But most materials (when keeping pressure equal) expand when melting. Thus if you have one sphere made out of such a material and one container of equal size, the melted sphere won't fit into the container
If private companies are encouraged to provide candidates for the blacklists, then why not start with submitting a list including all the MAFIAA companies and the US political party (the differences between the two main parties in the US are so small that they should be seen as the single party of the US).
Caffeine also has nasty physical withdrawl for heavy users - significant mood change and often terrible headaches.
Not only for heavy users.
In the last few years I've been a light user of caffeine. Two cups of coffee at breakfast was all coffee I drank (unless I was really tired, I would have a third in the afternoon). Usually no other forms of caffeine, although I had the odd cola occasionally.
I tried to quit half a year ago or so when my stomach was upset and I couldn't drink it anyway for a few a days and had heavy headaches in spite of only being a light user. And failed to quit even after being without for a week or so. A few months ago I tried again (again upset stomach) and this time did succeed.
The reason for my quitting was the withdrawal symptoms when unable to drink coffee due to stomach problems. I do now drink occasionally, but not daily or even weekly.
The problem is that people are too disorganized. When the MPAA, RIAA, Oil Industry, etc. give money to politician, they have a goal in mind. They want value for their money, they are bribing the politician to behave in a particular manner.
The disorganized rabble give money to a candidate, and in the same amounts as the organized groups, but get nothing for it. The candidate may, or may not get elected, but there are no hooks or definite agenda for that person after they are elected.
What we need is to organize so that money goes to candidates, but more and repeated money goes to candidates who execute on the goals behind the money. In short, the individual rabble need a website that manages their money in a way that gets them a return on investment from their bribes. (If you wish, you can read "campaign contributions" instead of bribes, but the effect is the same).
If I had modpoints I'd mod parent up.
Another way would be to completely ban bribes/campaign contributions and campaigns for that matter. Instead with the notices when and where to vote, send a book with the programs of all the different candidates. The cost of this will likely be far lower than the costs of all the propaganda (mostly empty slogans) plastered all over the country. As an added advantage, you would be able to make an informed choice. Plus, it might be possible to charge candidates not trying to get their programs through after being elected with the crime of false advertising.
If a US president can get by with not being able to use English, why would it be surprising that other people with US security clearances are not familiar with the English language?
Of course I didn't watch tfv, but from the comments I gather that apparently these were multiple choice questions. Wtf are multiple choice questions doing in an exam? If you really have too many students to check all answers, make sure at least fifty percent of the questions are new and open (as opposed to multiple choice) questions.
Rule of thumb: if parking tickets are a big grievance for you then your life isn't as bad as living in East Germany under the Stasi.
This is obviously true. No one will yet be executed, tortured, or held in secret prisons in Nice for parking violations.
Fixed that for you.
However, the GP's point isn't totally trivial either. Certainly a surveillance apparatus is being implemented that is vastly greater than anything envisioned by the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, and it is being aimed at punishing citizens who generally are trying to live their lives without harming others. Yes, people are breaking laws (usually, though there's plenty of stories of systems implemented in such a way that they catch even law abiders), but we all have occasions where we need to stop in a bus zone for a minute to drop something off, or realize that we left our change in our other pants and can't pay the meter. The notion of having eyes on us at all times, watching for us to make the smallest mistake and pouncing on it, does contribute to a sense of alienation, a feeling that government is working against us, rather than for us. Working for the citizens, rather than against them, is supposed to be the very essence of what separates liberal democracies from totalitarian autocracies. Just because a government demonstrates its hostility through annoyance, rather than brutality, doesn't mean it's not a disturbing attitude.
It's a slippery slope and the average voter doesn't seem to care about the slide to fascism (note that this is regardless of country, maybe it has something to do with the growth of the world population).
I agree, the situation might have improved a bit, but quite often I notice that instead of AI, AS (artificial stupidity) would be a better description. I haven't played too many recent games though, so it might be better by now.
The game I've played most over the last few years is Diablo II LOD, and there is a reason why the mercenary is usually called the moron. In addition, I wonder why the term role-playing game is used to describe that game, and a few more, when there is no ability to role-play at all. In this game there isn't even a choice of things to say in the dialogues with the NPC's, but even in a game like Planescape:Torment, the choice of things to say is very limited. That is one thing the text adventures of old did a bit better, although of course most of the things said weren't understood by the computer, you could at least say anything you liked.
If you set the bios to link the power button to instant-off, you can still get exactly that with ATX cases/motherboards. It might be that some bioses don't allow that (I wouldn't know, mine does allow it and I do have it set that way), though I doubt it.
Of course the link you mention in the last paragraph isn't relevant either, a successful violent criminal covers up his tracks and won't be convicted.
I think violent video games are just one method to prevent violence. Killing a lot in video games prevents me from killing a lot in real life. The same goes for sport, it is an other outlet for violence.
Any correlation can only be discovered if one researches a representative part of the population, and let all of them engage in the same activities. Any research done only on the people that already play violent video games, or even only on those that sign up to participate in research is worthless.
So why do you intend to use either OpenOffice or Microsoft Office 2007? If your concern is equations displaying correctly, switch to LyX or (La)TeX completely. Only in those can you be sure that equations display correctly. Besides, any decent university does have LaTeX installed on the computers since it is the scientific standard. If you try to submit an article to any science journal, you're requested to submit it either as TeX/LaTeX or plain text. Some people would argue about the difficulty of learning LaTeX, but I disagree, it's very easy to learn. I'm a self-taught LaTeX user, and I just took a beginners' book from the university library on the subject to get started, while starting to use it for writing lab reports. TeX is more difficult to learn since it gives you control over everything, and thus you need to know about everything, in general there are cases where some plain TeX needs to be used over LaTeX, but that means you can still use the LaTeX macro and just use TeX at those specific instants. I think that that 250$ you mentioned would certainly be better spent elsewhere, you can use a small part of it to buy the LaTeX companion, which is a very good reference book, it should be present in your university library as well so you can have a look at it.
This reminds me of the book Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, of course there they're sensible enough to only activate the shield during a very intensive solar storm. The shield is a nice idea, but as others have mentioned, it will kill vegetation that does need the light for photosynthesis. The same goes for the idea to combat the global warming by creating a small scale nuclear winter, which would be the cheap and easy version compared to the shield at L1. In this scenario, a few (10-100 ?) nuclear weapons, fission or fusion bombs as you choose, are used in some location which is not too populated and the resulting increase of dust particles in the atmosphere lowers the global temperature. Again, any vegetation dependent on photosynthesis will be negatively affected by this, so the amount of CO2 that vegetation takes from the air will be lowered. The advantage of this scenario over the shield scenario, apart from far lower costs and total lack of technical difficulties, is that one can instead choose to use the bombs in densely populated areas, thus lowering the overpopulation and human energy consumption, and as an added bonus this lowers the global nuclear weapons stockpile.
I've done this upgrade, and apart from it taking ages when downloading packages with a few failing due to connection problems (probably because too many people were downloading) I've had very few problems. Granted, a clean reinstall would have been faster assuming I could have downloaded the cd-image without problems, but I would certainly not term it a nightmare. I did manage to bork my X setup, but that was mostly my own fault (halfway through one way of reinstalling the frglx driver deciding to try another one). Even that I managed to remedy quickly by reinstalling the X.org server.
As to the mentioned example of Opera, I encountered no trouble whatsoever, no crashes, no need to reinstall. All in all the only program I have noticed so far that I needed to reinstall was the fglrx driver for my ATI video card. One oddity I did notice is that I could not install Neverwinter Nights anymore, whereas in Dapper I could install it but not make it playable.
As to the downside(s) of Edgy, there are no messages anymore when booting or shutting down, I'm sure it's possible to change that, but I need to look into that further. Another thing I've noticed is problems with changing file permissions, in particular an impossibility to change groups. Booting also takes longer. I have not noticed any random crashes, something I would associate with the nightmare mentioned in the article. True, this morning I discovered my computer was off, but since the clock on my microwave also was reset, it must have been an electricity issue, not Edgy arbitrarily deciding to shut itself down. Of course for those looking for the imaginary nightmare scenario, it might be that the electricity failure was due to the electric company using Ubuntu and upgrading to Edgy. Somehow I ever so slightly doubt that
For starting with all powers and infinite ammo, idkfa springs to mind, just build in some cheat codes and problem solved (still, try playing doom 2 past level 10 on ultraviolence while using idkfa just once and no other cheats).
As to playing the ending credits, there was a Monty Python game which had that option. I don't remember the name of the game, but it was based on the Holy Grail, so it might be called "The Black Knight", "The Knights Who Say `Ni'", or "Castle Anthrax", but more likely something along the line of "Monty Python And The Search For The Holy Grail".
What really annoys me about computer magazines nowadays (apart from them being mostly spam you have to pay for) is that they do seem to arrive from the future, but carry news from the past. Every single one seems to arrive a few months before its time and carries `news' you could have read on the internet a few months earlier. Nevertheless, there are occasionally interesting articles, but for actual information they're often not the best source. I would not go for a subscription on any of them at the moment, but do buy them occasionally.
Something like that it seems, but I understood that fullerenes are not too healthy for you either, although nothing is mentioned about that here. Still, my guess is that an egg-shaped buckyball would be less stable than a sphere-shaped one and thus more easily react with other compounds.
It is indeed, at least I did learn about it in an undergraduate course on statistical physics.
However, one of the authors of the first claimed that what they created was a proper BEC as well since it was finite. He claimed it was only impossible to have infinite two dimensional BECs. I don't have any idea as to the validity of this claim though.
The things you mention are indeed not bad, but they're not physics research, they're mostly engineering. Physics research tries to broaden our understanding of the universe/multiverse/nature/god, whatever word you prefer, and sometimes applications do come from that research. It is possible that new forms of energy creation will be discovered in such an accelerator, or that some results give rise to understanding needed for new engineering efforts to build that cold fusion reactor or the warp drive.
The example you mention of the space elevator is already being tested, and the basic physics are very simple, however that does not mean that building one is simple, or at all possible. At the moment, the suitable material seems to be carbon nanotubes. It might be that the LHC will produce some "exotic matter" which might be stronger, or generate stable transactinides (some heavy nuclei are predicted to be stable but to create them some high energy collisions are needed), they might be used some day, just like Americium (smoke detectors) and Plutonium (nukes, nuclear reactors, radio-isotope batteries) are used today in spite of not being found naturally occurring on earth.
Slashdot Mirror
But most materials (when keeping pressure equal) expand when melting. Thus if you have one sphere made out of such a material and one container of equal size, the melted sphere won't fit into the container
If private companies are encouraged to provide candidates for the blacklists, then why not start with submitting a list including all the MAFIAA companies and the US political party (the differences between the two main parties in the US are so small that they should be seen as the single party of the US).
Caffeine also has nasty physical withdrawl for heavy users - significant mood change and often terrible headaches.
Not only for heavy users.
In the last few years I've been a light user of caffeine. Two cups of coffee at breakfast was all coffee I drank (unless I was really tired, I would have a third in the afternoon). Usually no other forms of caffeine, although I had the odd cola occasionally.
I tried to quit half a year ago or so when my stomach was upset and I couldn't drink it anyway for a few a days and had heavy headaches in spite of only being a light user. And failed to quit even after being without for a week or so. A few months ago I tried again (again upset stomach) and this time did succeed.
The reason for my quitting was the withdrawal symptoms when unable to drink coffee due to stomach problems. I do now drink occasionally, but not daily or even weekly.
What good is a boss?
Fixed that for you
The problem is that people are too disorganized. When the MPAA, RIAA, Oil Industry, etc. give money to politician, they have a goal in mind. They want value for their money, they are bribing the politician to behave in a particular manner.
The disorganized rabble give money to a candidate, and in the same amounts as the organized groups, but get nothing for it. The candidate may, or may not get elected, but there are no hooks or definite agenda for that person after they are elected.
What we need is to organize so that money goes to candidates, but more and repeated money goes to candidates who execute on the goals behind the money. In short, the individual rabble need a website that manages their money in a way that gets them a return on investment from their bribes. (If you wish, you can read "campaign contributions" instead of bribes, but the effect is the same).
If I had modpoints I'd mod parent up.
Another way would be to completely ban bribes/campaign contributions and campaigns for that matter. Instead with the notices when and where to vote, send a book with the programs of all the different candidates. The cost of this will likely be far lower than the costs of all the propaganda (mostly empty slogans) plastered all over the country. As an added advantage, you would be able to make an informed choice. Plus, it might be possible to charge candidates not trying to get their programs through after being elected with the crime of false advertising.
Without this game among the nominees, this list is worthless.
If a US president can get by with not being able to use English, why would it be surprising that other people with US security clearances are not familiar with the English language?
I've had a condom break in the middle, but neither of us noticed until afterward.
I also think that demanding to stop in the middle constitutes torture (and yes I did stop after asking whether she was sure).
I think this already happened a few years ago http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/1385585/Cyanide-plot-to-poison-Rome-water.html
Of course I didn't watch tfv, but from the comments I gather that apparently these were multiple choice questions. Wtf are multiple choice questions doing in an exam? If you really have too many students to check all answers, make sure at least fifty percent of the questions are new and open (as opposed to multiple choice) questions.
Rule of thumb: if parking tickets are a big grievance for you then your life isn't as bad as living in East Germany under the Stasi.
This is obviously true. No one will yet be executed, tortured, or held in secret prisons in Nice for parking violations.
Fixed that for you.
However, the GP's point isn't totally trivial either. Certainly a surveillance apparatus is being implemented that is vastly greater than anything envisioned by the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, and it is being aimed at punishing citizens who generally are trying to live their lives without harming others. Yes, people are breaking laws (usually, though there's plenty of stories of systems implemented in such a way that they catch even law abiders), but we all have occasions where we need to stop in a bus zone for a minute to drop something off, or realize that we left our change in our other pants and can't pay the meter. The notion of having eyes on us at all times, watching for us to make the smallest mistake and pouncing on it, does contribute to a sense of alienation, a feeling that government is working against us, rather than for us. Working for the citizens, rather than against them, is supposed to be the very essence of what separates liberal democracies from totalitarian autocracies. Just because a government demonstrates its hostility through annoyance, rather than brutality, doesn't mean it's not a disturbing attitude.
It's a slippery slope and the average voter doesn't seem to care about the slide to fascism (note that this is regardless of country, maybe it has something to do with the growth of the world population).
They're catholic priests?
I agree, the situation might have improved a bit, but quite often I notice that instead of AI, AS (artificial stupidity) would be a better description. I haven't played too many recent games though, so it might be better by now.
The game I've played most over the last few years is Diablo II LOD, and there is a reason why the mercenary is usually called the moron. In addition, I wonder why the term role-playing game is used to describe that game, and a few more, when there is no ability to role-play at all. In this game there isn't even a choice of things to say in the dialogues with the NPC's, but even in a game like Planescape:Torment, the choice of things to say is very limited. That is one thing the text adventures of old did a bit better, although of course most of the things said weren't understood by the computer, you could at least say anything you liked.
If you set the bios to link the power button to instant-off, you can still get exactly that with ATX cases/motherboards. It might be that some bioses don't allow that (I wouldn't know, mine does allow it and I do have it set that way), though I doubt it.
Of course the link you mention in the last paragraph isn't relevant either, a successful violent criminal covers up his tracks and won't be convicted.
I think violent video games are just one method to prevent violence. Killing a lot in video games prevents me from killing a lot in real life. The same goes for sport, it is an other outlet for violence.
Any correlation can only be discovered if one researches a representative part of the population, and let all of them engage in the same activities. Any research done only on the people that already play violent video games, or even only on those that sign up to participate in research is worthless.
So why do you intend to use either OpenOffice or Microsoft Office 2007? If your concern is equations displaying correctly, switch to LyX or (La)TeX completely. Only in those can you be sure that equations display correctly. Besides, any decent university does have LaTeX installed on the computers since it is the scientific standard. If you try to submit an article to any science journal, you're requested to submit it either as TeX/LaTeX or plain text. Some people would argue about the difficulty of learning LaTeX, but I disagree, it's very easy to learn. I'm a self-taught LaTeX user, and I just took a beginners' book from the university library on the subject to get started, while starting to use it for writing lab reports. TeX is more difficult to learn since it gives you control over everything, and thus you need to know about everything, in general there are cases where some plain TeX needs to be used over LaTeX, but that means you can still use the LaTeX macro and just use TeX at those specific instants. I think that that 250$ you mentioned would certainly be better spent elsewhere, you can use a small part of it to buy the LaTeX companion, which is a very good reference book, it should be present in your university library as well so you can have a look at it.
I'm very interested in what this model predicts, but where is the gnu/linux version? Does the MacOsX version work on gnu/linux?
This reminds me of the book Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, of course there they're sensible enough to only activate the shield during a very intensive solar storm. The shield is a nice idea, but as others have mentioned, it will kill vegetation that does need the light for photosynthesis. The same goes for the idea to combat the global warming by creating a small scale nuclear winter, which would be the cheap and easy version compared to the shield at L1. In this scenario, a few (10-100 ?) nuclear weapons, fission or fusion bombs as you choose, are used in some location which is not too populated and the resulting increase of dust particles in the atmosphere lowers the global temperature. Again, any vegetation dependent on photosynthesis will be negatively affected by this, so the amount of CO2 that vegetation takes from the air will be lowered. The advantage of this scenario over the shield scenario, apart from far lower costs and total lack of technical difficulties, is that one can instead choose to use the bombs in densely populated areas, thus lowering the overpopulation and human energy consumption, and as an added bonus this lowers the global nuclear weapons stockpile.
I've done this upgrade, and apart from it taking ages when downloading packages with a few failing due to connection problems (probably because too many people were downloading) I've had very few problems. Granted, a clean reinstall would have been faster assuming I could have downloaded the cd-image without problems, but I would certainly not term it a nightmare. I did manage to bork my X setup, but that was mostly my own fault (halfway through one way of reinstalling the frglx driver deciding to try another one). Even that I managed to remedy quickly by reinstalling the X.org server.
As to the mentioned example of Opera, I encountered no trouble whatsoever, no crashes, no need to reinstall. All in all the only program I have noticed so far that I needed to reinstall was the fglrx driver for my ATI video card. One oddity I did notice is that I could not install Neverwinter Nights anymore, whereas in Dapper I could install it but not make it playable.
As to the downside(s) of Edgy, there are no messages anymore when booting or shutting down, I'm sure it's possible to change that, but I need to look into that further. Another thing I've noticed is problems with changing file permissions, in particular an impossibility to change groups. Booting also takes longer. I have not noticed any random crashes, something I would associate with the nightmare mentioned in the article. True, this morning I discovered my computer was off, but since the clock on my microwave also was reset, it must have been an electricity issue, not Edgy arbitrarily deciding to shut itself down. Of course for those looking for the imaginary nightmare scenario, it might be that the electricity failure was due to the electric company using Ubuntu and upgrading to Edgy. Somehow I ever so slightly doubt that
Do they obey the laws of robotics? Or is the terminator just around the corner?
For starting with all powers and infinite ammo, idkfa springs to mind, just build in some cheat codes and problem solved (still, try playing doom 2 past level 10 on ultraviolence while using idkfa just once and no other cheats).
As to playing the ending credits, there was a Monty Python game which had that option. I don't remember the name of the game, but it was based on the Holy Grail, so it might be called "The Black Knight", "The Knights Who Say `Ni'", or "Castle Anthrax", but more likely something along the line of "Monty Python And The Search For The Holy Grail".
What really annoys me about computer magazines nowadays (apart from them being mostly spam you have to pay for) is that they do seem to arrive from the future, but carry news from the past. Every single one seems to arrive a few months before its time and carries `news' you could have read on the internet a few months earlier. Nevertheless, there are occasionally interesting articles, but for actual information they're often not the best source. I would not go for a subscription on any of them at the moment, but do buy them occasionally.
Something like that it seems, but I understood that fullerenes are not too healthy for you either, although nothing is mentioned about that here. Still, my guess is that an egg-shaped buckyball would be less stable than a sphere-shaped one and thus more easily react with other compounds.
It is indeed, at least I did learn about it in an undergraduate course on statistical physics.
However, one of the authors of the first claimed that what they created was a proper BEC as well since it was finite. He claimed it was only impossible to have infinite two dimensional BECs. I don't have any idea as to the validity of this claim though.
The things you mention are indeed not bad, but they're not physics research, they're mostly engineering. Physics research tries to broaden our understanding of the universe/multiverse/nature/god, whatever word you prefer, and sometimes applications do come from that research. It is possible that new forms of energy creation will be discovered in such an accelerator, or that some results give rise to understanding needed for new engineering efforts to build that cold fusion reactor or the warp drive.
The example you mention of the space elevator is already being tested, and the basic physics are very simple, however that does not mean that building one is simple, or at all possible. At the moment, the suitable material seems to be carbon nanotubes. It might be that the LHC will produce some "exotic matter" which might be stronger, or generate stable transactinides (some heavy nuclei are predicted to be stable but to create them some high energy collisions are needed), they might be used some day, just like Americium (smoke detectors) and Plutonium (nukes, nuclear reactors, radio-isotope batteries) are used today in spite of not being found naturally occurring on earth.