How long until Mr Davidson gets prosecuted by some lawyer working for McCain
No politician would be stupid enough to sue someone perjoratively during an election.
With the amount the average judge knows about the internet, he could actually be imprisoned
Yeah, and with the amount the average gas station jerk knows about particle physics, MY CAR IS GOING TO ASPLODE. Here's a hint for you: no amount of stupidity on the part of a judge will invent a legal offense where before there was none. Read along with me: making someone look stupid is not illegal. (If it was, the wrong half of SlashDot would have been in jail ages ago, and I would be terrified to remind you how the world actually works.)
he could actually be imprisoned for this if some arsehole in a suit and tie crys loud enough
What amazes me is that I suspect you actually believe this is how the law works.
As simple as the case may seem to us, to the general public, defacing a site is illegal hacking,
No it isn't
Mr. Davidson didn't deface anything.
Maybe you didn't realize this, but it isn't Mr. Davidson's problem what someone else chooses to do with his site. It might be different if Mr. Davidson entered Mr. McCain's site and forcibly replaced data. He didn't. Mr. Davidson will not be going to jail because some other jackass decided to steal his bandwidth.
and no doubt McCain could get a clueless PHB to testify to that as an "expert witness" if he wanted to
And what, exactly, do you believe this "expert witness" of yours will say, to invent a breach of law?
No matter how much you want to pretend a stupid judge and ignorant public would mean going to jail over a misunderstanding, it never actually would; that's part of why we run in a precedent system in the first place.
It's funny - you're as clueless about the law as you seem to believe the average public is about the internet. The only real difference here is that the public hasn't been this clueless about the internet in five years, and you don't seem to be picking up a law book. Next time, when you want to feign familiarity with the law, remind yourself three words: "presumption of innocense." Nothing in this country is illegal unless it's specifically written down somewhere as legal, or unless it has illegal ramifications the person doing the thing was aware of a priori. There is no point at which switching an image on your own web page is illegal, unless the new image itself is illegal (child porn or whatever.)
Here's a good rule of thumb. Start by pretending to be the defender, and asking extremely difficult questions like "at what point did Mr. Davidson illegally connect to and change John McCain's website?" Because, y'know, even if someone out there was stupid enough to sue over a prank, the prosecutor would still have to deal with those pesky common sense questions. Also, nobody's going to jail for telling you they spit in your coffee after you drank it, even when they really didn't. Jail time is not actually the defacto way for the legal system to squint at someone and say "cut it out."
The fuel cell consumes the fuel as fast as it can, and uses that to charge a battery, which is used to deliver slow power over the long term. That's why the tag line says "powering batteries with" - the fuel cell is powering a battery.
Like, uh, what other fuel cells are these that use enzymes again?
Well, this kind, for one. Enzymatic fuel cells working on sugar are the norm for pacemakers, with close competition in radioactive batteries. We've had them working since 1981.
How uneducated do you have to be to write an article about alternative power storage technologies in which you write (something parent didn't know about) ?
Apparently not very. Generally it's not a good idea to pretend to be an expert in things with which you are not familiar.
It is. There are ten episodes left which are already filmed, and begin airing in the US in about two weeks ago. Britain and Canada already saw them, which may account for your confusion; domestic Sci Fi channel likes to delay its summer run so that its shows are put up against weaker competition, primarily repeats.
Have you seen it? It's people riding motorcycles across threads between hostile alien worlds trying to clear their wrongly besmirched names. It's kind of The Hulk meets Star Traveller. It's bad enough to make you long for Galactica 1980. There's actually a rare medical syndrome where watching the series can cause apoplexy; it has killed three people in South Korea, and almost caused a war.
Yeah, surely a show that's been on for ten years and a show that's been on three years will add up to more than three seven year, a five year, a three year, eleven movies, a two year cartoon, a book series with more than 200 elements, and a positively depressing amount of pornographic fan fiction.
The *only* science fiction heavyweight in Star Trek's neighborhood in terms of hours filmed is Dr Who.
Yeah, and what a tragedy it would be if a bit of sugar water got spilled. I mean, look at all the horror associated with gas stations. Mere mortals cannot be trusted to handle fluids!
Personally, I can't see how you have any honest intentions in hiding the fact that you are domain owner.
Almost half of all domains are registered privately. All but one of mine are; I don't want people to be able to look up my home address or phone number just because they know one of my domains.
Where do abuse reports get sent when someone starts sending spam using your domain name?
Uh, abuse@domain, just like before.
What about take-down notices when someone posts copyrighted material on a website with your domain name?
abuse@ is one fine place. I'd *never* anon-register a site where other people could post content. That said, most of the web is still non-interactive, and there's no point at which anyone would ever send me a content copy cease and desist, since I don't post other people's content on my web page.
There are a lot of good reasons for private registration, and private registration has worked well for more than a decade. Pretending otherwise is turning a blind eye to the internet as it is today.
You just made my point for me. Read what I said again until you get it. The object is to show you that industrial and recreational prices are not correlated in any way.
Current weed prices are comparable by weight to gold. Gold's been soaring lately - it's up to almost $650/oz - but high quality nuggets can be as much as $550/oz, so keep perspective. If you think fuel-supply scale farming will increase prices against a commodity normally measured in grams or eighth ounces, you need to do your supply and demand homework.
Wait, let me get this straight. You want to cover an entire state with essentially no infrastructure or population in a wind farm that takes so much energy from the atmosphere that it can power the most energy hungry nation on Earth, and you think that's better for the environment than the current system?
An energy sink that large in one place would throw our weather system into chaos. The biosphere in the area would be ruined. The metal supply is tremendously inadequate for such a large construction job. The maintenance demands would still require a significant amount of oil. The number of people you'd have to move into the area would be extreme. I mean, you're talking about a job thousands of times the size of the great wall, taipei 101 and a large modern strip mine put together. It is so radically infeasable that I find it remarkable someone proposes it as a solution.
There's enough energy in the magma ten miles beneath the surface to power the whole planet. Is it time for journey to the center of the earth, too? Try thinking about what could go wrong.
I don't see anything wrong with using these cheap food sources.
Many countries have learned this lesson the hard way. In recent times, for example 30 years ago, Zaire was Africa's breas basket. They provided nearly a third of all food eaten on the continent. Then their current governmental mess started, Zaire collapsed, and now it can't even feed its own people, let alone the rest of the continent. The primary problem was that as reparations, farms - Zaire's primary export business system - were reposessed from their primarily white invader owners, and given to traditional people. However, the government used a crony system to determine who got the farms, rather than giving them out to those individuals who knew how to run farms, and everything predictably went straight to hell.
Many of the famines in Africa are a direct result of Zaire's collapse, and the policies of other nations leading them to complete external dependency. A government must be able to feed its own people even if every other country on Earth closes their borders, or they can be directly manipulated through sanctions and export treaties.
The United States' major foreign problems right now are a result of our dependancy on certain nations for their fuel reserves. Can you imagine how much worse it would be if it was the food supply?
No, parent can easily be correct assuming Berkeley is also correct. Corn cannot fuel its own process. Therefore, if it is a 1.3x net fuel gain, that meants that for every four you get out you've put three in. If corn becomes the dominant fuel source, then all it has to do is get past 33% total market expansion, and our petro/coal usage starts going up again.
I'm no expert, but I believe the two are not contradictory. It's just a question of margins and the long view. Using numbers ISTR without citation (it's a slashdot tradition!,) our energy market is growing about 15% every decade. That suggests that switching to a corn based market would buy us a ~20 year dip until we got back to where we are right now.
Does that mean it's a bad thing? No: a 20 year dip is a long time, and fusion is break-even already at unacceptably short usage periods. And, hey, if there's something better than corn - and again, ISTR that the fuel gain for sugar cane in Brazil's current system is around 6.5x - then that's maybe more like a 50-60 year dip, and I feel confident that that's enough for us to get to truly sustainable energy (fusion doesn't need that much hydrogen, and even if we decided using the seas was a bad idea, mining hydrogen from the high upper atmosphere of Jupiter and Saturn wouldn't be that hard with today's technology.)
We're not that far off. We just need to buy some time. Is corn enough? I doubt it. But, I think sugar beets might be, and their arable ranges cover everything corn does and more; if they start producing our fuel, the corn industry might just try to switch, in the way that BP is trying to do at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
No politician would be stupid enough to sue someone perjoratively during an election.
With the amount the average judge knows about the internet, he could actually be imprisoned
Yeah, and with the amount the average gas station jerk knows about particle physics, MY CAR IS GOING TO ASPLODE. Here's a hint for you: no amount of stupidity on the part of a judge will invent a legal offense where before there was none. Read along with me: making someone look stupid is not illegal. (If it was, the wrong half of SlashDot would have been in jail ages ago, and I would be terrified to remind you how the world actually works.)
he could actually be imprisoned for this if some arsehole in a suit and tie crys loud enough
What amazes me is that I suspect you actually believe this is how the law works.
As simple as the case may seem to us, to the general public, defacing a site is illegal hacking,
Maybe you didn't realize this, but it isn't Mr. Davidson's problem what someone else chooses to do with his site. It might be different if Mr. Davidson entered Mr. McCain's site and forcibly replaced data. He didn't. Mr. Davidson will not be going to jail because some other jackass decided to steal his bandwidth.
and no doubt McCain could get a clueless PHB to testify to that as an "expert witness" if he wanted to
And what, exactly, do you believe this "expert witness" of yours will say, to invent a breach of law?
No matter how much you want to pretend a stupid judge and ignorant public would mean going to jail over a misunderstanding, it never actually would; that's part of why we run in a precedent system in the first place.
It's funny - you're as clueless about the law as you seem to believe the average public is about the internet. The only real difference here is that the public hasn't been this clueless about the internet in five years, and you don't seem to be picking up a law book. Next time, when you want to feign familiarity with the law, remind yourself three words: "presumption of innocense." Nothing in this country is illegal unless it's specifically written down somewhere as legal, or unless it has illegal ramifications the person doing the thing was aware of a priori. There is no point at which switching an image on your own web page is illegal, unless the new image itself is illegal (child porn or whatever.)
Here's a good rule of thumb. Start by pretending to be the defender, and asking extremely difficult questions like "at what point did Mr. Davidson illegally connect to and change John McCain's website?" Because, y'know, even if someone out there was stupid enough to sue over a prank, the prosecutor would still have to deal with those pesky common sense questions. Also, nobody's going to jail for telling you they spit in your coffee after you drank it, even when they really didn't. Jail time is not actually the defacto way for the legal system to squint at someone and say "cut it out."
Costanza is only funny on TV, not on SlashDot.
Yeah, as opposed to something new and inventive like an XML tagline.
The fuel cell consumes the fuel as fast as it can, and uses that to charge a battery, which is used to deliver slow power over the long term. That's why the tag line says "powering batteries with" - the fuel cell is powering a battery.
C'mon. RTFA.
Yeah, because if there's one thing that defines scientific vernacular, it's the carefully edited stories at SlashDot.
It never ceases to amaze me how people can sit on the internet after driving home from work and say that biology invents everything better.
As opposed to what it's currently used for? (Look on the bright side: it means the ethanol is left for us.)
cocaine for your PDA!
No, officer, the cocaine was for the PDA, it must have gotten around my nose when I was using it as a phone...
Like, uh, what other fuel cells are these that use enzymes again?
Well, this kind, for one. Enzymatic fuel cells working on sugar are the norm for pacemakers, with close competition in radioactive batteries. We've had them working since 1981.
How uneducated do you have to be to write an article about alternative power storage technologies in which you write (something parent didn't know about) ?
Apparently not very. Generally it's not a good idea to pretend to be an expert in things with which you are not familiar.
Creating machines that could "potentially" run off fuel made from dead humans might be a "potentially" bad thing.
EXXON GREEN IS PEOPLE! IT'S PEEEEEEOPLE!
Sorry, you don't get to use that line often.
I would think coming up with a stable reaction for the entire amount of fat in the tank would be difficult since they are not water soluable
You seem to be forgetting what gasoline actually *is*.
Man that was funny. When Mel Gibson said it. Twenty years ago.
It is. There are ten episodes left which are already filmed, and begin airing in the US in about two weeks ago. Britain and Canada already saw them, which may account for your confusion; domestic Sci Fi channel likes to delay its summer run so that its shows are put up against weaker competition, primarily repeats.
Have you seen it? It's people riding motorcycles across threads between hostile alien worlds trying to clear their wrongly besmirched names. It's kind of The Hulk meets Star Traveller. It's bad enough to make you long for Galactica 1980. There's actually a rare medical syndrome where watching the series can cause apoplexy; it has killed three people in South Korea, and almost caused a war.
Of course they don't bring it up.
Wikipedia fails it again: TOS, TNG, DS9, Voy, Ent, TAS. (The animated series. It had Niven-style Kzin. It's worse than it sounds. Look it up.)
...
I mean, I can understand wanting to forget that Voyager happened, and all, but
Yeah, surely a show that's been on for ten years and a show that's been on three years will add up to more than three seven year, a five year, a three year, eleven movies, a two year cartoon, a book series with more than 200 elements, and a positively depressing amount of pornographic fan fiction.
The *only* science fiction heavyweight in Star Trek's neighborhood in terms of hours filmed is Dr Who.
Yeah, and what a tragedy it would be if a bit of sugar water got spilled. I mean, look at all the horror associated with gas stations. Mere mortals cannot be trusted to handle fluids!
Personally, I can't see how you have any honest intentions in hiding the fact that you are domain owner.
Almost half of all domains are registered privately. All but one of mine are; I don't want people to be able to look up my home address or phone number just because they know one of my domains.
Where do abuse reports get sent when someone starts sending spam using your domain name?
Uh, abuse@domain, just like before.
What about take-down notices when someone posts copyrighted material on a website with your domain name?
abuse@ is one fine place. I'd *never* anon-register a site where other people could post content. That said, most of the web is still non-interactive, and there's no point at which anyone would ever send me a content copy cease and desist, since I don't post other people's content on my web page.
There are a lot of good reasons for private registration, and private registration has worked well for more than a decade. Pretending otherwise is turning a blind eye to the internet as it is today.
Bhuhuhu. Touche.
"tennants"
Tenets. Tennants are people who live in a building owned by someone else.
You just made my point for me. Read what I said again until you get it. The object is to show you that industrial and recreational prices are not correlated in any way.
Current weed prices are comparable by weight to gold. Gold's been soaring lately - it's up to almost $650/oz - but high quality nuggets can be as much as $550/oz, so keep perspective. If you think fuel-supply scale farming will increase prices against a commodity normally measured in grams or eighth ounces, you need to do your supply and demand homework.
Wait, let me get this straight. You want to cover an entire state with essentially no infrastructure or population in a wind farm that takes so much energy from the atmosphere that it can power the most energy hungry nation on Earth, and you think that's better for the environment than the current system?
An energy sink that large in one place would throw our weather system into chaos. The biosphere in the area would be ruined. The metal supply is tremendously inadequate for such a large construction job. The maintenance demands would still require a significant amount of oil. The number of people you'd have to move into the area would be extreme. I mean, you're talking about a job thousands of times the size of the great wall, taipei 101 and a large modern strip mine put together. It is so radically infeasable that I find it remarkable someone proposes it as a solution.
There's enough energy in the magma ten miles beneath the surface to power the whole planet. Is it time for journey to the center of the earth, too? Try thinking about what could go wrong.
Surprisingly, Paul Krugman is against killing babies, so, actually no.
I don't see anything wrong with using these cheap food sources.
Many countries have learned this lesson the hard way. In recent times, for example 30 years ago, Zaire was Africa's breas basket. They provided nearly a third of all food eaten on the continent. Then their current governmental mess started, Zaire collapsed, and now it can't even feed its own people, let alone the rest of the continent. The primary problem was that as reparations, farms - Zaire's primary export business system - were reposessed from their primarily white invader owners, and given to traditional people. However, the government used a crony system to determine who got the farms, rather than giving them out to those individuals who knew how to run farms, and everything predictably went straight to hell.
Many of the famines in Africa are a direct result of Zaire's collapse, and the policies of other nations leading them to complete external dependency. A government must be able to feed its own people even if every other country on Earth closes their borders, or they can be directly manipulated through sanctions and export treaties.
The United States' major foreign problems right now are a result of our dependancy on certain nations for their fuel reserves. Can you imagine how much worse it would be if it was the food supply?
No, parent can easily be correct assuming Berkeley is also correct. Corn cannot fuel its own process. Therefore, if it is a 1.3x net fuel gain, that meants that for every four you get out you've put three in. If corn becomes the dominant fuel source, then all it has to do is get past 33% total market expansion, and our petro/coal usage starts going up again.
I'm no expert, but I believe the two are not contradictory. It's just a question of margins and the long view. Using numbers ISTR without citation (it's a slashdot tradition!,) our energy market is growing about 15% every decade. That suggests that switching to a corn based market would buy us a ~20 year dip until we got back to where we are right now.
Does that mean it's a bad thing? No: a 20 year dip is a long time, and fusion is break-even already at unacceptably short usage periods. And, hey, if there's something better than corn - and again, ISTR that the fuel gain for sugar cane in Brazil's current system is around 6.5x - then that's maybe more like a 50-60 year dip, and I feel confident that that's enough for us to get to truly sustainable energy (fusion doesn't need that much hydrogen, and even if we decided using the seas was a bad idea, mining hydrogen from the high upper atmosphere of Jupiter and Saturn wouldn't be that hard with today's technology.)
We're not that far off. We just need to buy some time. Is corn enough? I doubt it. But, I think sugar beets might be, and their arable ranges cover everything corn does and more; if they start producing our fuel, the corn industry might just try to switch, in the way that BP is trying to do at the moment.
Who knows?