FTFA, it looks like the reasoning for the introduction of such legislation stems from someone watching said pr0n and murdering a woman...this is a huge step backwards for people taking responsibility for their own actions. What, the pr0n made him kill her? Come on.
I'm wondering what other images will become illegal because they elicit violence...perhaps it will be illegal to draw a picture of Muhammad too? Just my 2 cents.
Now, that brings up an interesting point - say they (NY) get this law passed, and suddenly want detailed lists of products and their prices on all good shipped to NY addresses...would that violate amazon's (or similar sites') privacy policies?
The US does not have a low population density The U.S. has roughly one tenth the population density of many western European countries at 80 people per square mile.
and most certainly its population is not poor. Clearly you've never been to Appalachia. Or southern Louisiana. Or rural Mississippi...the list goes on. Some people along the Ohio River live in tar-paper homes.
Before (or after, as the case may be) you call me ignorant, you may want to know a bit more about me - I've studied music since I was 7 years old (almost 20 years now), playing/singing professionally in some venues (including 'jamming'). Of course music is formulaic! Listen to the blues; it's such a regular formula, anyone can play it. My point was, as formulaic as music is, this prediction program isn't that much of a feat.
That being said, I love variety, and I love experimentation/musicality. My ears are trained to like harmony, but once in a while, some significant dissonance can be just as beautiful. In medival times, musicians were threatened to be burned at the stake if they used 'el diablo de musica' (a minor fourth) in their music, while it's so common, it's part of many major melodies today (hum 'Maria' from West Side Story, for example).
I didn't say the music was crappy, or that I don't like it - I rather enjoy listening to Linkin Park while I'm working out. I was trying to make the point that it's rather predictable. I also like, for example, the Youngblood Brass Band, whose latest album features some really progressive music that isn't quite so formulaic. It is very dissonant, loud, rhythmic, and beautiful.
...considering how unimaginitive most bands are today - the 1-4-5-1 progression is so prevalent in pop music, you can hum most songs on the radio within the first two minutes of listening to it.
Experiment: pick three Linkin Park songs (from their frist couple of albums), play the first, and sing the melody from the second or third over it. You'll be amazed at how different they aren't.
This seems a bit over the top if you ask me, but hopefully it will expose biometrics for what it is: an unchangeable, and in many cases public, password. It's not very easy to hide your fingerprints (or even your DNA, for that matter) from people who really want to find them, and to rely on them for definite identification has the same problems as a social security number. Plus, anyone with a police record would be somewhat compromised from the get go here in the U.S.
I'd hate to see people get proficient at faking fingerprints, because that leads to all sorts of interesting results in the realm of law. If fingerprint fraud becomes widespread, for example, will fingerprints at a crime scene still be valid evidence in court?
1.) Yes, it will indeed take heat from your body, but it would do nothing more than force the heart to pump a little more blood to maintain your body temperature. Many people don't know that one of the many functions your cardiovascular system performs is temperature control - it's one of the world's most complex heat exchangers. You introduce a small enough cold sink, and it will heat that area of the body up to make up for it.
2.) That depends on how they're getting power from the heat - if it's powering a heat engine and runs off heat flux, then yes, they would need a temperature gradient (which isn't that hard to get anyhow - put the cold sink near the epidermis and the hot sink near your heart/brain/etc.). If they're using the heat to run a small chemical reaction, then no, they probably wouldn't need a temperature gradient (e.g.: when using two dissimilar metals to generate a charge, the absolute temperature is directly proportional to the reaction rate).
I'm currently studying the thermodynamics of the body for my master's, it's a very interesting subject.
Exactly. In mechanical engineering terms, this is what we call the beta prototype - the prototype created with the real-world manufacturing process described in the manufacturing plan. The expensive one-of-a kind stuff is an alpha (like concept cars, etc.), which are usually hand-made. I would expect they'll have these mass produced quite soon, and at an affordable price for many applications.
Remember, if their plan didn't show expectations of profit (i.e.: a sellable product), they wouldn't be researching it. They're a company, they're out to make money. Luckily, in this case, they're trying to do it by developing a responsible technology.
They can adopt distributed updates and such and ask universities to help with the bandwidth costs. Instead I guess they want to keep all the chips in hand so that they could one day turn into a billion dollar company. Actually, I think Wikipedia would have a hard time getting universities to pitch in - most professors I know don't quite understand it, and absolutely abhor its use. I know of professors who will fail an assignment citing it as a source.
It's important to maintain that Wikipedia is not a primary source, but more of a source guide. Encyclopedias always have been. A lot of people forget that.
Perhaps these companies (whether they be electronics manufacturers (Sony) or automotive manufacturers (GM), etc.) need to pull their heads out of their asses with respect to customer research.
LG did a bit of customer research, painted their washers and dryers red, and quadrupled sales overnight. Toyota made a tiny, efficient car (echo), and sales boomed. Asus made a PC that it figured would sell really well, and they were right, as a result of understanding their customers' CTQ's.
I love my eeepc because it's exactly what I need. Portable, durable, cheap and linux-based. Sony, Dell and the rest can produce what they want, but when it doesn't sell, it's nobody's fault but their own.
Why New Zealand and not the US? Mostly because the US is QUITE a bit larger, with many more roads, as has been already stated. Same ting with cell-phone coverage - coverage in the UK is really good...in the US, well, it takes a bit more work than meets the eye. We have a New Zealand. We call it Hawaii.
My fiancee lives in a foreign country, and I call her every other day, you insensitive clod. Perhaps you missed the part where it's totally possible to monitor those phone conversations legally, with a warrant (at which point I would have no problem with it). Why the need for such secrecy, that the tap has to be without the approval of a judge, even 72 hours after the fact?
Beyond that, this isn't just about wiretapping phones. It sets a very dangerous precedent through which the executive branch can bypass the legislative branch's powers and act illegally with no fear of repercussions.
...and just when I thought the administration couldn't be any more open about breaking the law and violating my civil liberties. Honestly, does this piss everybody else off as much as it does me? I'm all for America, and I think we have a good number of good things going on over here, but this is getting ridiculous - we have these controls in place (the representatives of the people) to limit the power of the executive branch, and it's as if the administration doesn't even hear them.
I don't know what's worse, not having any input at all, or knowing that it won't be used in any decisions in the end anyway.
If anything, the pollution will be markedly worse with such a vehicle - just not on the roads. Remember, all that stored energy has to come from somewhere. By introducing not only a more complex mechanism to drive the car, but presumably a much HEAVIER mechanism (how much does a tank full of enough compressed air mass to drive a car weigh?), you have decreased the well-to wheel efficiency of the vehicle significantly.
This is like outsourcing production of high-polluting materials to countries where pollution isn't really controlled and saying the problem is fixed. The problem isn't fixed, it's hidden. Come on people, this is high school physics.
I hate to say it, but I agree. I've not been afraid of terrorists, even on 9/11. The only way I've felt towards terrorists since then is pissed off. What I'm afraid of is the US government. They are the ones with the power to limit my freedoms, and are doing so more and more each day.
Somehow the words "a more perfect union" don't quite embody what I'm seeing here.
Actually, most gyms already do this - if you haven't noticed, most modern gym equipment (bikes, rowing machines, etc.) doesn't start up until you start using it.
Now, if we could find an efficient way to extract the extra heat produced during exercise from the human body, that would be awfully cool - the human would be able to perform longer, and the heat could be used for something useful. Turns out the human body is a terribly inefficient heat engine - according to NASA SP-3006 (I research human power as a Mechanical Engineer), a human produces almost twice as much energy in waste metabolic heat that the body has trouble getting rid of as they do mechanical work.
...while they mine data that could be used for anything, if the right people got their hands on it. The minute the FBI breaks into my computer to get information, benign or not, whether or not I'm innocent of any crimes, is the minute I pick up and leave. If they're that hell bent on taking my privacy for your false sense of security, they've got problems bigger than a terrorist detonating a bomb in a crowded room.
Honestly, doesn't it seem like the terrorists got what they wanted? They hate us for our freedoms and our lifestyles, and they've managed to get our government to seize damned near all of it to "fight terrorism". They're not fighting terrorism, they're becoming the purveyors of it.
My engineering department is the home of one of the most advanced coal research labs in the US - while you don't provide any reasoning for your statement that it's all "bunk", there is actually quite significant work going on, and this plant would have been a big testbed for it.
In all honesty, abandoning such a project seems like a big step backwards.
LOL while I'll give you that rugby certainly is a rough sport, the contact in football's a little different. I myself have dislocated a shoulder and wrecked an ankle playing, and I know people who have split their fiberglass helmets, broken other people's arms with their facemasks (which are steel, btw), and the like.
I tire of people assuming because the players are wearing pads, it's kids play. Scrum? Try getting a 1-yard head start and see what the impact difference is like. If that doesn't convince you, an inside linebacker usually has more like 4-5 yards. Also, most football (not soccer) players are notably larger than rugby players (e.g.: a guard, loosely the brother of a tighthead prop in rugby, will usually weigh around 300-350 lbs [21-25 stone for the Brits in the audience], compared to 220-275 lbs for a prop [16-20 stone]). Just my 2 cents.
I think the correlation is more that terrorists find themselves most effective when they unravel the things we engineers labor to create. We are responsible for every facet of infrastructure, from water and roads to cars, planes, and cell phones and the Internet.
How can one person make the largest impact against a superpower? Hit their infrastructure. It's the only way. We don't have the same mindset, we do vastly different work on the same mechanisms.
I didn't mean in any way to suggest that I'm not mad as hell about stuff like this. You're damned right it's shameful. I meant it more to suggest that I'm not surprised. This isn't me sticking my head in the ground, it's me throwing my hands up in total frustration.
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Do you happen to know of any? I don't. This is why most voters are disaffected.
FTFA, it looks like the reasoning for the introduction of such legislation stems from someone watching said pr0n and murdering a woman...this is a huge step backwards for people taking responsibility for their own actions. What, the pr0n made him kill her? Come on.
I'm wondering what other images will become illegal because they elicit violence...perhaps it will be illegal to draw a picture of Muhammad too? Just my 2 cents.
I would argue that the rich get tax cuts, the poor get social support and the middle class gets the shaft.
Now, that brings up an interesting point - say they (NY) get this law passed, and suddenly want detailed lists of products and their prices on all good shipped to NY addresses...would that violate amazon's (or similar sites') privacy policies?
The U.S. has roughly one tenth the population density of many western European countries at 80 people per square mile.
and most certainly its population is not poor.
Clearly you've never been to Appalachia. Or southern Louisiana. Or rural Mississippi...the list goes on. Some people along the Ohio River live in tar-paper homes.
Heh, my mistype. Can I play Hillary and say I 'misremembered'? :-D
Before (or after, as the case may be) you call me ignorant, you may want to know a bit more about me - I've studied music since I was 7 years old (almost 20 years now), playing/singing professionally in some venues (including 'jamming'). Of course music is formulaic! Listen to the blues; it's such a regular formula, anyone can play it. My point was, as formulaic as music is, this prediction program isn't that much of a feat.
That being said, I love variety, and I love experimentation/musicality. My ears are trained to like harmony, but once in a while, some significant dissonance can be just as beautiful. In medival times, musicians were threatened to be burned at the stake if they used 'el diablo de musica' (a minor fourth) in their music, while it's so common, it's part of many major melodies today (hum 'Maria' from West Side Story, for example).
I didn't say the music was crappy, or that I don't like it - I rather enjoy listening to Linkin Park while I'm working out. I was trying to make the point that it's rather predictable. I also like, for example, the Youngblood Brass Band, whose latest album features some really progressive music that isn't quite so formulaic. It is very dissonant, loud, rhythmic, and beautiful.
...considering how unimaginitive most bands are today - the 1-4-5-1 progression is so prevalent in pop music, you can hum most songs on the radio within the first two minutes of listening to it.
Experiment: pick three Linkin Park songs (from their frist couple of albums), play the first, and sing the melody from the second or third over it. You'll be amazed at how different they aren't.
This seems a bit over the top if you ask me, but hopefully it will expose biometrics for what it is: an unchangeable, and in many cases public, password. It's not very easy to hide your fingerprints (or even your DNA, for that matter) from people who really want to find them, and to rely on them for definite identification has the same problems as a social security number. Plus, anyone with a police record would be somewhat compromised from the get go here in the U.S.
I'd hate to see people get proficient at faking fingerprints, because that leads to all sorts of interesting results in the realm of law. If fingerprint fraud becomes widespread, for example, will fingerprints at a crime scene still be valid evidence in court?
1.) Yes, it will indeed take heat from your body, but it would do nothing more than force the heart to pump a little more blood to maintain your body temperature. Many people don't know that one of the many functions your cardiovascular system performs is temperature control - it's one of the world's most complex heat exchangers. You introduce a small enough cold sink, and it will heat that area of the body up to make up for it. 2.) That depends on how they're getting power from the heat - if it's powering a heat engine and runs off heat flux, then yes, they would need a temperature gradient (which isn't that hard to get anyhow - put the cold sink near the epidermis and the hot sink near your heart/brain/etc.). If they're using the heat to run a small chemical reaction, then no, they probably wouldn't need a temperature gradient (e.g.: when using two dissimilar metals to generate a charge, the absolute temperature is directly proportional to the reaction rate). I'm currently studying the thermodynamics of the body for my master's, it's a very interesting subject.
Exactly. In mechanical engineering terms, this is what we call the beta prototype - the prototype created with the real-world manufacturing process described in the manufacturing plan. The expensive one-of-a kind stuff is an alpha (like concept cars, etc.), which are usually hand-made. I would expect they'll have these mass produced quite soon, and at an affordable price for many applications.
Remember, if their plan didn't show expectations of profit (i.e.: a sellable product), they wouldn't be researching it. They're a company, they're out to make money. Luckily, in this case, they're trying to do it by developing a responsible technology.
It's important to maintain that Wikipedia is not a primary source, but more of a source guide. Encyclopedias always have been. A lot of people forget that.
Perhaps these companies (whether they be electronics manufacturers (Sony) or automotive manufacturers (GM), etc.) need to pull their heads out of their asses with respect to customer research.
LG did a bit of customer research, painted their washers and dryers red, and quadrupled sales overnight. Toyota made a tiny, efficient car (echo), and sales boomed. Asus made a PC that it figured would sell really well, and they were right, as a result of understanding their customers' CTQ's.
I love my eeepc because it's exactly what I need. Portable, durable, cheap and linux-based. Sony, Dell and the rest can produce what they want, but when it doesn't sell, it's nobody's fault but their own.
Why New Zealand and not the US? Mostly because the US is QUITE a bit larger, with many more roads, as has been already stated. Same ting with cell-phone coverage - coverage in the UK is really good...in the US, well, it takes a bit more work than meets the eye. We have a New Zealand. We call it Hawaii.
My fiancee lives in a foreign country, and I call her every other day, you insensitive clod. Perhaps you missed the part where it's totally possible to monitor those phone conversations legally, with a warrant (at which point I would have no problem with it). Why the need for such secrecy, that the tap has to be without the approval of a judge, even 72 hours after the fact?
Beyond that, this isn't just about wiretapping phones. It sets a very dangerous precedent through which the executive branch can bypass the legislative branch's powers and act illegally with no fear of repercussions.
...and just when I thought the administration couldn't be any more open about breaking the law and violating my civil liberties. Honestly, does this piss everybody else off as much as it does me? I'm all for America, and I think we have a good number of good things going on over here, but this is getting ridiculous - we have these controls in place (the representatives of the people) to limit the power of the executive branch, and it's as if the administration doesn't even hear them.
I don't know what's worse, not having any input at all, or knowing that it won't be used in any decisions in the end anyway.
If anything, the pollution will be markedly worse with such a vehicle - just not on the roads. Remember, all that stored energy has to come from somewhere. By introducing not only a more complex mechanism to drive the car, but presumably a much HEAVIER mechanism (how much does a tank full of enough compressed air mass to drive a car weigh?), you have decreased the well-to wheel efficiency of the vehicle significantly.
This is like outsourcing production of high-polluting materials to countries where pollution isn't really controlled and saying the problem is fixed. The problem isn't fixed, it's hidden. Come on people, this is high school physics.
I hate to say it, but I agree. I've not been afraid of terrorists, even on 9/11. The only way I've felt towards terrorists since then is pissed off. What I'm afraid of is the US government. They are the ones with the power to limit my freedoms, and are doing so more and more each day.
Somehow the words "a more perfect union" don't quite embody what I'm seeing here.
Actually, most gyms already do this - if you haven't noticed, most modern gym equipment (bikes, rowing machines, etc.) doesn't start up until you start using it.
Now, if we could find an efficient way to extract the extra heat produced during exercise from the human body, that would be awfully cool - the human would be able to perform longer, and the heat could be used for something useful. Turns out the human body is a terribly inefficient heat engine - according to NASA SP-3006 (I research human power as a Mechanical Engineer), a human produces almost twice as much energy in waste metabolic heat that the body has trouble getting rid of as they do mechanical work.
...while they mine data that could be used for anything, if the right people got their hands on it. The minute the FBI breaks into my computer to get information, benign or not, whether or not I'm innocent of any crimes, is the minute I pick up and leave. If they're that hell bent on taking my privacy for your false sense of security, they've got problems bigger than a terrorist detonating a bomb in a crowded room.
Honestly, doesn't it seem like the terrorists got what they wanted? They hate us for our freedoms and our lifestyles, and they've managed to get our government to seize damned near all of it to "fight terrorism". They're not fighting terrorism, they're becoming the purveyors of it.
My engineering department is the home of one of the most advanced coal research labs in the US - while you don't provide any reasoning for your statement that it's all "bunk", there is actually quite significant work going on, and this plant would have been a big testbed for it.
In all honesty, abandoning such a project seems like a big step backwards.
LOL while I'll give you that rugby certainly is a rough sport, the contact in football's a little different. I myself have dislocated a shoulder and wrecked an ankle playing, and I know people who have split their fiberglass helmets, broken other people's arms with their facemasks (which are steel, btw), and the like.
I tire of people assuming because the players are wearing pads, it's kids play. Scrum? Try getting a 1-yard head start and see what the impact difference is like. If that doesn't convince you, an inside linebacker usually has more like 4-5 yards. Also, most football (not soccer) players are notably larger than rugby players (e.g.: a guard, loosely the brother of a tighthead prop in rugby, will usually weigh around 300-350 lbs [21-25 stone for the Brits in the audience], compared to 220-275 lbs for a prop [16-20 stone]). Just my 2 cents.
I think the correlation is more that terrorists find themselves most effective when they unravel the things we engineers labor to create. We are responsible for every facet of infrastructure, from water and roads to cars, planes, and cell phones and the Internet.
How can one person make the largest impact against a superpower? Hit their infrastructure. It's the only way. We don't have the same mindset, we do vastly different work on the same mechanisms.
I didn't mean in any way to suggest that I'm not mad as hell about stuff like this. You're damned right it's shameful. I meant it more to suggest that I'm not surprised. This isn't me sticking my head in the ground, it's me throwing my hands up in total frustration.