Fun fact: If you tell people what's in the healthcare plan without mentioning Congress or Obama, people are overwhelmingly for it (question along the lines of "would you support a healthcare plan that does xyz").
Now who could've possibly soured the American public on Congress and Obama, to the point where they'd decide based on that instead of the merits of the plan? Oh right...
Are you stupid or being delibrately obtuse? If I were to pick large agencies that show the government could do healthcare, I'd pick the post office and Medicare. Medicare's margin is something like 99% (that is, 99c on the dollar goes to patients). It's administration costs are tremendously low, and there are essentially no major complaints. In fact, if you were to try and take Medicare away from old folks, they'd kill you (in an election, and perhaps literally). It's called the third rail of politics for a reason.
In any case, as bad as government can get, they're not in it for the money. Insurance companies are offering insurance in order to make a profit, and I don't actually see how a profit motive can coexist with health insurance.
Yeah, that's why we make people like miners, metal workers, woodworkers, and others who work around artificially produced (and thus still sharp) dust wear personal protective equipment.
Yes, but they're directly breathing it in. One would think that not many people will be inhaling dust directly from the lunar surface, since there's no air to breathe. It'd only be there by deposition on clothing, such as mentioned in the article. And I wouldn't wear a respirator in the mine's break room, or upstairs of my wood shop.
I didn't know about the whole glove-damaging aspect. That's really interesting.
It's called regolith and isn't smooth. If you look at 'grit', such as sand or dirt or dust etc on earth, you'll find that it's all rounded by erosion. There is no erosion on the moon, so the 'grit' up there is all sharp.
I think that humans won't have too much trouble with it as far as inhaling goes - it'll get trapped in mucus as well as all the other dust we inhale.
Basically, it's different enough from Earth sand and dust to be interesting, but Earth grit is still abrasive. You probably wouldn't have any more trouble with your lenses than you would on Earth.
Wait... haven't we already sent people to the moon? If it was going to wreck our solar panels, lenses, or people, wouldn't we have already found that out?
If a teenager is too stupid to use a condom, they won't use a condom when they're 30.
I knew I wasn't stupid enough bareback because my parents didn't interfere with my sex life, aside from stressing the important of a condom. Had they forbidden it (in the process neglecting to discuss condoms), I would've done it ungloved.
Why do people think that 16-17 year olds get a whole lot smarter when they turn 18? Or hell, even 30. You don't mature all that much from 16; if you're immature at 16 you'll be immature at 18, 25, 40...
There was an episode of Futurama where Bender is captaining the ship, and Fry asks him if he's read the manual. Bender flips through the several-hundred-page book in about a half second and proclaims "Done", then proceeds to quote it.
It always seemed like a plausible thing to me. Isn't that what they're doing here?
You're ranting and raving. Go have a heart attack and try to manage it yourself -- good luck.
If you're deeply insulted about the fact that there is no link between autism and vaccines, too bad. If you're also insulted by my taking offense at parents like you who perpetuate the myth, kindly fuck off.
I've studied biotechnology. I've read the papers claiming the link, and understood them. I've read the papers questioning the paper, and understood *them*. I agree with the second class of papers, which were far more rigorous. What specific, concrete knowledge do *you* have about this? Something you read online? Something you heard?
Your opinion is EXACTLY what's wrong with healthcare today. I don't claim to understand what it's like to have a son with autism, and I'm sorry that such a thing has happened to you, but sometimes bad things happen to good people. For no reason. It's actually the reason I'm an atheist.
In any case, your situation is irrelevant to everybody but yourself and your son. Get it through your head: society does not care. It sounds harsh, and it is, but so is life - as you have experienced. I can understand the desperation, the search for answers, wanting there to be a reason... sorry, there isn't one.
If I'm able to insult you specifically by a simple comment on a forum, this says more about you than it does about me.
But in that instance they're just being dumb. All it takes is one malicious kid, who likes credit card numbers, waiting for a haircut and firing up nmap and pull down the customer DB, or fire up Metasploit.
They feel they're not a valuable enough target, but are they right? Maybe - it's hard to say for sure. But what's the cost of being wrong? For a smallish salon, almost definitely enough to put them entirely out of business.
And the cost being $50? They're simply being stupid. None of this bullshit "analyzing the economic realities and making the logical choice", just stupid.
Fact of the matter is, all this stuff only needs to happen once - especially for a small business. No security can prevent a super-hacker-paratrooper team from taking everything, but it can improve a once-in-5-years odd from some kid, to a once-in-1000-years odd.
Some security *is* ridiculous. But most of it isn't. You provide a great anecdote but I suspect it's fairly common.
Security people are a bit like doctors. It's not really up to the patient to tell the doctor how to do their job, in most cases. Witness the whole autism-vaccine BS. In both professions, the customer can override the professional advice, but it's not a good idea.
Carrying the analogy a bit further: Reasonable security is a bit like a prostate exam. It's easy and straightforward, a little unpleasant, and entirely unnecessary until it saves your life. Is it rational to forgo a prostate exam because "why would I need a prostate exam? I don't have cancer"
before long, he won't be thinking about deciphering "square", "circle", "room" etc. If my understanding is correct, he really will be able to see with his tongue, in the same way you or I see with our eyes. It'll wire the tongue up to the vision center.
In China, Google has Yahoo-level marketshare. I repeat: Google has a small marketshare compared to Baidu. Add to that the fact that they genuinely appear to be uncomfortable censoring (they show a 'censored' notice, among others) and the rather large PR hit, and most importantly the fact that they got hacked, and pulling out seems like a pretty good idea.
They could have said "we're licked" and flipped the switch, but they seem to prefer to bluster on and make this China's fault. I say more power to them.
Invest in our infrastructure? That would be communism! You're not a communist, are you?
And yes, standard gauge is 4'8.5". US, UK, Australia, Canada, and China all use standard gauge, as well as most of Western Europe. Russia's gauge is 3" wider.
So they'd have a job on their hands to connect up with Europe. They may run a third rail through Russia that matches with one existing rail to form standard gauge (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_gauge). Or they could just not connect to the Russian rail network and run all new tracks (maybe necessary for high-speed anyway).
They have quite a job on their hands, that's for sure.
Sounds great to me. I'd extend it to blood donors, with quantity donated moving you further up.
Humans aren't altruistic in general. It's nothing to be ashamed of - we're programmed to think of ourselves first. Aligning altruistic acts and self-preservation sounds like a great way to encourage altruistic behavior.
Same in the US. I was about to make some snide comment to the effect that that's bass-ackwards too...
That's not right. I can make up my mind for myself. It's a deeply, deeply personal choice that really cuts the the heart of what you believe about life.
It'd be one thing if I refrained from answering (in which case it should be up to them), but if I decided one way or the other that decision should be honored.
While I love and trust my family, they shouldn't be making that decision for me - nor should they be allowed to.
The way the system should work: Default is "not stated" in which case they ask the closest family members - without family members, default to 'yes'. You can state "yes" or "no", which is permanent unless you change it (which should be easy).
That's a month ago. Took about two minutes of searching - like I said, it was a month ago so I didn't have to look backwards very far.
Remote code execution on Server 2k3 (all versions), Windows 7, and Server 2k8. Of course, this presupposes that Windows has SMB (hint: yes)
Or do you not consider remote code execution a security issue?
Look. I don't despise Microsoft like most people around here - just a lukewarm pain-in-my-assness. But let's not go pretending that they don't have more holes than Swiss cheese. If you do, you're either too ignorant to comment, or being delibrately obtuse.
A LAN is just about the only place an idea like this could work.
The key is to encode down to h.264 or some other *video* codec that can be smart about how it removes redundancy. VNC and other remote-desktop programs treat the screen as a series of still images, not moving pictures, so they couldn't ever work for something like this.
This OnLive thing is crazy, but I bet you could pull it off over the LAN. You'd need some video encoding hardware though.
This is perfect for my NeoMagic MagicGraph256ZX, you insensitive clod!
Seriously... the only use I can see for this service is the ever-relevant "I don't have a 3d accelerator" group. Even a built-in Intel card is far more than sufficient to run most games pretty well. And "pretty well" is the absolute upper limit of how good this can be.
(sidenote: that's the 2d-only graphics card I had in a IBM thinkpad from like 1998. it even had a "NT4.0 or Win95" sticker on it)
The fact of the matter is that the Internet is not instantaneous.
I'm playing TF2 on my computer. Somebody shoots at me. What's my lag in firing back? Receive bullet data -> draw new frame -> My reaction time -> button click -> software noticing click and running 'fire' code -> sending 'fire' data -> waiting for the response
The significant parts of the above scenario are "Receive bullet data" (a few bytes), My reaction time (a few hundred ms, better on a good day), sending "fire" data and waiting for a response (send/recv a few bytes, another hundred ms at best).
So this entire scenario could take, at a minimum, about half a second. That assumes good reflexes, good framerates, and a fast connection.
I'm playing TF2 on this service. Somebody shoots at me. What's my lag in firing back? Receive some compressed video -> display it -> My reaction time -> button click -> software noticing click and sending it to server -> server running "fire" code and redrawing display -> receiving some compressed video -> display it
Most video games send information as "pyro at coords xxxyyyzzz", "fire weapon 523 in direction xxxyyyzzz". This is significantly smaller than even the most compressed video - in most games, it fits in a single packet. Hence the "lag" time between the server and client exchanging a bit of information is very close to the "ping" time.
But OnLive doesn't (and can't) do that - it requires local rendering. So their minimum lag time is the ping time *times* the amount of information divided by the number of packets, plus the total information divided by the worst connection bandwidth.
In other words, assuming that everything else was instantaneous (video rendering and compression, game code running), OnLive's best ping time is *STILL* a large multiple of a local client's.
Any modern video game does all sort of interpolation, motion compensation, etc - stuff that keeps all the clients guessing, in a predictable way, how everybody is going to move between updates. This allows you to shoot someone running between the two locations your client's been told about and still score a kill. *OnLive can't do that* because it requires local rendering.
It's not a question of technological wizardry, nor fancy trickery. There is a lag issue *defined* by the way the Internet works, and it can't be escaped.
Slashdot Mirror
Fun fact: If you tell people what's in the healthcare plan without mentioning Congress or Obama, people are overwhelmingly for it (question along the lines of "would you support a healthcare plan that does xyz").
Now who could've possibly soured the American public on Congress and Obama, to the point where they'd decide based on that instead of the merits of the plan? Oh right...
Are you stupid or being delibrately obtuse? If I were to pick large agencies that show the government could do healthcare, I'd pick the post office and Medicare. Medicare's margin is something like 99% (that is, 99c on the dollar goes to patients). It's administration costs are tremendously low, and there are essentially no major complaints. In fact, if you were to try and take Medicare away from old folks, they'd kill you (in an election, and perhaps literally). It's called the third rail of politics for a reason.
In any case, as bad as government can get, they're not in it for the money. Insurance companies are offering insurance in order to make a profit, and I don't actually see how a profit motive can coexist with health insurance.
Hermes: You lost your job 6 years ago you fat lobster!
Yeah, that's why we make people like miners, metal workers, woodworkers, and others who work around artificially produced (and thus still sharp) dust wear personal protective equipment.
Yes, but they're directly breathing it in. One would think that not many people will be inhaling dust directly from the lunar surface, since there's no air to breathe. It'd only be there by deposition on clothing, such as mentioned in the article. And I wouldn't wear a respirator in the mine's break room, or upstairs of my wood shop.
I didn't know about the whole glove-damaging aspect. That's really interesting.
From your link, silicosis occurs due to particles less than 10 micrometers wide. Regolith is typically more than 30 micrometers wide.
A bit more about moon dust -
It's called regolith and isn't smooth. If you look at 'grit', such as sand or dirt or dust etc on earth, you'll find that it's all rounded by erosion. There is no erosion on the moon, so the 'grit' up there is all sharp.
I think that humans won't have too much trouble with it as far as inhaling goes - it'll get trapped in mucus as well as all the other dust we inhale.
Basically, it's different enough from Earth sand and dust to be interesting, but Earth grit is still abrasive. You probably wouldn't have any more trouble with your lenses than you would on Earth.
Wait... haven't we already sent people to the moon? If it was going to wreck our solar panels, lenses, or people, wouldn't we have already found that out?
If a teenager is too stupid to use a condom, they won't use a condom when they're 30.
I knew I wasn't stupid enough bareback because my parents didn't interfere with my sex life, aside from stressing the important of a condom. Had they forbidden it (in the process neglecting to discuss condoms), I would've done it ungloved.
Why do people think that 16-17 year olds get a whole lot smarter when they turn 18? Or hell, even 30. You don't mature all that much from 16; if you're immature at 16 you'll be immature at 18, 25, 40...
It's called IPTV. And some places have it, usually provided by DSL providers (I've seen one in France).
To be fair, the format is entirely open, but patent encumbered. Nobody would argue that MP3 is a closed format, for example.
IOW the only challenges are legal challenges (regarding software patents and royalties). They're not proprietary at all.
FYI the episode is "Birdbot of Ice-Catraz" about 4 minutes in.
There was an episode of Futurama where Bender is captaining the ship, and Fry asks him if he's read the manual. Bender flips through the several-hundred-page book in about a half second and proclaims "Done", then proceeds to quote it.
It always seemed like a plausible thing to me. Isn't that what they're doing here?
I just lost most of my remaining faith in humanity. That actually ruined my day.
You're ranting and raving. Go have a heart attack and try to manage it yourself -- good luck.
If you're deeply insulted about the fact that there is no link between autism and vaccines, too bad. If you're also insulted by my taking offense at parents like you who perpetuate the myth, kindly fuck off.
I've studied biotechnology. I've read the papers claiming the link, and understood them. I've read the papers questioning the paper, and understood *them*. I agree with the second class of papers, which were far more rigorous. What specific, concrete knowledge do *you* have about this? Something you read online? Something you heard?
Your opinion is EXACTLY what's wrong with healthcare today. I don't claim to understand what it's like to have a son with autism, and I'm sorry that such a thing has happened to you, but sometimes bad things happen to good people. For no reason. It's actually the reason I'm an atheist.
In any case, your situation is irrelevant to everybody but yourself and your son. Get it through your head: society does not care. It sounds harsh, and it is, but so is life - as you have experienced. I can understand the desperation, the search for answers, wanting there to be a reason... sorry, there isn't one.
If I'm able to insult you specifically by a simple comment on a forum, this says more about you than it does about me.
But in that instance they're just being dumb. All it takes is one malicious kid, who likes credit card numbers, waiting for a haircut and firing up nmap and pull down the customer DB, or fire up Metasploit.
They feel they're not a valuable enough target, but are they right? Maybe - it's hard to say for sure. But what's the cost of being wrong? For a smallish salon, almost definitely enough to put them entirely out of business.
And the cost being $50? They're simply being stupid. None of this bullshit "analyzing the economic realities and making the logical choice", just stupid.
Fact of the matter is, all this stuff only needs to happen once - especially for a small business. No security can prevent a super-hacker-paratrooper team from taking everything, but it can improve a once-in-5-years odd from some kid, to a once-in-1000-years odd.
Some security *is* ridiculous. But most of it isn't. You provide a great anecdote but I suspect it's fairly common.
Security people are a bit like doctors. It's not really up to the patient to tell the doctor how to do their job, in most cases. Witness the whole autism-vaccine BS. In both professions, the customer can override the professional advice, but it's not a good idea.
Carrying the analogy a bit further: Reasonable security is a bit like a prostate exam. It's easy and straightforward, a little unpleasant, and entirely unnecessary until it saves your life. Is it rational to forgo a prostate exam because "why would I need a prostate exam? I don't have cancer"
What is this crap? Chuck it in Idle. Please.
Oh wait, it's samzenpus. Carry on, I guess.
before long, he won't be thinking about deciphering "square", "circle", "room" etc. If my understanding is correct, he really will be able to see with his tongue, in the same way you or I see with our eyes. It'll wire the tongue up to the vision center.
The brain is flippin' cool.
Nobody gets it, it seems.
In China, Google has Yahoo-level marketshare. I repeat: Google has a small marketshare compared to Baidu. Add to that the fact that they genuinely appear to be uncomfortable censoring (they show a 'censored' notice, among others) and the rather large PR hit, and most importantly the fact that they got hacked, and pulling out seems like a pretty good idea.
They could have said "we're licked" and flipped the switch, but they seem to prefer to bluster on and make this China's fault. I say more power to them.
Invest in our infrastructure? That would be communism! You're not a communist, are you?
And yes, standard gauge is 4'8.5". US, UK, Australia, Canada, and China all use standard gauge, as well as most of Western Europe. Russia's gauge is 3" wider.
So they'd have a job on their hands to connect up with Europe. They may run a third rail through Russia that matches with one existing rail to form standard gauge (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_gauge). Or they could just not connect to the Russian rail network and run all new tracks (maybe necessary for high-speed anyway).
They have quite a job on their hands, that's for sure.
Orthodox Judaism considers it obligatory if it will save a life, as long as the donor is considered dead as defined by Jewish law (from Wikipedia)
What gives? Can anyone shed light on this?
Sounds great to me. I'd extend it to blood donors, with quantity donated moving you further up.
Humans aren't altruistic in general. It's nothing to be ashamed of - we're programmed to think of ourselves first. Aligning altruistic acts and self-preservation sounds like a great way to encourage altruistic behavior.
Same in the US. I was about to make some snide comment to the effect that that's bass-ackwards too...
That's not right. I can make up my mind for myself. It's a deeply, deeply personal choice that really cuts the the heart of what you believe about life.
It'd be one thing if I refrained from answering (in which case it should be up to them), but if I decided one way or the other that decision should be honored.
While I love and trust my family, they shouldn't be making that decision for me - nor should they be allowed to.
The way the system should work: Default is "not stated" in which case they ask the closest family members - without family members, default to 'yes'. You can state "yes" or "no", which is permanent unless you change it (which should be easy).
Is it more complicated then I'm seeing?
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS10-006.mspx
That's a month ago. Took about two minutes of searching - like I said, it was a month ago so I didn't have to look backwards very far.
Remote code execution on Server 2k3 (all versions), Windows 7, and Server 2k8. Of course, this presupposes that Windows has SMB (hint: yes)
Or do you not consider remote code execution a security issue?
Look. I don't despise Microsoft like most people around here - just a lukewarm pain-in-my-assness. But let's not go pretending that they don't have more holes than Swiss cheese. If you do, you're either too ignorant to comment, or being delibrately obtuse.
A LAN is just about the only place an idea like this could work.
The key is to encode down to h.264 or some other *video* codec that can be smart about how it removes redundancy. VNC and other remote-desktop programs treat the screen as a series of still images, not moving pictures, so they couldn't ever work for something like this.
This OnLive thing is crazy, but I bet you could pull it off over the LAN. You'd need some video encoding hardware though.
This is perfect for my NeoMagic MagicGraph256ZX, you insensitive clod!
Seriously... the only use I can see for this service is the ever-relevant "I don't have a 3d accelerator" group. Even a built-in Intel card is far more than sufficient to run most games pretty well. And "pretty well" is the absolute upper limit of how good this can be.
(sidenote: that's the 2d-only graphics card I had in a IBM thinkpad from like 1998. it even had a "NT4.0 or Win95" sticker on it)
The fact of the matter is that the Internet is not instantaneous.
I'm playing TF2 on my computer. Somebody shoots at me. What's my lag in firing back?
Receive bullet data -> draw new frame -> My reaction time -> button click -> software noticing click and running 'fire' code -> sending 'fire' data -> waiting for the response
The significant parts of the above scenario are "Receive bullet data" (a few bytes), My reaction time (a few hundred ms, better on a good day), sending "fire" data and waiting for a response (send/recv a few bytes, another hundred ms at best).
So this entire scenario could take, at a minimum, about half a second. That assumes good reflexes, good framerates, and a fast connection.
I'm playing TF2 on this service. Somebody shoots at me. What's my lag in firing back?
Receive some compressed video -> display it -> My reaction time -> button click -> software noticing click and sending it to server -> server running "fire" code and redrawing display -> receiving some compressed video -> display it
Most video games send information as "pyro at coords xxxyyyzzz", "fire weapon 523 in direction xxxyyyzzz". This is significantly smaller than even the most compressed video - in most games, it fits in a single packet. Hence the "lag" time between the server and client exchanging a bit of information is very close to the "ping" time.
But OnLive doesn't (and can't) do that - it requires local rendering. So their minimum lag time is the ping time *times* the amount of information divided by the number of packets, plus the total information divided by the worst connection bandwidth.
In other words, assuming that everything else was instantaneous (video rendering and compression, game code running), OnLive's best ping time is *STILL* a large multiple of a local client's.
Any modern video game does all sort of interpolation, motion compensation, etc - stuff that keeps all the clients guessing, in a predictable way, how everybody is going to move between updates. This allows you to shoot someone running between the two locations your client's been told about and still score a kill. *OnLive can't do that* because it requires local rendering.
It's not a question of technological wizardry, nor fancy trickery. There is a lag issue *defined* by the way the Internet works, and it can't be escaped.