Slashdot Mirror

The original banning of cannabis was from The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, where the government declared that any sold in the US had to have the appropriate tax stamp, and then did not print any tax stamps.

This law review from 1968 covers a lot of the early cases such as how the supreme court decided whether or not American Indians can use drugs for their ceremonies and such, as well as somewhat-related cases like regulation of LSD under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. It concludes that the most likely avenue for a successful challenge would be a freedom of religion argument, but would require an established religion to have a sincerely held belief in the use of cannabis specifically (as a person claiming to use it independently of a recognized, established religion for the religious/spiritual experience lost their appeal because they were held not to have a sincere belief requiring its use).

The expensive part of the internet connection is the last mile. Each endpoint has a cost to it

So you're saying putting 300,000 computers on the Internet in Comcast's network requires linking exactly 300,000 endpoints? There's no additional cost per endpoint? No back-end costs, no cross-state lines connecting California to Virginia, nothing but a little line run from your house to Comcast's little shack in your cozy little neighborhood?

You're saying the cost of running a ginormous, distributed network with multiple routes to reach from any point to any other point, spanned across an entire continent, is exactly the same (or less!) per customer endpoint as the cost of plugging one customer endpoint *into* that network?

You're saying this is the expensive part and this is the cheap part?

1. Monolithic Dome construction.
2. Passivhaus energy guidelines.
3. Solar Closet to store heat for the winter.
4. Radiant floors.
5. Utility closet in the dead center of the house for wiring with conduit running to it.
6. The best R-value windows I could find.
7. PEX water distribution with a distribution block so any water can be shut off without the whole house
8. Solar panels to cover 2x what I anticipate using.

Facial recognition with good images works just fine on a database population the size of the USA.
Costs and speeds from the 1990s are not the issue as the measurement math is very simple and very fast per face.
The only past limit was legal national/state database image sharing.
You just need to get an image at the right height ie cameras on a road side checkpoints covering average passenger and driver car/truck/van face heights.
Local Feature Analysis ~ 80 points on a face, 14-22 nodal points, in 2000 you could get searching at ~ 60 million faces a minute for a few $10 million in grants.
Trying to rebuild a face only seen from one side over a few fames is harder but will soon be done with very complex 3d work.
eg "Although the technology is capable of scanning approximately seventy million images per minute,.... " http://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1336&context=vlr

Build an ion (or flame) speaker set. Basically, the idea is that you ionize the air between two electrodes so as to create a current path in the air, and the resulting vibrations in the ions due to the varying voltage placed on the electrodes make sound. villanova's explanation I know it can be done by lighting a fire between the two electrodes, and I'd imagine that you could also pulse ultra-high voltages between two normal electrodes, sort of like a highly controlled tesla coil.

The coolest demonstration that I ever saw, though, was when my professor showed me a water bridge this past November. He bought some exceedingly pure ($50/gallon) water and a 40kV power supply, filled two beakers to not-quite-overflowing with the water, places two electrodes (I think butter knives) in the water, and turns on the power. He then brought the two beakers into contact with one another so that the water from one beaker flowed into the other, and when he tried to separate them, the water formed a bridge from one beaker to the next, suspended in the air, several centimeters long. Apparently the math was not only beyond the scope of the course, but actually beyond the capabilities of Maple. According to my professor, anyway, the "highly ordered microstructures" mentioned in the original researcher's work are bull, but I was too much in awe of what I'd just seen to actually understand what he was saying.

Solar thermal energy is much more cost effective than photovoltaics (solar to electricity). Here's a nice paper on solar closets and sunspaces for heating your home: http://www.ece.villanova.edu/~nick/solar/solar.html Also check out this guy's archive of posts, mostly to alt.solar.thermal: http://www.ece.villanova.edu/~nick/usenet/

Solar thermal energy is much more cost effective than photovoltaics (solar to electricity). Here's a nice paper on solar closets and sunspaces for heating your home: http://www.ece.villanova.edu/~nick/solar/solar.html Also check out this guy's archive of posts, mostly to alt.solar.thermal: http://www.ece.villanova.edu/~nick/usenet/

I see. This one happens to agree with you, and so she's aces.

But if she were ruling that DRM were legal, I would expect she would be villified as knowing nothing.

Plenty of people got in trouble with the law for stealing cable. It becomes a non-civil matter when it is criminalized. Which that was. And recording the screen in a movie theater.

Speak of precise language?

Here's a 2001 ruling from a US court where the court quotes Congress several times in calling stealing cable theft and the court also turns a phrase with it.

http://vls.law.villanova.edu/locator/3d/Oct2001/98 5341.txt

Language games are pointless. "A rose by any other name"

The key issue should be the actual act, punishment and hopefully future revisions to copyright law in the US. Not on redefining words so as to win semantic arguments.

When losing a court case in a particular scope to greatly expand that scope? It seems preposterious to me - if I attempt to claim ownership of B, D, and F, but begin to lose how could it possibly make sense to now claim that I own A thorough G?

Perhaps this is just the first scope-creep in a long overarching strategy which can only lead to one inevitable outcome!

Has anyone got the patent for the on-off switch?

Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes

Researchers are now using remote control facilities to peer through the world's largest telescopes, without traveling thousands of miles. The high-speed connection that Internet2 offers make it unnecessary for researchers to make the trip to the telescopes, and also provides real time alerts of when to log on for optimal stargazing. For example, at the University of Florida, Astronomer Charlie Telesco uses an Internet2 link to view the eight-meter telescope at the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii via a video conferencing application on his office computer.

Applications drive the networks by allowing communication and cooperation between researchers. The primary applications are tele-immersion, virtual laboratories, digital libraries, and distributed instruction.

Right, so as I've said in other responses, you followed the text book designs, which are a) expensive (particularly if you use glass!) and b) rarely give better than 10% offset to heating bills c) fail to work well even in theory. You live in your solar store, which makes it hard to keep warm in winter and hard to keep cool in summer. Living in the solar store requires far more thermal mass because you want to restrict the temperature variation which gives you less storage per J. Keeping your storage separate in an insulated box means you can heat it to say 50C with the attendant decrease in space.

You also have your collector connected to the living area. This means that it is hard to control the heating rate. It means that you tend to lose your energy gains over night and on cloudy days. You want to use your collector as a window too, which means you need to use expensive and fragile materials.

Here's one analysis trying to separate out the issues:

http://www.ece.villanova.edu/~nick/solar/solar.htm l

As an alternative, my friend's house's roof was breaking down. It was old cement tiles and they are very brittle and replacements unavailable. He was looking at zincalume/colourbond roof iron ($20/m^2), I instead proposed clear polycarbonate($10/m^2). When the sun is shining he can move heat from the roof using a large, slow ceiling type fan. Then it's colder in the roof the fan stops and the louvres close. The normal ceiling insulation provides the same insulation it did with the tiles, but now he can collect 100kW of heat when the sun is shining. In summer some 2' square louvres on the side let out the heat.

At first he thought I was mad (well I am) but within a week he'd come back with pricing and within two weeks he'd done it. It cost him less than 3k (compared with 12k for replacement with tiles).

He paid less for the passive solar solution than for roof iron, could install it himself without a permit, on an existing house, he can sit in the attic and look at the stars or the storm, it doesn't over heat in summer (no hotter than under tiles) and polycarbonate is quite hail proof (if it is damaged, it would have damaged the iron or tiles too, so he's still better off). The neighbours still think he's got roof iron rather than polycarbonate :)

The basic problem is that people that came up with textbook passive solar (solar thermal) designs haven't actually done the design process. It's akin to the pain caused by web sites with javascript programmed by graphic designers, only far worse because we're talking about once off, hard to change designs. The first thing to do is to throw away your textbook and start thinking about the problem as a scientist and engineer.

'direct gain' solar houses are poor performers. As a slashdot geek you should look at http://www.ece.villanova.edu/~nick/solar/solar.htm l instead for a much more elegant solution. And you can build them for $300 attached to your existing house or shed.

Or you could put something up using structural insulated panels in a weekend with comparable thermal performance.

For heating all year round, read this: http://www.ece.villanova.edu/~nick/solar/solar.htm l

Not my estimate, but Nick Pine's, whose philly house is 100% solar heated. He also points to Norman Saunders:

http://www.ece.villanova.edu/~nick/solar/solar.htm l
http://www.geocities.com/~dmdelaney/Solar-thermal- energy-for-housing.html

I lived in Norway for a year, I am quite aware of black ice ;) I also rode or skied 3km to work (but I'm crazy).

You need to do some research before giving up on our greatest energy source. My own greenhouse/solar space cost just over $100 AU, but we have a mild climate. My current roof is cement tiles, but I can replace all of them with polycarbonate on the North side (South for northern hemisphere) for $600. Based on previous experience, I could do that myself in a day (including throwing the tiles in a skip from the roof). I could also sell the tiles to a secondhand merchant for 30c a tile, making me $100. That would give me a collection area of 50m^2, and at 3kWh/m^2 in mid winter would provide 3 times as much energy as I need to heat the house. I don't even need a council permit to replace roof tiles with polycarbonate.

Obligatory list of mirrors of my favorite techy Onion article:

http://home.att.net/~jbcole/humor/Microsoft_patent s.htm

http://www.ece.villanova.edu/~thanneru/zeroesAndOn es.html

http://www.gleitsmann.com/Frame3x3long.htm

And here's a link for a shirt:
http://subscribe.theonion.com/product_info.php?cPa th=5_12&products_id=80

When I was a little kid, we went to Astoria and climbed the spiral staircase inside of the Candlestick. I'm not sure how high it was, but it was probably only 80 feet - give or take. At the top, you only had a small ledge (perhaps two people-wide at best) and a rickety steel gaurdrail that seemed like it would give if you leaned on it.

Yeah, I went there when i was 8 or so... my parents wouldn't come inside, so i was left to go up by myself. I made it about 3/4 of the way up, and had to come back down because the staircase was freaking me out so much. Really narrow, steep steps, constantly shaking.

I haven't thought about that in years. A few years back I went to Chichen-Itza, near Cancun on the Yucatan peninsula (my honeymoon). they were still letting people climb to the top at that time (not sure if they still are). It's about a 45 degree angle, and I tell you... the most vertigo-inducing experience of my life. ...but this time I made it to the top. :-)

m-

In other news... (From an old Onion article)

REDMOND, WA--In what CEO Bill Gates called "an unfortunate but necessary step to protect our intellectual property from theft and exploitation by competitors," the Microsoft Corporation patented the numbers one and zero Monday.

With the patent, Microsoft's rivals are prohibited from manufacturing or selling products containing zeroes and ones--the mathematical building blocks of all computer languages and programs--unless a royalty fee of 10 cents per digit used is paid to the software giant.

"Microsoft has been using the binary system of ones and zeroes ever since its inception in 1975," Gates told reporters. "For years, in the interest of the overall health of the computer industry, we permitted the free and unfettered use of our proprietary numeric systems. However, changing marketplace conditions and the increasingly predatory practices of certain competitors now leave us with no choice but to seek compensation for the use of our numerals."


Read More.

--
Sounds like a scam, but it works.
Free Flat Screens | Free iPod Photo |

In other news... (From an old Onion article)

REDMOND, WA--In what CEO Bill Gates called "an unfortunate but necessary step to protect our intellectual property from theft and exploitation by competitors," the Microsoft Corporation patented the numbers one and zero Monday.

With the patent, Microsoft's rivals are prohibited from manufacturing or selling products containing zeroes and ones--the mathematical building blocks of all computer languages and programs--unless a royalty fee of 10 cents per digit used is paid to the software giant.

"Microsoft has been using the binary system of ones and zeroes ever since its inception in 1975," Gates told reporters. "For years, in the interest of the overall health of the computer industry, we permitted the free and unfettered use of our proprietary numeric systems. However, changing marketplace conditions and the increasingly predatory practices of certain competitors now leave us with no choice but to seek compensation for the use of our numerals."


Read More.

--
Sounds like a scam, but it works.
Free Flat Screens | Free iPod Photo |

Of course, "caucasian" doesn't have any meaningful definition anyhow, as the concept of race is a social rather than scientific distinction; but the original definition of caucasian included people in India:

...To this first variety belong the inhabitants of Europe ( except the Lapps and the remaining descendants of the Finns) and those of Eastern Asia, as far as the river Obi, the Caspian Sea and the Ganges; and lastly, those of Northern Africa.

Well, that actually was probably another thing you are thinking about, whether people could form their own private armies. According to U.S. Code, you most likely are already a member of the militia, if you are between 16 and 46 years old.

It ( U.S. Code) actually explains thing pretty completely.

As to the 2nd amendment, it's not written in current everyday language, it's written using common Lawyer-speak of the 18th century; all you have to do to find out EXACTLY what it means is read the discussions written by the people who composed the Constitution, they were very clear about what it meant.

It can be worse. I work in Elbonia

----
(There isnt any significative difference between working in Elbonia and working in Brazil)

David Brooks used it to bash Gore in an article published in the NYT in in 2000 called The Triumph of Hope Over Self-Interest.

Of course, that was in 2000. I'd like to see that poll now.

Space requirements indeed. I had to buy a laptop when I moved into the quad at Villanova, the desks in that dorm honestly couldn't fit a CRT iMac. Buying a laptop was my only option.

I like the mobility of the laptop (and I really do love my Powerbook) but there is something about the desktop formfactor that just appeals to me. For one, it doesn't have a battery that needs to be charged/conditioned/whatever.

Off-Topic Bit: The Powerbook would be a hell of a lot more "mobile" if it had two mouse buttons. I hate having to carry around a real mouse with me.

The College of New Jersey and Villanova University are working on a search engine called W.H.A.T. which uses AI to apply contexts to search results. The idea is that the user can express some how more than words do, the meaning of the target. Pretty interesting stuff.
I'm biased as I worked on it for a year, though. :-)

He has many hundreds of usenet posts, ideas about converting an existing house to 100% solar, low cost and warm homeless shelters, and is conducting solar heating experiments, all using inexpensive / easily obtainable materials.

If you're interested in solar heating, you should check him out.

He has many hundreds of usenet posts, ideas about converting an existing house to 100% solar, low cost and warm homeless shelters, and is conducting solar heating experiments, all using inexpensive / easily obtainable materials.

If you're interested in solar heating, you should check him out.

He has many hundreds of usenet posts, ideas about converting an existing house to 100% solar, low cost and warm homeless shelters, and is conducting solar heating experiments, all using inexpensive / easily obtainable materials.

If you're interested in solar heating, you should check him out.