You do realize that there's a hell of a difference between some comments on slashdot and a university English paper, yes? In online discussion an informal style is perfectly acceptable and the errors illustrated in the TFA are not errors so much as they are adaptations. In an English paper, however, a formal writing style is expected.
Just look at your signature for fuck's sake, it's completely informal and riddled with errors. I find it odd that you are railing on people for making simple errors here but you don't even bother to write properly yourself.
They make these nifty things called rags that can wipe that away. They also make AC which dries the air and works just as well, if not better than, heating the car up.
These diamonds aren't "precious". Either they're too far out of our reach and therefore worthless or they're within our reach and they're worthless because there's so many of them. If we could ever make it there and back the diamond market would crash. Not that that would be a bad thing. Debeers needs to have their illegal monopoly crushed by any means necessary.
The difference is that it's not a human error that anyone at the end of the line can fix. The radiation tech can't go reprogram the machine to fix someone else's "human error".
"It could be that the probability of a fatal complication, defined as (# of fatal complications) / (# of procedures) is quite low."
It doesn't matter how low the numbers are, anything above ZERO mistakes is BAD, period! We're not talking about the risks of radiation therapy here. We're talking about the risks of IDIOTS FUCKING SHIT UP! These people didn't die because the radiation didn't work, they died because some dipshit didn't use the machine correctly. It's the same thing as a surgeon cutting out someone's heart when they should have been removing the pancreas.
Regardless of how risky anything is, every attempt should be made to make it LESS risky. As safe as possible. No, it won't ever hit 100% success, but we should make every attempt to get it as close as possible.
"If it's such a minor thing, why don't your people with advanced degrees "read the fucking graph generated by someone else.""
Because they're busy doing science. You know, designing telescopes, doing calculations, determining where the scope should be pointed based off of data that requires a lot of education to understand.
Their time is too valuable to spend hours watching graphs looking for blobs.
I may have been a bit quick on the draw there. After finding the second article it appears that she didn't even type in any commands. I didn't edit it our because it wasn't exactly clear.
No, people need to STOP USING MONEY SERVICES THAT AREN'T BANKS. There's no reason to declare this paypal nonsense a bank. Just stop using things that aren't banks. Declaring paypal a bank would just give it a large aura of legitimacy. They can still be very shady and do things that are ALMOST illegal.
By "right people" he means people that need the supplies rather than jackshits that will horde everything and try to sell it to starving people for everything they have left.
5 days hardly seems long enough to conduct a serious study. You have to take into account the fact that these journalists are going to be working in an environment completely different from what they're used to. It's going to take them a while to adapt to being cut off from their regular tools before they can report anything properly, assuming that it's possible at all.
No, actually, you're completely and absolutely wrong. This is going to sound trollish, but this telescope cost a fuckload of money and had absolutely nothing to do with the student. The people operating the telescope basically just give out the data to a bunch of schools. The schools then have the students punch in a few commands, the computer goes to work, and a while later the computer says "Hey, this data looks like it might not be garbage, might want to check it out". So then the professionals actually did some further analysis and found that yeah, it was a pulsar.
I hate every freaking one of these stories that claim "Young person does science usually done by people with advanced degrees!". She punched in some commands, she didn't do science. Christ. Any other 15 year old working their ass off in school to become a physicist or engineer gets no special recognition or help or any assistance doing science or research like this. But one student who just fucking happened to be in the seat when the computer came up with the result gets credit for doing something completely unremarkable.
She didn't point the telescope, she didn't actually gather any data, she didn't develop the algorythm used by the computer to actually analyze the signal. She read a fucking graph generated by someone else. Look at this article from the same source about another kid who did the same thing: http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2009/pulsarstudent/ You can see the plots there. You look at a graph and if you see a blob you report it.
I mean, think about this for a little bit. Why on earth do people go to college and get degrees in science if it can be done by a 15 year old with exactly zero formal training in the area?
It probably sounds like I'm belittling these students' achievements. I'm really not. I'm simply pointing out what they actually did. It's the media that in their haste for a story trumps up this unremarkable junk into something amazing.
You have to remember though that this isn't being paid for by NASA necessarily. I mean, they own the bloody link. They or the government probably owns any satellites that are used in the link.
There's also the fact that this isn't a commercial ISP. This is a purpose built (ish) system. Their latency could be anything from 20 ms to 5 seconds depending on just how they are doing this.
Because the standard tool works alright and the ergonomic tool is some dipshit changing something inconsequential and marking it up another $50.
Seriously though, yes, humans are multi-purpose. Yes, we really interface with the items we build. There are such a huge number of humans and we're all a little different so of course one tool will not work for every single human on the face of the planet. That's really a non-issue though because any robot designed to perform human tasks with human tools will be designed to use these human tools regardless of how different the robots are from one another. No one is going to make a toilet cleaning robot and design it such that it can't use a toilet brush.
Furthermore, it's a matter of money and convenience as well. Yeah, you could have one humanoid robot that's somewhat inefficient at all tasks. The more specialized you make a robot the more efficient it becomes and the more robots you need (to do the tasks that the others can't do). Every specialized robot is going to cost roughly the amount of a humanoid robot because they all need their own electronics. Their own batteries, motors, controllers, etc. You can't save money here because every robot has to be as intelligent as a humanoid to properly interact with humans as it would and to navigate the house properly.
You have 5 times the amount of shit to break down, 5 times the amount of regular maintenance, 5 times the number of old batteries to recycle, 5 times the amount of space taken up.
You actually gain NOTHING by having the robot be more efficient. The robot will conserve a little more power, but remember that charging is inherently somewhat inefficient. You are now charging 5 robots instead of one. Any money you save in efficiency you again lose in the inefficiency of charging.
And then there's the fact that I now have to buy specialized tools for all these things. Can't use a standard toilet brush because that's "inefficient". I have to spend a lot more money on one that this robot can use. What's more, if my toilet cleaning robot breaks down I can't clean the toilet myself because the tool is designed for the robot.
People watch too much television and get this idea in their heads that "robots" are these amazing high-tech devices that resemble the terminator. They expect a robot to be awesome. Yes, your washing machine is a robot. Go look up the definition of a robot and you'll see that a washing machine meets those criteria.
A robot doesn't involve movement, you're putting that into your definition because you think that robots have to be cool or look like they accomplish some complicated task or think that robots have to all be useful. Robots involve actuation. A robot without actuation is called a computer. Actuation involves more than movement, it's doing anything physical. Turning on a heating element, turning on a pump (technically there's movement inside the pump I guess, but that's not the point), etc.
Yes, your coffee maker is a robot. It's not a cool robot, it's not fascinating to watch, and it doesn't do very much, but none of these things have to do with he definition of a robot. It does what it does autonomously and it involves actuation. (It heats the coffee then pumps it through the coffee grounds). It turns on the warmer below the pot when it gets cold, etc.
Why design it like a human? Because everything that you or I do is done with devices that were... designed for humans. Stairs: Designed for humans Doorway size: humans Chairs: Humans Desks: Humans
The list goes on. Everything from your car to your dishwasher was designed so that it could be operated by you, not by a purpose-built robot. Thus, when you want a multi-purpose robot you want a robot designed like a human. These robots are the "personal assistant" robots. They do (or will in the future) your dishes, make dinner, take your car to the shop, etc. On the other hand, if you want a robot to do one specific thing, like weld car chassis, then you want to design the robot differently to be the most efficient at doing that one specific thing.
Yes, your humanoid robot is less efficient at loading your dishwasher than a purpose-built dishwashing robot would be, but that dishwashing robot can't also go drive your car to the shop. The robot that only drives your car can't do anything else because it's part of the car itself.
So when you say that you wouldn't start with a human form when you want to get useful stuff done you really have to evaluate what exactly you call "useful stuff" and decide just/how much/ useful stuff you want to do.
That's not how it works. The company is using the money gained through your effort to further a cause regardless of whether or not you support it. That's not free association. Employment is not free association.
And give soldiers another 20 years worth of tech gadget development and all of a sudden you'll have a wearable interface that looks remarkably like COD4, where the bad guys have bright red markers above their heads.
In a business that sounds like a personnel issue rather than a security one. I mean, what if they guy "simply refused" to arm the alarm after he left the building, (obviously just an example) or "simply refused" to lock his office door, or "simply refused" to take any physical security measures. Would the company just let him to continue to keep working there? If so, they probably deserve the consequences when they loose a client and get sued for releasing all sorts of confidential data.
Anyone who "simply refuses" to follow security policies after a warning or two should be promptly sacked with a black mark on their record. Not just "asked to resign", but sacked and escorted out of the building immediately.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that there's a hell of a difference between some comments on slashdot and a university English paper, yes? In online discussion an informal style is perfectly acceptable and the errors illustrated in the TFA are not errors so much as they are adaptations. In an English paper, however, a formal writing style is expected.
Just look at your signature for fuck's sake, it's completely informal and riddled with errors. I find it odd that you are railing on people for making simple errors here but you don't even bother to write properly yourself.
They make these nifty things called rags that can wipe that away. They also make AC which dries the air and works just as well, if not better than, heating the car up.
NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPAMISH INQUISITION!!!!!
On another note, this sentence is to bypass the caps filter.
These diamonds aren't "precious". Either they're too far out of our reach and therefore worthless or they're within our reach and they're worthless because there's so many of them. If we could ever make it there and back the diamond market would crash. Not that that would be a bad thing. Debeers needs to have their illegal monopoly crushed by any means necessary.
It's much cheaper to settle with the families with gag orders attached.
Gag orders should not legally be allowed in settlements. The ONLY reason they're used is to prevent justice.
The difference is that it's not a human error that anyone at the end of the line can fix. The radiation tech can't go reprogram the machine to fix someone else's "human error".
"It could be that the probability of a fatal complication, defined as (# of fatal complications) / (# of procedures) is quite low."
It doesn't matter how low the numbers are, anything above ZERO mistakes is BAD, period! We're not talking about the risks of radiation therapy here. We're talking about the risks of IDIOTS FUCKING SHIT UP! These people didn't die because the radiation didn't work, they died because some dipshit didn't use the machine correctly. It's the same thing as a surgeon cutting out someone's heart when they should have been removing the pancreas.
Regardless of how risky anything is, every attempt should be made to make it LESS risky. As safe as possible. No, it won't ever hit 100% success, but we should make every attempt to get it as close as possible.
"If it's such a minor thing, why don't your people with advanced degrees "read the fucking graph generated by someone else.""
Because they're busy doing science. You know, designing telescopes, doing calculations, determining where the scope should be pointed based off of data that requires a lot of education to understand.
Their time is too valuable to spend hours watching graphs looking for blobs.
I may have been a bit quick on the draw there. After finding the second article it appears that she didn't even type in any commands. I didn't edit it our because it wasn't exactly clear.
No, people need to STOP USING MONEY SERVICES THAT AREN'T BANKS. There's no reason to declare this paypal nonsense a bank. Just stop using things that aren't banks. Declaring paypal a bank would just give it a large aura of legitimacy. They can still be very shady and do things that are ALMOST illegal.
By "right people" he means people that need the supplies rather than jackshits that will horde everything and try to sell it to starving people for everything they have left.
5 days hardly seems long enough to conduct a serious study. You have to take into account the fact that these journalists are going to be working in an environment completely different from what they're used to. It's going to take them a while to adapt to being cut off from their regular tools before they can report anything properly, assuming that it's possible at all.
No, actually, you're completely and absolutely wrong. This is going to sound trollish, but this telescope cost a fuckload of money and had absolutely nothing to do with the student. The people operating the telescope basically just give out the data to a bunch of schools. The schools then have the students punch in a few commands, the computer goes to work, and a while later the computer says "Hey, this data looks like it might not be garbage, might want to check it out". So then the professionals actually did some further analysis and found that yeah, it was a pulsar.
I hate every freaking one of these stories that claim "Young person does science usually done by people with advanced degrees!". She punched in some commands, she didn't do science. Christ. Any other 15 year old working their ass off in school to become a physicist or engineer gets no special recognition or help or any assistance doing science or research like this. But one student who just fucking happened to be in the seat when the computer came up with the result gets credit for doing something completely unremarkable.
She didn't point the telescope, she didn't actually gather any data, she didn't develop the algorythm used by the computer to actually analyze the signal. She read a fucking graph generated by someone else.
Look at this article from the same source about another kid who did the same thing: http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2009/pulsarstudent/
You can see the plots there. You look at a graph and if you see a blob you report it.
I mean, think about this for a little bit. Why on earth do people go to college and get degrees in science if it can be done by a 15 year old with exactly zero formal training in the area?
It probably sounds like I'm belittling these students' achievements. I'm really not. I'm simply pointing out what they actually did. It's the media that in their haste for a story trumps up this unremarkable junk into something amazing.
You have to remember though that this isn't being paid for by NASA necessarily. I mean, they own the bloody link. They or the government probably owns any satellites that are used in the link.
A memo written by bill gates in '76 is not at all representative of Microsoft's stance against or actions towards piracy during the last 20-30 years.
There's also the fact that this isn't a commercial ISP. This is a purpose built (ish) system. Their latency could be anything from 20 ms to 5 seconds depending on just how they are doing this.
Sounds like a recipe for awesome if you ask me.
Because the standard tool works alright and the ergonomic tool is some dipshit changing something inconsequential and marking it up another $50.
Seriously though, yes, humans are multi-purpose. Yes, we really interface with the items we build. There are such a huge number of humans and we're all a little different so of course one tool will not work for every single human on the face of the planet. That's really a non-issue though because any robot designed to perform human tasks with human tools will be designed to use these human tools regardless of how different the robots are from one another. No one is going to make a toilet cleaning robot and design it such that it can't use a toilet brush.
Furthermore, it's a matter of money and convenience as well. Yeah, you could have one humanoid robot that's somewhat inefficient at all tasks. The more specialized you make a robot the more efficient it becomes and the more robots you need (to do the tasks that the others can't do). Every specialized robot is going to cost roughly the amount of a humanoid robot because they all need their own electronics. Their own batteries, motors, controllers, etc. You can't save money here because every robot has to be as intelligent as a humanoid to properly interact with humans as it would and to navigate the house properly.
You have 5 times the amount of shit to break down, 5 times the amount of regular maintenance, 5 times the number of old batteries to recycle, 5 times the amount of space taken up.
You actually gain NOTHING by having the robot be more efficient. The robot will conserve a little more power, but remember that charging is inherently somewhat inefficient. You are now charging 5 robots instead of one. Any money you save in efficiency you again lose in the inefficiency of charging.
And then there's the fact that I now have to buy specialized tools for all these things. Can't use a standard toilet brush because that's "inefficient". I have to spend a lot more money on one that this robot can use. What's more, if my toilet cleaning robot breaks down I can't clean the toilet myself because the tool is designed for the robot.
He's not diluting the term at all.
People watch too much television and get this idea in their heads that "robots" are these amazing high-tech devices that resemble the terminator. They expect a robot to be awesome. Yes, your washing machine is a robot. Go look up the definition of a robot and you'll see that a washing machine meets those criteria.
Robots aren't all exciting, get over it.
A robot doesn't involve movement, you're putting that into your definition because you think that robots have to be cool or look like they accomplish some complicated task or think that robots have to all be useful. Robots involve actuation. A robot without actuation is called a computer. Actuation involves more than movement, it's doing anything physical. Turning on a heating element, turning on a pump (technically there's movement inside the pump I guess, but that's not the point), etc.
Yes, your coffee maker is a robot. It's not a cool robot, it's not fascinating to watch, and it doesn't do very much, but none of these things have to do with he definition of a robot. It does what it does autonomously and it involves actuation. (It heats the coffee then pumps it through the coffee grounds). It turns on the warmer below the pot when it gets cold, etc.
Why design it like a human? Because everything that you or I do is done with devices that were... designed for humans.
/how much/ useful stuff you want to do.
Stairs: Designed for humans
Doorway size: humans
Chairs: Humans
Desks: Humans
The list goes on. Everything from your car to your dishwasher was designed so that it could be operated by you, not by a purpose-built robot. Thus, when you want a multi-purpose robot you want a robot designed like a human. These robots are the "personal assistant" robots. They do (or will in the future) your dishes, make dinner, take your car to the shop, etc.
On the other hand, if you want a robot to do one specific thing, like weld car chassis, then you want to design the robot differently to be the most efficient at doing that one specific thing.
Yes, your humanoid robot is less efficient at loading your dishwasher than a purpose-built dishwashing robot would be, but that dishwashing robot can't also go drive your car to the shop. The robot that only drives your car can't do anything else because it's part of the car itself.
So when you say that you wouldn't start with a human form when you want to get useful stuff done you really have to evaluate what exactly you call "useful stuff" and decide just
That's not how it works. The company is using the money gained through your effort to further a cause regardless of whether or not you support it. That's not free association. Employment is not free association.
20,000,000 smokers can't be wrong! Smoking is good for you!
And give soldiers another 20 years worth of tech gadget development and all of a sudden you'll have a wearable interface that looks remarkably like COD4, where the bad guys have bright red markers above their heads.
In a business that sounds like a personnel issue rather than a security one. I mean, what if they guy "simply refused" to arm the alarm after he left the building, (obviously just an example) or "simply refused" to lock his office door, or "simply refused" to take any physical security measures. Would the company just let him to continue to keep working there? If so, they probably deserve the consequences when they loose a client and get sued for releasing all sorts of confidential data.
Anyone who "simply refuses" to follow security policies after a warning or two should be promptly sacked with a black mark on their record. Not just "asked to resign", but sacked and escorted out of the building immediately.