Where do you watch TV? The hour long broadcast shows I watch are 40-45 minutes long, sans commercials. More commercials than I'd prefer there to be, but substantially less than "more than half of every hour"
I understand your argument. I don't agree with it, but I understand it.
First, for those reading, it should be noted that arth is not advocating sterilization if you simply don't have the genes--merely if you'd otherwise have been removed from the gene pool. That being said, I can't deny that it still smacks of 'genetic hygiene' programs...
But since you seem to be approaching this from a fairly purely logical standpoint, I'll dispense with the humanitarian side for the time being. The flaw I see in your argument is this: evolution is dumb. Which is to say, if you look at history, it's full of deadends, missteps, and mass extinctions. It is undirected. Unless you believe in ID, in which case, the appeal to natural selection seems unwarranted. One thing seems pretty clear to me, at least--in the general case, genetic diversity in a population tends to be significantly more advantageous than any single mutation when it comes to survival of that population. What is an advantage in one situation may prove to be fatal in another. Sickle cell anemia helps ward off malaria. Myopia mitigates age-induced presbyopia.
Example: a disease comes along and wipes out the part of the population that does not have the CCR5 receptor. The population then uniformly has no CCR5. If another disease were to come along that the CCR5 receptor were to play a significant part in fighting (which is not implausible), then that disease might rampage through the population unchecked, wiping it out completely.
I don't know about you, but personally, I would prefer that my species--or its derivative--survives. If I can weight the dice thus, I will. I don't think natural selection is anything holy, that we're not to stand against. If you, on the other hand, only care about the 'Law' of natural selection and evolution, then I don't think we have enough common ground to establish any sort of framework for discussion. Me, I've got a vested interest.
Actually, it touched down on May 25, 2008, making it ~157 days between landing and the beginning of shutting down pieces of it. Still, that's a good 75% longer than it was designed for, and it'll still limp along for a while longer. And in this case, they did indeed choose to go with a cheaper option--a lander rather than a rover (though cost was not the only consideration). Anyway, I think the notion that the ROI for extending the life of a probe reaches a point of diminishing returns is a valid one--especially a fixed location lander like Phoenix. But you gotta hand it to the ol' bird...
it's been my experience that sleep problems are often caused by hardware--much like BSOD--and when it's not hardware, it usually has to do with a lot of crapware/etc being installed.
now, i've only ever had one keyboard with a sleep or power button, and those i actually popped them off of the keyboard, because i didn't like where they were placed, but i would expect that the control panel > power options > advanced > power buttons options would affect precisely what you're talking about. there's a "sleep button" choice and an option to "do nothing".
i believe that i disagree with you about whether specifically this should be legal, though i can't say i've thought in depth about it, but there are 2 minor points i would like to make off the top of my head:
1. speaking as someone who had his apartment building burn down 6 months ago, fire in a building is not necessarily easily falsifiable, even if fire in a room is. building fires can still present an immediate and lethal danger, even if not immediately detectable from a particular room. the time that could be needed to falsify it might also put one beyond any hope of saving (now, this is not an endorsement of panic--panic invariably causes confusion and wastes time). this in response to your statement regarding medical cures: "it is very easy to falsify 'is this room really on fire?' It is not easy to falsify a medical cure without expensive medical studies. Apples and oranges. Totally bogus comparison."
2. let me preface this with saying that in general, i loathe stupidity, and often concur with the "let's let stupidity be its own punishment" point of view. however, the life that gets taken by the trampling may be that of someone who is NOT panicking, rather than one of those whose "own stupidity and lack of clearheadedness" has put into desperate motion. now, as to the where the responsibility lies, i suppose that that is up for debate.
i might draw comparisons between this situation and negligent homicides or (temporary?) insanity or good faith, and i might point out that a situation like this is generally the result of deliberate malice, but i'll leave it at glossing over them, as i'm sure you've heard it all before. let me also clarify that i'm very much a proponent of free speech/press/etc, so take my disagreement with you on this particular point at face value. i'm not trying to be pedantic, i merely feel that you've made some erroneous assumptions/assertions in your arguments.
no, seriously, though, i agree with you walmart already exercises too much influence in some markets for my peace of mind. if they managed to successfully get their claws sunk deep into the computer parts market, think of the additional leverage the increased vertical integration would give them with respect to what kind of content is manufactured/distributed...
they might've meant thousands of spyware-related items.
when i was working in a retail shop, i personally serviced a computer that ended up having somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000 spy/ad/mal/crapware-related items on it as well as a couple dozen trojans/virii/etc.
no, the computer wouldn't boot. and yes, the customer brought it to us. and the customer vehemently refused a clean install. so i had to pull out the hard drive, hook it up to an external enclosure and hook it up to one of our store computers and run AdAware, Spybot, MS AntiSpyware, TrojanHunter, etc. then, once it would let me boot, i had to install said programs on it, run them back and forth in safe and regular mode, edit the registry manually, and delete files. i think it ended up requiring somewhere around a dozen reboots, maybe more, before i was able to call it clean.
anyway, some of the items were recreated after reboots and whatnot, and when i say "items" i am, of course, referring to files, processes, registry keys, and the like.
we kept a wall of fame in the back, in our repair area, with printed screenshots and customer names of the most impressive PCs we've had to work on. usually, we had numbers in the hundreds, sometimes low thousands of items.
i was able to determine the source of many of the infections---both the 45 year old hubby and the 12 year old son of the woman who brought it in were constantly surfing for--you guessed it. porn. with IE. there was even evidence that the highschool aged daughter had occasionally done likewise.
by default, the NT line (including XP) uses NTFS. I mean, one of my XP computers still has an old drive with FAT-32 on it, but that's 'cause I'm lazy. And Vista is ostensibly using an Transactional NTFS so....yeah.
well, for one thing, 'cause i like having tangibles. i'm also a packrat, for what that's worth. but i can think of lots of reasons one might want to have a physical copy
privacy reasons, mobility, geek cred.
not to mention there are still logistical problems with media distribution. (storage vs. streaming, alarms about piracy, the lack of ubiquity of broadband, etc)
as an aside, i find the argument that "These new disc formats are all dead in the long run" to be kind of silly, if only because that's pretty well true of ALL formats. bigger, better, faster formats will always be a goal, to the very limit that science allows.
anyway, it'll probably come, but personally, i doubt it'll happen in time to suddenly obsolete the upcoming generation of format. moreover, there are social attitudes that would have to be overcome before people will be universally willing to relinquish having their own physical copies of things. i don't see that changing in this generation.
the paperless office uses more paper than ever. e-books don't replace books. and geeks like me will always want to show off their favorites.;)
I'm actually starting to think that there (sadly) needs to be some sort of non-profit organization to protect consumers, y'know...sort of like governments are supposed to. The Slashdot Patent Consortium, or something.
Not that that would actually work, but....you know.
ok, i'm trying REALLY hard not to make any of the obvious Java jokes...
but seriously, it's not like this hasn't been kicked around a lot
in fact, back in college, in a network application development class, we had to write (in Java, no less [damn]) a number of tiny, appliance-specific http servers that could serve for an XML-based Internet kitchen, along with drivers and whatnot.
i believe we wrote for the fridge, oven, microwave, coffemaker, toaster oven, and then a recipe selection/interface server.
I think a lot of people live such miserable uninteristing lives (no offense intended) that they are looking for anything which seems new to continually distract themselves from their own life.
good thing we've got slashdot, or we might be like that!
Ok, IANAAE/EE, but I have had some experience/education in the Air Traffic Management arena.
So some facts:
Typically, cell phones nowdays have a broadcast power of 300mW. Some older phones are more powerful, since they predated certain FCC regulations, I've been told. They're going to be tens of meters away. IIRC, transmitter power from the NAVSTAR satellites is <= 50W. Satellites are 12,000 miles away.
I haven't done the math for relative signal strength, but the numbers are there, if you want to do it, for cell phones. I don't offhand know the frequencies operated on by GPS sats, so more advanced calculations will have to be offered by someone else. My prof for my personal navigation systems class back in college, who is probably the smartest man I know, assured us that standard GPS is, in fact, fairly easy to obscure. So take that for what you will. I couldn't really tell you about the intereference produced by the circuitry of a laptop (or other devices), but laptops nowdays also use WiFi, which I can only imagine that most people don't turn off, and cause have some pretty nice interference, too.
And NAVSTAR GPS originally had errors artificially introduced into it, since it was a military system. Even with this turned off, it's not as accurate as the FAA would like (I think it's somwhere around 5-20 meters of accuracy for most receivers?), so several systems are being used/developed to increase accuracy, including: uber expensive receivers, WAAS/LAAS (wide/local area augmentation system, which uses sats and ground based stations to increase accuracy), etc.
Oh, and while I love West Wing, the Lockheed Tristar L-1011s ended production sometime in the mid 80s, I believe.
As for engineering around it, I imagine a Faraday cage could help, but it would also mean cell phones and other radio type devices wouldn't work at all inside the cabin.::shrug::
Slashdot Mirror
As was suggested, write a polite letter to Toyota
Shigeru Hayakawa
9 W. 57th St., Ste. 4900
New York, NY 10019-2701
United States
Perhaps include a picture of your car ;)
Side note: you probably meant "in light of..."; lieu means "place" or "stead"
Srsly? You link to the movie? When there's the book? Not to mention that your point was made rather more eloquently by the AC before you.
Where do you watch TV? The hour long broadcast shows I watch are 40-45 minutes long, sans commercials. More commercials than I'd prefer there to be, but substantially less than "more than half of every hour"
I understand your argument. I don't agree with it, but I understand it.
First, for those reading, it should be noted that arth is not advocating sterilization if you simply don't have the genes--merely if you'd otherwise have been removed from the gene pool. That being said, I can't deny that it still smacks of 'genetic hygiene' programs...
But since you seem to be approaching this from a fairly purely logical standpoint, I'll dispense with the humanitarian side for the time being. The flaw I see in your argument is this: evolution is dumb. Which is to say, if you look at history, it's full of deadends, missteps, and mass extinctions. It is undirected. Unless you believe in ID, in which case, the appeal to natural selection seems unwarranted. One thing seems pretty clear to me, at least--in the general case, genetic diversity in a population tends to be significantly more advantageous than any single mutation when it comes to survival of that population. What is an advantage in one situation may prove to be fatal in another. Sickle cell anemia helps ward off malaria. Myopia mitigates age-induced presbyopia.
Example: a disease comes along and wipes out the part of the population that does not have the CCR5 receptor. The population then uniformly has no CCR5. If another disease were to come along that the CCR5 receptor were to play a significant part in fighting (which is not implausible), then that disease might rampage through the population unchecked, wiping it out completely.
I don't know about you, but personally, I would prefer that my species--or its derivative--survives. If I can weight the dice thus, I will. I don't think natural selection is anything holy, that we're not to stand against. If you, on the other hand, only care about the 'Law' of natural selection and evolution, then I don't think we have enough common ground to establish any sort of framework for discussion. Me, I've got a vested interest.
Actually, it touched down on May 25, 2008, making it ~157 days between landing and the beginning of shutting down pieces of it. Still, that's a good 75% longer than it was designed for, and it'll still limp along for a while longer. And in this case, they did indeed choose to go with a cheaper option--a lander rather than a rover (though cost was not the only consideration). Anyway, I think the notion that the ROI for extending the life of a probe reaches a point of diminishing returns is a valid one--especially a fixed location lander like Phoenix. But you gotta hand it to the ol' bird...
Other way around.
Why do you think they look so much alike?
We could always just ask them what a litmus test is actually designed to measure ;)
it's been my experience that sleep problems are often caused by hardware--much like BSOD--and when it's not hardware, it usually has to do with a lot of crapware/etc being installed. now, i've only ever had one keyboard with a sleep or power button, and those i actually popped them off of the keyboard, because i didn't like where they were placed, but i would expect that the control panel > power options > advanced > power buttons options would affect precisely what you're talking about. there's a "sleep button" choice and an option to "do nothing".
Just as an aside, personally, I have yet to see a laptop that actually has a CLEAN installation...
i believe that i disagree with you about whether specifically this should be legal, though i can't say i've thought in depth about it, but there are 2 minor points i would like to make off the top of my head:
1. speaking as someone who had his apartment building burn down 6 months ago, fire in a building is not necessarily easily falsifiable, even if fire in a room is. building fires can still present an immediate and lethal danger, even if not immediately detectable from a particular room. the time that could be needed to falsify it might also put one beyond any hope of saving (now, this is not an endorsement of panic--panic invariably causes confusion and wastes time). this in response to your statement regarding medical cures: "it is very easy to falsify 'is this room really on fire?' It is not easy to falsify a medical cure without expensive medical studies. Apples and oranges. Totally bogus comparison."
2. let me preface this with saying that in general, i loathe stupidity, and often concur with the "let's let stupidity be its own punishment" point of view. however, the life that gets taken by the trampling may be that of someone who is NOT panicking, rather than one of those whose "own stupidity and lack of clearheadedness" has put into desperate motion. now, as to the where the responsibility lies, i suppose that that is up for debate.
i might draw comparisons between this situation and negligent homicides or (temporary?) insanity or good faith, and i might point out that a situation like this is generally the result of deliberate malice, but i'll leave it at glossing over them, as i'm sure you've heard it all before. let me also clarify that i'm very much a proponent of free speech/press/etc, so take my disagreement with you on this particular point at face value. i'm not trying to be pedantic, i merely feel that you've made some erroneous assumptions/assertions in your arguments.
Do I want my future powered by corn or fusion?
Why choose?
Fusion for appliances/etc...
Ethanol for people!
you forgot:
7. Profit!
no, seriously, though, i agree with you
walmart already exercises too much influence in some markets for my peace of mind. if they managed to successfully get their claws sunk deep into the computer parts market, think of the additional leverage the increased vertical integration would give them with respect to what kind of content is manufactured/distributed...
Can you imagine a WalMart-branded Windows? Or that damn smileyface in the corner of IE?
Talk about the stuff of nightmares.
they might've meant thousands of spyware-related items.
when i was working in a retail shop, i personally serviced a computer that ended up having somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000 spy/ad/mal/crapware-related items on it as well as a couple dozen trojans/virii/etc.
no, the computer wouldn't boot. and yes, the customer brought it to us. and the customer vehemently refused a clean install. so i had to pull out the hard drive, hook it up to an external enclosure and hook it up to one of our store computers and run AdAware, Spybot, MS AntiSpyware, TrojanHunter, etc.
then, once it would let me boot, i had to install said programs on it, run them back and forth in safe and regular mode, edit the registry manually, and delete files. i think it ended up requiring somewhere around a dozen reboots, maybe more, before i was able to call it clean.
anyway, some of the items were recreated after reboots and whatnot, and when i say "items" i am, of course, referring to files, processes, registry keys, and the like.
we kept a wall of fame in the back, in our repair area, with printed screenshots and customer names of the most impressive PCs we've had to work on. usually, we had numbers in the hundreds, sometimes low thousands of items.
i was able to determine the source of many of the infections---both the 45 year old hubby and the 12 year old son of the woman who brought it in were constantly surfing for--you guessed it. porn. with IE. there was even evidence that the highschool aged daughter had occasionally done likewise.
now, items != actual applications/processes
but people are pretty impressive.
Works of art were produced before copyright and they would continue to be produced afterwards.
let's bear in mind, however, that we don't exactly have the extensive system of patronage that existed, say, during the Renaissance
by default, the NT line (including XP) uses NTFS. I mean, one of my XP computers still has an old drive with FAT-32 on it, but that's 'cause I'm lazy. And Vista is ostensibly using an Transactional NTFS
so....yeah.
well, for one thing, 'cause i like having tangibles.
;)
i'm also a packrat, for what that's worth.
but i can think of lots of reasons one might want to have a physical copy
privacy reasons, mobility, geek cred.
not to mention there are still logistical problems with media distribution. (storage vs. streaming, alarms about piracy, the lack of ubiquity of broadband, etc)
as an aside, i find the argument that "These new disc formats are all dead in the long run" to be kind of silly, if only because that's pretty well true of ALL formats. bigger, better, faster formats will always be a goal, to the very limit that science allows.
anyway, it'll probably come, but personally, i doubt it'll happen in time to suddenly obsolete the upcoming generation of format. moreover, there are social attitudes that would have to be overcome before people will be universally willing to relinquish having their own physical copies of things. i don't see that changing in this generation.
the paperless office uses more paper than ever. e-books don't replace books. and geeks like me will always want to show off their favorites.
I'm actually starting to think that there (sadly) needs to be some sort of non-profit organization to protect consumers, y'know...sort of like governments are supposed to. The Slashdot Patent Consortium, or something.
Not that that would actually work, but....you know.
where would I put my feet, slung over my shoulder?
why not? I can do this now.
i think the computer is the car. the analogy being that IE is an easy way for anyone to steal your car.
You run a web server on your coffee maker?
;)
you don't??
ok, i'm trying REALLY hard not to make any of the obvious Java jokes...
but seriously, it's not like this hasn't been kicked around a lot
in fact, back in college, in a network application development class, we had to write (in Java, no less [damn]) a number of tiny, appliance-specific http servers that could serve for an XML-based Internet kitchen, along with drivers and whatnot.
i believe we wrote for the fridge, oven, microwave, coffemaker, toaster oven, and then a recipe selection/interface server.
I think a lot of people live such miserable uninteristing lives (no offense intended) that they are looking for anything which seems new to continually distract themselves from their own life.
good thing we've got slashdot, or we might be like that!
but you know they're going to come down on anyone or any group that's been doing something "scandalous".
generally, yes.
unless, of course, they can make more money in the medium- or long-run by not.
Ok, IANAAE/EE, but I have had some experience/education in the Air Traffic Management arena.
::shrug::
So some facts:
Typically, cell phones nowdays have a broadcast power of 300mW. Some older phones are more powerful, since they predated certain FCC regulations, I've been told.
They're going to be tens of meters away.
IIRC, transmitter power from the NAVSTAR satellites is <= 50W.
Satellites are 12,000 miles away.
I haven't done the math for relative signal strength, but the numbers are there, if you want to do it, for cell phones. I don't offhand know the frequencies operated on by GPS sats, so more advanced calculations will have to be offered by someone else. My prof for my personal navigation systems class back in college, who is probably the smartest man I know, assured us that standard GPS is, in fact, fairly easy to obscure. So take that for what you will.
I couldn't really tell you about the intereference produced by the circuitry of a laptop (or other devices), but laptops nowdays also use WiFi, which I can only imagine that most people don't turn off, and cause have some pretty nice interference, too.
And NAVSTAR GPS originally had errors artificially introduced into it, since it was a military system.
Even with this turned off, it's not as accurate as the FAA would like (I think it's somwhere around 5-20 meters of accuracy for most receivers?), so several systems are being used/developed to increase accuracy, including: uber expensive receivers, WAAS/LAAS (wide/local area augmentation system, which uses sats and ground based stations to increase accuracy), etc.
Oh, and while I love West Wing, the Lockheed Tristar L-1011s ended production sometime in the mid 80s, I believe.
As for engineering around it, I imagine a Faraday cage could help, but it would also mean cell phones and other radio type devices wouldn't work at all inside the cabin.
Awesome.