I was hoping that the administration was on the up and up, but this is definitely a signal that what they are and were doing has highly questionable legal merit.
There's the rub. Even if everything was handled well and no innocent person's privacy was violated without good cause, the lack of oversight makes it wrong. I don't care if they were being nefarious or not, I want the spying investigated and overseen by the judiciary then, now, and forever always. Any organization that says "Trust us, we're working in your best interests!" without accountability is almost certainly not.
Art's expensive. Paint, canvas, pianos, harpsicords, guitars, theatres, lights, studios, tour buses, dancers in cages, and hand-sorted m&ms all cost money.
Gone are the days when it took hundreds of thousands of dollars--if not millions--to publish a book, release an album or make a film. F*ck the "artists" who don't like the way the world is changing. I'd much rather toss a 20 to a brilliant performer on open mic night than a shrink-wrapped CD any day.
IANAP, but the way I understand it is that particles behave as waves until observation causes the waveform to collapse into a particle. Our pieces of paper will "act" gray (as waveforms of their black-or-white color probability) until the moment the envelope is opened.
Do you not think it would be meaningful just to receive the message "hello"?
Oh, any response would be momentous. The issue is simply that round-trip signal time for 30+ly is 60+ years. Whoever sent the signals may very well be dead by the time a response comes (if one comes at all).
30 or even 300 LY is tiny on a galactic scale. Then again, anybody who's more than 30 ly away won't be able to have a meaningful conversation with us over the course of a single researcher's lifetime . . . unless of course they're kind enough to send instructions on how to communicate FTL.
Speaking of FTL communications . . . maybe civilizations only use radio for a relatively short time in their development. Present understanding of physics pretty much rules out FTL communications, but there could always be some exotic aspect of our universe we haven't discovered yet that would allow it and we'll finally be able to log in to the giant IRC server of the universe.
we just got a bunch of those induction flashlights at work that are supposed to charge themselves when you shake them... for "safety". Naturally, we disected them the same day we got them, only to find that they are powered by two Lithium batteries.
Same concept, different application. Those flashlights contain a linear generator. Shaking them charges the batteries by essentially shaking a magnet back and forth past some coiled wire. Inductive chargers contain two coils--one inside the charger and one inside the device. When the charger runs current through its coil, the electrons in the device's coil are essentially "dragged along" too which generates current in the charging device without any metal touching between the charger and the device. This is especially handy for things like shavers and electric toothbrushes as metal contacts can get corroded or grimed up with toothpaste and shaving cream.
It doesn't help that most free software cannot exactly count "a familiar, consistent user interface" as one of its strengths.
Such was the case with mainstream software in days before Win95 (and that wasn't even the end-all). Even today there are still some commercial apps that have their own set of rules *cough*LotusNotes*cough*. And don't even get me started on web-based apps.
Cross-platform FOSS apps are getting more consistent all the time. The best of breed have pretty much standardized on GTK+ and/or Qt. Those two still behave differently, but two's a vast improvement over dozens.
They can blacklist her name and all the various permutations that crop up, employ measures similar to the copyright enforcement they're still working on by attempting to automatically recognize the particular video, and on and on. People will still find ways to put it right back. It's going to be an endless cat and mouse game. Can anyone else think of a way to realistically keep the video off YouTube without moderating the whole shooting match?
The real problem is that their are thousands, if not millions of people whose attention is fixated on this video and they'll keep trying to distribute it. The only way this is going to go away is when people lose interest . . . which isn't going to happen any time soon now that there's constant media coverage because she was foolish enough to file suit. Daniela's best bet is to get over herself and take advantage of the fact she's now a world-wide household name. Paris Hilton wasn't nearly as famous until her sex tapes and look at how much she's been raking in ever since. Welcome to celebrity, Daniela--your privacy is now forfeit.
Mark went and got some plastic shield and thus a splash guard deflector was instantly fabricated.
It sounds to me like that might introduce some cooling issues--hot air tends to rise, covering the top of a rack with plastic might allow the hotter air to collect and cause thermal issues.
how do we know if the robot really is sentient, or is merely simulating sentience?
How do we know if a person really is sentient, or is merely simulating sentience?
The short answer: We don't. The real problem is that we can't even define sentience clearly enough to definitively test for it. Once AI gets to the point where it appears sentient as far as anyone can tell, then it won't matter if it's really sentient. It becomes a philosophical argument.
I haven't played with it in a while, but QEMU was considerably slower than VMWare when I last gave it a spin. I figured it was a performance penalty from emulating the whole x86 where VMWare could run closer to the bare metal (on an underlying x86, that is) for near-native performance. Am I mistaken?
I doubt this. But then, Wired has always been even bigger Apple shills than Slashdot is.
Apple's laptop market share doubled in the first half of last year from 6% in January 2006 to 12% in June 2006. I don't know what their market share is up to since 6/06 but predicting 20% for 2007 doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
$3k for a video camera!? This isn't the 1980s anymore. My camcorder was $300 and it takes fantastic videos in that resolution and it's 4 years old. A $3k video camera better fluff your dick between shots for that kind of money.
If you want it to look decent in a studio environment, then yes, you need a pro-sumer grade video camera. Usually the differences lie in better optics & control over focus and exposure settings, multiple CCDs for better color definition (especially important when you have bright studio lights if you want decent color balance/gamut). There are a *lot* more factors to a camera's video quality than just resolution.
maybe we should refer to the **AAs as Vikings or Raiders or something. Successively stealing our rights and enforcing their business models..
Vikings and Raiders both sound too cool and are also names of sports teams. However, especially with the help of a few popular movies, "Pirates" are pretty cool in the public mind. Call 'em by the stodgy acronyms they are. or the already-popular MAFIAA.
Common rail diesels are coming soon too. VW has to pull most of its diesels out of the upcoming model year while they change over, but they'll be back & cleaner than ever in '08. I believe the pending changes will make them legal in the more eco-strict states (i.e. California) too.
That depends on the implentation. Personally, I'd love to have a computer running iTunes in my car -- all I'd have to do is set it to "party shuffle" and hit "next track" every once in a while.
Personally though, I'd just scrap NASA entirely as it's entirely too encumbered by red-tape to do anything worthwhile and replace it with commercial space programs.
How does one create a commercial space program capable of manned missions to space and interplanetary scientific probes?
Private industry will jump in as soon as they feel it's profitable. NASA's continued existence in no way forbids this. The payoff from NASA's current activities will come decades, maybe centuries in the future when manned spaceflight has matured enough to allow humans to colonize other worlds. The reward from this is no less than the continued survival of the human species in the event of a planetary cataclysm. (which is only a matter of when, not if)
Mining asteriods and the greater solar system can reduce the environmental impact of terrestrial mining operations and might be quite profitable if it can be done efficiently enough. Everything that has been learned (and continues to be learned) from NASA's probes will be of tremendous help in figuring out how to tackle something like that.
A lot of good science is being accomplished with NASA's robotic missions. This may be of little value to some, but it's the life's-work of others. Some might sneer and call the martian rovers "expensive toys humping rocks on another planet," while others view it as another step on the very long path to humanity leaving its cradle.
but the delayed in the launch has cost Microsoft, billions of dollars.
Until the day Vista ships, MS is getting huge amounts of cash from Windows XP licenses on almost every new PC sold. Most people don't run out and buy a new OS for existing PCs, they usually stick with whatever came with it. How exactly will Vista increase MS's revenue to the tune of billions? Had they released something sooner, what new cash flow would that have provided and would it have justified the expense for development?
I'm sortof dancing around my real point here: I think the *real* reason so much time has gone buy since XP is that Microsoft really hasn't had much incentive to release a new OS.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought MS's "corporate volume licenses" required 2 parts:
-A valid OEM or Retail license for a recent version of Windows PLUS
-A valid Volume license.
Most of them allow you to mix and match (A WinXP Pro OEM license sticker is still kosher to combine with a Win2k volume license). But OEM licenses are non-transferable to new equipment. So unless you have a stack of retail licenses to back up those volume licenses, you still need an OEM sticker on any new equipment you buy. Getting a box with FreeDOS from Dell doesn't entitle you to install Windows.
I thought that the open-source community was suposed to be better.. There are no fan-boy-fanatics, (RMS aside)
Every community has its fanatics. It just comes with the territory when dealing with people. Whether it's a religious, political, social or technological faction; there are foaming-at-the-mouth busybodies with agendas and megaphones and there are reasonable rational participants. In most cases, the fanatics are only a tiny minority. They're just a lot louder.
Slashdot Mirror
There's the rub. Even if everything was handled well and no innocent person's privacy was violated without good cause, the lack of oversight makes it wrong. I don't care if they were being nefarious or not, I want the spying investigated and overseen by the judiciary then, now, and forever always. Any organization that says "Trust us, we're working in your best interests!" without accountability is almost certainly not.
Art's expensive. Paint, canvas, pianos, harpsicords, guitars, theatres, lights, studios, tour buses, dancers in cages, and hand-sorted m&ms all cost money.
Gone are the days when it took hundreds of thousands of dollars--if not millions--to publish a book, release an album or make a film. F*ck the "artists" who don't like the way the world is changing. I'd much rather toss a 20 to a brilliant performer on open mic night than a shrink-wrapped CD any day.
But it couldn't come to the party until 1994 when its legal issues were finally cleared up. Linux had already gained enough momentum by then.
IANAP, but the way I understand it is that particles behave as waves until observation causes the waveform to collapse into a particle. Our pieces of paper will "act" gray (as waveforms of their black-or-white color probability) until the moment the envelope is opened.
Oh, any response would be momentous. The issue is simply that round-trip signal time for 30+ly is 60+ years. Whoever sent the signals may very well be dead by the time a response comes (if one comes at all).
30 or even 300 LY is tiny on a galactic scale. Then again, anybody who's more than 30 ly away won't be able to have a meaningful conversation with us over the course of a single researcher's lifetime . . . unless of course they're kind enough to send instructions on how to communicate FTL.
Speaking of FTL communications . . . maybe civilizations only use radio for a relatively short time in their development. Present understanding of physics pretty much rules out FTL communications, but there could always be some exotic aspect of our universe we haven't discovered yet that would allow it and we'll finally be able to log in to the giant IRC server of the universe.
Isn't this a bit like chickens getting help from a pack of wolves for their security needs?
Perhaps I'm being too cynical, as both MS and the NSA have just stellar track records on their concern for an individual's privacy . . .
Same concept, different application. Those flashlights contain a linear generator. Shaking them charges the batteries by essentially shaking a magnet back and forth past some coiled wire. Inductive chargers contain two coils--one inside the charger and one inside the device. When the charger runs current through its coil, the electrons in the device's coil are essentially "dragged along" too which generates current in the charging device without any metal touching between the charger and the device. This is especially handy for things like shavers and electric toothbrushes as metal contacts can get corroded or grimed up with toothpaste and shaving cream.
Such was the case with mainstream software in days before Win95 (and that wasn't even the end-all). Even today there are still some commercial apps that have their own set of rules *cough*LotusNotes*cough*. And don't even get me started on web-based apps.
Cross-platform FOSS apps are getting more consistent all the time. The best of breed have pretty much standardized on GTK+ and/or Qt. Those two still behave differently, but two's a vast improvement over dozens.
They can blacklist her name and all the various permutations that crop up, employ measures similar to the copyright enforcement they're still working on by attempting to automatically recognize the particular video, and on and on. People will still find ways to put it right back. It's going to be an endless cat and mouse game. Can anyone else think of a way to realistically keep the video off YouTube without moderating the whole shooting match?
The real problem is that their are thousands, if not millions of people whose attention is fixated on this video and they'll keep trying to distribute it. The only way this is going to go away is when people lose interest . . . which isn't going to happen any time soon now that there's constant media coverage because she was foolish enough to file suit. Daniela's best bet is to get over herself and take advantage of the fact she's now a world-wide household name. Paris Hilton wasn't nearly as famous until her sex tapes and look at how much she's been raking in ever since. Welcome to celebrity, Daniela--your privacy is now forfeit.
How do we know if a person really is sentient, or is merely simulating sentience?
The short answer: We don't. The real problem is that we can't even define sentience clearly enough to definitively test for it. Once AI gets to the point where it appears sentient as far as anyone can tell, then it won't matter if it's really sentient. It becomes a philosophical argument.
I haven't played with it in a while, but QEMU was considerably slower than VMWare when I last gave it a spin. I figured it was a performance penalty from emulating the whole x86 where VMWare could run closer to the bare metal (on an underlying x86, that is) for near-native performance. Am I mistaken?
Bill was understudying with Jim Henson for Kermit in case the whole software thing didn't pan out.
Apple's laptop market share doubled in the first half of last year from 6% in January 2006 to 12% in June 2006. I don't know what their market share is up to since 6/06 but predicting 20% for 2007 doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
If you want it to look decent in a studio environment, then yes, you need a pro-sumer grade video camera. Usually the differences lie in better optics & control over focus and exposure settings, multiple CCDs for better color definition (especially important when you have bright studio lights if you want decent color balance/gamut). There are a *lot* more factors to a camera's video quality than just resolution.
Their processors are PowerPC based RAD6000s. They are capable of a whopping 35 MIPS, which is obviously woefully inadequate for any kind of sentience.
Vikings and Raiders both sound too cool and are also names of sports teams. However, especially with the help of a few popular movies, "Pirates" are pretty cool in the public mind. Call 'em by the stodgy acronyms they are. or the already-popular MAFIAA.
Common rail diesels are coming soon too. VW has to pull most of its diesels out of the upcoming model year while they change over, but they'll be back & cleaner than ever in '08. I believe the pending changes will make them legal in the more eco-strict states (i.e. California) too.
Or you could just break down and get an ipod.
How does one create a commercial space program capable of manned missions to space and interplanetary scientific probes?
Private industry will jump in as soon as they feel it's profitable. NASA's continued existence in no way forbids this. The payoff from NASA's current activities will come decades, maybe centuries in the future when manned spaceflight has matured enough to allow humans to colonize other worlds. The reward from this is no less than the continued survival of the human species in the event of a planetary cataclysm. (which is only a matter of when, not if)
Mining asteriods and the greater solar system can reduce the environmental impact of terrestrial mining operations and might be quite profitable if it can be done efficiently enough. Everything that has been learned (and continues to be learned) from NASA's probes will be of tremendous help in figuring out how to tackle something like that.
A lot of good science is being accomplished with NASA's robotic missions. This may be of little value to some, but it's the life's-work of others. Some might sneer and call the martian rovers "expensive toys humping rocks on another planet," while others view it as another step on the very long path to humanity leaving its cradle.
Until the day Vista ships, MS is getting huge amounts of cash from Windows XP licenses on almost every new PC sold. Most people don't run out and buy a new OS for existing PCs, they usually stick with whatever came with it. How exactly will Vista increase MS's revenue to the tune of billions? Had they released something sooner, what new cash flow would that have provided and would it have justified the expense for development?
I'm sortof dancing around my real point here: I think the *real* reason so much time has gone buy since XP is that Microsoft really hasn't had much incentive to release a new OS.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought MS's "corporate volume licenses" required 2 parts:
-A valid OEM or Retail license for a recent version of Windows
PLUS
-A valid Volume license.
Most of them allow you to mix and match (A WinXP Pro OEM license sticker is still kosher to combine with a Win2k volume license). But OEM licenses are non-transferable to new equipment. So unless you have a stack of retail licenses to back up those volume licenses, you still need an OEM sticker on any new equipment you buy. Getting a box with FreeDOS from Dell doesn't entitle you to install Windows.
Considering where the robots will be crawling, I think they're more likely to have a Zune inspired color scheme.
Every community has its fanatics. It just comes with the territory when dealing with people. Whether it's a religious, political, social or technological faction; there are foaming-at-the-mouth busybodies with agendas and megaphones and there are reasonable rational participants. In most cases, the fanatics are only a tiny minority. They're just a lot louder.