That is an oversimplification. I'm not going to deny that there is corporate spin, but there is also union spin. The worst things I've personally heard about unions are from union members. People going on strike and being promised compensation from the union, and then not getting said compensation. People going on strike only to find their union settled for lower wages than originally promised in exchange for an all union shop. Corporations are organizations of people with leaders. Unions are organizations of people with leaders. People are greedy and leaders of organizations often put their own interests above those of the people they are supposed to represent.
So you're making an argument for the right to have a car? I like Slashdot, apparently I should have a free car, free entertainment, free software, and free internet access, all paid from the pockets of the rich. Sign me up!
(sighs, rolls eyes to heaven) No, that's not at all what I'm saying. I'm not even saying I'm for progressive taxes. I'm mainly for lower taxes, and then it wouldn't make so much difference whether you soak the rich or the poor -- you don't "soak" anyone! I've heard taxation likened to trying to attach as many leeches to the economy as possible without killing it, and unfortunately I think that's a fairly accurate description of taxes in my beloved US of A. Back on topic, though, I was merely making an argument that an automobile tax isn't any more progressive (as the parent to my original post suggested) than a fuel tax. I was saying that many poor people will need a car, I didn't say anyone owed them one. I'm sure most could come up with some other option if it came down to it -- live closer to work, work closer to home, car pool, work from home, etc, but most buy cars that probably cost them a greater percentage of their income than richer people's cars are of their incomes.
I think the leech analogy applies to this story. When the state sees people driving on something besides fossil fuels, they see a spot that doesn't have a leech on it yet. To be fair, I suppose the state has a point here: If fuel taxes are supposed to pay for the roads, and suddenly everyone started using veg oil and the fuel taxes dried up then they'd need to make up the money somehow to maintain the roads. But it seems pretty ridiculous to fine this guy who probably had no idea that he owed the state money and would have been happy to pay it if he had.
So imagine you're a long-haul trucker, traveling thousands of miles on one trip. What do you do? You buy fuel where's cheap, filling both 100-gallon tanks to the top. IOW, you don't buy gas in states where it's expensive, you just drive straight through. What does the state of NC call this? Yep, you guessed it: "fuel tax evasion!" That's right. They even have checkpoints set up on the highways to measure the amount of fuel in a big rig's tanks and THEY FINE THE TRUCKER FOR THE TAXES HE WOULD HAVE PAID if he were stupid enough to buy NC's overpriced fuel.
These claims seem to be disputed, and I havn't verified it, but I found this article. It sounds like there is some system in place in the US and Canada which requires truckers to pay tax for the fuel consumed in a state, regardless of where you bought it. It does list the NC fuel tax rate as 30.2 cents, lower than the 57 cents cited in the parent post.
Then we could really make taxation progressive by taxing the percentage of the vehicle's value to bring in the necessary revenue.
I suspect that would wind up being a regressive tax. I would think lower income people spend more as a percentage of their income on their vehicle(s). I mean, unless you live near your work or have public transportation you just need a car, even if that expense limits your food and housing budget. Certainly the very rich don't spend a large percentage of their income on automobiles (unless they collect them or something). The same argument applies to most sales taxes.
So the article says captcha stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". The Turing test is about whether a human could discern a computer from a human. The "captcha" problem is coming up with a test that will allow a computer to discern a computer from a human, and that's an entirely different story. Maybe instead of pictures of text, we should use pictures of objects, animals, public figures etc. That is still very hard for computers to do. They'd almost have a build a database of all the pictures themselves to crack it, and you could continually add or change out the pictures in your database.
What he has clearly demonstrated is that behavior, especially in insects, obeys very simple rules. His insect robots have almost no processing power and yet mimic the behavior of real bugs very well.
Interesting, I'll bet I could make a robotic/. poster. I'd just make some minor variations to Eliza. For example:
"Dup. Wasn't WETA Working on Robotic Lizard For Science months ago?"
"I was Working on Robotic Lizard For Science for the last 10 years. Nothing new here."
"What is the carbon footprint of WETA works on Robotic Lizard for Science?"
"Microsoft is evil because WETA Working on Robotic Lizard for science"
I bred at less than my replacement level. If everyone in the word were to follow that tendency, we would be able to half the population by roughly 2050 and half it again in the 20 years after that so by 2100 the population would be roughly 1.5 billion. The chinese made some of these extremely hard choices with regard to overbreeding and overpopulation and have benefited from doing so.
You take a bold position there. You're looking to China as an example? According to some Chinese people I know, one of the reasons their population increased so much was that a few decades ago, the government encouraged people to have many children to build a big army. It's a classic example of why socialism and central planning doesn't work -- no one is really selfless enough or intelligent enough to make those decisions for everyone else. If you want to make that decision for yourself -- go ahead.
The problem is that ignorant poor people and some religious people are going to breed us to the point where things are unpleasant all the time at the best or downright ugly and murderous at the worst.
Way to characterize and stereotype! So all you smart, rich, atheists would get along fine if it weren't for everybody else messing it up, huh? I'm wondering who's been telling you we're on the brink of doom? Because eggs are smaller? I'll heartily agree that "Big Corporate Eggs" are terrible compared to eggs from the farm down the road (I live in a rural area), but I think by many standards we are not (yet) in a decline due to overpopulation. Is life expectancy going up or down? Standard of living? Birth defects? I'm sure there is some point past which we're going to be in trouble, but it seems presumptuous to me to say that we're already there and then to start telling people how many children they can have.
Rampant unchecked capitalism is little better than rampant unchecked communism.
I think you are equating capitalism with greed, which isn't accurate. A government owned journal might behave the same way or worse (like not publishing findings that reflect poorly on the administration).
the universe has always existed, it neither came into existance, nor will it "ever" end (which is a bogus question anyway, since time only exists INSIDE the universe, it's pointless to ask what was there before the beginning of time, like it's pointless to ask where the moon is on the surface of the earth : it just isn't a location
I'm not sure that makes sense. I've always had a problem with the terms "other universe" or "outside our universe" - doesn't the universe include EVERYTHING by definition? But okay, supposing there is some other "place" outside of what we could ever travel to or see by any known physical means --- who is to say that place doesn't have it's own time? Or even share our timeline in some way? And although we are constrained to move through time in a certain way, is it certain that everything is?
But we just don't know, do we? We have theories about the conditions required for life and about mechanisms which can produce it, but it's never been duplicated in a lab, and it's mostly based on what we think must have happened on earth. I think, scientifically, we may have to admit that we have no idea what the odds are that life as we know it exists on any other planet.
Your morals tell you that abortion is a terrible thing. Someone else may see it differently. What gives you, or anyone else, the right to force your morals upon others?
That is a cop-out argument and (IMO) shows you don't really understand the other point of view. For one thing, if you accept that the unborn child is a person, then the mother who aborts is the one forcing her beliefs on the unborn child. And someone out there might think you don't qualify as a human because you have the wrong genes or belief system and that therefore it wouldn't be a crime to kill you. Saying, "All belief systems are equally valid so just leave me alone" won't magically solve any of the world's problems.
Call me a radical thinker, but sometimes it's easier to consider the subtext than to throw yourself into a fit of self-righteous rage.
FYI, Smidge204, your post comes off sounding a lot more self-righteous and angry than the parent. I think the guy was just making the valid point that some grid power is already pretty clean, and the marketing info (not surprisingly) compared their product to the worst sources of grid power - which is arguably misleading.
I just wanted to thank you for explicitly typing the acronym at the end. Merely boldfacing and capitalizing the first letters of the individual words might have been too subtle.
That makes this test irrelevant to the music to the iTunes store, since that music comes from the original masters (higher quality than the CD)...
What do you mean by "the original masters"? If you mean the glass master from which they stamp the CDs, that would be the exact same quality, bit for bit, wouldn't it?
It ignores other factors such as relative price...
So with today's technology you should be able to build a computer as useful and powerful as a MacPlus and sell them for $10 a piece in a bin at WalMart! Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but it's an interesting idea.
By reducing funding for the poor and reducing funding for economic development, socio-economic factors will lead to greater violence in the lower classes.
Wow! IMO, this comment crosses the sometimes fuzzy line between "social compassion" and "elite condescension". I don't know if the "lower classes" would appreciate the implication that they are prone to violence unless given funding, even if you excuse them of responsibility by blaming it on "socio-economic factors".
I'm not sure if this is exactly on topic, but is anyone ever concerned about how much of our computer equipment is manufactured by foreign countries? I would actually be surprised if China hasn't approached chipset or motherboard manufacturers to implement some kind of espionage or remote control feature into their products. Of course, the U.S. has Intel and AMD, so it could be doing the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been 3 minutes, I can't believe no one's corrected you yet ... It's EBCDIC.
(sighs, rolls eyes to heaven) No, that's not at all what I'm saying. I'm not even saying I'm for progressive taxes. I'm mainly for lower taxes, and then it wouldn't make so much difference whether you soak the rich or the poor -- you don't "soak" anyone! I've heard taxation likened to trying to attach as many leeches to the economy as possible without killing it, and unfortunately I think that's a fairly accurate description of taxes in my beloved US of A. Back on topic, though, I was merely making an argument that an automobile tax isn't any more progressive (as the parent to my original post suggested) than a fuel tax. I was saying that many poor people will need a car, I didn't say anyone owed them one. I'm sure most could come up with some other option if it came down to it -- live closer to work, work closer to home, car pool, work from home, etc, but most buy cars that probably cost them a greater percentage of their income than richer people's cars are of their incomes.
I think the leech analogy applies to this story. When the state sees people driving on something besides fossil fuels, they see a spot that doesn't have a leech on it yet. To be fair, I suppose the state has a point here: If fuel taxes are supposed to pay for the roads, and suddenly everyone started using veg oil and the fuel taxes dried up then they'd need to make up the money somehow to maintain the roads. But it seems pretty ridiculous to fine this guy who probably had no idea that he owed the state money and would have been happy to pay it if he had.
Well, that depends on your definition of "time"
So the article says captcha stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". The Turing test is about whether a human could discern a computer from a human. The "captcha" problem is coming up with a test that will allow a computer to discern a computer from a human, and that's an entirely different story. Maybe instead of pictures of text, we should use pictures of objects, animals, public figures etc. That is still very hard for computers to do. They'd almost have a build a database of all the pictures themselves to crack it, and you could continually add or change out the pictures in your database.
Interesting, I'll bet I could make a robotic /. poster. I'd just make some minor variations to Eliza. For example:
"Dup. Wasn't WETA Working on Robotic Lizard For Science months ago?""I was Working on Robotic Lizard For Science for the last 10 years. Nothing new here."
"What is the carbon footprint of WETA works on Robotic Lizard for Science?"
"Microsoft is evil because WETA Working on Robotic Lizard for science"
You take a bold position there. You're looking to China as an example? According to some Chinese people I know, one of the reasons their population increased so much was that a few decades ago, the government encouraged people to have many children to build a big army. It's a classic example of why socialism and central planning doesn't work -- no one is really selfless enough or intelligent enough to make those decisions for everyone else. If you want to make that decision for yourself -- go ahead.
Way to characterize and stereotype! So all you smart, rich, atheists would get along fine if it weren't for everybody else messing it up, huh? I'm wondering who's been telling you we're on the brink of doom? Because eggs are smaller? I'll heartily agree that "Big Corporate Eggs" are terrible compared to eggs from the farm down the road (I live in a rural area), but I think by many standards we are not (yet) in a decline due to overpopulation. Is life expectancy going up or down? Standard of living? Birth defects? I'm sure there is some point past which we're going to be in trouble, but it seems presumptuous to me to say that we're already there and then to start telling people how many children they can have.I think you are equating capitalism with greed, which isn't accurate. A government owned journal might behave the same way or worse (like not publishing findings that reflect poorly on the administration).
That is a cop-out argument and (IMO) shows you don't really understand the other point of view. For one thing, if you accept that the unborn child is a person, then the mother who aborts is the one forcing her beliefs on the unborn child. And someone out there might think you don't qualify as a human because you have the wrong genes or belief system and that therefore it wouldn't be a crime to kill you. Saying, "All belief systems are equally valid so just leave me alone" won't magically solve any of the world's problems.
I just wanted to thank you for explicitly typing the acronym at the end. Merely boldfacing and capitalizing the first letters of the individual words might have been too subtle.
What do you mean by "the original masters"? If you mean the glass master from which they stamp the CDs, that would be the exact same quality, bit for bit, wouldn't it?
Where does it end? What if google shows a picture of you through your window on your computer on google looking at someone else through their window?
So with today's technology you should be able to build a computer as useful and powerful as a MacPlus and sell them for $10 a piece in a bin at WalMart! Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but it's an interesting idea.
#define MAX_NUM_CORES 128
Okay, we're good for another few years.
I'm not sure if this is exactly on topic, but is anyone ever concerned about how much of our computer equipment is manufactured by foreign countries? I would actually be surprised if China hasn't approached chipset or motherboard manufacturers to implement some kind of espionage or remote control feature into their products. Of course, the U.S. has Intel and AMD, so it could be doing the same thing.