tired_man

Nope, not at all.

I don't think domesticated prey/herd animals are good examples to compare capabilities.

IMHO, the human leg/knee/ankle/feet are not well designed. Mountain goats (Dall Sheep, for instance), pumas, and most larger working dogs and cats seem to fly in the face of your statement about handling obstructed terrain.

Quads rule.

Why say it at all? It's sort of a given at this point.

Very few sites fail to appear if you drop it entirely since they have DNS pointers for both ways.

That was a very interesting explanation on how streaming royalties are generated and distributed.

I think that the Silent September idea is good. I'd thought that the groups I streamed got a fair distribution of royalties. Now I see that I was completely mistaken on that count.

Perhaps it's better to download everything and send money directly to the groups :-)

The robots are very cool.

Can someone explain to me why it's important to duplicate the our mediocre human design for the robot? Our design is fairly flawed, mechanically. I understand the "let's not scare people" idea, but is that concern actually relevant?

IMHO, by the time any of the robotics technology is ready to go into production, that the old people they were worried about scaring will have died long ago, and those old people will be replaced by people who are today in their 40s or so.

I think it's fairly safe to say that today's average 40 year-old understands the concept of robots and wouldn't be particularly frightened or even concerned by the presence by a robot having four legs and two arms, even if it was standing upright. The designers could benefit by simplified balancing and all the practical working knowledge available on multi-legged movement.

I'd probably be startled to find a Big Dog checking me out at night in a hospital bed, but some upright robot with the suitable production coverings? That'd be okay.

If they object to a photo, I imagine they would be apoplectic if someone analyzed the contents of their doggy bag and reverse engineered the ingredients.

I honestly don't see how their ouija board method violates freedoms. I think it's ineffective and dimwitted, but I don't think the method violates anything since it isn't based on hard data.

Probably, not. I'll work on that.

Not relevant. So what? Was that drunk capable of fleeing and attacking anyone? Not likely. Is it hard to pursue a person fleeing on crutches for a few yards until you can kick a crutch out from him? It's not rocket science.

Sure, he was a big damned nuisance and they couldn't let him get whacko. Playing dogpile on a UNARMED disabled guy isn't ever going to be the right answer.

They mishandled that situation.

There's a difference between being adverse to failing at some task and not wanting your venture to crash.

For vital infrastructure, it's more important that those "failures" be more in the way of the dba or sa needing to look up how to make something work properly, than actually fry the server instance and wipe your data.

Let's see you dance to that music after your leg is amputated.

They've had the training already.

Someone was sleeping on the days when descalation was covered. And they were probably on vacation during the in-service stuff, too. <rolling eyes ;-)>

I fully agree that the best policy is to comply with directions, but I can't see any reason for the number of responding officers.

I question why the SFPD allows those fos guys them to patrol without a supervisor.

Why is it that they couldn't calm the guy down? Arrogance? Apathy? Or were they all rookies? They couldn't holler for a detective or a supervisor?

Out-argued by a guy on crutches. What'd they think? He was going to somehow run away from them? Sprout wings?

Holy crap! It's darned lucky they had so many officers handy!

That dude might have turned his crutches into some sort of martial arts weapon and killed hundreds of people! Hell, they could be some advanced flight system that would have let him ram the TransAmerica building and destroy it!

If that guy'd had both legs, they would have needed twice as many officers, SWAT, and an armored vehicle. I'm thankful the casualty list was so low. Oh, wait... No casualties? Even better!

Thanks, SFPD, for ridding the streets of another deadly terrorist!

/utter disgust.

> How does that happen?

Sorry, friend. I can't explain anything happening in the US government.

This man is one of the smartest pro athletes I've ever read about. He probably won't end up doing lifealert or reverse mortgage commercials when he is older.

I think he rates a bit of applause.

Well, heck. That's the only way they can do it. Any other way would offend someone's sense of political correctness.

Just an FYI, the first picture is _not_ from 1949. It's from the 80's. A result of the SALT talks whereby the US and USSR would start dismantling nuke-capable offensive weaponry.

The planes were towed into position and chopped up in-place to ensure their numbers and disposition.

Yeah. We're going to disagree here.

Let's revisit this after the next big earthquake to see which buildings survived the event in a habitable condition and monitor which areas are without utilities the longest.

LOL, yeah, the american intel community. Everyone else has already read them.

The americans just haven't gotten to the point in their data review of monitored internet traffic to see them yet.

That's fine if you can stop them from tearing you apart for not increasing their basic stipend as the cost of living increased.

You aren't going to defeat human nature.

Those theories have been around for hundreds (thousands) of years, but oddly, it never happens. There's a reason for that.

People are not automatons and they usually think for themselves (with varying degrees of success) and won't fall into line with the rules necessary to sustain a utopian society.

You'll be left with nothing but a gun in your hand trying to force your well upon them. Forced utopia begs for revolution.

We have local channels put together by the cable company (and the phone company in some places), too. They mainly have video of community events, like town council meetings or school sporting events. There are a few that have tickers and scrolling panels with various topics and combinations of topics (general news, financial news, community news, weather, sports scores, stock ticker, etc.).

US Law enforcement does what it's told (more or less) and acts on the orders of the various governmental entities, from the Federal level on down to the tiniest incorporated entity with it's own budget and cop. Some politician or bureaucrat decided how to do this, not a cop.

Do you really still think that the US government pays attention to any of the constitutional stuff?

I wish with my whole heart that they did. All that civics crap from the schoolbooks is little more than propaganda. It's been roundly ignored since way before I was born.

Too many lawyers, too many overlapping laws created simply to make a politician seem busy for his sheep before for election time, too many politician's bought and sold.

> Whether this makes Google Groups "shitty", I'm not sure. I guess a large part of it is about expectations. Does Google still claim to "do no evil"? I'm sure if it was Microsoft that was running the service then no one would be surprised.

Unfortunately, "Do No Evil" does not include, "Don't Be A Dick."

Google has killed 15-20 years worth of information that's not only of interest for it's history, but for the still useful conversations on damned near any topic you can think of.

Ok, so not everything is still useful. I can't argue that since there were plenty of sports and entertainment groups, but there were also many groups whose information doesn't really become stale. In hiding this data, Google has fucked over anyone who might have benefited from finding it.

Hell, the very damned first time I ever heard of Google was an announcement on USENET. I thought they were pretty slick then and I started using Google instead of DogPile(? I think it was dogpile. That was a long time ago.).

As if she has any credibility left to speak about security issues.

Let's hear from her after she's prosecuted for compromising classified information. If that had been anyone else, they'd already be warming a concrete bunk in a federal supermax.

Guaranteed income?

What happens as more and more people decide to live on the dole? Are you going to force them to work? What happens when the last wealthy people you could tax into paying for it flee your country with their money?

Utopia fails because, "HUMAN."

Please add "Having Jury Nullification Explained in Detail" to your list.

Except for all those people who telecommute or hire teleciommuters.

You want to build vertically in an earthquake prone area?

You need to move a bit east, friend. There _is_ going to be an earthquake.

Exit tax? LOL. Good luck collecting. The operative part of that term is EXIT.

Citizenship that guts your wealth is not worth having. Any number of countries that don't have such avaricious tax laws would be happy to have a new, monied resident to spend money there.

Absentee Landowners. I'll bet the Irish are laughing up their sleeves at England being reduced to foreign ownership.

Man, my working knowledge is really outdated.

Had microsfot paided the least attention to Dvorak back in the 80's, we might have been able to bypass all of those lovely "benefits" (read as "ugliness") that Mr' Gates's tight OS/App integration bestowed upon the DOS world.

I don't let MS do automatic anything on my windows box. I only use that box for a couple of apps, but when I need them, I really need them and can't afford to be blindsided by a box that won't boot.

I pick and choose the updates I apply and only then after they've been out in the wild for a month or so. I'm not going to let microsoft do any alpha/beta QA testing... errr... I meant "automatic updating," on my production box.

Transmitting electricity is quite a bit different from transmitting bytes. That's the main reason we are using Alternating Current rather than Direct Current to power virtually everything.