I just want to point out that everything tied to the government is dead weight. The military is one of the only truly necessary endeavors the government pursues that actually helps the economy. It doesn't do this by adding to the economy, far from it, it is still quite a drain on the economy. However, without a stable government and a strong military to protect against outside forces, the economy would not be able to exist in any stable way. Look at countries like Haiti that are in constant uprising to see what I mean. Earthquake notwithstanding, their economy could never gain a foothold because the government and military are unstable.
The majority of the rest of what the government does, however, just drains our economy and adds little to nothing of benefit (or at least the gain is far overshadowed by the cost).
That doesn't necessarily mean Apple was not the first to invent the thing. They could have been simply waiting for their patent to go through. I don't think they can sue until they actually have the patent. "Patent pending" is just to keep people from wasting their time on something you've already invented.
However, I very seriously doubt many of Apple's patents against HTC are legit. If this goes full scale I hope Apple loses a lot of these patents, because some of them are bull.
Multi-touch was invented by some folks at MIT, Apple was simply the first to use it in a large-scale product.
Being the first to use someone else's invention doesn't somehow make it your invention. People seem to think that though. I'll bet there are some dumbasses who even think Apple was involved in creating the GSM band too.
I think he meant in the hearts and minds of geeks, not an actual decline. Microsoft is as strong as ever, yet it is the bottom of the barrel in opinion around here. Hell, Gates aught to be every nerd's hero, he's the richest man in the world (or one of, it fluctuates) for selling computer software!
Same with Apple, they really are a dirty, nasty company. For some reason putting out pretty products that aren't Microsoft makes you golden among geeks though. Never mind that they treat their employees, their customers, and developers like pieces of scum, and it is only by the grace of Jobbs that they are permitted to use their products at all.
Seriously, get over Apple. OSX is neat, Macs are solid, their iPods are the best, but the company is run by grade - A assholes who think you are pure trash. Great products, shitty ass company. I really wish people could see the difference.
The primary piece of the patent, however, is rotating the touch screen. A touch-screen is nothing more than a screen with a pressure sensitive layer, so when you have a rotating screen already, and you have touch technology, a rotating touch-screen is obvious.
Putting all the pieces together in a new configuration is just engineering, it isn't necessarily innovation and it isn't patent worthy.
Besides, there had been messaging phones that flipped the screen when you went into sms mode. Basing that on an accelerometer instead of a keyboard slide out is trivial, it's just using a different kind of switch.
I think the whole reason Apple didn't go after Nokia is because their patents were on shaky ground to begin with. I think they are trying to scare HTC, who is quite a bit smaller than Nokia, and I hope HTC doesn't fall for it. The Hero is way better than the iPhone.:P
Not that I'm trying to bash Apple, I appreciate what they did bringing smartphones to the consumer market, but I think they have a comeuppance coming for all the dirty tricks they like to pull (you should see what they do to their own employees!).
RAND only applied to the companies that helped develop GSM. There are about a dozen companies with patents that helped create it, so they set up RAND to come to a mutually beneficial cross-licensing agreement. Apple had nothing to do with the development of GSM; they contributed nothing for which they should receive a favorable licensing agreement.
Now, in order to get a piece of the pie, Apple needs to bring something to the table, which they have been unwilling to do. Nokia has said "not good enough", and it's well within their rights to do so. They don't think Apple's patents are worth what their patents are worth, so they want Apple to share more. It's like trading a $20 dollar item for a $10 item, you wouldn't think it's fair either and wouldn't make the trade. For some reason, Apple seems to believe their $10 item is worth $200, and so we have a problem. I think some companies did give Apple favorable licensing, but by no means did they have to. They likely did not have the same level of investment in the GSM technology that Nokia has either.
In any case, what Apple can NOT do is just ignore the patents and make the phone anyway, that's called patent infringement and it's a whole lot worse if you do it on purpose than if you did it by accident.
You do realize that a penthouse is just an apartment on the top floor, right? We aren't necessarily talking a high-rise here with the world's greatest view.
In fact, in a two story apartment complex half the apartments are penthouses!
You know those trashy buildings in the projects? Yeah, those all have penthouses too. They aren't exactly Trump money.
He didn't say how much the apartment was, but apartments seem to start at around $350k, so you should be able to find a penthouse in the $500k-$1M range, which is well within an engineer's reach. Hell a friend of mine is a geologist, and his house is worth around $2M.
Now, you start getting into the $3-$5M range and you're out of reach for your average successful engineer, but not really out of range for a top tier money-wise engineer (though a money-wise engineer would probably not even bother with an apartment that expensive) running a successful company.
I hate to tell you this, but there are no "known guaranteed safe" levels of anything. "Safe" is a negative, it means "not dangerous". There is absolutely no way to prove conclusively that something is not dangerous. The best you can do is either prove or fail to prove that something is dangerous. Failing to prove it is dangerous is not quite the same as proving something is safe, but that is the best we can do.
That's why consumer products are subjected to a bevy of tests to see if they are dangerous. If the product fails to be dangerous, we can be reasonably certain that it is safe. However, it isn't a proof that the product is safe, and we can and do miss things. That is why products are recalled on occasion - it passed all the tests but something unexpected proved to be dangerous.
I meant to put this in my other post, but oh well.
Cancer rates aren't exactly rising by a whole lot either among children (the leading potential indicator of environmental causes of cancer). A study involving the SEER database at the National Cancer Institute concluded there was no statistically significant increase in cancer rates among children between the 1980's and the late 90's. The CDC more or less agrees, giving a 0.6% yearly increase among children since 1990.
The mortality rate for children with cancer in the same period, however, has plummeted. Obviously that is probably due to better treatment options.
The lack of evidence that is dangerous is evidence that it is safe.
It is impossible to prove a negative. For example, I could never prove that you are not an android. A perfect android would be indistinguishable from a human in every way, even down to being organic flesh and blood. The best I could do is find something to prove you ARE an android. Now, since there is no evidence to suggest (let alone prove) that you ARE an android, I am pretty confident you are not.
It's the same reason you can never prove that a god does not exist, you can only fail to prove that he does. You can look and look and not find a god, and therefore be reasonably certain that one does not exist, but you can never prove that one does not exist.
In the same way, it is impossible to prove that something is not dangerous (the definition of "safe" is basically "not dangerous"). All you have to have done is miss something and your proof is worthless. However, when we try over and over to find a way something is dangerous, and fail, we can then be confident that it is safe. However, we could still be wrong, and there is no way to prove that the thing is safe.
The only thing close to proof that anything is safe is a failure to prove that it is dangerous.
Have you thought that perhaps the giant factories those power lines are feeding might be the cause, and not the power lines themselves?
By looking solely at the number of power lines, which is not a known source of cancer, and ignoring things like proximity to large polluters, which are known sources of cancer, you effectively invalidate the entire study.
Income by itself isn't all that important, except that the people are more likely to work physically demanding and stressful jobs (which is also a potential contributing factor). However, low income people live in low income housing, and low income housing tends to be in places where high income people are unwilling to live.
Those power lines are going somewhere, and chances are the reason the low income housing is in the area is because it is near a major polluter. In other words, people who live near power lines are far more likely to live near a major source of polution, which could very easily account for the 70% higher incidence.
You need to control for everything in a study, or it is not worthwhile. There is nothing in the studies about power lines that show power lines themselves are the cause, because there are a host of other factors which are equally likely to be in close proximity of people who live near power lines, and some of these are well known to cause cancer.
Take a coal fired power plant, for example. Everything down wind of that plant is going to be low-income housing. There are also going to be a lot of power lines going back and forth between the plant and the city.
Is it the power lines causing the higher cancer that occurs in that case, or is it the radioactive ash and other known carcinogens the plant is pumping into their air? Which do YOU think it is? Higher income housing is not going to be near the power lines, but it also won't be near the coal plant. You haven't eliminated the variables, how did you come to the conclusion that it is the power lines causing the 70% increase in incidents?
That's the point, if you don't account for income, which affects stress levels and ability to afford care (both of which can increase your susceptibility for cancer and a host of other diseases), and if you don't account for other known potential sources for cancer (often associated with low income), then the study is next to worthless. Yeah, it may tell you that people who live near power lines get cancer more often, but it won't tell you why. If it isn't the power lines at all, then it just makes people needlessly afraid of the power lines, when they should be worried about the actual causes (like that coal plant down the road).
By not accounting for income, you cannot account for other relevant factors.
For example, why are there so many power lines in the less desirable neighborhoods? It certainly isn't because the neighborhoods need that much power, and it certainly isn't because a place that already has a power line is cheaper to build on - those things take up space in awkward ways, and you have land rights to deal with. It's cheaper to build in an area with nothing than an area with power lines.
So why do they build there? Well, the reason there are power lines are to feed that automobile factory, or that industrial chemicals factory, or whatever other nasty widget factory it may be. Ah, now we're getting somewhere. See, that factory is an eyesore, it pumps out nasty chemicals so the air isn't so hot, and there is a chance the soil has been ruined by either pollutants settling out of the air or nasty bits getting into the ground water.
So now we see why the price is so low, it's much cheaper to build there than anywhere else because it is very undesirable land, and the only people who would be willing to live there are those who can't afford to live anywhere else. It's cheap because it's a nasty, polluted area, and there is no doubt you'd see higher rates of cancer regardless of whether or not the power lines were there.
If they don't control for the other factors, the best they can say is that people who live in areas that have a lot of power lines have a higher incident rate for cancer. They cannot conclude that the power lines themselves had anything at all to do with it. They can only do that by eliminating other factors, which hasn't been done. That makes the study next to worthless regarding power lines, except to be able to say that people with lower incomes get cancer more often than people with higher incomes, and that they often live closer to power lines. The correlation means effectively nothing.
New cell towers use about 100 watts, but I couldn't tell you from that how much they put out. That's actually much lower wattage than it used to be.
These antennas, however, will definitely not be concave parabolas. Cell towers need to spread the signal out, not direct it. They will either be multiple flat antennas, or a smaller number of slightly convex antennas.
If it is a tower to tower link you're worried about, you needn't be - those will be setup to keep clear of buildings and are very directed, you'd never get any of the radiation.
That's not completely accurate, you can legally own guns in NYC, it's just prohibitively difficult.
It's much easier to just buy one from the shady looking kid on the corner and hide it. You're probably a lot less likely to get busted for that too (assuming you're a fine upstanding citizen in every other way), and it will be a lot easier to defend yourself. Sure, you'll get some jail time, but at least you'll be alive.
Nah, you can make a bullet for pennies. Lead is cheap, so are tin and antimony for lead alloys. Bullet molds and lead smelters are also cheap.
Good gunpowder is a lot harder to make, but doable (a bit of nitric acid and cotton, then mix with ether and alcohol and make into a powder). It's the primers that are tough, got to get a hold of a stable high explosive for that one. Making it yourself is pretty freaking dangerous.
Why do you think it's such a "kickass apartment"? If it were ordinarily in his price range it wouldn't look much different than the other apartments in that price range. But this one is kickass, suggesting that the price is depressed.
Now, what do you think could depress the price of a kickass apartment sitting next to a pair of cell phone antennas?
I guarantee at least 50% of people see the towers and don't even bother looking at the apartment. It's not really a question of whether you think it's dangerous, it's how strongly you believe it's safe. If there is any hesitation at all people generally don't even bother to consider the place.
Of course, none of them care enough to sit down and work out the physics of it, and come to the conclusion that they get significantly more radiation when they stick their phone up to their ears. That doesn't matter, they see radio towers of any kind, and people don't want to be near them. At the very least it's "better safe than sorry", especially given the number of times the experts have been wrong. Better to not take the chance.
Thus, houses in these types of situations typically go for much less than similar houses further away for radio towers or power lines.
I don't know why he said lead, that's foolish. What you need is a faraday cage, which is just a (conducting) wire mesh.
If you want the smooth-wall look or the lightly textured look, put the mesh up behind the drywall. If you like stucco you can use the mesh as your plaster-holder and keep it outside the drywall.
Talk the price down as much as you can, too, site a bunch of bogus studies, blah blah, then offer something way below what they currently want. I'm sure you'll be able to work something out.
They retain the rights of the photos, however they cannot distribute those photos for profit without the permission of the people in the photos. I'm sure they usually get that permission in the contract, but it won't necessarily cover everybody, just those who signed.
Virgin got in a hell of a lot of trouble over this for buying the rights to photos from photographers on Flickr and not bothering to get the permission of the people who were actually in the photos. There was a major lawsuit about it some time ago.
I can kinda see the guy's point, but I'm not sure how I feel about it yet.:P
What happens to the distribution when you run results through the function again?
I ask because I just went to http://www.browserchoice.eu/ and tried it about 40 times and IE only came up in the last spot all of three times (I was watching it specifically because of your post). While it's certainly possible I flipped heads 37 times out of 40, it seems extremely unlikely. In fact, I got twice as many hits on the first position for IE than the last, and more often than not it was in one of the middle three positions.
They start with the base list each time (you can see it briefly on the refresh), so in my opinion you haven't shown that running the flawed function a second time doesn't normalize the distribution adequately.
The function they used seems perfectly acceptable for a random list of browsers.
I just ran it doing a poor man's manual verification (i.e. go to www.browserchoice.eu and refresh it 40 times and see what happens) and it looked pretty freaking random to me. More often than not, IE was somewhere in the middle, as were all the others.
Some people have been complaining that, given the algorithm, IE would end up in the last position about 50% of the time. While 40 hits is not enough to give any real valid statistical data, IE was in the last position 3 times and the first position 6 times. They should be in either first or last position 40% of the time for a truly random function, and about 64% for the flawed function, but in my short test they were only in either position a little over 20% of the time. I'd be very surprised to see that low of a result if the function is biased toward them 64% of the time.
In other words, I call bullshit, and I want you to prove their function is not adequate, and I want real-world verification that what you say is true.
Yeah, I know I'm asking a lot, but it's no more than what all these people talking out their asses are demanding from Microsoft. In fact, it's a lot more realistic - generally in western society the burden of proof is on the accuser. So prove that what they use is not adequate, because it looks good enough to me.
I don't accept the premise that the function needed to be truly random (in a practical sense, 99% or so). I think the cheap and easy solution using math.random is perfectly fine. It works out to about 60% random, which is adequate for the purpose of ordering a list of browsers. Since spending the time using a solid random function isn't going to make Microsoft any more money, the quickest and easiest solution is the best choice. This function uses very well known functions, and it is all of five lines long. You can't get much cheaper and easier than that.
That said, regarding the misuse of random functions in code that does need to be truly random (again, 99% is usually good enough), I'd be extremely surprised if 99% of freshmen CS students didn't make this mistake the first time they were asked. A lot of people here on slashdot have done it even though we are talking about how non-random random is when used in this way.
Then when the prof shows them how abysmally they did, the lesson is learned, and hopefully 99% of sophomore CS students wouldn't make that mistake. The reason everybody remembers it so well is because they screwed it up so badly the first time they tried it.
Slashdot Mirror
I just want to point out that everything tied to the government is dead weight. The military is one of the only truly necessary endeavors the government pursues that actually helps the economy. It doesn't do this by adding to the economy, far from it, it is still quite a drain on the economy. However, without a stable government and a strong military to protect against outside forces, the economy would not be able to exist in any stable way. Look at countries like Haiti that are in constant uprising to see what I mean. Earthquake notwithstanding, their economy could never gain a foothold because the government and military are unstable.
The majority of the rest of what the government does, however, just drains our economy and adds little to nothing of benefit (or at least the gain is far overshadowed by the cost).
That doesn't necessarily mean Apple was not the first to invent the thing. They could have been simply waiting for their patent to go through. I don't think they can sue until they actually have the patent. "Patent pending" is just to keep people from wasting their time on something you've already invented.
However, I very seriously doubt many of Apple's patents against HTC are legit. If this goes full scale I hope Apple loses a lot of these patents, because some of them are bull.
Multi-touch was invented by some folks at MIT, Apple was simply the first to use it in a large-scale product.
Being the first to use someone else's invention doesn't somehow make it your invention. People seem to think that though. I'll bet there are some dumbasses who even think Apple was involved in creating the GSM band too.
I think he meant in the hearts and minds of geeks, not an actual decline. Microsoft is as strong as ever, yet it is the bottom of the barrel in opinion around here. Hell, Gates aught to be every nerd's hero, he's the richest man in the world (or one of, it fluctuates) for selling computer software!
Same with Apple, they really are a dirty, nasty company. For some reason putting out pretty products that aren't Microsoft makes you golden among geeks though. Never mind that they treat their employees, their customers, and developers like pieces of scum, and it is only by the grace of Jobbs that they are permitted to use their products at all.
Seriously, get over Apple. OSX is neat, Macs are solid, their iPods are the best, but the company is run by grade - A assholes who think you are pure trash. Great products, shitty ass company. I really wish people could see the difference.
The primary piece of the patent, however, is rotating the touch screen. A touch-screen is nothing more than a screen with a pressure sensitive layer, so when you have a rotating screen already, and you have touch technology, a rotating touch-screen is obvious.
Putting all the pieces together in a new configuration is just engineering, it isn't necessarily innovation and it isn't patent worthy.
Besides, there had been messaging phones that flipped the screen when you went into sms mode. Basing that on an accelerometer instead of a keyboard slide out is trivial, it's just using a different kind of switch.
I think the whole reason Apple didn't go after Nokia is because their patents were on shaky ground to begin with. I think they are trying to scare HTC, who is quite a bit smaller than Nokia, and I hope HTC doesn't fall for it. The Hero is way better than the iPhone. :P
Not that I'm trying to bash Apple, I appreciate what they did bringing smartphones to the consumer market, but I think they have a comeuppance coming for all the dirty tricks they like to pull (you should see what they do to their own employees!).
RAND only applied to the companies that helped develop GSM. There are about a dozen companies with patents that helped create it, so they set up RAND to come to a mutually beneficial cross-licensing agreement. Apple had nothing to do with the development of GSM; they contributed nothing for which they should receive a favorable licensing agreement.
Now, in order to get a piece of the pie, Apple needs to bring something to the table, which they have been unwilling to do. Nokia has said "not good enough", and it's well within their rights to do so. They don't think Apple's patents are worth what their patents are worth, so they want Apple to share more. It's like trading a $20 dollar item for a $10 item, you wouldn't think it's fair either and wouldn't make the trade. For some reason, Apple seems to believe their $10 item is worth $200, and so we have a problem. I think some companies did give Apple favorable licensing, but by no means did they have to. They likely did not have the same level of investment in the GSM technology that Nokia has either.
In any case, what Apple can NOT do is just ignore the patents and make the phone anyway, that's called patent infringement and it's a whole lot worse if you do it on purpose than if you did it by accident.
One would hope.
You do realize that a penthouse is just an apartment on the top floor, right? We aren't necessarily talking a high-rise here with the world's greatest view.
In fact, in a two story apartment complex half the apartments are penthouses!
You know those trashy buildings in the projects? Yeah, those all have penthouses too. They aren't exactly Trump money.
He didn't say how much the apartment was, but apartments seem to start at around $350k, so you should be able to find a penthouse in the $500k-$1M range, which is well within an engineer's reach. Hell a friend of mine is a geologist, and his house is worth around $2M.
Now, you start getting into the $3-$5M range and you're out of reach for your average successful engineer, but not really out of range for a top tier money-wise engineer (though a money-wise engineer would probably not even bother with an apartment that expensive) running a successful company.
I hate to tell you this, but there are no "known guaranteed safe" levels of anything. "Safe" is a negative, it means "not dangerous". There is absolutely no way to prove conclusively that something is not dangerous. The best you can do is either prove or fail to prove that something is dangerous. Failing to prove it is dangerous is not quite the same as proving something is safe, but that is the best we can do.
That's why consumer products are subjected to a bevy of tests to see if they are dangerous. If the product fails to be dangerous, we can be reasonably certain that it is safe. However, it isn't a proof that the product is safe, and we can and do miss things. That is why products are recalled on occasion - it passed all the tests but something unexpected proved to be dangerous.
Breathe man, breathe!
I meant to put this in my other post, but oh well.
Cancer rates aren't exactly rising by a whole lot either among children (the leading potential indicator of environmental causes of cancer). A study involving the SEER database at the National Cancer Institute concluded there was no statistically significant increase in cancer rates among children between the 1980's and the late 90's. The CDC more or less agrees, giving a 0.6% yearly increase among children since 1990.
The mortality rate for children with cancer in the same period, however, has plummeted. Obviously that is probably due to better treatment options.
The lack of evidence that is dangerous is evidence that it is safe.
It is impossible to prove a negative. For example, I could never prove that you are not an android. A perfect android would be indistinguishable from a human in every way, even down to being organic flesh and blood. The best I could do is find something to prove you ARE an android. Now, since there is no evidence to suggest (let alone prove) that you ARE an android, I am pretty confident you are not.
It's the same reason you can never prove that a god does not exist, you can only fail to prove that he does. You can look and look and not find a god, and therefore be reasonably certain that one does not exist, but you can never prove that one does not exist.
In the same way, it is impossible to prove that something is not dangerous (the definition of "safe" is basically "not dangerous"). All you have to have done is miss something and your proof is worthless. However, when we try over and over to find a way something is dangerous, and fail, we can then be confident that it is safe. However, we could still be wrong, and there is no way to prove that the thing is safe.
The only thing close to proof that anything is safe is a failure to prove that it is dangerous.
Have you thought that perhaps the giant factories those power lines are feeding might be the cause, and not the power lines themselves?
By looking solely at the number of power lines, which is not a known source of cancer, and ignoring things like proximity to large polluters, which are known sources of cancer, you effectively invalidate the entire study.
Income by itself isn't all that important, except that the people are more likely to work physically demanding and stressful jobs (which is also a potential contributing factor). However, low income people live in low income housing, and low income housing tends to be in places where high income people are unwilling to live.
Those power lines are going somewhere, and chances are the reason the low income housing is in the area is because it is near a major polluter. In other words, people who live near power lines are far more likely to live near a major source of polution, which could very easily account for the 70% higher incidence.
You need to control for everything in a study, or it is not worthwhile. There is nothing in the studies about power lines that show power lines themselves are the cause, because there are a host of other factors which are equally likely to be in close proximity of people who live near power lines, and some of these are well known to cause cancer.
Take a coal fired power plant, for example. Everything down wind of that plant is going to be low-income housing. There are also going to be a lot of power lines going back and forth between the plant and the city.
Is it the power lines causing the higher cancer that occurs in that case, or is it the radioactive ash and other known carcinogens the plant is pumping into their air? Which do YOU think it is? Higher income housing is not going to be near the power lines, but it also won't be near the coal plant. You haven't eliminated the variables, how did you come to the conclusion that it is the power lines causing the 70% increase in incidents?
That's the point, if you don't account for income, which affects stress levels and ability to afford care (both of which can increase your susceptibility for cancer and a host of other diseases), and if you don't account for other known potential sources for cancer (often associated with low income), then the study is next to worthless. Yeah, it may tell you that people who live near power lines get cancer more often, but it won't tell you why. If it isn't the power lines at all, then it just makes people needlessly afraid of the power lines, when they should be worried about the actual causes (like that coal plant down the road).
By not accounting for income, you cannot account for other relevant factors.
For example, why are there so many power lines in the less desirable neighborhoods? It certainly isn't because the neighborhoods need that much power, and it certainly isn't because a place that already has a power line is cheaper to build on - those things take up space in awkward ways, and you have land rights to deal with. It's cheaper to build in an area with nothing than an area with power lines.
So why do they build there? Well, the reason there are power lines are to feed that automobile factory, or that industrial chemicals factory, or whatever other nasty widget factory it may be. Ah, now we're getting somewhere. See, that factory is an eyesore, it pumps out nasty chemicals so the air isn't so hot, and there is a chance the soil has been ruined by either pollutants settling out of the air or nasty bits getting into the ground water.
So now we see why the price is so low, it's much cheaper to build there than anywhere else because it is very undesirable land, and the only people who would be willing to live there are those who can't afford to live anywhere else. It's cheap because it's a nasty, polluted area, and there is no doubt you'd see higher rates of cancer regardless of whether or not the power lines were there.
If they don't control for the other factors, the best they can say is that people who live in areas that have a lot of power lines have a higher incident rate for cancer. They cannot conclude that the power lines themselves had anything at all to do with it. They can only do that by eliminating other factors, which hasn't been done. That makes the study next to worthless regarding power lines, except to be able to say that people with lower incomes get cancer more often than people with higher incomes, and that they often live closer to power lines. The correlation means effectively nothing.
New cell towers use about 100 watts, but I couldn't tell you from that how much they put out. That's actually much lower wattage than it used to be.
These antennas, however, will definitely not be concave parabolas. Cell towers need to spread the signal out, not direct it. They will either be multiple flat antennas, or a smaller number of slightly convex antennas.
If it is a tower to tower link you're worried about, you needn't be - those will be setup to keep clear of buildings and are very directed, you'd never get any of the radiation.
That's not completely accurate, you can legally own guns in NYC, it's just prohibitively difficult.
It's much easier to just buy one from the shady looking kid on the corner and hide it. You're probably a lot less likely to get busted for that too (assuming you're a fine upstanding citizen in every other way), and it will be a lot easier to defend yourself. Sure, you'll get some jail time, but at least you'll be alive.
Nah, you can make a bullet for pennies. Lead is cheap, so are tin and antimony for lead alloys. Bullet molds and lead smelters are also cheap.
Good gunpowder is a lot harder to make, but doable (a bit of nitric acid and cotton, then mix with ether and alcohol and make into a powder). It's the primers that are tough, got to get a hold of a stable high explosive for that one. Making it yourself is pretty freaking dangerous.
Buying bullets is pretty damned expensive though.
I can also guarantee that you're a dumbass.
Why do you think it's such a "kickass apartment"? If it were ordinarily in his price range it wouldn't look much different than the other apartments in that price range. But this one is kickass, suggesting that the price is depressed.
Now, what do you think could depress the price of a kickass apartment sitting next to a pair of cell phone antennas?
I guarantee at least 50% of people see the towers and don't even bother looking at the apartment. It's not really a question of whether you think it's dangerous, it's how strongly you believe it's safe. If there is any hesitation at all people generally don't even bother to consider the place.
Of course, none of them care enough to sit down and work out the physics of it, and come to the conclusion that they get significantly more radiation when they stick their phone up to their ears. That doesn't matter, they see radio towers of any kind, and people don't want to be near them. At the very least it's "better safe than sorry", especially given the number of times the experts have been wrong. Better to not take the chance.
Thus, houses in these types of situations typically go for much less than similar houses further away for radio towers or power lines.
I don't know why he said lead, that's foolish. What you need is a faraday cage, which is just a (conducting) wire mesh.
If you want the smooth-wall look or the lightly textured look, put the mesh up behind the drywall. If you like stucco you can use the mesh as your plaster-holder and keep it outside the drywall.
Talk the price down as much as you can, too, site a bunch of bogus studies, blah blah, then offer something way below what they currently want. I'm sure you'll be able to work something out.
They retain the rights of the photos, however they cannot distribute those photos for profit without the permission of the people in the photos. I'm sure they usually get that permission in the contract, but it won't necessarily cover everybody, just those who signed.
Virgin got in a hell of a lot of trouble over this for buying the rights to photos from photographers on Flickr and not bothering to get the permission of the people who were actually in the photos. There was a major lawsuit about it some time ago.
I can kinda see the guy's point, but I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. :P
It wasn't done by the US government, it was done for the US government.
And for what it's worth, the government tries to claim copyrights on public legal documents and the like all the time, it's bull.
What happens to the distribution when you run results through the function again?
I ask because I just went to http://www.browserchoice.eu/ and tried it about 40 times and IE only came up in the last spot all of three times (I was watching it specifically because of your post). While it's certainly possible I flipped heads 37 times out of 40, it seems extremely unlikely. In fact, I got twice as many hits on the first position for IE than the last, and more often than not it was in one of the middle three positions.
They start with the base list each time (you can see it briefly on the refresh), so in my opinion you haven't shown that running the flawed function a second time doesn't normalize the distribution adequately.
The function they used seems perfectly acceptable for a random list of browsers.
Which one?
I just ran it doing a poor man's manual verification (i.e. go to www.browserchoice.eu and refresh it 40 times and see what happens) and it looked pretty freaking random to me. More often than not, IE was somewhere in the middle, as were all the others.
Some people have been complaining that, given the algorithm, IE would end up in the last position about 50% of the time. While 40 hits is not enough to give any real valid statistical data, IE was in the last position 3 times and the first position 6 times. They should be in either first or last position 40% of the time for a truly random function, and about 64% for the flawed function, but in my short test they were only in either position a little over 20% of the time. I'd be very surprised to see that low of a result if the function is biased toward them 64% of the time.
In other words, I call bullshit, and I want you to prove their function is not adequate, and I want real-world verification that what you say is true.
Yeah, I know I'm asking a lot, but it's no more than what all these people talking out their asses are demanding from Microsoft. In fact, it's a lot more realistic - generally in western society the burden of proof is on the accuser. So prove that what they use is not adequate, because it looks good enough to me.
It starts off as a list dumbass, the browsers to sort have to come from somewhere.
Would you be upset if the first item on the list were FireFox, so FF popped up first momentarily?
Seriously, get a life.
I don't accept the premise that the function needed to be truly random (in a practical sense, 99% or so). I think the cheap and easy solution using math.random is perfectly fine. It works out to about 60% random, which is adequate for the purpose of ordering a list of browsers. Since spending the time using a solid random function isn't going to make Microsoft any more money, the quickest and easiest solution is the best choice. This function uses very well known functions, and it is all of five lines long. You can't get much cheaper and easier than that.
That said, regarding the misuse of random functions in code that does need to be truly random (again, 99% is usually good enough), I'd be extremely surprised if 99% of freshmen CS students didn't make this mistake the first time they were asked. A lot of people here on slashdot have done it even though we are talking about how non-random random is when used in this way.
Then when the prof shows them how abysmally they did, the lesson is learned, and hopefully 99% of sophomore CS students wouldn't make that mistake. The reason everybody remembers it so well is because they screwed it up so badly the first time they tried it.