Better regulate stoves, ovens, hair dryers, tumble-dryers, and coffeemachines, too. And make a special tax on them.
Laws are made simply because a group of typically idiots got together and said "hey, what can we do to screw with the people that we personally don't like? Damn those feds for making it illegal to mess with the gays. I know, let's require breathylizers on all new cars!"
All lawmakers do this all the time, it's just more obvious when small cities are trying to abuse honest folks they consider "the wrong sort" in order to run them out of town sans rope and torches. But it happens at every level... even the highest where it's the most abusive.
I've thought about this before, too, and considered what effects mandatory time-limits might have.
But what about the constitution? Does that have a time limit? (maybe with the current administration....:-)
And passing with a higher (or equal) percentage is crazy, imho. That means that you can strike a law that passed unanimously with a single nay vote! Original vote 100 for, 0 against. Revote is 99 for, 1 against.... law is repealed. Talk about buying votes.
Here is some things mandatory time limits on laws would do:
stupid laws repealed, eventually So, all those "you can't carry a saddle into a bar while armed" would fall off the books. Recently, a jilted woman tried to sue using a very little-known law against courting a married man. Or something... one of those 1890's laws that occasionally gets brought up by vindictive plaintiffs or government agencies that are reaching for anything to charge someone with.
good and bad laws would be striken depending on the political wind We would eventually lose some bad laws, but also lose some great laws designed to protect your freedoms, depending on the political wind. Think things like Roe v Wade. Politicians would become incredibly corrupt -- wars would be started and international conflicts timed to resolve just to influence upcoming revotes. Remember how the republicans got Iraq to hold off releasing hostages until Reagan was elected? Depending on the time limits (20 years? 1 year?) we'd be barraged with propaganda. Politics is nasty now, it would just get worse. I believe it would ultimately harm our freedoms significantly, especially in such times as a one-party house/senate/president.
Apparently, comcast has been doing some Very Nasty Stuff with vonage, such as not resolving DNS addresses to vonage. A vonage tech commented that it looks like the only way this is going to get solved is through the courts.
This has been an ongoing issue since comcast entered the voip market.
You're right, I misremembered. I was sure I saw him say somewhere he had little education.
Geeks+gambling go together like lawyers+ambulances
on
Geeks and Poker?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Geeks start out with the basic abilities to learn the math, and that gives them a huge advantage when learning poker over the average player. Their learning curve is shallow to understand the game. They also tend to like playing games. They will do very well in games such as blackjack, where the rules are very clear and the math works well. They will also do well in shorter-term play such as poker tournements.
But in poker, the separation between those that can hold their own, and those that excel over the long-term, is human observation. According to poker great Doyle Brunson, poker is a human game, not a numbers game. He had little education, and probably had to struggle to learn the math (which he knows very well).
Just like lawyers need to have legal skills in addition to a litigious client, geeks need human skills in addition to the math to succeed in the long-term.
Blackjack + geeks: teh winz Poker + geeks: depends on the geek's human skills.
Re:What is with PDI/Dreamworks?
on
Shrek 2 How-To
·
· Score: 1
AC:No one left Pixar to write Antz, and Pixar uses software to interpolate between key frames just like every other 3D animation studio.
(Not sure why I ever respond to cowards, but) My friend that works at Pixar claims otherwise. He even provided the name of the guy that defected with the information, which I can't remember since this was several years ago.
You also must've scored low on your reading comprehension tests, too. Pixar uses interpolation for many things, but takes very much time on certain details ignored by Dreamworks, which allowed Dreamworks to release Antz before Pixar could release Bugs Life.
So, basically, shut yer pie hole and get a clue, coward. Or face the karma.
And the bombs are actually which nodes have a bsod.
Re:What is with PDI/Dreamworks?
on
Shrek 2 How-To
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The antz idea was stolen by someone that left pixar and had access to the script. And it came out first because of the interpolation techniques they used, instead of meticulous hand-designing facial expressions and such (rather, they used software to interpolate between the key frames).
It showed, too. Examine the expressions of the faces in Antz, and compare them to A Bug's Life. Bug's Life has much more "alive" characters.
I'm really surprised there weren't lawsuits.
Other similar ideas, however, I suspect are mostly coincidence or rumblings which kind of hit the scene in rumors, and actually materialize.
"Hi, I just bought one of your 92T routers, and a few minutes ago, I only got 101,155,069,755,390 bits through in one of the seconds. Can you send me my two bits please?"
Having been through many parts of tejas, except the coastal areas like houston, I can't see how tx is at all nicer than NM. The damn place is flat and ugly as hell, and about 30 miles in from the NM border you can see a sudden shift of flora and features to flat nothingness.
Utah has some pretty nice spots, and some pretty crappy ones, but I could see an argument for Utah's beauty.
To appreciate New Mexico you need to agree with a couple things: 1) mountains kickass 2) not all vegetation is green, and more isn't always better 3) sunsets and big skies kickass 4) pain is actually a flavor, and comes in both red and green
If you're looking for an ocean, it ain't in NM. But mountains they got... and lots of outdoorsy areas. Think of NM as a poor colorado, except that people die when they don't carry enough water or a coat on a hike.
I don't claim that military spending isn't used to build bombs. I claim that the research to make a bigger bomb often comes back in the form of technology returned to the public and applied in non-military applications. I also claim that the US would not be a leader in technology if it wasn't a leader in military, and that (although it might be a large waste) that spending money on military has beneficial side-effects and does produce something.
I don't know for sure, but I'd put money on it that some aeronautical or guidance advances are used by private corporations in the US due to research on the apache or tomahawk.
(It's easy to get DARPA, DoD and DoE funding, but difficult to get NSF funding)
Ever hear of the Internet? Created by DARPA?
How about advances in aviation, nuclear power, computers, ballistics, energy, batteries, GaAs semiconductors, emp and radiation-hardened electronics for space and medicine, the Hubble....
The list goes on forever. Although many of us will have issues with our tax dollars going to darpa/doe/dod, many of those dollars go into research that often gets returned to the public, sometimes with royalty-free patents, GPL, or even public domain.
After getting hammered by the PC market, the comparison of Sun to DEC is a good one. They both were competing with Intel. DEC ended up selling the alpha to intel and having them produce it, ending the competition and settling a lawsuit over IP. The alpha was a great chip, too, but it's dead now.
Sun is also competing with intel and it's hurting them just like it hurt Apple. Businesses realize that they can buy 5 PC's for the price of one Sun, so even the awesome support sun offers pales when compared to the bottom line (provided you're saavy enough to swap a DIMM).
There is one hardware product that they will continue selling, IMHO. Sunrays. These machines rock. I'm using one right now. The footprint and lack of fans are awesome... my office is so quiet I can hear the fans in the machines across the hall and I barely even notice the space it takes up (about 12" x 6"). But this is not going to be enough to keep their thousands of employees.
Sorry, the cornell study was a lab study which tried to simulate the BT corn in the outdoors. As I said, that list was off the top of my head.
GIS for "corn pollen monarch butterfly" and you'll get all the links you need which shows that it significantly increases mortality to the larvae.
The point is that it is an unknown evironmental effect. When you use pesticides, you know that you're putting poison on something, and even then it has unknown effects (such as DDT on eagle eggs). But this merely emphasizes that you have no frikking clue what you're doing when you plant GE crops. No clue whatsoever of the fallout, and it might end up way too late when it's discovered.
We aren't just looking under the hood . . . to use your analogy, we are taking parts one vehicle and force fitting them into another.
uhhh rtfa? It's all about selective breeding.
The parts are from the same model vehicle. From the article, the idea is to manipulate genes that already exist, by using very specific selective breeding. That's considerably different than making glowing tobacco, which is probably not possible using this technique unless the genes to glow somehow exist already.
Here are a couple meaningful dangers, just off the top of my head.
1) Crossbreeding into non-GE crops. This is extremely common with wind-pollenated crops such as corn and other grasses. A recent example was a cross of a GE crop for feedstock crossing into corn for human consumption, was known to produce an allergic reaction in humans. This got into Taco Bell foods. Additionally, it is a pollutant to the gene pool, and the farmers and companies are not responsible for keeping it under control.
2) Effects on the environment A recent GE corn, designed to resist insects, dropped pollen on nearby milkweed plants. The pollen was poisonous to insects and ended up wiping out the monarch butterfly population in that small area. It could end up an environmental nightmare, but the companies producing this have no idea of the impact. A plant could potentially end up contaminating all crops, especially if it grew as a weed and could outcompete all untainted crops. Pollen is tiny and potent, and can travel thousands of miles over wind or animals.
3) Effects on others As stated, GE crops pollute the environment because they are not controlled. Produced in a sealed lab, it has little chance of escaping. But all GE crops should be viewed as potential pollution, simply because their pollen can blow into your yard, and contaminate your crops.
4) Legal issues If your crops become contaminated through no fault of your own, it's very possible -- even likely -- that you'll have to destroy your crops for violating patents or pay license fees, or be basically shut down from legal suits. In other words, everytime a gene is spliced in, that food item is patented and any violation of that patent can be prosecuted. This violation can even happen if your plants happened to crossbreed and incorporate that gene. Intent is not figured into patents... if you invent something completely on your own that is patented, you lose. If you grow something without a license that's patented, you lose.
5) Social issues Other issues are social, such as the painful idea of corporations owning the rights to grow food. But let's say you practice vegetarianism because you happen to believe in it (for whatever reason). What if GE tomatoes incorporate a fish gene? Is that tomato suddenly non-vegetarian? Let's say you know that GE tomatoes might have fish genes so you avoid them and look for items marked "organic". WHOA THERE... the corporations have lobbied congress to bastardize the concept of "organic" (to make it meaningless, basically allowing full use of pesticides, etc) and even pressed the FDA to disallow labelling things as organic or produced without pesticides. This last part is one of the worst things about patenting foodstuffs -- the corporations want their actions hidden, and will pay lobbiests millions to get laws passed protecting them from people that simply want to know what their eating.
That's so bizarre. One of the big reasons I use unix is to avoid reinstalling a couple times each year. The sheer time saved from reboots is amazing, too.
For me, the first things I install in windows (used pretty much only for gaming), after all the patches and drivers and patches to drivers:
cygwin or putty filzip adaware mozilla zonealarm direct x 9.0b and games.
Wow! you managed to fit microsoft, sco, and starwars into a single line, like a skinpatch of jocular fun applied to the forehead of every/. reader to handle those nasty cravings.:o
What they really should've done is embed the dotcode into the holographic cards, in such a way that it's only visible from a particular angle and looks normal from others.
This would render moot having the details released, because folks would have to either hack their reader or have a holographic printer to use that information. It would also enable the entire card to be used for storage, to hold way more than 5kb/card. They could possibly even have the reader examine the same point from two separate angles to make sure it got different bits, and use such a technology to verify the authenticity.
They'd push their market by making the foil cards worth more (especially by adding foil commons and uncommons, possible making a new "rare-common" card), and it would help them cross the boundaries of table vs computer games in BOTH directions.
Slashdot Mirror
Better regulate stoves, ovens, hair dryers, tumble-dryers, and coffeemachines, too. And make a special tax on them.
Laws are made simply because a group of typically idiots got together and said "hey, what can we do to screw with the people that we personally don't like? Damn those feds for making it illegal to mess with the gays. I know, let's require breathylizers on all new cars!"
All lawmakers do this all the time, it's just more obvious when small cities are trying to abuse honest folks they consider "the wrong sort" in order to run them out of town sans rope and torches. But it happens at every level... even the highest where it's the most abusive.
I've thought about this before, too, and considered what effects mandatory time-limits might have.
:-)
But what about the constitution? Does that have a time limit? (maybe with the current administration....
And passing with a higher (or equal) percentage is crazy, imho. That means that you can strike a law that passed unanimously with a single nay vote! Original vote 100 for, 0 against. Revote is 99 for, 1 against.... law is repealed. Talk about buying votes.
Here is some things mandatory time limits on laws would do:
stupid laws repealed, eventually
So, all those "you can't carry a saddle into a bar while armed" would fall off the books. Recently, a jilted woman tried to sue using a very little-known law against courting a married man. Or something... one of those 1890's laws that occasionally gets brought up by vindictive plaintiffs or government agencies that are reaching for anything to charge someone with.
good and bad laws would be striken depending on the political wind
We would eventually lose some bad laws, but also lose some great laws designed to protect your freedoms, depending on the political wind. Think things like Roe v Wade. Politicians would become incredibly corrupt -- wars would be started and international conflicts timed to resolve just to influence upcoming revotes. Remember how the republicans got Iraq to hold off releasing hostages until Reagan was elected? Depending on the time limits (20 years? 1 year?) we'd be barraged with propaganda. Politics is nasty now, it would just get worse. I believe it would ultimately harm our freedoms significantly, especially in such times as a one-party house/senate/president.
so the end result is that some "g" cards work as "a" cards with "g" access points.
You probably meant act as "b" cards, since "a" is in a completely different RF band.
IIRC, networks cannot handle full-speed "g" rates if any "b" cards are connected to that network.
But ya, companies were producing "g" cards before the draft was finalized, but most, if not all, of those cards can be reflashed to be compliant.
Apparently, comcast has been doing some Very Nasty Stuff with vonage, such as not resolving DNS addresses to vonage. A vonage tech commented that it looks like the only way this is going to get solved is through the courts.
This has been an ongoing issue since comcast entered the voip market.
Any vonage (or comcast) moles want to comment?
You're right, I misremembered. I was sure I saw him say somewhere he had little education.
Geeks start out with the basic abilities to learn the math, and that gives them a huge advantage when learning poker over the average player. Their learning curve is shallow to understand the game. They also tend to like playing games. They will do very well in games such as blackjack, where the rules are very clear and the math works well. They will also do well in shorter-term play such as poker tournements.
But in poker, the separation between those that can hold their own, and those that excel over the long-term, is human observation. According to poker great Doyle Brunson, poker is a human game, not a numbers game. He had little education, and probably had to struggle to learn the math (which he knows very well).
Just like lawyers need to have legal skills in addition to a litigious client, geeks need human skills in addition to the math to succeed in the long-term.
Blackjack + geeks: teh winz
Poker + geeks: depends on the geek's human skills.
AC: No one left Pixar to write Antz, and Pixar uses software to interpolate between key frames just like every other 3D animation studio.
(Not sure why I ever respond to cowards, but) My friend that works at Pixar claims otherwise. He even provided the name of the guy that defected with the information, which I can't remember since this was several years ago.
You also must've scored low on your reading comprehension tests, too. Pixar uses interpolation for many things, but takes very much time on certain details ignored by Dreamworks, which allowed Dreamworks to release Antz before Pixar could release Bugs Life.
So, basically, shut yer pie hole and get a clue, coward. Or face the karma.
Freecell is actually the management system.
And the bombs are actually which nodes have a bsod.
The antz idea was stolen by someone that left pixar and had access to the script. And it came out first because of the interpolation techniques they used, instead of meticulous hand-designing facial expressions and such (rather, they used software to interpolate between the key frames).
It showed, too. Examine the expressions of the faces in Antz, and compare them to A Bug's Life. Bug's Life has much more "alive" characters.
I'm really surprised there weren't lawsuits.
Other similar ideas, however, I suspect are mostly coincidence or rumblings which kind of hit the scene in rumors, and actually materialize.
I can just imagine cisco getting a call...
"Hi, I just bought one of your 92T routers, and a few minutes ago, I only got 101,155,069,755,390 bits through in one of the seconds. Can you send me my two bits please?"
I'd normally believe you since I've tried several times and failed miserably.
But my girlfriend had no problem at all. Go figure.
Having been through many parts of tejas, except the coastal areas like houston, I can't see how tx is at all nicer than NM. The damn place is flat and ugly as hell, and about 30 miles in from the NM border you can see a sudden shift of flora and features to flat nothingness.
Utah has some pretty nice spots, and some pretty crappy ones, but I could see an argument for Utah's beauty.
To appreciate New Mexico you need to agree with a couple things:
1) mountains kickass
2) not all vegetation is green, and more isn't always better
3) sunsets and big skies kickass
4) pain is actually a flavor, and comes in both red and green
If you're looking for an ocean, it ain't in NM. But mountains they got... and lots of outdoorsy areas. Think of NM as a poor colorado, except that people die when they don't carry enough water or a coat on a hike.
The author is currently working on an OSS CLI to an app to send money to the RIAA legal fund for orphaned artists.
Who said software had to be useful?
I don't claim that military spending isn't used to build bombs. I claim that the research to make a bigger bomb often comes back in the form of technology returned to the public and applied in non-military applications. I also claim that the US would not be a leader in technology if it wasn't a leader in military, and that (although it might be a large waste) that spending money on military has beneficial side-effects and does produce something.
I don't know for sure, but I'd put money on it that some aeronautical or guidance advances are used by private corporations in the US due to research on the apache or tomahawk.
stem cells can be programmed to develop into teeth, and then inserted into the gap in a patient's jaw.
Can they program one to turn into a foot? Because then I'd have an excuse for all my off-color comments.
Oohhhh... I can see some really nasty jokes coming on what body parts can be inserted there.
(It's easy to get DARPA, DoD and DoE funding, but difficult to get NSF funding)
Ever hear of the Internet? Created by DARPA?
How about advances in aviation, nuclear power, computers, ballistics, energy, batteries, GaAs semiconductors, emp and radiation-hardened electronics for space and medicine, the Hubble....
The list goes on forever. Although many of us will have issues with our tax dollars going to darpa/doe/dod, many of those dollars go into research that often gets returned to the public, sometimes with royalty-free patents, GPL, or even public domain.
After getting hammered by the PC market, the comparison of Sun to DEC is a good one. They both were competing with Intel. DEC ended up selling the alpha to intel and having them produce it, ending the competition and settling a lawsuit over IP. The alpha was a great chip, too, but it's dead now.
Sun is also competing with intel and it's hurting them just like it hurt Apple. Businesses realize that they can buy 5 PC's for the price of one Sun, so even the awesome support sun offers pales when compared to the bottom line (provided you're saavy enough to swap a DIMM).
There is one hardware product that they will continue selling, IMHO. Sunrays. These machines rock. I'm using one right now. The footprint and lack of fans are awesome... my office is so quiet I can hear the fans in the machines across the hall and I barely even notice the space it takes up (about 12" x 6"). But this is not going to be enough to keep their thousands of employees.
Sorry, the cornell study was a lab study which tried to simulate the BT corn in the outdoors. As I said, that list was off the top of my head.
GIS for "corn pollen monarch butterfly" and you'll get all the links you need which shows that it significantly increases mortality to the larvae.
The point is that it is an unknown evironmental effect. When you use pesticides, you know that you're putting poison on something, and even then it has unknown effects (such as DDT on eagle eggs). But this merely emphasizes that you have no frikking clue what you're doing when you plant GE crops. No clue whatsoever of the fallout, and it might end up way too late when it's discovered.
We aren't just looking under the hood . . . to use your analogy, we are taking parts one vehicle and force fitting them into another.
uhhh rtfa? It's all about selective breeding.
The parts are from the same model vehicle. From the article, the idea is to manipulate genes that already exist, by using very specific selective breeding. That's considerably different than making glowing tobacco, which is probably not possible using this technique unless the genes to glow somehow exist already.
Here are a couple meaningful dangers, just off the top of my head.
1) Crossbreeding into non-GE crops.
This is extremely common with wind-pollenated crops such as corn and other grasses. A recent example was a cross of a GE crop for feedstock crossing into corn for human consumption, was known to produce an allergic reaction in humans. This got into Taco Bell foods. Additionally, it is a pollutant to the gene pool, and the farmers and companies are not responsible for keeping it under control.
2) Effects on the environment
A recent GE corn, designed to resist insects, dropped pollen on nearby milkweed plants. The pollen was poisonous to insects and ended up wiping out the monarch butterfly population in that small area. It could end up an environmental nightmare, but the companies producing this have no idea of the impact. A plant could potentially end up contaminating all crops, especially if it grew as a weed and could outcompete all untainted crops. Pollen is tiny and potent, and can travel thousands of miles over wind or animals.
3) Effects on others
As stated, GE crops pollute the environment because they are not controlled. Produced in a sealed lab, it has little chance of escaping. But all GE crops should be viewed as potential pollution, simply because their pollen can blow into your yard, and contaminate your crops.
4) Legal issues
If your crops become contaminated through no fault of your own, it's very possible -- even likely -- that you'll have to destroy your crops for violating patents or pay license fees, or be basically shut down from legal suits. In other words, everytime a gene is spliced in, that food item is patented and any violation of that patent can be prosecuted. This violation can even happen if your plants happened to crossbreed and incorporate that gene. Intent is not figured into patents... if you invent something completely on your own that is patented, you lose. If you grow something without a license that's patented, you lose.
5) Social issues
Other issues are social, such as the painful idea of corporations owning the rights to grow food. But let's say you practice vegetarianism because you happen to believe in it (for whatever reason). What if GE tomatoes incorporate a fish gene? Is that tomato suddenly non-vegetarian? Let's say you know that GE tomatoes might have fish genes so you avoid them and look for items marked "organic". WHOA THERE... the corporations have lobbied congress to bastardize the concept of "organic" (to make it meaningless, basically allowing full use of pesticides, etc) and even pressed the FDA to disallow labelling things as organic or produced without pesticides. This last part is one of the worst things about patenting foodstuffs -- the corporations want their actions hidden, and will pay lobbiests millions to get laws passed protecting them from people that simply want to know what their eating.
That's so bizarre. One of the big reasons I use unix is to avoid reinstalling a couple times each year. The sheer time saved from reboots is amazing, too.
t x 9.0b
For me, the first things I install in windows (used pretty much only for gaming), after all the patches and drivers and patches to drivers:
cygwin or putty
filzip
adaware
mozilla
zonealarm
direc
and games.
Wow! you managed to fit microsoft, sco, and starwars into a single line, like a skinpatch of jocular fun applied to the forehead of every /. reader to handle those nasty cravings. :o
bravo!
The OED, good book
The plot is pretty thin. I had already guessed the ending by Chapter Q.
Virtual Ditch Digger
Foreman of Javascript
Driver Driver
Mouse Machinist
What they really should've done is embed the dotcode into the holographic cards, in such a way that it's only visible from a particular angle and looks normal from others.
This would render moot having the details released, because folks would have to either hack their reader or have a holographic printer to use that information. It would also enable the entire card to be used for storage, to hold way more than 5kb/card. They could possibly even have the reader examine the same point from two separate angles to make sure it got different bits, and use such a technology to verify the authenticity.
They'd push their market by making the foil cards worth more (especially by adding foil commons and uncommons, possible making a new "rare-common" card), and it would help them cross the boundaries of table vs computer games in BOTH directions.