Given that I don't believe in existence of god[s]... no, I don't. This, however, does not prevent me from using the Bible as one of oldest sets of stories, be they fictional or true. IMO, most people don't have much imagination, and it would be hard for an ancient man to invent "a man on a flying throne" without some sort of an input (mushrooms wouldn't be enough - the idea of a flying machine has to be in his brain already.)
It is also interesting that Indian equivalent of the Bible also features UFOs (vimanas, see Wikipedia.)
The oldest recorded sightings are in the Bible. Many sightings occurred before 1897, but they were interpreted as divine manifestations, angels, etc. rather than extraterrestrial vehicles. I saw some Middle Age [engraved] prints with UFOs. You know, it takes a certain level of technology to recognize a higher technology.
"the minor tweaks needed to make OS X run on them" ? This is not supposed to be possible, AFAIK, but once it's possible Psystar may have a good defense. So Apple would stop Psystar's works, and at the same time get access to hacks to make sure they are no longer possible.
But I agree, this is pure speculation - exactly why/. exists, now that we don't get much news here:-)
Apple can afford the trial, but Psystar probably can't. So if Apple went with the settlement then Apple wanted to avoid trial - likely because Psystar promised to expose inconvenient facts and be generally a pain to deal with in front of the judge. A settlement will keep all that quiet, and if it fails the trial is still an option. If I were to guess, Apple may buy Psystar - for cheap from Apple's POV, but for a fortune from the POV of the Psystar owner. The trial would cost a $1M to Apple, easily, so why not to buy something useful with this money, instead of words of lawyers?
Your example password is not random. Look at the letters of it, one by one, and you will notice that each next letter is either in direct physical proximity (QWERTY-wise) to its predecessor, or in a similar proximity for the other hand. This is a serious weakness because password crackers will exploit it in an instant.
The frequency of these transponders is around 0.9-1.1GHz, so it's not completely absurd that consumer electronics would interfere.
I'd presume that transponders send a modulated, coded signal that carries certain information and checksums. I'd also presume that the transponder system is designed to have several transmitters (airplanes) close to each other - like they do in airports, for example - without freaking out.
One could say that car traffic is more important because it carries more people and more goods than bicycle traffic does. In India or China it could be the opposite.
Now if only American drivers didn't behave like asshats towards cyclists...
Now if only cyclists could pedal at 45 mph on major roads and accelerate not worse than a common car, and have always-on headlights as motorcycles do...
Instead we have weirdos cycling at night, in black clothes, with no light, across the road, randomly. Or we have a good cyclist doing his best in right lane, but his best is still not good enough, so drivers in the morning rush hour try to pass him, with each pass being a near-accident.
I personally have nothing against bicycles, as long as they don't create a major obstruction to car traffic. The law gives bicycles the same rights as motorcycles and cars have, but unfortunately it does not give them the same power to smoothly join the traffic at the traffic speed. Even reserved bike lanes are not safe because car drivers are supposed to enter them (or cross them) for right turns. One fact of life is that most city roads are unsafe for bicycles, and I don't know what can fix that aside from totally separate bike paths.
$7.9M for 420 kg -- I reckon thats enough mass for a partly reusable single person capsule
You are off by an order of magnitude: the first piloted spacecraft needed 2.5 tons for the capsule and another 2 tons for the support hardware. Similarly, Apollo capsule was about 4.1 tons.
The bulk of the mass has to be there to protect the astronaut from the heat of descent; in your case, leaving 100 kg for the astronaut's body and 10 kg for the light spacesuit you have only 310 kg left for the hermetic enclosure, heat shield, water, air, batteries, radio and video, flight controls, and a parachute. It's tough to achieve even using modern materials - life-critical stuff that can survive the launch and save you during the descent tends to be heavy.
Yet another issue with one-man capsules is safety. The buddy system is normally used in dangerous situations. It would be sad to launch a man into space and then see him on video dying from a normally not a life-threatening situation just because there is nobody there to help him. Say, an air hose on his spacesuit kinked and he can't reach there himself.
Do not forget that Russia had an absolutist feudalist government, with peonage, before Lenin's revolution - people were better off during Lenin's time.
The serfdom in Russia was abolished in 1861 - a good half a century before Lenin walked into history. These years were generally good for development of agrarian capitalism, and a good number of former peasants got wealthy. Those were the guys Lenin (and Stalin) declared enemies, and they were all eliminated by 1930s, mostly by taking their property away and shipping the whole family to Siberia, to die.
Even those loathing Stalin often consider Lenin in a similar way as most Americans look at their founding fathers.
This was a popular mind trick in 1970s, when someone had to be made responsible for all the damage. Stalin was a convenient scapegoat since he was dead already, and he was indeed a bad guy in real life. However in 1990s Lenin's traditional friendly face was unmasked by many historians, writers and other to be just as inhumane as Stalin's. For example, a famous Lenin's order "to kill all priests, every single one" - it's pretty barbaric even if you don't subscribe to religion. I do not believe that many people still see Lenin as a founding father.
Most Russians are not convinced that "western style democracy" is a more just, efficient and humane system than "sovjet democracy"
This is absolutely correct, considering that "western style democracy" is in fact a staged political show where results of elections do not matter. This is exactly why we see so much backlash against people who promoted this kind of democracy in 1990s - Russians know now what these proposals actually mean, and they don't want any of them any more. Yeltsin did a good thing to Russia by giving it the taste of this "western democracy" - it built an immunity to it.
I worked in ARRL "10 GHz and up" contest last weekend, at 10 and 24 GHz, and those frequencies are not for beginners. The dish has to be pointed precisely to the source, with error within a couple of degrees. If the satellites are not geostationary then tracking would be a major problem, and I think they are not geostationary due to the distance involved.
Among other problems, microwave gear is very expensive, sensitive to abuse, and has low power output. Hams can deal with that, being happy with mere 100-200 mW at 10 GHz, but they don't mind chasing the signal as atmospheric conditions
change during the day. It would be a lot of work to achieve a reliable link whenever you need it. Rain and fog are major problems in these bands. You basically have to throw power (and money) at the problem; if the military complains about "high cost" of these systems, they are surely not affordable yet to a common man. Considering that the economy just entered a tailspin, we may have bigger problems in coming years than fixing the mobile internet thing.
In case of the local newspaper the customer will call you and later show up at your house to inspect the item, and if all is well then he will pay in cash and take the item. If you sell on Craigslist the buyer can be anywhere, and then you have to deal with shipping and payments (and escrow, and returns etc.)
RAR is a pretty good format, and software for [de]compression exists for all platforms, incl. Linux. It indeed has tons of features, like solid archives, locked archives, error recovery, multi-volume, and more. Latest WinZip borrowed some of those, but not all. RAR also offers very good compression factors. It is a very good format (and software.)
It amazes me that this employee chose illegal means of getting an archiving program instead of using a FOSS solution such as 7-zip
Compare GUIs of those two programs. 7-Zip's GUI is quite bad. Also 7-Zip does not have the "Move" function where your files are archived and deleted. I use WinZip for that since the company has it licensed. I also have 7-Zip installed, but as I said it's GUI is very rudimentary, IIRC lacking buttons for many obvious functions.
This is actually a well known effect of piracy on free software. If the commercial software is free to the user, just as F/OSS software is, then the commercial software wins - it is simply better in most cases, at least because more effort and more money went into it.
but is the person threatening you with a gun going to let you draw it? Or are they going to just shoot you?
If someone wants to shoot you then they will; several US presidents were shot even though they have protection. So this case is not interesting. If someone wants you dead, you will be dead.
However casual street crime is a different story. Hooligans would think twice about attacking an armed person. An armed robber will not attack an armed person, just because it's not worth the risk. In other words, no sane person will attack an armed person if there is a choice. A criminal is not willing to gamble his life on a bet how much training his opponent got. Besides, many criminals are poorly trained in most things in life, and marksmanship is on top of that list (felons can't own guns.) In some cases the criminal's gun doesn't even work. So if it comes to the question of who will win a duel, the criminal does not always have that much of an advantage.
So you could start by burglarizing people's homes until you find one.
I don't think the percentage of handgun owners is that great. In a city that would be very few, and the criminal would have to turn the whole house upside down to find a gun that is most likely not even there, or locked in a safe, or otherwise hidden, or the owner just carries it with him.
Outside of a city there would be farmers with long guns - which are totally useless to a criminal. Besides, said farmers are always around, may carry firearms at all times, and they always notice strangers on their small, narrow country roads.
I disagree. I think a lot of them are getting blown to hell.
This is not a failure, being blown to hell, as long as the attacker kills at least one opponent. There are more Iraqis (and Taliban, etc.) willing to fight than the USA has soldiers. Also their religion presents such a death as highly honorable; but that is not even required - in WWII European guerrilla fighters, not being Muslim at all, fought Nazis with extreme bravery and many were killed by superior Nazi war machine. But we know who won in the end.
But by lowering taxes, the state government hasn't gotten the income it needs
The state government will get as much as we, taxpayers, permit them to have. The government should not have any say in how much it needs, because otherwise the demand for money would be infinite.
and our education system (including the state universities, such as UCLA and Berkley) is taking a large hit
Why should I pay for some universities? Is this some sort of socialism here? (well, maybe there is, in CA.) If a university needs funds it should get them from private sources - like, maybe, students that get valuable knowledge there. What has it to do with a taxpayer?
Californians are being robbed in more ways then money...
Maybe. But let's fix the money problem first, and the rest will follow. If people don't have money they are not likely to solve any problems.
Probably such a powerful grenade could also have a timer... a commando could get to the enemy, throw a few such grenades into the camp and walk away. Half an hour later they will activate, synchronously if you wish.
A Russian equivalent of "ball" would be "shar" which means spheroid, or a football / tennis ball, and nothing else. Plural of this word is equally harmless. To get to the ball(2) that was assumed in your mistranslation you'd have to translate "egg".
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Given that I don't believe in existence of god[s] ... no, I don't. This, however, does not prevent me from using the Bible as one of oldest sets of stories, be they fictional or true. IMO, most people don't have much imagination, and it would be hard for an ancient man to invent "a man on a flying throne" without some sort of an input (mushrooms wouldn't be enough - the idea of a flying machine has to be in his brain already.)
It is also interesting that Indian equivalent of the Bible also features UFOs (vimanas, see Wikipedia.)
http://www.bibleufo.com/subjects.htm
the sightings really didn't kick off until 1897
The oldest recorded sightings are in the Bible. Many sightings occurred before 1897, but they were interpreted as divine manifestations, angels, etc. rather than extraterrestrial vehicles. I saw some Middle Age [engraved] prints with UFOs. You know, it takes a certain level of technology to recognize a higher technology.
In just this year alone, I've received $300 in rebates.
Then you either filled your car up about 600 times per last year (twice a day) or you ate 6,000 hamburgers (20 per day.) Those are amazing numbers!
But what would Apple WANT with Psystar?
"the minor tweaks needed to make OS X run on them" ? This is not supposed to be possible, AFAIK, but once it's possible Psystar may have a good defense. So Apple would stop Psystar's works, and at the same time get access to hacks to make sure they are no longer possible.
But I agree, this is pure speculation - exactly why /. exists, now that we don't get much news here :-)
Apple can afford the trial, but Psystar probably can't. So if Apple went with the settlement then Apple wanted to avoid trial - likely because Psystar promised to expose inconvenient facts and be generally a pain to deal with in front of the judge. A settlement will keep all that quiet, and if it fails the trial is still an option. If I were to guess, Apple may buy Psystar - for cheap from Apple's POV, but for a fortune from the POV of the Psystar owner. The trial would cost a $1M to Apple, easily, so why not to buy something useful with this money, instead of words of lawyers?
I'm 55 and I've always dreamed in color.
The real world around us is in color, and I bet it has more influence on people than some boring TV a couple of hours per day.
I recently moved up 23 chars, but it won't calculate that for me.
Do not worry, the keylogger inside of your keyboard has plenty of memory.
Your example password is not random. Look at the letters of it, one by one, and you will notice that each next letter is either in direct physical proximity (QWERTY-wise) to its predecessor, or in a similar proximity for the other hand. This is a serious weakness because password crackers will exploit it in an instant.
The frequency of these transponders is around 0.9-1.1GHz, so it's not completely absurd that consumer electronics would interfere.
I'd presume that transponders send a modulated, coded signal that carries certain information and checksums. I'd also presume that the transponder system is designed to have several transmitters (airplanes) close to each other - like they do in airports, for example - without freaking out.
Why does car traffic have priority in your view?
One could say that car traffic is more important because it carries more people and more goods than bicycle traffic does. In India or China it could be the opposite.
Now if only American drivers didn't behave like asshats towards cyclists...
Now if only cyclists could pedal at 45 mph on major roads and accelerate not worse than a common car, and have always-on headlights as motorcycles do...
Instead we have weirdos cycling at night, in black clothes, with no light, across the road, randomly. Or we have a good cyclist doing his best in right lane, but his best is still not good enough, so drivers in the morning rush hour try to pass him, with each pass being a near-accident.
I personally have nothing against bicycles, as long as they don't create a major obstruction to car traffic. The law gives bicycles the same rights as motorcycles and cars have, but unfortunately it does not give them the same power to smoothly join the traffic at the traffic speed. Even reserved bike lanes are not safe because car drivers are supposed to enter them (or cross them) for right turns. One fact of life is that most city roads are unsafe for bicycles, and I don't know what can fix that aside from totally separate bike paths.
$7.9M for 420 kg -- I reckon thats enough mass for a partly reusable single person capsule
You are off by an order of magnitude: the first piloted spacecraft needed 2.5 tons for the capsule and another 2 tons for the support hardware. Similarly, Apollo capsule was about 4.1 tons.
The bulk of the mass has to be there to protect the astronaut from the heat of descent; in your case, leaving 100 kg for the astronaut's body and 10 kg for the light spacesuit you have only 310 kg left for the hermetic enclosure, heat shield, water, air, batteries, radio and video, flight controls, and a parachute. It's tough to achieve even using modern materials - life-critical stuff that can survive the launch and save you during the descent tends to be heavy.
Yet another issue with one-man capsules is safety. The buddy system is normally used in dangerous situations. It would be sad to launch a man into space and then see him on video dying from a normally not a life-threatening situation just because there is nobody there to help him. Say, an air hose on his spacesuit kinked and he can't reach there himself.
Do not forget that Russia had an absolutist feudalist government, with peonage, before Lenin's revolution - people were better off during Lenin's time.
The serfdom in Russia was abolished in 1861 - a good half a century before Lenin walked into history. These years were generally good for development of agrarian capitalism, and a good number of former peasants got wealthy. Those were the guys Lenin (and Stalin) declared enemies, and they were all eliminated by 1930s, mostly by taking their property away and shipping the whole family to Siberia, to die.
Even those loathing Stalin often consider Lenin in a similar way as most Americans look at their founding fathers.
This was a popular mind trick in 1970s, when someone had to be made responsible for all the damage. Stalin was a convenient scapegoat since he was dead already, and he was indeed a bad guy in real life. However in 1990s Lenin's traditional friendly face was unmasked by many historians, writers and other to be just as inhumane as Stalin's. For example, a famous Lenin's order "to kill all priests, every single one" - it's pretty barbaric even if you don't subscribe to religion. I do not believe that many people still see Lenin as a founding father.
Most Russians are not convinced that "western style democracy" is a more just, efficient and humane system than "sovjet democracy"
This is absolutely correct, considering that "western style democracy" is in fact a staged political show where results of elections do not matter. This is exactly why we see so much backlash against people who promoted this kind of democracy in 1990s - Russians know now what these proposals actually mean, and they don't want any of them any more. Yeltsin did a good thing to Russia by giving it the taste of this "western democracy" - it built an immunity to it.
I worked in ARRL "10 GHz and up" contest last weekend, at 10 and 24 GHz, and those frequencies are not for beginners. The dish has to be pointed precisely to the source, with error within a couple of degrees. If the satellites are not geostationary then tracking would be a major problem, and I think they are not geostationary due to the distance involved.
Among other problems, microwave gear is very expensive, sensitive to abuse, and has low power output. Hams can deal with that, being happy with mere 100-200 mW at 10 GHz, but they don't mind chasing the signal as atmospheric conditions change during the day. It would be a lot of work to achieve a reliable link whenever you need it. Rain and fog are major problems in these bands. You basically have to throw power (and money) at the problem; if the military complains about "high cost" of these systems, they are surely not affordable yet to a common man. Considering that the economy just entered a tailspin, we may have bigger problems in coming years than fixing the mobile internet thing.
In case of the local newspaper the customer will call you and later show up at your house to inspect the item, and if all is well then he will pay in cash and take the item. If you sell on Craigslist the buyer can be anywhere, and then you have to deal with shipping and payments (and escrow, and returns etc.)
RAR is a pretty good format, and software for [de]compression exists for all platforms, incl. Linux. It indeed has tons of features, like solid archives, locked archives, error recovery, multi-volume, and more. Latest WinZip borrowed some of those, but not all. RAR also offers very good compression factors. It is a very good format (and software.)
It amazes me that this employee chose illegal means of getting an archiving program instead of using a FOSS solution such as 7-zip
Compare GUIs of those two programs. 7-Zip's GUI is quite bad. Also 7-Zip does not have the "Move" function where your files are archived and deleted. I use WinZip for that since the company has it licensed. I also have 7-Zip installed, but as I said it's GUI is very rudimentary, IIRC lacking buttons for many obvious functions.
This is actually a well known effect of piracy on free software. If the commercial software is free to the user, just as F/OSS software is, then the commercial software wins - it is simply better in most cases, at least because more effort and more money went into it.
Plus the gritty, dark, angsty look has been done to death. I like color.
Try Scrapland then :-)
but is the person threatening you with a gun going to let you draw it? Or are they going to just shoot you?
If someone wants to shoot you then they will; several US presidents were shot even though they have protection. So this case is not interesting. If someone wants you dead, you will be dead.
However casual street crime is a different story. Hooligans would think twice about attacking an armed person. An armed robber will not attack an armed person, just because it's not worth the risk. In other words, no sane person will attack an armed person if there is a choice. A criminal is not willing to gamble his life on a bet how much training his opponent got. Besides, many criminals are poorly trained in most things in life, and marksmanship is on top of that list (felons can't own guns.) In some cases the criminal's gun doesn't even work. So if it comes to the question of who will win a duel, the criminal does not always have that much of an advantage.
So you could start by burglarizing people's homes until you find one.
I don't think the percentage of handgun owners is that great. In a city that would be very few, and the criminal would have to turn the whole house upside down to find a gun that is most likely not even there, or locked in a safe, or otherwise hidden, or the owner just carries it with him.
Outside of a city there would be farmers with long guns - which are totally useless to a criminal. Besides, said farmers are always around, may carry firearms at all times, and they always notice strangers on their small, narrow country roads.
I disagree. I think a lot of them are getting blown to hell.
This is not a failure, being blown to hell, as long as the attacker kills at least one opponent. There are more Iraqis (and Taliban, etc.) willing to fight than the USA has soldiers. Also their religion presents such a death as highly honorable; but that is not even required - in WWII European guerrilla fighters, not being Muslim at all, fought Nazis with extreme bravery and many were killed by superior Nazi war machine. But we know who won in the end.
But by lowering taxes, the state government hasn't gotten the income it needs
The state government will get as much as we, taxpayers, permit them to have. The government should not have any say in how much it needs, because otherwise the demand for money would be infinite.
and our education system (including the state universities, such as UCLA and Berkley) is taking a large hit
Why should I pay for some universities? Is this some sort of socialism here? (well, maybe there is, in CA.) If a university needs funds it should get them from private sources - like, maybe, students that get valuable knowledge there. What has it to do with a taxpayer?
Californians are being robbed in more ways then money...
Maybe. But let's fix the money problem first, and the rest will follow. If people don't have money they are not likely to solve any problems.
Probably such a powerful grenade could also have a timer... a commando could get to the enemy, throw a few such grenades into the camp and walk away. Half an hour later they will activate, synchronously if you wish.
A Russian equivalent of "ball" would be "shar" which means spheroid, or a football / tennis ball, and nothing else. Plural of this word is equally harmless. To get to the ball(2) that was assumed in your mistranslation you'd have to translate "egg".