What's the difference between a hunter with a drone and a factory fishing vessel with spotter planes? Is it scale? money? Both models are using airborne technology to assist in the gathering of food. If we are going to ban aerial observation, than it should be for all applications and uses of it regardless of how monied the operator is.
Actually using spotter planes for fishing (tuna for example) is forbidden in many places.
This pervasive mentality (shooting wolves from a helicopter) and now this new drone thing is what gives hunters a bad name.
Damn right. Even a high powered rifle with no other technology is a ridiculously one sided advantage when hunting. There are several perfectly practical reasons to go hunting that have nothing to do with entertainment. (food, pests, protection, environment) They even have the gall to call hunting a "sport" and euphemise their bloodlust by calling their kills "harvesting" as if it was no different than planting corn. I'm not quite sure how it is a "sport" if the other team doesn't know they are playing.
I don't have a problem with allowing hunting for practical reasons but most hunters I know (and I know lots of them) are pretty disingenuous about their motives for killing harmless animals. 99% of the time it is for no purpose other then their own amusement. I find that sort of mentality rather disturbing.
Sorry, your biased opinion of hunting aside, it is called harvesting because left to their own devices, and with no other predators available, many hunted species would populate to the point of being unable to feed and then slowly dying of starvation killing off most, if not all, of entire herds. Hunting seasons are used to cull these herds of excess population and provide food and "sport" to humans.
Here's a thought. How about re-introducing natural predators like say
Well said!
There is a big difference between holding a phone vertically at eye hight (=most probably taking a picture) and the diagonal position used to crush candy or communicate via text or do other stuff.
I think it is a sign on the wall that 99% of the criticism is about taking pictures and only 1% about things like distraction and so forth. It is all about consent and not knowing if someone is (not) taking a picture. And even if the wearer is not actively engaged in taking pictures, remote access tools might be able to take over. There is a reason I got the webcam taped off on my laptop...
I just simply fail to see why a webcam strapped to a face is a nice idea.
It's not only about taking pictures and video without consent, it is about the device doing it being connected to the immense data collection machine that is Google, with capabilities to aggregate and correlate, track and face-recognize.
So in a couple of years when the technology is embedded in lapel pins or other subtle wearables, and they are "always on", what do we do, ban jewelry and clothing accessories? This is like horse owners complaining about them new fangled motorized carriages because they are loud, dangerous and the money all goes to Detroit. Its just humans being humans.
Yeah, yeah yeah, cast everybody who wants some privacy as an ignorant Luddite
I am kind of surprised to see that the majority of posts are railing against this phone, mostly over the display resolution being so high. I'm thinking most people never made it past the summary. On top of what the summary lists, it has 3 gigabytes of ram, 32 gigabytes of internal storage, micro SD that can handle 128 gigabyte cards, 5 megapixel front facing camera, 50 (sorta) megapixel rear camera, 3000mAh removable battery. Rapid charging technology - going from 0 to 75% charge on a 3000mAh battery is pretty sweet.
At a $599 retail price point? That's pretty remarkable. The only thing the article does not discuss in the graphics chip set but I'm willing to bet it's nothing to sneeze at.
There were no pictures of the thing in the TFA and no easily visible links so in case anybody wants to know what the thing looks like:
http://en.oppo.com/products/fi...
It's a nice minimalistic design. Dunno why I'd want a 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution in a phone that size but I'd still consider buying one too.
Right or wrong, the reason a large site like Facebook stays large as most people dont want to have to go different places to do what amounts to the same thing.
Would you rather go to 10 friends house each week for 30 minutes each, or everyone hang out at one for the afternoon? Most people would not choose all the running around.
Here's my pet theory at the moment: Facebook stays big because it got a 'critical mass' user base very early and is keeping it through lack of inter-operability with other social networks. If that description sounds a bit like the Microsoft's PC operating system monopoly of yesteryear, that's because it is. This phenomenon also goes by another name: 'vendor lock'. People on Facebook don't have much choice other than to stay on Facebook if they want to enjoy the full spectrum options for interacting with their friends electronically because a huge percentage of 'everybody' is on Facebook and you cannot interact with Google+ users from Facebook so they get left out. If you somehow could force Facebook to be fully interoperable with other social networking sites such that a Google+ user could interact without restrictions with a Facebook user, they could post things to each others timeline, a Facebook user could prune a Google+ users Farmville carrot patches, they could prick and poke each other (or what ever else it is that social media drones spend their time doing) you could soon sit back in an armchair and see Facebook deflate as people defect to a social media site with a better UI, specialist communities more interesting to each individual, etc.....
1. Why are cockpit voices recorded only in the black box? If other data from a plane is constantly being sent for maintenance purposes, while in flight, why do planes not also not relay cockpit voices to some storage system, for just such a situation? CCTV keeps footage for a few hours or a few days, why is this kind of valuable data not also routinely stored?
Streaming material from an aircraft to ground stations would only work reliably over a satellite link which I understand from talking to airline people is expensive but then nowadays they are offering internet on transatlantic flights so it can't be that expenisive. Things like installing CCTV are technically possible but for all manner of reasons including things like: safety assessments, corporate bureaucracy and the fact that aircraft can't be grounded long enough for equipment to be installed for profit reasons (down time, obscene prices of aircraft electronics and other spares) the upgrading of commercial airliners tends to move at a glacial pace. Just for example, there are variants of some Boeing airliner (777 iirc) flying around the world with a bug in their FANS equipment that causes a faulty log-off. This is not a critical issue but it is just bloody annoying for flight control staff around the world. This could be fixed with a simple software update but getting that patch certified, getting an airline bean counter to shell out the money and finally catching the aircraft on the ground long enough to have the patch installed takes a loooooooooooooooooooooooong time.
Of course we don't know that it was suicide. It could just have been an unusually unreasonable highjacker who didn't understand that the 777-200 had shorter range than for example Wikipedia lists because it wasn't fully fueled for the relatively short flight to Beijing.
That's what I was thinking too. This happened to an Ethiopian Airlines flight that was hijacked back in 1996. The hijackers ignored the captains warning that his aircraft's fuel load was insufficient to get them to Australia where the hijackers wanted to go and eventually he was forced to ditch the aircraft in the sea off the Comoros Islands, due to fuel starvation. He would have probably stood a good chance of pulling off a near textbook belly-landing if one of the hijackers hadn't started wrestling with him for the controls seconds before the aircraft touched down on the water which caused one of the engines to touch the water too soon so the machine broke up. Some 125 out of 175 passengers and crew were killed but more would have died if the co-pilot hadn't kept the hijackers off the captains back for most of the landing. It was a pretty impressive feat of airmanship considering the circumstances.
We have been able to clone several species already. That's not the problem. The problem is that you need a surrogate mother for the embryo and the closest we have is the African elephant, which separated from the mammoth a long time ago. From TFA it seems they are already working on cross-species clones but they are still a long way off.
That may seem like a victory but it's really just scratching the surface. Once you have cloned a mammoth what then? To establish a viable population you need genetic diversity, a minimum founder population of 50-100 individuals that should preferably be as distantly related as possible. The up side of a project like this is that if we can solve the problem do cloning a mammoth it we can start harvesting the DNA of many individuals of species like tigers and rhinos that are about to be become extinct thanks hedonistic nouveau rich assholes with more money than sense who keep poachers and exotic pet traders in business. Then, at a later date when Gene Roddenberry's vision has come true and mankind has grown up (not holding my breath) we will be able to recreate viable populations.
If mammoths were wiped out by climate change, then resurrecting the species in a modern climate would be bringing it into an environment that it was not evolved to handle.
Not only does that seem rather pointless, but it also strikes me as arguably sounding like animal cruelty. I'd suggest that the scientific discoveries we might make by doing this may be heavily outweighed by the ethical considerations involved.
This matter really feels one of those times when scientists should be reminding themselves that just because we *CAN* do something does not necessarily mean that we *SHOULD*.
Mammoths survived until at least 2500 years ago on Wrangel island where that particular population was probably wiped out by modern humans so at least the habitat question is a non issue.
If Google didn't want children to use their devices, why are they approving apps specifically targeted at children? This is a money-grab from Google, pure and simple.
How does that saying go again? Never ascribe malice to that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
It's well-established by now that one of the most significant factors in destroying the lives of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers across the country has been the influx of similar immigrants from around the world. Legal versus illegal, its immaterial. The invisible hand doesn't give a damn whether they hold a green card or not and giving legal status to the illegals won't suddenly drive wages up because their mere presence in the economy provides at least implicit price competition.
Here's how you enact a sensible immigration policy. You crack down on the employers of illegals such that no one will hire them. You then offer a contingent amnesty to the illegals that allows them to come forward and face no charges if they leave the country of their own volition, and you even let them keep all of the money and property they've earned if they self-deport. Then, you only allow immigrants with provable skills to immigrate as singles or with their immediate family if they're married with children. None of this "let's bring the whole extended family" over. Grandma, the aunts and uncles and cousins have no business piggybacking on that green card. That's just a recipe for waking up one day and finding a large ethnic enclave in an American city (oh wait, that's precisely what's happened in many areas because of this, silly me).
Obligatory: http://content.time.com/time/c...
Not that your suggestions are terribly unreasonable but you are kind of taking an axe (or chainsaw) to the USA's "Nation of immigrants" founding epic.
One in Ten Americans Thinks HTML is a Type of Sexually Transmitted Infection
To be fair, from an IT geeks perspective that is kind of true. To be precise, web pages written in HTML can be, and frequently are, carriers for a multitude of electronically transmitted infections.
Russia is in charge now of the entire ex-Soviet Union area.
Not quite. NATO isn't likely to roll over and accept aggression directed at Poland or the Baltic States (boy, I bet they're happy they got admitted now) and I suspect even the EU would grow a spine if Russia started pushing Finland around.
Finland is nothing but miles upon miles of easily defended terrain, the Finns are masters of using terrain as a weapon and they will give the Russians a very hard time if they start a war like they did last time. This time strike aircraft flying out of Norway, Sweden and aircraft carriers in the region will have a field day tearing up Russian divisions filing down those forest roads in-between the Finnish Lakes. I'd say Poland is a more likely target for Russian aggression. We might actually witness German Panzer divisions rolling over the Polish border and the Poles being glad to see them. In view of relatively recent history, that must be considered to be a pretty strange turn of events. If the Russians start a shooting war I fully trust the Poles to fight like a cornered tiger but they are going to need help. The Ukraine, however, is in the crappy position of being a 'buffer state' (to borrow a bit of Machiavellian 19th century political jargon) between NATO and Russia and I can't say I envy them of it. I certainly hope the western powers show some backbone and keep Putin's dirty paws out of the Ukraine and don't make the same mistake they made back in the 30s when they handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler in a futile attempt to save their own skins.
This is beginning to remind me of the annexation of Czechoslovakia, let's hope this time around the Western powers will have enough spine to stand up to the dictator in stead of encouraging him with appeasement. We are gettign to the point where threatenign to move a few NATO divisions to the Urainian border would seem appropriate, at least that was the only thing that seemed to work on Hitler.
Fuck this guy.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to decline that offer.
FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed -- it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer. -- A.J. Perlis
