread seem to be heading along the lines of "this is a laudible idea, good on you Mr. Warren!" but it's interesting how the second most successful player in the capitalist system has gone off the scale and come up on the other side with vast vast donations.
I'm making this post just before I go to sleep, hopefully I haven't rambled/burbled too much or stopped making sense halfway through:)
You can get anything published in scientific journals, so long as you put it in context. However the speed with which those articles get taken out of context is amazing.
At the same time, further spinouts wouldn't happen nearly as much, because the central funding from windows would no longer reach other potential departments. Your plan may work short-term, but cripples the ability of a large company to move bulk quantities of cash in interesting directions.
Re:A Collection of Videos on /. ???
on
Wii-mote In Action
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
{{subst:Sofixit}}...
http://mirrordot.org/ as usual. If you've been here long enough to know about the slashdot effect, you've been here long enough to have heard of mirrordot, coral cache, etc etc, rather than just waving at the article server.
Huh... you don't want any recordings of your own girlfriend (recordings of her are a bad thing)? Or you don't want anyone else to look at her, ever?
Remember she's her own person, and if she's wearing clothes that show any skin she's wearing look-at-me clothes. Granted it's look don't touch, but getting your back hairs up simply at the thought of anyone finding your girlfriend hot enough to glance at is both worrying and hilarious.
Permanent it can't be, because of the way the eye ages. However as the process becomes cheaper and cheaper it may be a viable option to have it done multiple times - slightly overcorrect, allow the aging of the eye to lapse through and out the other side; rinse, repeat. Currently only an option for the very rich; but with advances in the field improving rapidly (astigmatism can now be corrected where it couldn't 3-5 years ago; I think they're up to being able to fix 7 of the eye's 12 parameters) and prices going down (the cost of the research and the outlay for the machines are presumably recouped now, as can be seen by the lowering prices to attract more people) it may well be a viable option later.
Me, I'm 22. I got my eyes done last year because the cost of glasses is high enough that the treatment is seriously offset, and have healthy enough eyes of the right shape/type/etc that I have fantastic vision now, 99% or more of perfect. To those who can afford it early, it's a great saving over time; I even got it done at a clinic with 10000+ treatments rather than on the high street store that was doing it at half the price, because they're the only eyes I have. But until my eyes start to deteriorate - 20 years at least, on the going average - I can now see everywhere that I couldn't before, in the rain, in any steamy room, in bed. Add that to the cost saving, and permanence becomes irrelevant - even when my eyes do start to go, they'll start going from 0/0 instead of -2.5/-3.5.
Well, Monsanto's crops are designed so the plants produced by their seeds are sterile, i.e. bad choice for the seed bank anyway. That's giving a man his proverbial fish.
Slashdot Mirror
As vix86 points out, it's not the electrical signals that matter. The human nervous system is not based on electricity, but on ions; the application of electricity to the skin will cause those ions to move, since they're charged particles, but the nervous system itself is purely chemical. For one thing, it doesn't have any closed circuits - the nerve system is entirely radiative, pointing outwards but with no equivalents of wires that come back. What matters here is the synapses. When these are ripped out of place by medical trauma, it's damn hard to fit them back together again - in the rest of the body, it works, but in the spinal cord there's other cells present that effectively inhibit this healing.
Nerves outside the spinal cord/brain have always had the capacity to regrow. I was run over 10 days ago, and suffered severe bruising down my left wrist; over the last week the bruise has been incredibly itchy at times. I've never had itchy bruises before, so I looked it up; apparently it's the regrowth of the nerves that were smashed up. I mentioned this to a colleague of mine who studied some bio at uni, and he agreed with it and cited a better example - he'd had a bad cut to the outside edge of his hand, and lost the feeling in his little finger. Over the year it took to heal, he would occasionally get itching and even burning sensations as the nerves regrew - as mentioned in TFA, it's the cells in the spinal system that inhibit the regrowth there, and it's the treatment of this inhibition that's being focused on here.
Just because the second law of thermodynamics is violated doesn't mean time breaks too. If I have two connected boxes with only 5 particles in each, on average and by the second law of thermodynamics you will see 5 particles in each box. Sometimes it'll be 6-4, occasionally 7-3. Once in a while, you'll get 10 particles in one and none in the other (barrack is a game that plays on this in a way, I just realised) - applying the second law of thermodynamics, your energy has moved to heat one box more than the other. Violation! At no point did time stand still, go backwards, or go round in circles. This doesn't work at higher scales because of probability - there's simply too much likelihood that the energy will tend to equalise. Nevertheless, it is physically possible for the energy to fluctuate contrary to the second law; the second law is statistical, not physical.
I can picture these 14-inch robots holding 12-inch knives, and toppling gently forwards because of the vast forwards weight; as added bonus you'd probably get the knives stuck in the ground. Only plain scary if you have *really* expensive flooring or carpets... ;)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
Have you ever come across someone under 14 online? The greater chance is that they will fit the greater internet fuckwad theory. Sure, you can learn to work with others, have good social skills, and so on. But nuance and so on are things that have to be learnt elsewhere and can only be vaguely applied to online interactions; the only way my italics work is because you can hear me emphasising that word in your head. Your click-of-a-button is a great idea if it can be made to work - but secondary socialisation (as soon as everyone knows that they're on this other irc channel too in another window) becomes completely and utterly invisible to the teacher. The mind of a child is not geared towards vast interest in learning - it's geared towards play. Straight off the top of my head, we've got: A few kids being able to provide the answers in the background to others, completely invisible to the teacher; the teacher believes the class all understand the subject and moves on. Kids find it a great trick, and only a few need to understand. Granted, that exists in some form in the classroom at the moment - mouthing answers, etc. But computers make it completely and utterly opaque; unless you want to go to the lengths of installing VNC on each computer to watch them to the same level as at school. You'll get the "invasion of privacy omg" crowd at you right away on that. Any lesser solution that only monitors a part of the screen doesn't solve the problem at all.
I know I'm being overdramatic to illustrate my point, but my experience of kids on the web is by and large hugely negative. Perhaps that'll be lessened by keeping them in a controlled environment and not letting them interact with the rest of us until they can prove they have the right social skills; perhaps it won't. And I know there's also fuckwards of all ages around; it's just disproportionately biased towards younger users.
Fortunately for us, Nostradamus' dates for the apocalypse have gone by without anyone noticing. 26th July 1999 was the major one; and there was also one around a month ago I believe? that was supposed to be the alternate date if you read one of the bits in the prophecy in a different way. Hey, we're still alive! (Unless we're now a variation on sinfest's brains in a vat ;). His next prediction seems to be the year 3797...
Wha?! Just because one thing is 100 times more likely to kill you doesn't mean the other is trivial. If it can kill you, it can kill you. I'm probably 100 times more likely to get killed while riding my bike than while walking along the road. That doesn't mean I don't still take care while I'm walking - I'm 100 times less likely to be killed, but like hell am I going to stop looking both ways. The same is true for this - if they manage to get it into space, then having taken no measures to stop the station getting smashed by space junk seems like an incredibly stupid idea.
Of course the stock market can "lose" money, when people pull their money out. How do you think the money got there in the first place? People put money in. People pull money out all the time; if your share price doubles, you slice a little off the top and buy yourself something new. People also put money in - end of year bonus, or accumulation of salary, sure, I'll put some more in. The problem happens when everyone realises or thinks at once that their stocks are slipping, and quickly sell. They get their money, and pull it out of the market. The price drops. Normally that's just part of trading; but in slides, where everyone is trying to pull out before they devalue, then hell yes the stock market loses. Technically there's still the same amount of money around, it's just relocated to the hands of the investors - but that means it has been pulled out of the companies and the shares they are trading. The money from shares is what companies spend to build up and invest in labour, machinery, training - the company tells the investor it intends to make far more money back. But - unfortunately - when the investors sell their shares, some of those are - by law - bought back by the company as a return on their promise. The company then has a lower budget to play with; and if there's a slide on, the company has to pay out too much to stay alive, considering half of the money is already sunk into wages, training, capex, etc. This is also recognised by traders - even if the stock price drops by nn% the company might go bust!
So no - the stock market can indeed lose 'anything'. It's true that it's a zero sum game, since the money has just moved around - BUT in a stock market slide or crash, the money is moving round in a disastrous way.
Er, never mind... D'oh :(
What? Bacterial power? The article is about building nanowires, nothing in there at all about power at all...
If it wasn't important to them, why did they start in the first place?
What on earth are you talking about? Just because someone declines an adminship or other position doesn't render their edits worthless. The whole point of WP is that it just looks for contribution of knowledge. If you edit anonymously or are spotted as a vandal, then your edits will be treated with suspicion, but past that an editor's 100th edit is equal to their 100,000th, ignoring better control of the syntax. It doesn't matter if someone is an admin, arbitrator, whatever. Me? I don't care to be an admin; the only tool I'd use is blocking vandals, for which there is a place to report vandals to admins; therefore the post of admin is near useless to me. Therefore, paraphrasing your words, the role is not important to me. Why did I start in the first place? The question is utterly and totally irrelevant. My contributions to WP are still useful. There is no obligation on me to continue editing, nor any guilt when I take holidays and don't edit for a couple of weeks. Admins are so numerous that one stepping down out of choice is accepted as a choice; there is no pressure for an individual to hold that role, because there's enough people around who are able to take up the slack, not to mention the influx of additional admins each week.
The only sentence of yours I haven't picked apart yet is the one in the middle - accepting roles that you wouldn't otherwise take, to justify the time spent so far. I haven't picked on it because I find the thought near incomprehensible, and only from the following line can I understand what you seem to mean. That's answered above; but for the most part you seem to be completely and simply wrong. If it was a corporate environment, with salary and bonuses and options derivative of a position, then yes, there is a pressure to take a job you might not feel comfortable with. Wikipedia? It's free. None of the contributors get paid for it; there's a handful of people doing back-end stuff like server maintenance, and beyond that I believe the main drain for the money that is contributed by editors in the fundraising cycles is to pay for hardware and bandwidth.
My contributor ID there is in the 116xxx range, iirc. The only 'hierarchy' in what must be nearer 200k users now are the various positions such as adminship and the various moderation positions, and the only privileges granted are more powerful tools - simply because the power of those tools is enough that they can be severely misweilded, and the voting structure set up is in place to get an overview of whether the community believes an individual capable of holding those tools. Any user can vote for or against the acceptance of a user's nomination for adminship. It's not picked by admins. And even when someone is given that mop and bucket or those keys, the only reward for those positions is job satisfaction and the occasional compliment. The only reward for editing the article namespace is satisfaction that the project is getting better, and the occasional compliment. Implying that a user must advance through the different levels of responsibility to be satisfied is... just wrong.
I can't find any inkling of truth in your post. Please try again.
Handed? Offered. As you must know, adminship and so on on wikipedia are granted by nomination and acceptance, pending a majority of community trust. Anyone can turn down that nomination for any reason they want, including "I just don't want to".
If you're reliable, trustworthy, competent, and are happy to wear those hats, you will get your hats. The reward for a job well done is the offer of another three jobs, which don't affect your current job if you decline them. It's not like a company, with an upwards hierarchy. When it comes down to it, an anonIP's edits are as valid as yours, with the only difference being that you've accepted other tools to handle the misedits and issues from other users. Adminship on Wikipedia is not glorious - it's a janitor role. That's embodied in the 'you have been entrusted with the mop and bucket'. Both that and the bunches of keys you get later with other positions are your own choice, and utterly rejectable if you don't like it. Don't make out like it's a chore that was forced onto you for doing good edits.
How often do you see cities created? For the greatest part, they arise out of towns; the single counterexample I can think of in the UK is Milton Keynes, which was built because labour was cheap and houses were needed at the same time. Your idea - while nominally good - requires the creation of a city, and would be incredibly expensive to apply to any current one, since you'd have to dig up the entire city to install it. Perhaps if you just converted any section that needed redoing anyway; it is a nice idea, but it's just very difficult to implement.
crap, I forgot my first /b. Sorry for the bad bolding.
What? No. If I will pay up to $100 for an item on eBay, but the current bid is $10, then I'll enter $100. My bid will show as $12 or whatever minimum increment it is. If someone bids $20, my $100 bid trumps them and becomes listed as $22. If someone snipes in the last second at $50, I'll win the bid with $52 - without having had to pay any attention to the auction past my original bide. If someone snipes $102 in the last second, then they're paying more than I was willing to pay for the item anyway, and so should win the auction.
Why on earth do people bid over and over again, or wake up at a specific time? The eBay system is set up so you can put down the single bid you are willing to pay for an item. The automatic system does it for you. It doesn't show anyone what your maximum amount is; in fact the system is set up to the advantage of the buyer, because if I'm willing to pay $100 but the second bidder only bids $20, then the seller only gets $22 of what I was willing to pay and I keep the rest in my pocket. The problem with eBay is that people treat it as a conventional bid, believing for some reason that you should bid over and over again, just above the opposition. This is actually bad for the buyer, because it tends to draw people into bidding higher than they would originally peg as their maximum.
If you use the system as it is designed, then you cannot be "sniped". You can be outbid by someone who was willing to pay more than you, and it doesn't actually matter whether that happens a second after you bid or a second before the auction closes. If you're outbid, then someone was willing to pay more than you were; simple. However the masses simply do not comprehend this and continue bidding by the rules from another system, which are simply wrong here.
Sniping works against those who don't understand eBay.
If you put a wire with no current in a fluctuating electromagnetic field, it will register a tiny signal. I call utter bullcrap that it'll effect the flight controls; if my lights wavered while I played games over my home wifi, or if *anything at all* changed when I send or recieve big files, I'd be slightly inclined to believe you. Wired systems carrying current simply have far to great a signal to noise ratio to be affected at all by this stuff; that holds true for the thousands of radio stations, hundreds of millions of cell phones and the supporting equipment. The only thing you see any effect from is when a phone is very close to a speaker. If anyone used analog electrical signals, this might be a reasonable worry - but for the digital technology of today, it's just plain wrong.
How on earth did they manage to spend a *billion* on wifi? The systems in the plan are still wired, so you should only need to shield the cockpit and any more backwards-mounted instruments if you're worried that wifi operation at a completely different frequency to aircraft systems will affect the instruments, autopilot or ILS in any way. I'm astounded that it even cost a few million, let alone a billion. What the heck have they been doing with all that money?
And so we would see the swing back from capitalism towards communism...
:)
It's difficult to use the word 'communism' here - I expect there'll probably be a reply of something along the old lines of "filthy commies" or whatever biased crud they came up with when the cold war was on and more leverage was needed - but the base concepts of communism, of sharing the wealth to those who need it, are becoming interestingly intermingled. It turns capitalism into more of a game - whee I made more money than Mr. Xyzzy, but in the end we're all sharing it out again so we can play again. Granted, there's too much complexity and that analogy is too simple, but there's definitely a glimmer of community there. I'm too young to know and too politically apathetic to really care what was wrong with communism 30 years ago; maybe there was too much enforcement or disbalance of power, that seems to be the main image; maybe it was something else. But there's too much residual resistance to the word 'communism' - remember that other outstems of the word are 'community' or 'communal'.
I'm not sure that the parent post meant it that way; and most posts in the thread seem to be heading along the lines of "this is a laudible idea, good on you Mr. Warren!" but it's interesting how the second most successful player in the capitalist system has gone off the scale and come up on the other side with vast vast donations.
I'm making this post just before I go to sleep, hopefully I haven't rambled/burbled too much or stopped making sense halfway through
You can get anything published in scientific journals, so long as you put it in context. However the speed with which those articles get taken out of context is amazing.
s sionid=H0UDXCSJ0NINFQFIQMGCFFOAVCBQUIV0?xml=/opini on/2006/04/09/do0907.xml.
Go read http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jse
At the same time, further spinouts wouldn't happen nearly as much, because the central funding from windows would no longer reach other potential departments. Your plan may work short-term, but cripples the ability of a large company to move bulk quantities of cash in interesting directions.
{{subst:Sofixit}}...
http://mirrordot.org/ as usual. If you've been here long enough to know about the slashdot effect, you've been here long enough to have heard of mirrordot, coral cache, etc etc, rather than just waving at the article server.
Huh... you don't want any recordings of your own girlfriend (recordings of her are a bad thing)? Or you don't want anyone else to look at her, ever?
Remember she's her own person, and if she's wearing clothes that show any skin she's wearing look-at-me clothes. Granted it's look don't touch, but getting your back hairs up simply at the thought of anyone finding your girlfriend hot enough to glance at is both worrying and hilarious.
This is a bad thing?
Permanent it can't be, because of the way the eye ages. However as the process becomes cheaper and cheaper it may be a viable option to have it done multiple times - slightly overcorrect, allow the aging of the eye to lapse through and out the other side; rinse, repeat. Currently only an option for the very rich; but with advances in the field improving rapidly (astigmatism can now be corrected where it couldn't 3-5 years ago; I think they're up to being able to fix 7 of the eye's 12 parameters) and prices going down (the cost of the research and the outlay for the machines are presumably recouped now, as can be seen by the lowering prices to attract more people) it may well be a viable option later.
Me, I'm 22. I got my eyes done last year because the cost of glasses is high enough that the treatment is seriously offset, and have healthy enough eyes of the right shape/type/etc that I have fantastic vision now, 99% or more of perfect. To those who can afford it early, it's a great saving over time; I even got it done at a clinic with 10000+ treatments rather than on the high street store that was doing it at half the price, because they're the only eyes I have. But until my eyes start to deteriorate - 20 years at least, on the going average - I can now see everywhere that I couldn't before, in the rain, in any steamy room, in bed. Add that to the cost saving, and permanence becomes irrelevant - even when my eyes do start to go, they'll start going from 0/0 instead of -2.5/-3.5.
Well, Monsanto's crops are designed so the plants produced by their seeds are sterile, i.e. bad choice for the seed bank anyway. That's giving a man his proverbial fish.