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Domain: su.se
Stories and comments across the archive that link to su.se.
Comments · 66
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Screenshots mirror
Here.
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Re:DMCA
I'm from sweden and I have an evil planAs soon as the law gets passed I'll email Tomas BodstrÃm who's the man behind the suggestion. In that email i'll attatch an image of a friend who hasn't approved me sending his picture, ie an illegal image. Then he looks at the mail and of course his mailreader will cache it (ie he will save the image to his hdd) and then break his own law.
Sure I could get a fine but imagine the headlines of a minister breaking his own law
I 0wn you tomas -
Dude, you seem to wrong about your Illinois model
"The Maine model is not the largest, and Peoria, IL, my hometown, has had the largest model for many years now, the Pluto model (in Kewanee, IL) being over 60 miles away from the sun model."
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Maybe 60 **km**, but *not* 60 miles.
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Both the Lakeview IL model and the Maine model have SunPluto distances of about 40 miles. (64km).
Lakeview Jupiter: 45" diameter
Maine Jupiter: 61.4" diameter
Lakeview Scale: 1:140,000,000
Maine Scale: 1:93,000,000
Lakeview Earth: 4" diameter
Maine Earth: 5.5" diameter
Go Maine!
Go Illinois!
Go Sweden!
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Maine's is bigger than Peoria's, actually.joshamania obviously hasn't bothered to read either the page for his town's model or the one in Maine. If he had, he'd presumably have noticed that the one in Maine doesn't, unfortunately, list the actual distance from the sun to pluto in their model except for the 'over 40 miles'. They do however list the distance from the sun to Neptune, on their Neptune page, and that distance is 30 miles, and Neptune has a diameter of 21.3 inches. The Peoria model, on the other hand, lists it's Neptune model at diameter of 15 inches, and a distance of 23 miles. So it would appear that yes, the Maine model is bigger.
Plus while the first post only claimed (correctly) that it was North America's largest model, the second post claimed it's the World's largest, which as many other posters have pointed out, is wrong.
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Not the biggest . . .
The Maine model may be the largest in the US, but it's not the largest in the world . . . This one in Sweden has Pluto 300km from the Sun.
--Chris -
Re:The world's largest model...
You really gotta hand it to those Swedes for going all the way from design to reality.
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The world's largest model...
...is located in Sweden.
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Doubtful it's an improvementtheir jobs are actual improvements over their rural standards of living.
But one of course had to define how far back one is going to measure these 'rural standards of living', which often were better for average peasents before industrial farming methods (see Scott's "Weapons of the Weak" for a good description of how the coming of modern farming practices often reduces the living standards of average peasants.
Of course, after labor has been replaced by tractors and small land owners have been kicked off their family plots, their living standards are often quite bad, and working for barely under subsistance wages in a factory may be a marginal improvement, in an 'out of the frying pan into the fire' sort of way (Scott goes into that as well, pointing out the similarites to the Highland Clearences in the dawn of the Industrial Revolution
If mine is a "quasi-pastoral view of underdevelopment" fine, no matter how many syllables you throw at me, I still say that if it would be exploitation to treat an American that way, it is exploitation to treat a Malay that way. Call me simple minded if you like.
I find it hard to believe that there are large externalities associated with spinning cotton into fiber.
While the environmental impacts of more chemically intensive industries are often much easier to measure, making cheap jeans has a negative impact as well:Denim jeans are made from cotton - the world's most popular fibre, which still provides as much yarn as all the 'modern' artificial fibres put together. Cotton crops cover 34 million hectares of the surface of the earth and use 25% of all the world's pesticides. An estimated one million cases of pesticide poisoning and 20,000 deaths per year are attributable to cotton.
And then there is the synthetic indigo dye that makes 'em blue... -
Speech synthesisAccording to Randi's description:
"A small bellows and vibrating reed, a sort of artificial speaking mechanism, was incorporated whereby the operator could signal "check!" by forcing air through a tube. The approximation of the word "check" was said to lack clarity..."
Randi says this was an improvement made by Maelzel, who bought the machine after von Kempelen's death, but I think this idea, too, came from Kempelen's work, who spent his last years researching speech synthesis. Quiet successfully as he actually did build a speech synthetizer capable producing whole words and short sentences. And this machine was not a trick: it is exhibited in the Deutches Museum in Munich, and, according to the author of the link I mentioned, still functional. -
Re:outside of rental cars...It's damn hard to contest when you actually did it and they have you on film doing it. D'Oh!
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Not necessarily harmless
Praise of the EU privacy laws usually focuses on the limitations it puts on corporations to share data collected about customers without their permission. So far this is all well and good, but the data protection laws affect other areas as well. Here's a discussion of problems found with the Swedish implementation of the EU data directive for some examples of what the law can be used to suppress.
As far as I can tell, it's not really possible to be in compliance with the EU data directives without running into these suppressive effects on noncommercial speech and criticism.
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Bad Side of Privacy LawsGovernment data privacy laws are a mixed bag at best.
Not only is it hard to figure out what privacy means in a way that enhances your
privacy without ripping off mine,
but there's an inherent contradiction between the agencies in government who might benefit from
providing protection laws and most other agencies who are doing data collection,
which will resist any regulation that interferes with them requiring businesses and individuals
to use Social Security Numbers, Taxpayer ID numbers, and other centralized identifiers and databases that
the agencies need or want. The economics of computers and communication (cheap and getting massively
cheaper all the time) make private data correlation valuable and easy already, and with mandatory
use of common database keys (SSNs are great, but even telephone numbers or name+address work surprisingly well),
there's minimal incentive for businesses to structure their databases in ways that are hard to correlate.
European data privacy laws don't just control big annoying corporations in ways that
don't affect you - they also let governments into everybody's computers,
including yours and including corporations that have records on you.
In some countries, they make it illegal to keep databases of any kind of personal information online
unless you register them with the government.
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Have you registered your online address book with them? -
Or the email from your girlfriend with her phone number? -
Or the mailing list for your anti-nuclear group -
or your church -
or your football team -
or your anarchist literature-and-beer-drinking society?
There's a good article on
Swedish network regulations
- the early ones banned computer conferencing systems,
because they were on computers, and might have discussions including the names of
participants, or their religious or political views, etc.
They've calmed down a bit, but not enough.
In some countries, including Sweden and the US, it's safer if you're a journalist,
because there are press freedom laws protecting the privacy of journalists' work.
Of course, in Cyberspace, everybody can be a journalist.
You've probably got Journalistic Works In Progress, which have special legal protection, on your home computer, haven't you?
......... No? Well, then go write some!
However, it's not safe
to be a journalist everywhere.
On the bright side, if European Data Protection Laws don't let you keep personal records, your anonymous remailer really can't go keeping logs, can it?
(Most of this rant is on my web pages.)
David Brin has written a lot of stuff about privacy, particularly
The Transparent Society, about how the economics of surveillance, cheap cameras, and databases are unstoppable, so give up and focus on the important issue, which is making sure the public can watch the government so it behaves itself. I don't agree with it all, but he makes a lot of good points.
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Bad Side of Privacy LawsGovernment data privacy laws are a mixed bag at best.
Not only is it hard to figure out what privacy means in a way that enhances your
privacy without ripping off mine,
but there's an inherent contradiction between the agencies in government who might benefit from
providing protection laws and most other agencies who are doing data collection,
which will resist any regulation that interferes with them requiring businesses and individuals
to use Social Security Numbers, Taxpayer ID numbers, and other centralized identifiers and databases that
the agencies need or want. The economics of computers and communication (cheap and getting massively
cheaper all the time) make private data correlation valuable and easy already, and with mandatory
use of common database keys (SSNs are great, but even telephone numbers or name+address work surprisingly well),
there's minimal incentive for businesses to structure their databases in ways that are hard to correlate.
European data privacy laws don't just control big annoying corporations in ways that
don't affect you - they also let governments into everybody's computers,
including yours and including corporations that have records on you.
In some countries, they make it illegal to keep databases of any kind of personal information online
unless you register them with the government.
-
Have you registered your online address book with them? -
Or the email from your girlfriend with her phone number? -
Or the mailing list for your anti-nuclear group -
or your church -
or your football team -
or your anarchist literature-and-beer-drinking society?
There's a good article on
Swedish network regulations
- the early ones banned computer conferencing systems,
because they were on computers, and might have discussions including the names of
participants, or their religious or political views, etc.
They've calmed down a bit, but not enough.
In some countries, including Sweden and the US, it's safer if you're a journalist,
because there are press freedom laws protecting the privacy of journalists' work.
Of course, in Cyberspace, everybody can be a journalist.
You've probably got Journalistic Works In Progress, which have special legal protection, on your home computer, haven't you?
......... No? Well, then go write some!
However, it's not safe
to be a journalist everywhere.
On the bright side, if European Data Protection Laws don't let you keep personal records, your anonymous remailer really can't go keeping logs, can it?
(Most of this rant is on my web pages.)
David Brin has written a lot of stuff about privacy, particularly
The Transparent Society, about how the economics of surveillance, cheap cameras, and databases are unstoppable, so give up and focus on the important issue, which is making sure the public can watch the government so it behaves itself. I don't agree with it all, but he makes a lot of good points.
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Free Science CampaignTo this general end, I was quite impressed with Stefano Ghirlanda's Free Science Campaign. In particular, there is a lot of useful information decoding the copyright policies of the various academic publishers. Take a look!
From the Preamble:
When authors of scientific papers submit their manuscripts for publication in scientific journals, they are frequently asked to sign a copyright-transfer agreement to the publishers of the journal. After such a transfer, the authors may retain little freedom to use their own papers. For example, some copyright agreements forbid authors to make their works available on a web page: you might be reading something more interesting than this, now!
We feel that such copyright policies greatly reduce the freedom of scientists and researchers to exchange information and ideas. In our view, what is important is making scientific literature fully available to all scientists, free of the restrictions that are imposed today. Who owns the copyrights is a secondary issue (please read our objectives for more information).
If you are a scientist or researcher, or simply an interested person, please read on.
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link here
http://www.info
2 42. Too bad babelfish don't do swedish. -
Er, *here*
Funny, that Swedish message looked just like a Slashdot error. Maybe it's here.
(A M00se once bit my HTML Validator...)
