Slashdot Mirror

So you can't take a laptop into the passenger cabin because of "bomb risk", but it's ok to put that same laptop in the cargo hold where an explosion could still take down the aircraft? Or is there some other risk here, like the NSA/CIA needs time alone with your laptop unobserved?

I seem to remember that luggage/cargo within the plane is placed inside specially designed containers that absorb the forces of bombs?

If so, it would be safer but by how much I do not know. Which airlines use these, not sure.

...performed a quick google search:
US patent from 1994, Containers for use on aircraft for the protection of aircraft structures: http://www.freepatentsonline.c... [freepatentsonline.com]

from 1999, Aircraft luggage bomb protection system: http://www.freepatentsonline.c... [freepatentsonline.com]

from 2009, Explosion resistant cargo container: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/49... [docstoc.com]

How is carrying a laptop in luggage any "safer" than carrying it in the passenger cabin?

I seem to remember that luggage/cargo within the plane is placed inside specially designed containers that absorb the forces of bombs?

If so, it would be safer but by how much I do not know. Which airlines use these, not sure.

...performed a quick google search:
US patent from 1994, Containers for use on aircraft for the protection of aircraft structures: http://www.freepatentsonline.c...

from 1999, Aircraft luggage bomb protection system: http://www.freepatentsonline.c...

from 2009, Explosion resistant cargo container: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/49...

For example, here's a copy of an NDA that Luckey signed two years ago that seems to back up Zenimax's claims a bit. Zenimax also claims that they were investing "tens of millions of dollars" in VR tech before Carmack was even part of the picture. I think the general idea is that they brought him in, where he worked primarily on their VR tech, and then left last year to join OR to work on their VR tech.

Anyway, all I'm saying is that people need to stop just assuming Zenimax is trolling here. From what I've seen and read, they have a pretty good case.

Somebody's a tad butthurt, me thinks...

Why would teleportation lead to the collapse of civilization? All the bridges rusting, maybe (see: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/83804749/Niven_-Larry---All-The-Bridges-Rusting) but it is not like developing psi powers or perfect memories.

"Facebook is based in Ireland"

Huh? No, they're not, although they could certainly have a subsidiary incorporated there.

The location of their headquarters doesn't mean much. Facebook is legally incorporated in Delaware.

Unobtanium, a lazy sci-fi writers contribution to the element table that explains in one simple word how difficult it is to obtain the ore... except that they are able to obtain it.

To quote from the official scriptment:

"Pandora is blessed with a naturally occurring susbstance a million times more precious than gold. Its joke name of "unobtanium" has stuck, over the years."

The backstory to Avatar was actually a lot more fleshed out and interesting than used in the movie, and they stuck to real science more than almost any other modern sci-fi that I can think of. As for "unobtanium": it's a room-temperature superconductor (probably the most likely thing on Earth for scientists and engineers to jokingly refer to as "unobtanium"). There are hints to that in the movie, such as when one character sets a piece of it down over a magnet and it floats in place. The backstory is that astronomers' attention was drawn to this moon because of the tremendous magnetic fields it was generating. A lot of the "ORLLY?" moments in the world are actually quite plausible given the concept of large deposits of a room-temperature superconductor underground -- a planetwide communication network, floating mountains (superconductors strongly expel magnetic fields), highly intense and uneven localized levels of magnetic field strength and radiation (and thus communication disruption), and so forth.

They really went to a ton of detail with the latest in scientific paradigms on pretty much every aspect of the worldbuilding. The spacecraft, for example. It's dual propulsion. For earth departure, it uses a photon sail pumped by a laser array at Earth, to accelerate the craft without it having to carry extra propellant for said acceleration. For decelaration, however, there is no such laser array, so instead it needs to provide its own thrust. For this, they use antimatter-initiated microfusion. All parts of the spacecraft are sized in proportion to what they'd actually need to be sized as to actually complete the journey. The craft is laid out in a very un-sci-fi-like fashion using tensile structures rather than rigid structures. First the sail, then the propellant/engine system for deceleration, all lie *ahead* of the craft, with the craft hanging in tension behind them. This can dramatically reduce system mass. The first system I read about like that, although there may have been others proposed before then, was "Medusa", a more efficient alternative to the popular "Orion" nuclear pulse propulsion system. Behind the spacecraft lies a reflective shield that protects it from the lasers used during the initial boost phase. During interstellar travel, it is then rotated to act as a shield against grains of interstellar dust. For the return trip, the antimatter and hydrogen are topped back up from locally-produced sources and used to boost it back up to 0.7c. At Earth, the photon sail and laser array is then used for deceleration.

Similar level of detail went into creating the biomes and evolutionary history of the different species, and pretty much every aspect of the worldbuilding. Unfortunately, a lot of compromises were made in trying to wedge the plot in and make it appeal to the lowest common denominator :P. For example, the Navi were initially far less human-looking, in fitting with a realistic evolutionary development pattern. This was changed to help the audience bond with them better. One can only likewise expect similar compromises in the Na'vi speaking so much in English, the human being the "big damn hero", and other unrealistic audience-identification-with-characters aspects. I find it a shame that there's no way to get a "not dumbed down" version.

As a side note, I found it interesting to read that the visual similarities between the

I've pulled the complaint from PACER and uploaded it to docstoc:

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/98231225/ACS-Atlas

How about using the RECAP Firefox plugin , so that it would get uploaded automatically to the Internet Archive?

I've pulled the complaint from PACER and uploaded it to docstoc:

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/98231225/ACS-Atlas

From the court order:

a. "Anonymous" was a collective of computer hackers [...]
b. "Lulz Security," or simply "LulzSec," was a group of elite computers hackers affiliated with Anonymous.

So elite that they were able to hack more than one computer at once! So elite that they used the paid VPN service of a legal UK company under their real names...

Because there is honest debate about whether your point of view is correct or not.

The statutes largely do require corporations to act in the best interest of the shareholders, and in a relationship where the transactions are almost strictly monetary, that is largely taken to mean they must maximize stock value. There is debate as to whether other goals are allowed, and they are allowed mostly due to their potential impact on long term stock value.

See this paper for a much closer look at the issue:
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/26568445/Corporate-Law-Profit-Maximization-and-the-Responsible-Shareholder

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. I may be wrong about legal matters, which is why I quote more scholarly articles.

Yep, in Switzerland, for example. Links: article, analysis

Some picking apart may be in order here...

Apple sued HTC over hardware patents, IIRC. Microsoft merely included their (and Oracle's) name to legitimize what they were up to in the eyes of their audience. Not sure I'd want the association with Oracle, though - that particular one smells/tastes like Ellison trying to generate some revenue off of his recent purchase of Java, not (as portrayed) as some aggrieved party sick of getting ripped off (remember, Oracle just bought the thing).

Long-term, sure, Google will likely be vying w/ Apple for the #1 slot. OTOH, I don't think Apple cares if they ever quite reach #1 in the smartphone market, or any market. If they cared about market position, Verizon would be selling iPhones by now, and Dell and HP would be selling computers with OSX preloaded on them. OTOH, Apple has its own, not-so-obvious goals, mostly having to do with holding more money than the US Treasury and China combined, methinks.

Finally, one last nitpick... I sincerely doubt that Microsoft was/is cozy at all with the iPhone coming out of nowhere and basically tearing it a new arse in the US smartphone markets (and I bet that Palm hated the whole episode even worse). Globally, Microsoft was drowned out by Nokia anyway. :)

True story:

When Florida's new accounting software project, http://www.docstoc.com/docs/18152104/Auditing-Large-and-Complex-IT-Projects/(slide 26) Aspire, failed due to an ungodly amount of incompetence, it cost the state $89 million.

This includes the nearly $10 million already paid out, plus the unknown amount of money in lost productivity of the various agencies, etc. who paid folks to attend meetings, plan stuff, gather requirements.

So $89 Million could easily have actually been $100 Million+.

And they think $1 million will get them far into space?

Of course the other problem with what he said is that the money spent on the military (including the wars it has fought) doesn't come from a level of government that has any business being involved in education.

That is not compleatly true. If federal taxes weren't as high then states could raise their taxes, they'd thus have more money for education. Oh, and the federal government is in education. While I agree it shouldn't be the feds have entered into education, just look at the United States Department of Education to start with. The U.S. Department of Education 2010 Budget is $46.7 billion. Now that's only a fraction of the cost of the war in Iraq but it's still pretty big.

Falcon

IANAL, but I RTFA, and I also read the linked settlement document. Am I correct in understanding that Katzer et. al. owe $100,000 plus legal costs? I know this has been a drawn-out battle, but that still seems like a fairly significant victory for Jacobsen et al.

Here is a link to the real Apple case against Nokia (AAPL-NOKCountersuit): http://www.docstoc.com/docs/19291155/?key=NWQ3MTg2ODAt&pass=ZTY0Yy00OWE4 Of course it is biased towards Apple point of view. Also, the text of the Nokia's suit is needed to fully understand it.

Here's one guy's description of the Apex Technology Group's H-1B agreement (from http://ripoffatapextgi.blogspot.com/ ):

This information is being mailed to you as a reply to your post regarding Apex Technology Group Inc (Sarvesh Kumar Dharayan) (www.apextgi.com)Please find the employment agreement letter http://www.docstoc.com/docs/10702214/agreement, which I received after I started working for Apex at a client location. None of the terms were part of the initial agreement between me and Apex Technology Group Inc.

I would like to take this oppurtunity to highlight several aspect's of the 9 page legal agreement which might be important for you. For example: 30 day termination notice or forget your last paycheck when you quit, If you join a company (including any level between you and Apex) then pay $35000 or face a law suit, $9000 for legal,training and guest services when you quit. $35000 if you quit in between a contract...etc

The document at http://www.docstoc.com/ is not available any more. I assume it was the victim of a takedown request.

Once again, I want to make it clear that I am in favor of technical immigration (both to and from the U.S., for that matter) but it's these kinds of alleged abuses that have made it clear that the H-1B program is fundamentally flawed.

Here's one guy's description of the Apex Technology Group's H-1B agreement (from http://ripoffatapextgi.blogspot.com/ ):

This information is being mailed to you as a reply to your post regarding Apex Technology Group Inc (Sarvesh Kumar Dharayan) (www.apextgi.com)Please find the employment agreement letter http://www.docstoc.com/docs/10702214/agreement, which I received after I started working for Apex at a client location. None of the terms were part of the initial agreement between me and Apex Technology Group Inc.

I would like to take this oppurtunity to highlight several aspect's of the 9 page legal agreement which might be important for you. For example: 30 day termination notice or forget your last paycheck when you quit, If you join a company (including any level between you and Apex) then pay $35000 or face a law suit, $9000 for legal,training and guest services when you quit. $35000 if you quit in between a contract...etc

The document at http://www.docstoc.com/ is not available any more. I assume it was the victim of a takedown request.

Once again, I want to make it clear that I am in favor of technical immigration (both to and from the U.S., for that matter) but it's these kinds of alleged abuses that have made it clear that the H-1B program is fundamentally flawed.

He then apparently went crazy. Actual mental illness, which he didn't have any sign of when they were letting him out.

The point he should been locked up is when he ended up in police custody again a while back. It would have been nice if someone had noticed he was batshit insane at that time, held a competency hearing, and locked him up on that while he was helped.

But we stopped caring about the mentally ill in this society a while back.

Actually, they did. And didn't find that he was insane (though by now we've all seen the video where he seems to prove his instability, then there's his friend implying that Clemmons thought he was Christ). We've spent so much time and money locking up non-violent drug users that we've left the mentally ill to rot. A lot of the mentally ill self-medicate as well, so they have been hit even harder by Prohibition 2.0.

This paradoxically works out in favor of the trolley lines, given that they tend to attract economic development to them.

Perhaps I'm looking at it wrong but I look at it as saying the use of trolleys attracts economic development like the parable of the broken window, by breaking a window glass you're creating work for the glass maker. However in reality breaking the glass only diverts money when it can be used for a better purpose. Instead of the kid getting the shoes he needs the money is now spent on glass.

It also sounds like the line that using tax money to pay for a new sports stadium brings in new revenue for the area. Not one economic study I've heard of concludes this is true. Some conclude any benefit is smaller than what was advertised. Others conclude there is no benefit at all.

Portland, OR claims that its streetcar line has spurred billions of dollars of investment in the area surrounding it in a very short period of time.

They may claim it but do the numbers support that? Or is it a broken window parable?

Falcon

Oh, mind you I'm not arguing against improving mass transit, I support doing it, but I'd like to see the numbers crunched. It's easy to be over optimistic when you're not spending your own money.

Well, this is reported by the Washington Times, so you know it's not biased in the least. OK, let's take a look.

The only substantive abuse claim here is a quote from the NSF's inspector general making a budget request to Congress. The Times article implies that "this dramatic increase," forcing fraud detection efforts to be reduced, refers to employees browsing porn.

But that's not the case, is it. If we read the Times article very carefully, we see that the very first graf references:

Employee misconduct investigations, often involving workers accessing pornography

Subsequent references to "the problems," "this dramatic increase," and "the misconduct cases" are all really talking about employee misconduct as a whole, not porn surfing specifically.

Maybe that's why this article is big on rhetoric and small on actual cases. One lengthy case is detailed on the article's first page. How much did that case cost taxpayers? "Between $13,800 and $58,000." Out of the NSF's $6.49 billion budget. That's 0.0006%.

How often is "often"? Six times as often as before. Misconduct cases -- not porn specifically -- went from 3 in 2006, to 7 in 2007, to 10 in 2008. The Times hints repeatedly that this is a huge problem, but despite its lavish use of adjectives -- "pervasive," "swamped," "well-publicized" -- it has to report that the actual number of porn-related misconduct cases in 2008 was seven.

Slashdot's headline "Porn Surfing Rampant" is exactly the kind of exaggeration that the Washington Times was hoping secondary media would slap on this story. "Rampant" is just not true, there's no possible way seven cases in a year can be described that way.

If each case was as bad as the one "between $13,800 and $58,000" case that was identified, those seven cases probably cost 0.004% of the NSF's budget.

But the Times article gets worse, moving from exaggeration to outright lies. Later, its author Jim McElhatton writes:

The foundation's inspector general ... told Congress it was diverted from that mission by the porn cases.

That's a flat-out lie. The OIG told Congress it was diverted by "employee misconduct," not porn. Here, read the actual budget request. (Full quote below.)

There is one paragraph in a 7-page report that references employee misconduct, and nowhere are "porn cases" referenced. Surely some of the cost to the agency was specifically from porn-surfing misconduct. And some was not. How much? We still don't know.

Look, any major institution, private or public, that employs a large number of people and gives them access to the internet, is going to have a few employees who abuse that access. It's ridiculous to think otherwise. Employees are capable of wasting time in a wide variety of creative ways. I daresay some employees in the private sector are wasting time reading Slashdot right at this very moment when they are nominally getting paid to do other things.

Republicans aren't fans of science; we know that. Smearing the NSF in the media by associating their name with porn for a news cycle is a fun yuk I suppose, but for conservatives it's another shot fired in the culture war. I find it depressing. There's actual news out there; this is at best People magazine type crap.

And it's ironic that this gets spread over the internet that the NSF helped create, and the story is brought to you thanks to the Freedom of Information Act that was passed by Democrats over the objections of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Scalia.

Finally, as someone who 10 years ago was writing stories for Slashdot

See Figure 3 in this paper.

From this in 1950 the highest rate, about 84%, kicked in at $400k, or about $3.5M in 2008 dollars.

That is simply wrong. The "cost of a large battery pack that can provide > 300 miles range per charge" depends on the chemistry, of course, but excluding the titanates, you're looking at $0.35 to $0.50 per watt hour. A Tesla or Volt-like vehicle gets about 200Wh/mi. That's $21k to $30k. Fuel cell stacks are about $10/W. A 30kW fuel cell stack -- which *also* needs a large battery pack for current buffering -- costs $300k An order of magnitude more.

As for the safety of *any* hydrogen system, check out NASA's handling guidelines. People who make money on hydrogen systems can say whatever
they want, but the facts about hydrogen are the facts.

This idea has actually been around for a while. If you read the essay at the link, and manage to get most of the way to the end of it, you will find the idea in there.

R Quick Reference, by E. Slate and E. Hill, adapted from the "R Reference
Card" by Jonathan Baron.

does not apply to things like suing to stop the government from doing something.

Citation? Generally sovereign immunity applies to all cases, except where the constitution says otherwise, or the legislature has passed rules and regulations that consent to the government being sued on that matter.

The judicial power of the courts over what the government does are fairly limited, except where it has been otherwise specified.

The courts won't even hear a claim that a law is unconstitutional, except in the manners that the law allows them to do so.

Soveriegn immunity applies to all political subdivisions.

No.

See: Northern Insurance Company of New York v. Chatham County [link]

This was actually developed by Carlos Lange from the University of Alberta. It was constructed in Denmark at the University of Aarhus. And of course the project is run from the University of Arizona.

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=5de7e220-b9d3-4540-8c02-f9369339c52c
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=25509
http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?id=9360
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/620268/The-Telltale-Wind-Experiment-for-the-NASA-Phoenix-Mars-Lander-2008

One thing for certain.. it's definitely a U of A project.

Oh, yeah. The original paper is here:

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/529160/PageRank-for-Product-Image-Search

Making government data available online in universally accessible formats... - Barack Obama

Making government data on 25 million citizens available in universally accessible formats (zip files)... - Prime Minister Brown