Per my previous post SGI used NeWS as part of their 4Sight. And wikipedia mentions that there was a Macintosh port, MacNeWS, as well as a port to OS/2.
There is no "sometimes the computer drives and sometimes you do", unless it's a complete transition. But when the computer is driving, I should be able to climb in the back and sleep, or read the paper.
Agreed. This has to be the case. All the real value use cases for autonomous requires 100% autonomy and liability on the car.
From drop me off downtown and then go find a place a park on its own (empty) and then come pick me up when I call it; to dropping the kids off a school (no adult), and return home (empty).
It has to have contingency smarts to handle everything from construction and flag people sending the car down a detour to getting home and the garage door not working so it has to find some other nearby place to park to being able to deal with a mattress falling off the truck in front of it leaving an obstacle that blocks the road, to being hit by a cyclist.
Because if a driver is expected to sit in the driver seat, hands on the wheel, ready to take control, but not actually in control the entire time, then there is no reason to have an autonomous car.
Making cube shaped cases and using black when everyone else was using beige...?
I kid of course, but Jobs really wasn't that technical. I don't dispute that he saw the merits of portability or hardware abstraction,
It is by design.
Sure the design of BSD and of Mach.
He tried to sell this idea to other software companies but no one bit.
He tried to sell the NeXT as a platform. No one was biting on that.
You seem to imply that if someone is not a coding ninja, then they have nothing to contribute to software. I strongly disagree with this.
Not at all. Jobs contributed a great deal to the software, just not at the technical level.
He realized that simplicity and cleanness was key to good software, to maintainable software, to portable software.
Wow.
a) Jobs beleived that "simplicity and cleanness" was key to pretty much absolutely everything; at the expense of functionality, even at times at the expense of usability or rational sense.
He realized that if [X] was not done properly at its earliest stages, it would remain inherently flawed no matter how much it was maintained.
Everyone who is even peripherally involved with software or hardware or engineering or plumbing or dentistry or shoe repair knows this. I'll give Jobs credit for being a perfectionist, and sticking to his guns on keeping things clean where others would let features and clutter creep in and that was a gift of his... but everybody knows this.
It is no coincidence that Jobs made his best software when he was working with a small team of engineers.
This is also pretty much true of everyone everywhere.
As for your comment on NeXT, well it became OSX,
I suppose it did. But really ANY BSD or even Linux could have formed the foundation of OSX.
im Berners Lee first implemented hypertext on a NeXT workstation...that was the beginning of the web as we know it today.
Hypertext was conceived and implemented years before by others. And even Tim Berners-Lee implemented hypertext years before the NeXT was released.
Its true that CERN httpd was first implemented on a NeXT; but crediting Steve Jobs NeXT for the web is as ridiculous as crediting the vision of Bill Gate's MS-DOS for Doom and the modern FPS genre.
If you had every used an NeXT workstation
I did actually. The university I attended had a lab of them; and I had programming courses assigned on them; but can't remember what I did. I remember the screens were markedly higher resolution than what I had at home but were black and white and the optical mice with their special mouse pads were obnoxious.:)
They were neat though.
There was simply nothing like it at the time.
Take a look at old screenshots of IRIX,. Even "4D1 3.0" released in 1988 (same as NeXT) was sitting on UNIX System V with the 4Sight windows system based on NeWS (a postscript windowing system and IRIS GL).
NeXT was definitely pretty cutting edge, but it wasn't alone there.
In my opinion, this was Job's most important technical decision and it is what allowed Apple to become successful again.
Perhaps; and its equally probable he had no idea it was any more or less feasiblbe than using rabbits as power supplies. Jobs was a lot of things, but technical was NOT one of them.
He may well have made the right decision... or he may have just made the decision to use a 'mature unix' foundation, because it was basically just reusing his baby from NeXT (and we all remember how that company was taking the PC world by storm right? =scoffs=)
It worked out brilliantly for him and made Mac's relevant again. But if you think for a second it was because Jobs had an ounce of technical expertise or made the decision based on the processor portability of a unix core your high as kite. If NeXT had been using AmigaOS as its foundation, OSX would probably be sitting on that.
There are plenty of Macbook Air users who are technically literate and care about such questions
He didn't say there weren't. He said it doesn't matter if they care. Because no matter how much they care, if apple doesn't adopt these and they need a new macbook... then they will buy either the slower one apple is selling or the slightly faster one for a silly markup.
And so forth... do you want a Cherry Trail mac? Maybe you do... so what?
Maybe Apple will make one, or maybe they'll just sit on their thumbs for another rake in the profit of selling a 2 year old product for the same price as the day it was announced and then go with whatever the next chipset is next year for the next refresh.
This is pretty much the site to go to. Buy something recently refreshed. Don't buy something that hasn't been recently refreshed. If you want a mini and you like the specs buy it now. Its not going to get any better any time soon.
If you want an air? Wait if you can, and buy whatever it is they refresh it with when they refresh it.
That's the point... it doesn't matter what you -want- in a product. Either it has it or it doesn't. All you can really control is whether or not you can wait for the next refresh or not... and sometimes you can't even control that.
I like Mac hardware in terms of overal build quality. I loathe it in terms of selection.
The programmers just set the thing up to 'buy whatever'.
Knowing full well that 'whatever' was a range of legal and illegal goods.
If I father a child (creator) and raise it to be... less than respectful of the law... my child then robs a bank. Do they put *me* in jail? By your definition they should...
When the child turns the age of majority he is elevated to independently being responsible for his actions regardless of how well or poorly you raised him. Perhaps you truly should be in jail, but it will be him, not you. In any case there is no legal system by which a shopping bot no matter how long i let it run ever becomes an independent legal adult.
Now let me spin you this:
If I setup a robot with boxing gloves and have it programmed to randomly walk around and swing them, am I responsible if it punches anyone?
f the law says : 'knowingly violated' - they are not responsible. If the law says 'recklessly violated' then there is a case to be made.
Regardless of what the law says today its pretty much guaranteed to be updated to include "recklessly" language as soon as it's an issue as a result of silliness like this.
You're basically paying regularly/multiple times to hear the same music you could just pay for/download once.
True. On the other hand you don't have to buy songs you only listen 2 twice, or listen to for a week and then tire of never to listen to them again. Depends on your personality.
The economics becomes a question of do you explore new music more or less than you return to old favorites.
Because your right, if you just like pink floyd, then buy the discography and never pay for music again. Win!
On the other hand if you've got 10,000 tracks in your itunes collection and not one of them has been listened to more than 3 times then what is the point of buying anything ever?
Most of us are somewhere in between those two extremes. And at the right price points streaming becomes more sensible than buying.
I'd take spotify at half the current price. I already sub scribe to netflix.
1) You can't listen to your music when you dont have an active internet connection.
Spotify has offline support. Its not quite as bad as you suggest.
There is a workaround for this. Type until you get Alice COOPER then back up and delete the first cap O, replace with little o, and keep going. It's dumb but it works.
Ah... yes... "back up" by which you mean use the arrow keys once Alice COOPER is autocompleted; not the backspace key.
So I start with Alice COOPER, modify to Alice CoOOPER -- which... Alice CooperOOPER and then delete OOPER...
That does work; and thanks. But you'll probably agree its as idiotic as having to use notepad though.
He makes the claim that their software quality has taken a nosedive, that they're introducing tons of bugs and functional regressions, but he doesn't give a single example of any of that.
Well. iTunes is a total cluster fuck. It doesn't get better. It just gets different in annoying and bizarre new ways.
For example, i've got an Alice Cooper track. Its mis-capitalized as Alice COOPER. No problem right... right click "Get Info".
A dialog box that violates every standard appears, but I shrug that off and move on. I click on the artist name and it turns into an edit/dropdown control of some sort. I type A-l-i and the dropdown floods with suggestions.... Alice COOPER Alice in Chains Alicia Keys Alien Vampires...
I keep typing... A-l-i-c-e- -C-o...
As soon as I type the first 'o', itunes suggests "Alice COOPER", and autocompletes what I'm typing; and it helpfully capitalizes the 'o' I just typed too. I literally could not find any way to get itunes to accept "Alice Cooper" into the box via the keyboard. I resorted to typing Alice Cooper in notepad, and using paste in iTunes as the ONLY way to fix the artist name.
A few versions back that dialog box worked just fine.
That's just one tiny example that represents an entire CLASS of grief I have with apple software these days. I run into the same sorts of grief all over the place.
Even clippy was less annoying... at least it asked if you wanted help, and you say no, and you could even turn it off. Apple now just assumes you need help, won't let you say no or turn it off, and won't even let you fix its incorrect guesses. UX idiocy.
Aragorn gives them the swords at Bree, probably prepared for the fact that hobbits probably wouldn't have swords.
I remember that scene as well; but given the previous posters seemingly total non-awareness of it I have to ask:
Was that in the theatrical release or the extended cut? I haven't watched the theatrical release in so long I can't recall exactly what all got added.
However, that really makes no sense, as Eowyn was able to kill him with plain old iron (and a little bit of destiny), no special Numenorean magic required.
One line of argument is that Merry's stab breaks the enchantment making the Witchking vulnerable to Eowyn's attack.
Whether Eowyn+Merry actually killed it outright is a separate question; I expect it was probably just banished again, and it would have reformed. The destruction of the one ring, would have been their final demise, its destruction caused the other rings power to fail as well. The wraiths, of course, were sustained by their rings of power; the 9 rings that went to men.
Maybe. I think I'd prefer the law itself to be written as enforcement starts the moment it turns red. But I certainly don't see any harm in having the cameras configured with 0.5 second of grace; so as not to catch anyone right on the line.
The point is that you don't need to get rid of the system because it can work properly. The cameras dont necessarily need to make on drive poorly -- a poorly configured system might incent that behaviour, but you can configure the system better, you don't HAVE to get rid of it entirely to fix the problem.
I'd be interested to hear of a method for measuring supply (number of drivers) and demand (number of potential customers) that wouldn't be considered obvious. It is after all one of the most basic areas of economics.
And wiping windows is one the most basic areas of home maintenance, but if you come up with a wiper design that gets a cleaner window with less streaking its still patentable. Even if "using a better wiper to wipe the window" is obvious.
Setting prices will be an algorithm and they aren't eligible for patenting in a lot of countries and difficult to protect in others.
True, and I closed my post mentioning that I didn't agree with business method patents; so we're in agreement here.
I would have thought falls under the obvious category.
You don't seem to realize what the "obvious" category is. It's not for the idea, its for the implementation.
It is simply pricing for supply and demand. higher prices bring in more suppliers and reduce the buyers.
Yes, but how to you measure supply and demand? How do you set prices? Those are the details that define the patent.
Otherwise I could patent a cure for cancer. Its pretty obvious really and I'm not sure why it hasn't been done already. It simply prevents the cancer cells from replicating. Patent please!
Oh wit....now you want to know exactly HOW I'm stopping the cells from replicating? Well I haven't worked out the details yet, but still... the idea was obvious.
This is why we patent inventions, not ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen, making them work is the patentable part.
most businesses don't do it because it is difficult to manage and can cause a lot of customer aggro
So its difficult and causes problems?
What if they had an invention which presented a working solution to these problems... why wouldn't that qualify for a patent exactly?:)
That said, I do disagree with busines method patents. And software patents too.
If the light turns red and you go through the intersection 0.1 seconds later, you're not going to cause an accident
Agreed.
If you go through at the halfway point of the red cycle, you've got an excellent chance of causing an accident
Also agreed.
I'd think that, if the cameras were a little forgiving, people wouldn't slam on their brakes at the last minute.
No. I think there needs to be an easy line in the sand. If you enter the intersection on red you should get a fine.
If you are going to allow a half second or one second leeway on entering the red -- then it makes more sense to me to leave the hard line on the red, and just make the yellow 0.5 or 1 second longer.
I've given it a fair bit of thought actually, and I think the following is the best way to run the system:
100% of the revenue generated from any criminal penalty or fine should also be redistributed back to the residents in the form of a direct payment.
This ensures the city doesn't view the cameras (and any other crime) as revenue; and no part of the government becomes dependent on that revenue.
Then the city will make rational (and correct) decisions where and how to install and configure cameras, and when to decommission or rotate them elsewhere, based purely on safety objectives.
It does mean taxes have to go up a bit to cover the overall revenue loss; since enforcement is purely a cost centre now. But it balance out with the rebate. And having it go through the rebate and tax cycle means the costs/benefit of running the program is exposed directly to voters; and the city has no incentive or benefit from running a program unless it's actually working to improve safety, etc.
They can probably get around the criminal part by just creating a fictional person. It's only criminal if they steal a real persons identity. I doubt the cops care anything about civil law.
Maybe. But the computer misuse laws are so broadly written right now, that violating the "terms of service" is tantamount to "unauthorized use of a computer"...
While I don't care for the cameras I do live in a city with red light cameras. I've NEVER had any difficulty stopping safely; and I've never gotten a red light ticket.
As long as the city isn't screwing with the yellow light duration, if you were driving safely then red light cameras really don't affect you.
just to drive the way they were driving before that was safer.
Running red lights is not safe.
What the cameras force are sudden stops and accelerations. You can't avoid it.
Again, around here, that's just not the case. When the light turns yellow, people prepare to stop for the red. Unless they are moving at sufficient speed to enter the intersection while its still yellow. Its basic driving 101.
If red light cameras make you are slam on the brakes then you are driving poorly.
due to the extra threat of photos people are more likely to slam on the brakes at the last second when it would be safer to continue through the intersection.
If you are choosing between "slamming your brakes at the last second" or "running a red light" then you were driving unsafely.***
Further if you are "slamming your brakes at the last second" to avoid a ticket, AND you get rear ended as a result -- what was the guy behind you thinking? Sounds like he was driving even poorer than you were... because if you couldn't get through the intersection legally; then he certainly couldn't either, so he should have been slowing down to stop even if you hadn't fucked up and waited to the last second to slam on your brakes.
I'm not disputing that the rear-end accident rate went up. But only because the red light camera exacerbated already shitty driving habits. Nobody was driving safely and now HAD to drive unsafely. They were driving unsafely all along.
Further T-bone accidents were reduced. The severity of T-bone accidents tends to be a lot higher than rear-ends. Especially as the "slammed on the brakes at the last second scenarios" typically involve pretty small differences in relative vehicle speeds... e.g you slowing from 35mph to 20mhp and get rear ended by a vehicle that also slammed on its brakes from 35mph and hits you still moving 30mph... a difference of only 10mph.
T-bones tend to involve vehicles both hitting eachother at 30mph at orthoganal angles which is both a larger impact and harder for the vehicles accident systems to absorb.
(***Yes, we can argue that IF the yellow light timers were adjusted downward below what they should be for the speed limit to further increase revenues then yes. But that is a completely separate issue from merely installing properly configured red light cameras.)
Rocks are expected (from operation of simple physics laws), so are not life-y self-causal by particular information.
And what happens when we discover a means to create what we would categorize as life from non-life by way of the operation of simple physics laws?
I mean, we do largely assert that this is what happened. And although we don't know how to "make" it happen today, it may be that its not altogether that exotic.
If something was inevitably going to happen anyway to some matter and energy, due to its statistical distribution and the surrounding thermodynamic regime and fundamental forces, do we say that that future state (or equivalence class of states) required a particular cause (beyond the operation of the simple physical laws on the situation?) No.
That's the rub. Are the sub-cellular molecular interactions of my body not individually quite predictable by the simple physical laws on the situation. Protein folding might be quite complicated, but its guided by simple rules.
Are you categorizing life then as nothing more than emergent deviations from expected outcomes due to the cumultative effects of complex interactions that don't lend themselves well to simpler modelling?
Is then a galaxy alive, if it does something we don't "expect" simply as the cumulative addition of all the sub-processes that we didn't individually model?
Or conversely, if we successfully modeled a life form such that we could predict from simple laws of physics the sorts of things that it will do does that strip from it the label of "life"?
Because that definition of life sounds much like the definition of magic. The more we understand physics the the less will qualify. First we'll reduce simple organisms to predictable machines, then ever more increasingly complicated ones will fall until the robots we build and count as non-life and the insects and bacteria we count as alive intersect...
Rabbits have internal information which under the right conditions can be used to form a new rabbit.
Male rabbits can't form a new rabbit without female rabbits. Does a male rabbit still count as having all the "information" necessary to form a new rabbit if it can't do it itself? It also lacks key physiology required to transform the information into a new rabbit.
Rabbits have internal information which under the right conditions can be used to form a new rabbit.
What are the right conditions for a population of male rabbits to form a new rabbit?
The rock is just as self-describing; scan the rock see what its made of and that is the information required by a suitable 3rd party contraption to create a new rock.
What makes some sort of scanner + nano-assembler + raw materials capable of reproducing rocks different from a female rabbit and some food capable of processing the informational element handed to it by a male rabbit?
Why not? You could batch program it for delivery twice a day.
All inter-company email slowed to twice a day batches. Every exchange with an external consultant or contractor; every conference call meeting confirmation, everything... goes out at noon and 5 pm?
What issue exactly would twice a day batches even solve?
In a company where you were in charge upper management would literally crucify you, and the regular employees would cheer them on.
Slashdot Mirror
Per my previous post SGI used NeWS as part of their 4Sight. And wikipedia mentions that there was a Macintosh port, MacNeWS, as well as a port to OS/2.
There is no "sometimes the computer drives and sometimes you do", unless it's a complete transition. But when the computer is driving, I should be able to climb in the back and sleep, or read the paper.
Agreed. This has to be the case. All the real value use cases for autonomous requires 100% autonomy and liability on the car.
From drop me off downtown and then go find a place a park on its own (empty) and then come pick me up when I call it; to dropping the kids off a school (no adult), and return home (empty).
It has to have contingency smarts to handle everything from construction and flag people sending the car down a detour to getting home and the garage door not working so it has to find some other nearby place to park to being able to deal with a mattress falling off the truck in front of it leaving an obstacle that blocks the road, to being hit by a cyclist.
Because if a driver is expected to sit in the driver seat, hands on the wheel, ready to take control, but not actually in control the entire time, then there is no reason to have an autonomous car.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
Making cube shaped cases and using black when everyone else was using beige...?
I kid of course, but Jobs really wasn't that technical. I don't dispute that he saw the merits of portability or hardware abstraction,
It is by design.
Sure the design of BSD and of Mach.
He tried to sell this idea to other software companies but no one bit.
He tried to sell the NeXT as a platform. No one was biting on that.
You seem to imply that if someone is not a coding ninja, then they have nothing to contribute to software. I strongly disagree with this.
Not at all. Jobs contributed a great deal to the software, just not at the technical level.
He realized that simplicity and cleanness was key to good software, to maintainable software, to portable software.
Wow.
a) Jobs beleived that "simplicity and cleanness" was key to pretty much absolutely everything; at the expense of functionality, even at times at the expense of usability or rational sense.
He realized that if [X] was not done properly at its earliest stages, it would remain inherently flawed no matter how much it was maintained.
Everyone who is even peripherally involved with software or hardware or engineering or plumbing or dentistry or shoe repair knows this. I'll give Jobs credit for being a perfectionist, and sticking to his guns on keeping things clean where others would let features and clutter creep in and that was a gift of his... but everybody knows this.
It is no coincidence that Jobs made his best software when he was working with a small team of engineers.
This is also pretty much true of everyone everywhere.
As for your comment on NeXT, well it became OSX,
I suppose it did. But really ANY BSD or even Linux could have formed the foundation of OSX.
im Berners Lee first implemented hypertext on a NeXT workstation...that was the beginning of the web as we know it today.
Hypertext was conceived and implemented years before by others. And even Tim Berners-Lee implemented hypertext years before the NeXT was released.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Its true that CERN httpd was first implemented on a NeXT; but crediting Steve Jobs NeXT for the web is as ridiculous as crediting the vision of Bill Gate's MS-DOS for Doom and the modern FPS genre.
If you had every used an NeXT workstation
I did actually. The university I attended had a lab of them; and I had programming courses assigned on them; but can't remember what I did. I remember the screens were markedly higher resolution than what I had at home but were black and white and the optical mice with their special mouse pads were obnoxious. :)
They were neat though.
There was simply nothing like it at the time.
Take a look at old screenshots of IRIX,. Even "4D1 3.0" released in 1988 (same as NeXT) was sitting on UNIX System V with the 4Sight windows system based on NeWS (a postscript windowing system and IRIS GL).
NeXT was definitely pretty cutting edge, but it wasn't alone there.
In my opinion, this was Job's most important technical decision and it is what allowed Apple to become successful again.
Perhaps; and its equally probable he had no idea it was any more or less feasiblbe than using rabbits as power supplies. Jobs was a lot of things, but technical was NOT one of them.
He may well have made the right decision... or he may have just made the decision to use a 'mature unix' foundation, because it was basically just reusing his baby from NeXT (and we all remember how that company was taking the PC world by storm right? =scoffs=)
It worked out brilliantly for him and made Mac's relevant again. But if you think for a second it was because Jobs had an ounce of technical expertise or made the decision based on the processor portability of a unix core your high as kite. If NeXT had been using AmigaOS as its foundation, OSX would probably be sitting on that.
There are plenty of Macbook Air users who are technically literate and care about such questions
He didn't say there weren't. He said it doesn't matter if they care. Because no matter how much they care, if apple doesn't adopt these and they need a new macbook... then they will buy either the slower one apple is selling or the slightly faster one for a silly markup.
And so forth... do you want a Cherry Trail mac? Maybe you do... so what?
Maybe Apple will make one, or maybe they'll just sit on their thumbs for another rake in the profit of selling a 2 year old product for the same price as the day it was announced and then go with whatever the next chipset is next year for the next refresh.
If your tech savvy and want to buy mac...
http://buyersguide.macrumors.c...
This is pretty much the site to go to. Buy something recently refreshed. Don't buy something that hasn't been recently refreshed. If you want a mini and you like the specs buy it now. Its not going to get any better any time soon.
If you want an air? Wait if you can, and buy whatever it is they refresh it with when they refresh it.
That's the point... it doesn't matter what you -want- in a product. Either it has it or it doesn't. All you can really control is whether or not you can wait for the next refresh or not... and sometimes you can't even control that.
I like Mac hardware in terms of overal build quality. I loathe it in terms of selection.
The programmers just set the thing up to 'buy whatever'.
Knowing full well that 'whatever' was a range of legal and illegal goods.
If I father a child (creator) and raise it to be... less than respectful of the law... my child then robs a bank. Do they put *me* in jail? By your definition they should...
When the child turns the age of majority he is elevated to independently being responsible for his actions regardless of how well or poorly you raised him. Perhaps you truly should be in jail, but it will be him, not you. In any case there is no legal system by which a shopping bot no matter how long i let it run ever becomes an independent legal adult.
Now let me spin you this:
If I setup a robot with boxing gloves and have it programmed to randomly walk around and swing them, am I responsible if it punches anyone?
f the law says : 'knowingly violated' - they are not responsible. If the law says 'recklessly violated' then there is a case to be made.
Regardless of what the law says today its pretty much guaranteed to be updated to include "recklessly" language as soon as it's an issue as a result of silliness like this.
You're basically paying regularly/multiple times to hear the same music you could just pay for/download once.
True. On the other hand you don't have to buy songs you only listen 2 twice, or listen to for a week and then tire of never to listen to them again. Depends on your personality.
The economics becomes a question of do you explore new music more or less than you return to old favorites.
Because your right, if you just like pink floyd, then buy the discography and never pay for music again. Win!
On the other hand if you've got 10,000 tracks in your itunes collection and not one of them has been listened to more than 3 times then what is the point of buying anything ever?
Most of us are somewhere in between those two extremes. And at the right price points streaming becomes more sensible than buying.
I'd take spotify at half the current price. I already sub scribe to netflix.
1) You can't listen to your music when you dont have an active internet connection.
Spotify has offline support. Its not quite as bad as you suggest.
There is a workaround for this. Type until you get Alice COOPER then back up and delete the first cap O, replace with little o, and keep going. It's dumb but it works.
Ah... yes... "back up" by which you mean use the arrow keys once Alice COOPER is autocompleted; not the backspace key.
So I start with Alice COOPER, modify to Alice CoOOPER -- which... Alice CooperOOPER and then delete OOPER...
That does work; and thanks. But you'll probably agree its as idiotic as having to use notepad though.
He makes the claim that their software quality has taken a nosedive, that they're introducing tons of bugs and functional regressions, but he doesn't give a single example of any of that.
Well. iTunes is a total cluster fuck. It doesn't get better. It just gets different in annoying and bizarre new ways.
For example, i've got an Alice Cooper track. Its mis-capitalized as Alice COOPER. No problem right... right click "Get Info".
A dialog box that violates every standard appears, but I shrug that off and move on. I click on the artist name and it turns into an edit/dropdown control of some sort. I type A-l-i and the dropdown floods with suggestions. ... ...
Alice COOPER
Alice in Chains
Alicia Keys
Alien Vampires
I keep typing ... A-l-i-c-e- -C-o...
As soon as I type the first 'o', itunes suggests "Alice COOPER", and autocompletes what I'm typing; and it helpfully capitalizes the 'o' I just typed too. I literally could not find any way to get itunes to accept "Alice Cooper" into the box via the keyboard. I resorted to typing Alice Cooper in notepad, and using paste in iTunes as the ONLY way to fix the artist name.
A few versions back that dialog box worked just fine.
That's just one tiny example that represents an entire CLASS of grief I have with apple software these days. I run into the same sorts of grief all over the place.
Even clippy was less annoying... at least it asked if you wanted help, and you say no, and you could even turn it off. Apple now just assumes you need help, won't let you say no or turn it off, and won't even let you fix its incorrect guesses. UX idiocy.
Aragorn gives them the swords at Bree, probably prepared for the fact that hobbits probably wouldn't have swords.
I remember that scene as well; but given the previous posters seemingly total non-awareness of it I have to ask:
Was that in the theatrical release or the extended cut? I haven't watched the theatrical release in so long I can't recall exactly what all got added.
However, that really makes no sense, as Eowyn was able to kill him with plain old iron (and a little bit of destiny), no special Numenorean magic required.
One line of argument is that Merry's stab breaks the enchantment making the Witchking vulnerable to Eowyn's attack.
Whether Eowyn+Merry actually killed it outright is a separate question; I expect it was probably just banished again, and it would have reformed. The destruction of the one ring, would have been their final demise, its destruction caused the other rings power to fail as well. The wraiths, of course, were sustained by their rings of power; the 9 rings that went to men.
Maybe. I think I'd prefer the law itself to be written as enforcement starts the moment it turns red. But I certainly don't see any harm in having the cameras configured with 0.5 second of grace; so as not to catch anyone right on the line.
I'd probably still up yellow durations though.
The point is that you don't need to get rid of the system because it can work properly. The cameras dont necessarily need to make on drive poorly -- a poorly configured system might incent that behaviour, but you can configure the system better, you don't HAVE to get rid of it entirely to fix the problem.
I'd be interested to hear of a method for measuring supply (number of drivers) and demand (number of potential customers) that wouldn't be considered obvious. It is after all one of the most basic areas of economics.
And wiping windows is one the most basic areas of home maintenance, but if you come up with a wiper design that gets a cleaner window with less streaking its still patentable. Even if "using a better wiper to wipe the window" is obvious.
Setting prices will be an algorithm and they aren't eligible for patenting in a lot of countries and difficult to protect in others.
True, and I closed my post mentioning that I didn't agree with business method patents; so we're in agreement here.
I would have thought falls under the obvious category.
You don't seem to realize what the "obvious" category is. It's not for the idea, its for the implementation.
It is simply pricing for supply and demand. higher prices bring in more suppliers and reduce the buyers.
Yes, but how to you measure supply and demand? How do you set prices? Those are the details that define the patent.
Otherwise I could patent a cure for cancer. Its pretty obvious really and I'm not sure why it hasn't been done already. It simply prevents the cancer cells from replicating. Patent please!
Oh wit... .now you want to know exactly HOW I'm stopping the cells from replicating? Well I haven't worked out the details yet, but still ... the idea was obvious.
This is why we patent inventions, not ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen, making them work is the patentable part.
most businesses don't do it because it is difficult to manage and can cause a lot of customer aggro
So its difficult and causes problems?
What if they had an invention which presented a working solution to these problems... why wouldn't that qualify for a patent exactly? :)
That said, I do disagree with busines method patents. And software patents too.
Cancer is just one of many, many things that are likely to kill you before you're 120.
Yup... and its not even the worst of the bunch. I'd put Alzheimer's on the top of the list; maybe advanced Parkinson's after that. Or a bad stroke...
If the light turns red and you go through the intersection 0.1 seconds later, you're not going to cause an accident
Agreed.
If you go through at the halfway point of the red cycle, you've got an excellent chance of causing an accident
Also agreed.
I'd think that, if the cameras were a little forgiving, people wouldn't slam on their brakes at the last minute.
No. I think there needs to be an easy line in the sand. If you enter the intersection on red you should get a fine.
If you are going to allow a half second or one second leeway on entering the red -- then it makes more sense to me to leave the hard line on the red, and just make the yellow 0.5 or 1 second longer.
I've given it a fair bit of thought actually, and I think the following is the best way to run the system:
100% of the revenue generated from any criminal penalty or fine should also be redistributed back to the residents in the form of a direct payment.
This ensures the city doesn't view the cameras (and any other crime) as revenue; and no part of the government becomes dependent on that revenue.
Then the city will make rational (and correct) decisions where and how to install and configure cameras, and when to decommission or rotate them elsewhere, based purely on safety objectives.
It does mean taxes have to go up a bit to cover the overall revenue loss; since enforcement is purely a cost centre now. But it balance out with the rebate. And having it go through the rebate and tax cycle means the costs/benefit of running the program is exposed directly to voters; and the city has no incentive or benefit from running a program unless it's actually working to improve safety, etc.
They can probably get around the criminal part by just creating a fictional person. It's only criminal if they steal a real persons identity. I doubt the cops care anything about civil law.
Maybe. But the computer misuse laws are so broadly written right now, that violating the "terms of service" is tantamount to "unauthorized use of a computer"...
For example...
http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/2913...
All you've done is argue that its not the presence of red light cameras causing accidents; its the screwing around with the yellow timing that is.
Screwing around with the yellow durations -- that leads to an unsafe intersection.
Nobody has to drive poorly if red light cameras are installed and the intersection is setup properly.
They could just get tickets I guess.
While I don't care for the cameras I do live in a city with red light cameras. I've NEVER had any difficulty stopping safely; and I've never gotten a red light ticket.
As long as the city isn't screwing with the yellow light duration, if you were driving safely then red light cameras really don't affect you.
just to drive the way they were driving before that was safer.
Running red lights is not safe.
What the cameras force are sudden stops and accelerations. You can't avoid it.
Again, around here, that's just not the case. When the light turns yellow, people prepare to stop for the red. Unless they are moving at sufficient speed to enter the intersection while its still yellow. Its basic driving 101.
If red light cameras make you are slam on the brakes then you are driving poorly.
due to the extra threat of photos people are more likely to slam on the brakes at the last second when it would be safer to continue through the intersection.
If you are choosing between "slamming your brakes at the last second" or "running a red light" then you were driving unsafely.***
Further if you are "slamming your brakes at the last second" to avoid a ticket, AND you get rear ended as a result -- what was the guy behind you thinking? Sounds like he was driving even poorer than you were... because if you couldn't get through the intersection legally; then he certainly couldn't either, so he should have been slowing down to stop even if you hadn't fucked up and waited to the last second to slam on your brakes.
I'm not disputing that the rear-end accident rate went up. But only because the red light camera exacerbated already shitty driving habits. Nobody was driving safely and now HAD to drive unsafely. They were driving unsafely all along.
Further T-bone accidents were reduced. The severity of T-bone accidents tends to be a lot higher than rear-ends. Especially as the "slammed on the brakes at the last second scenarios" typically involve pretty small differences in relative vehicle speeds... e.g you slowing from 35mph to 20mhp and get rear ended by a vehicle that also slammed on its brakes from 35mph and hits you still moving 30mph... a difference of only 10mph.
T-bones tend to involve vehicles both hitting eachother at 30mph at orthoganal angles which is both a larger impact and harder for the vehicles accident systems to absorb.
(***Yes, we can argue that IF the yellow light timers were adjusted downward below what they should be for the speed limit to further increase revenues then yes. But that is a completely separate issue from merely installing properly configured red light cameras.)
The result was actually an increase in accidents because everyone had to start driving dangerously to avoid the cameras.
Nobody HAD to drive dangerously simply because the cameras were installed.
Otherwise I generally agree with you.
Yeah, the netflix angle breaks things and really just highlights just how terrible a player it is.
Expect a lot more of this with "Internet of Things".
I for one am not interested in any of that crap.
Rocks are expected (from operation of simple physics laws), so are not life-y self-causal by particular information.
And what happens when we discover a means to create what we would categorize as life from non-life by way of the operation of simple physics laws?
I mean, we do largely assert that this is what happened. And although we don't know how to "make" it happen today, it may be that its not altogether that exotic.
If something was inevitably going to happen anyway to some matter and energy, due to its statistical distribution and the surrounding thermodynamic regime and fundamental forces, do we say that that future state (or equivalence class of states) required a particular cause (beyond the operation of the simple physical laws on the situation?) No.
That's the rub. Are the sub-cellular molecular interactions of my body not individually quite predictable by the simple physical laws on the situation. Protein folding might be quite complicated, but its guided by simple rules.
Are you categorizing life then as nothing more than emergent deviations from expected outcomes due to the cumultative effects of complex interactions that don't lend themselves well to simpler modelling?
Is then a galaxy alive, if it does something we don't "expect" simply as the cumulative addition of all the sub-processes that we didn't individually model?
Or conversely, if we successfully modeled a life form such that we could predict from simple laws of physics the sorts of things that it will do does that strip from it the label of "life"?
Because that definition of life sounds much like the definition of magic. The more we understand physics the the less will qualify. First we'll reduce simple organisms to predictable machines, then ever more increasingly complicated ones will fall until the robots we build and count as non-life and the insects and bacteria we count as alive intersect...
Rabbits have internal information which under the right conditions can be used to form a new rabbit.
Male rabbits can't form a new rabbit without female rabbits. Does a male rabbit still count as having all the "information" necessary to form a new rabbit if it can't do it itself? It also lacks key physiology required to transform the information into a new rabbit.
Rabbits have internal information which under the right conditions can be used to form a new rabbit.
What are the right conditions for a population of male rabbits to form a new rabbit?
The rock is just as self-describing; scan the rock see what its made of and that is the information required by a suitable 3rd party contraption to create a new rock.
What makes some sort of scanner + nano-assembler + raw materials capable of reproducing rocks different from a female rabbit and some food capable of processing the informational element handed to it by a male rabbit?
Why not? You could batch program it for delivery twice a day.
All inter-company email slowed to twice a day batches. Every exchange with an external consultant or contractor; every conference call meeting confirmation, everything... goes out at noon and 5 pm?
What issue exactly would twice a day batches even solve?
In a company where you were in charge upper management would literally crucify you, and the regular employees would cheer them on.