Why would Heinz et al bother paying extra so their customers don't waste as much of their product [ie, so they don't return the store and buy more sooner]?
Sure you can, I did just that earlier today. That advice assumes that the sun isn't being obstructed by clouds or heavy cloud cover. There's no actual difference between clouds and glass blocking out most of the light. I was able to view it just fine with no eye protection and no squinting, and not even the after image that you would get if you looked directly at a light bulb.
And last I checked, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, which means that Asia is at the tail end of observing things rather than the beginning. Unless of course there's a secondary eclipse that I'm not aware of that happens tonight as well. But, I saw one this morning in China and I doubt very much that there's going to be another one tomorrow.
You, sir, are wrong on both points.
Enjoy your eye damage... your retina has no pain receptors and clouds selectively block different wavelengths. Check out the UV part of the water absorption (I should say transmission) spectrum!
I think it's pretty clear to any reasonable individual that significant adult assistance is involved when a 15-year-old develops an advanced medical diagnostic for pancreatic cancer.
These kids are the intellectual equivalent of Miss Universe contestants: In addition to being somewhat skilled, they are highly competitive, aggressive, have a good spin campaign and lots of behind-the-scenes coaching. And while they all probably want world peace, at least they don't all have breast implants.
The primary purpose would be to catch or build cases against drug traffickers, but at a Utah Legislature committee meeting Wednesday, the sheriffs and a DEA representative described how the scanners also could be used to catch kidnappers and violent criminals.
How long will it be until they lower the freeway speed limit "for safety," place two scanners a few miles apart on the highway, use the data to calculate your average velocity, and then send you an automated speeding ticket?
Of course, the primary purpose of the system will be to catch drug traffickers and child molesters for your safety, but the state would like the secondary objective to be profit.
This reeks of a government scare tactic to increase state authority at the expense of citizen privacy. If law enforcement wants to build a case against someone, they should either do some detective work or get a warrant. Citizen tracking is not a palatable in a free and open country.
PROTIP: NONE OF THEM DO! If that was true you would have to do the same every time you opened a couple cans of tuna or catfood.
The packages do all have obscure warnings about the bulb containing mercury, that it should be handled carefully because mercury is harmful, and that "special precautions" should be taken if it is broken. But they do not specify what those precautions are. It stinks of legalese and is annoying to consumers. It's even more annoying that I have to take the bulb somewhere to recycle it: given that the government has essentially mandated that we need to use these things, they should find a way to allow mercury bulb recycling from our homes.
I don't want an easy-to-break product in my house that requires me to evacuate and vent a room for 15 minutes if I break it. And then I have to worry about the powder? What if I have a pregnant wife or young children in the house? Either take the mercury out of the bulb or armor it so that it can survive a 9 foot drop.
And despite the claims that they last "up to 10x longer" than a regular incandescent, I have found that they last just about as long during normal usage.
It's a scam product that costs more and doesn't work as well, like low-fat cheese. You want to save the environment? Have less children and learn to like a dark house.
Because their friends who like burgers are also going there for lunch. The ability to placate the healthy eater or vegeterian in a lunch group has become vital to the lunch menu, particularly in urban business areas. If you don't have these items, you get Veto'd by one person out of six, and you lose the whole group to some place the one can settle for.
Hmm..I dunno. In my experience, if you have one out of the 6 that is that fucking picky...then you rapidly become a group of '5' that can go anywhere to eat a nice lunch.
I don't mind someone being a vegan, but they certainly aren't welcome to severely limit choices of restaurants for a nice work lunch outing. They're the outlier....let them deal with it.
Your statement does not account for extenuating circumstances such as that person being (1) your boss or (2) extremely attractive.
To be fair, if vaccines caused autism, I would probably opt out of most vaccines, because most kids don't die of whooping cough or scarlet fever, but autism is forever.
Death, mental retardation, and physical disfigurement is forever too.
Vaccines prevent your child from getting diseases that cause those three effects. The only reason that not getting vaccinated is a tractable option for some parents is because those diseases have been mostly eradicated by years of getting everyone vaccinated.
People avoiding vaccinations are banking on the fact that everyone else is vaccinated. That works in developed countries, for the most part. Go live in a third-world country and see how long you last though.
I do not think that intentionally unvaccinated children should be allowed to live in America.
Are you a parent and married? Usually, "mom knows best" and gets her way when it comes to the kids. You can try to fight it, but it'll be a losing battle.
That's why you don't marry woman who is both stupid and controlling... her scientifically deficient choices can naturally select against your offspring.
(See how I brought that ultimate responsibility back on you?)
Also, if you really feel strongly about it, you can always take the kids to the doctor for shots when she isn't home. But I wouldn't recommend going behind your wife's back if you are too much of a puss to stand up to her face.
(And yes, I am married with a kid, who gets his shots.)
Having done construction work in polar regions, I can't imagine how much money and energy must have gone into that thing. Cool, yes, but how much useful, peaceful scientific research could have been conducted there for the same budget ?!? Compare to now where instead instead of wasting it on useless and scary bombs, we waste it on useless and scary traders. Hmmm.
A more contemporary question is how much peaceful scientific research could have been conducted in the US for the cost of military operations in Afganistan and Iraq.
I'm not interested in a computer that can't compile. I deal with it on my iPhone because it's a phone ( but it's really a computer that's faster than my 10yo box), but I'm not going to buy a Mac and a $99 development license just to make a simple RPG assistant (I've been making them with JavaScript as a result; at least they didn't strip all programs that can interpret code).
While your post is off-topic, I respect your principles. But most iPad users don't give a hoot about compiling code for their iPads. Also, the plenty of developers who do are willing to pay for the development license.
You could say the same thing about cars: You won't buy any car that you can't fix without tools, because you are too cheap to spend money on tools! (But you bought a moped because you need to get around.)
Of course, if you drive more, you'll bring the cost per mile down.
Buying a high-performance sports car for everyday driving is like using an F-22 Raptor instead of a Jumbo jet for commuting. Or, like marrying a supermodel instead of a normal woman.
Of course it isn't going to be cost effective or reliable! But you have significantly more performance at your command.
You aren't spending your money properly if you don't use (or at least appreciate) the extra performance and complain then about the cost.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1
What about when it all became worthless because those silly companies all dried up and blew away when people finally realized their business plans were idiotic? Is the government going to refund billions of dollar in taxes when that happens?
No, they'll just have the IRS fine the taxees for fraud (claiming false profits)!
I really don't get the irrational hatred for lawyers on Slashdot.
The public generally hates any profession that gets a 30% cut on winnings that most people feel were entitled to them anyway.
They feel that lawyers have made the legal system so complicated that it is impossible to navigate it without their help, ensuring their eventual profit.
They also hate the fact that most politicians are lawyers, and that they have similarly made the government so complex and expensive.
Warranted or not, that's the plainly stated sentiment.
To put it in perspective, a Volt battery has roughly 16 KWh of energy stored. An gas tank on an equivalent sized car is roughly 10 gallons. At 36.6 KWh/gal, that's 360 Kwh of energy, or more than 22X the energy of the battery. Now, assuming that all goes up at once, which one do you want to be near? Couple that with the fact you can't easily set off a lithium battery fire with an open flame or a spark, and I know which odds I'll be taking.
Your logic is flawed!
Gasoline would need to be premixed with enough oxygen to "go up all at once." In a real world situation, this is not possible. The oxygen deficiency would severely limit the magnitude of any explosion (sorry Hollywood). The combustion could burn someone trapped in the car to death, however.
An impacted lithium-ion battery, on the other hand, could actually dump most of it's energy at once through a series of shorts. This could electrocute people and then cause an explosion (discharge-driven blast wave). Then the lithium could react with atmospheric oxygen (again oxygen-deficiency could be a rate limiting step) to burn. Lithium fires burn hot, are very difficult to extinguish, and could ignite any gasoline nearby.
Personally, I would buy a hybrid to save money on gas. But I would rather be sitting in a gasoline-only car during a severe accident!
Personally, I would prefer DRM-free PDFs or interactive and cross platform HTML 5 "books" that didn't mandate a platform.
The epub format (which iBooks uses, I'm not sure about iBooks2, we'll have to see) is HTML5.
And trust me, you don't want PDF for e-books. I have a couple PDF books alongside epub e-books on my iPad and gosh does PDF suck. It doesn't re-flow when I change from portrait to landscape, and it doesn't re-scale text, only zooms on a page level.
Is re-flowing really a requirement?
The text in paper books doesn't re-flow either AND you can't even scale it up by tapping it. Yet it has been acceptable technology for a really really long time because it is an imperfect, yet robust system.
You people aren't going to be happy until they can just implant the information directly into your brains!
It's hard to do that nowadays with Apple's packaging and the store's anti-theft procedures! They basically unlock the iPad for you and then escort you to the purchase counter.
Journal of negative results will never become widespread because the scientific funding system does not favor it. It's a fantasy of a wide-eyed postdoc, who has yet to experience the cutthroat realities of the scientific funding system in the US. (I know this because I, and may others, used to have the same idea.) Here's why the concept is fatally flawed:
The OP notes that your scientific colleagues are also your competitors. He then notes that if you don't report your scientific failures, that your colleagues will likely repeat them. When completing for limited funding, why would you give your competitors an advantage? Wouldn't you rather they spend 2 months of their resources and $50K doing something you will set them back?
Also, let's say that you had 20 articles published in the Journal of Negative Results and two published in a "real" journal. Is that going to look good on your resume? Or on your next funding proposal?
Successful scientists become good at recasting their negative results as positive ones and getting them published in a journal. No unethical behavior is required. A negative result can become a positive one with a simple change of hypothesis! Ideally, you plan for that outcome when designing your experiment, so that you always get a useful result. Or you limit the devoted resources (scoping tests) until you have an indication that you are onto something good.
The most important part of Moore's Law was it essentially saying that your new toy will be far better than your old one before it even breaks. When the rate of doubling gets closer to 10 years, buying a new computer isn't going to be so much as the new toy is faster but rather the old toy broke. Once that driving force is over with, electronic companies will be talking about other ways to produce money in more mundane ways.
Yeah, they'll actually have to make their software run efficiently.
Slashdot Mirror
Include it in paint.
That might complicate the painting process... you know, the part where the paint sticks to the wall?
Why would Heinz et al bother paying extra so their customers don't waste as much of their product [ie, so they don't return the store and buy more sooner]?
Heinz won't pay extra, you will as a customer.
Sure you can, I did just that earlier today. That advice assumes that the sun isn't being obstructed by clouds or heavy cloud cover. There's no actual difference between clouds and glass blocking out most of the light. I was able to view it just fine with no eye protection and no squinting, and not even the after image that you would get if you looked directly at a light bulb.
And last I checked, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, which means that Asia is at the tail end of observing things rather than the beginning. Unless of course there's a secondary eclipse that I'm not aware of that happens tonight as well. But, I saw one this morning in China and I doubt very much that there's going to be another one tomorrow.
You, sir, are wrong on both points.
Enjoy your eye damage... your retina has no pain receptors and clouds selectively block different wavelengths. Check out the UV part of the water absorption (I should say transmission) spectrum!
I think it's pretty clear to any reasonable individual that significant adult assistance is involved when a 15-year-old develops an advanced medical diagnostic for pancreatic cancer.
These kids are the intellectual equivalent of Miss Universe contestants: In addition to being somewhat skilled, they are highly competitive, aggressive, have a good spin campaign and lots of behind-the-scenes coaching. And while they all probably want world peace, at least they don't all have breast implants.
The primary purpose would be to catch or build cases against drug traffickers, but at a Utah Legislature committee meeting Wednesday, the sheriffs and a DEA representative described how the scanners also could be used to catch kidnappers and violent criminals.
How long will it be until they lower the freeway speed limit "for safety," place two scanners a few miles apart on the highway, use the data to calculate your average velocity, and then send you an automated speeding ticket?
Of course, the primary purpose of the system will be to catch drug traffickers and child molesters for your safety, but the state would like the secondary objective to be profit.
This reeks of a government scare tactic to increase state authority at the expense of citizen privacy. If law enforcement wants to build a case against someone, they should either do some detective work or get a warrant. Citizen tracking is not a palatable in a free and open country.
It doesn't start in the US for a few hours.
If you care about viewing astronomical events, you may want to find a more reliable space information source than /. (like an astronomy magazine).
Also, you can't view this eclipse without eye protection.
Please do name 1 brand that says that.
PROTIP: NONE OF THEM DO! If that was true you would have to do the same every time you opened a couple cans of tuna or catfood.
The packages do all have obscure warnings about the bulb containing mercury, that it should be handled carefully because mercury is harmful, and that "special precautions" should be taken if it is broken. But they do not specify what those precautions are. It stinks of legalese and is annoying to consumers. It's even more annoying that I have to take the bulb somewhere to recycle it: given that the government has essentially mandated that we need to use these things, they should find a way to allow mercury bulb recycling from our homes.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=are-compact-fluorescent-lightbulbs-dangerous
I don't want an easy-to-break product in my house that requires me to evacuate and vent a room for 15 minutes if I break it. And then I have to worry about the powder? What if I have a pregnant wife or young children in the house? Either take the mercury out of the bulb or armor it so that it can survive a 9 foot drop.
And despite the claims that they last "up to 10x longer" than a regular incandescent, I have found that they last just about as long during normal usage.
It's a scam product that costs more and doesn't work as well, like low-fat cheese. You want to save the environment? Have less children and learn to like a dark house.
Hmm..I dunno. In my experience, if you have one out of the 6 that is that fucking picky...then you rapidly become a group of '5' that can go anywhere to eat a nice lunch.
I don't mind someone being a vegan, but they certainly aren't welcome to severely limit choices of restaurants for a nice work lunch outing. They're the outlier....let them deal with it.
Your statement does not account for extenuating circumstances such as that person being (1) your boss or (2) extremely attractive.
To be fair, if vaccines caused autism, I would probably opt out of most vaccines, because most kids don't die of whooping cough or scarlet fever, but autism is forever.
Death, mental retardation, and physical disfigurement is forever too.
Vaccines prevent your child from getting diseases that cause those three effects. The only reason that not getting vaccinated is a tractable option for some parents is because those diseases have been mostly eradicated by years of getting everyone vaccinated.
People avoiding vaccinations are banking on the fact that everyone else is vaccinated. That works in developed countries, for the most part. Go live in a third-world country and see how long you last though.
I do not think that intentionally unvaccinated children should be allowed to live in America.
Are you a parent and married? Usually, "mom knows best" and gets her way when it comes to the kids. You can try to fight it, but it'll be a losing battle.
That's why you don't marry woman who is both stupid and controlling... her scientifically deficient choices can naturally select against your offspring.
(See how I brought that ultimate responsibility back on you?)
Also, if you really feel strongly about it, you can always take the kids to the doctor for shots when she isn't home. But I wouldn't recommend going behind your wife's back if you are too much of a puss to stand up to her face.
(And yes, I am married with a kid, who gets his shots.)
Having done construction work in polar regions, I can't imagine how much money and energy must have gone into that thing. Cool, yes, but how much useful, peaceful scientific research could have been conducted there for the same budget ?!? Compare to now where instead instead of wasting it on useless and scary bombs, we waste it on useless and scary traders. Hmmm.
A more contemporary question is how much peaceful scientific research could have been conducted in the US for the cost of military operations in Afganistan and Iraq.
My car could be driving itself by now...
I would do number 1. This is not a hard question. There is no muddy ethics. Don't do business with corrupt countries.
Is that why you are posting anonymously? :)
I'm not interested in a computer that can't compile. I deal with it on my iPhone because it's a phone ( but it's really a computer that's faster than my 10yo box), but I'm not going to buy a Mac and a $99 development license just to make a simple RPG assistant (I've been making them with JavaScript as a result; at least they didn't strip all programs that can interpret code).
While your post is off-topic, I respect your principles. But most iPad users don't give a hoot about compiling code for their iPads. Also, the plenty of developers who do are willing to pay for the development license.
You could say the same thing about cars: You won't buy any car that you can't fix without tools, because you are too cheap to spend money on tools! (But you bought a moped because you need to get around.)
This guy has a nice analysis of why it costs over $6 per mile to drive his Lamborghini:
http://supercarrentalsinc.com/lamborghini-gallardo-buyers-guide-part-v-ownership-cost-estimate/
Of course, if you drive more, you'll bring the cost per mile down.
Buying a high-performance sports car for everyday driving is like using an F-22 Raptor instead of a Jumbo jet for commuting. Or, like marrying a supermodel instead of a normal woman.
Of course it isn't going to be cost effective or reliable! But you have significantly more performance at your command.
You aren't spending your money properly if you don't use (or at least appreciate) the extra performance and complain then about the cost.
What about when it all became worthless because those silly companies all dried up and blew away when people finally realized their business plans were idiotic? Is the government going to refund billions of dollar in taxes when that happens?
No, they'll just have the IRS fine the taxees for fraud (claiming false profits)!
I really don't get the irrational hatred for lawyers on Slashdot.
The public generally hates any profession that gets a 30% cut on winnings that most people feel were entitled to them anyway.
They feel that lawyers have made the legal system so complicated that it is impossible to navigate it without their help, ensuring their eventual profit.
They also hate the fact that most politicians are lawyers, and that they have similarly made the government so complex and expensive.
Warranted or not, that's the plainly stated sentiment.
add monitor privacy screens to solve the problem?
It is human nature to need to know why.
It isn't in China. Maybe that's why they are winning at manufacturing.
Once again I will ask the tired question, "Why do actual humans need to ever go into space?"
Take your moon base money and your ISS money and give it to the roboticists, that we might finally advance from a 1940s view of space exploration.
The same might be said about /.
Yet you're here when your robot could be surfing the web and posting witty comments!
To put it in perspective, a Volt battery has roughly 16 KWh of energy stored. An gas tank on an equivalent sized car is roughly 10 gallons. At 36.6 KWh/gal, that's 360 Kwh of energy, or more than 22X the energy of the battery. Now, assuming that all goes up at once, which one do you want to be near? Couple that with the fact you can't easily set off a lithium battery fire with an open flame or a spark, and I know which odds I'll be taking.
Your logic is flawed!
Gasoline would need to be premixed with enough oxygen to "go up all at once." In a real world situation, this is not possible. The oxygen deficiency would severely limit the magnitude of any explosion (sorry Hollywood). The combustion could burn someone trapped in the car to death, however.
An impacted lithium-ion battery, on the other hand, could actually dump most of it's energy at once through a series of shorts. This could electrocute people and then cause an explosion (discharge-driven blast wave). Then the lithium could react with atmospheric oxygen (again oxygen-deficiency could be a rate limiting step) to burn. Lithium fires burn hot, are very difficult to extinguish, and could ignite any gasoline nearby.
Personally, I would buy a hybrid to save money on gas. But I would rather be sitting in a gasoline-only car during a severe accident!
Anyone else sick of encountering this kind of thinking?
It's a matter of perspective.
Education IS just about jobs for most people who can barely make ends meet and are struggling through night classes.
People who argue that education should be about more than just employment usually already have a good job and live comfortably.
Personally, I would prefer DRM-free PDFs or interactive and cross platform HTML 5 "books" that didn't mandate a platform.
The epub format (which iBooks uses, I'm not sure about iBooks2, we'll have to see) is HTML5.
And trust me, you don't want PDF for e-books. I have a couple PDF books alongside epub e-books on my iPad and gosh does PDF suck. It doesn't re-flow when I change from portrait to landscape, and it doesn't re-scale text, only zooms on a page level.
Is re-flowing really a requirement?
The text in paper books doesn't re-flow either AND you can't even scale it up by tapping it. Yet it has been acceptable technology for a really really long time because it is an imperfect, yet robust system.
You people aren't going to be happy until they can just implant the information directly into your brains!
It's hard to do that nowadays with Apple's packaging and the store's anti-theft procedures! They basically unlock the iPad for you and then escort you to the purchase counter.
Journal of negative results will never become widespread because the scientific funding system does not favor it. It's a fantasy of a wide-eyed postdoc, who has yet to experience the cutthroat realities of the scientific funding system in the US. (I know this because I, and may others, used to have the same idea.) Here's why the concept is fatally flawed:
The OP notes that your scientific colleagues are also your competitors. He then notes that if you don't report your scientific failures, that your colleagues will likely repeat them. When completing for limited funding, why would you give your competitors an advantage? Wouldn't you rather they spend 2 months of their resources and $50K doing something you will set them back?
Also, let's say that you had 20 articles published in the Journal of Negative Results and two published in a "real" journal. Is that going to look good on your resume? Or on your next funding proposal?
Successful scientists become good at recasting their negative results as positive ones and getting them published in a journal. No unethical behavior is required. A negative result can become a positive one with a simple change of hypothesis! Ideally, you plan for that outcome when designing your experiment, so that you always get a useful result. Or you limit the devoted resources (scoping tests) until you have an indication that you are onto something good.
The most important part of Moore's Law was it essentially saying that your new toy will be far better than your old one before it even breaks. When the rate of doubling gets closer to 10 years, buying a new computer isn't going to be so much as the new toy is faster but rather the old toy broke. Once that driving force is over with, electronic companies will be talking about other ways to produce money in more mundane ways.
Yeah, they'll actually have to make their software run efficiently.