Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet.
on
LHC Flips On Tomorrow
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This is really the big problem here: we like to imagine black holes as object that suck everything in, but that's only true of black holes that have star-level masses. A black hole sounds impressive until you realize it could weigh as much as a proton. At that scale, it's gravitational pull isn't really going to be big enough to be a big deal on the femtoscale. And at that collapsed size, there is no reason that it will go and contact anything it can suck in.
It's not even that. I can walk around and take photos of people in public areas for my own edification without requiring a license. But if I do the same thing for pay as an investigator for a third party, I may be required to obtain a license. The same logic applies here. MediaSentry is conducting itself as a private investigator so it needs a license to do so. The fact a private citizen can access the P2P has no bearing on MediaSentry's obligations.
"Nickel metal hydride batteries are benign. They can be fully recycled," says Ron Cogan, editor of the Green Car Journal. Toyota and Honda say that they will recycle dead batteries and that disposal will pose no toxic hazards. Toyota puts a phone number on each battery, and they pay a $200 "bounty" for each battery to help ensure that it will be properly recycled.
I agree. The TJX break-in that revealed the private information of hundreds of thousands of consumers was recent but also groundbreaking because it brought to the fore the importance of data security. Before TJX, IT budgets were probably being cut to make room for Sarbanne-Oxley compliance. After TJX got screwed, I'm sure IT security budgets went through the roof.
I think it's great that they are using liquid coolants for their system. Whenever I see a traditional server farm, I just can't help but think that air conditioners are so inefficient for the task of cooling computers. Not only do you have to cool the air, you also have to blow it around. The floors in some data centers are raised just to allow better airflow. And if you think about it, only the insides of the computers have to be cooled, not the entire freaking room. I hope this ushers in a new age of more power-efficient computing.
I also think it's pretty funny that a supercomputer is used to make movies.
Yeah. It sounds that the patent in question was meant to knock out a similarly over-broad patent that was asserted against Apple. It's not like Apple bought this guy out to keep him quiet; he probably knows a lot about the state of the art around the time personal audio devices were being invented.
This guy's patents would have expired before the iPod reached the market. It sounds like Apple used the inventor's testimony to establish the prior art in order to invalidate some patentee's claims.
The STS was an inherently dumb idea. Putting the crew capsule on the side of the cryogenic tanks would assure that it will be hit with ice chunks on every takeoff. There's also no way to provide an escape capsule or an launch escape system. We could provide Shuttle-like capabilities by having a small man-rated capsule dock with a larger station launched on a cheaper expendable booster. With every Shuttle launch costing $400 million, it's easier to drop the fiction that reusing the components is saving any money. Time to move to cheaper, more reliable boosters based on Apollo and proven Shuttle technology.
In Iraq, the US Air Force operates unmanned aerial vehicles to follow suspected insurgents. For instance, they will find a dude who just fired mortars and follow him around Iraq as he makes his getaway. He's unaware that he's being followed from the sky. Sometimes, he gets together with some other guys in a pickup truck with RPGs in the back. Then an Apache goes and blows that car up to hell. You can see videos like this at Liveleak.com. It's pretty fucking scary.
I definitely wouldn't use gait analysis alone to make a kill call, but I'd definitely send ground troops to a guy's house if I had enough confidence in the gait analysis.
Until the government starts following the guy who walks like has a two-inch lift in one shoe. Any sort of military intelligence operation hopefully has people with common sense.
"And from the same sources, the original Hubble "mirror flaw" occured because they shipped a Keyhole part by mistake. Not hard to believe since they built both systems. Left unsaid was how similar the Hubble/Keyhole airframes were."
The Hubble mirror flaw occurred due to an inaccurately-assembled null compensator that was used to guide the shaping of the mirror. The assembly was guided by the reflection of a laser beam off a mirrored circle at the end of a pole but instead the beam bounced off the raised rim over the mirror. The rim, it seems, was not completely non-reflective. Without wondering why the device had a 1.3 mm error, the engineers just shimmed it using a flattened washer. The Perkin Elmer engineers ignored other instruments telling them that the mirror was flawed.
The change is supposed to be retroactive, according to their blogger. Since Google is the party giving up a contractual right, they are barred from enforcing that right based on estoppel.
According to the article, "Federal laws also prohibit the export of state-of-the-art microprocessors from the United States to China, meaning that microchips shipped to China are usually a few generations behind the newest ones in the West." Thus, a native Chinese microprocessor project does not need to be state-of-the-art. It just has to be good enough to compete with the older stuff from Intel and AMD. Once the Chinese build up their own knowledge base in microprocessor design, then nationalism and Communism will help foist it upon their populace as they demand computers. It'll be interesting to see how this dovetails with any effort to create Red Flag Linux to move away from the Wintel-opoly.
Dude. The license users grant to Google are for the "sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services." The term "promote" concerns me because I don't want the Facebook photos I upload to be used in a Google ad campaign, but it's not like Google can run off and publish all of my submissions to Wikipedia for its own profit.
The FDA regime tests a sample of cows over 36 months, at which time the test will work, and all cows that flop. (Cows that cannot get up on their own and just fall the floor twitching, to put it lightly, are likely to have mad cow disease.)
The 100% testing proposed by the company would give false assurances that their cattle was safe, and would be very expensive to do so. Basically, they want to scam the foreign countries that desire assurances that US cattle was safe. If they were allowed to do so, then all US manufacturers would have to perform this ineffective and expensive test on all their cattle as well. Then someone will get sick from CJD from "tested" US cattle and then US cattle will be forever off limits to the rest of the world (if our tests don't even work....)
Credit cards can be insecure but if someone uses my credit card, I'm protected by the company. I never use debit cards or direct withdrawal to pay my bills online. If there is a dispute, I can always challenge it and I don't risk having my bank account overdrawn. The only exception is my student loan: the servicer provides an interest rate discount for direct deposit; the servicer is well-known and reputable so that's the only exception.
The Iraq War has cost $1 trillion SO FAR. It will cost $3 trillion before it ends. Imagine if only we spent that money researching alternative fuels five years ago. We would have been on the path energy independence from foreign sources!!!
Cigarette taxes bring in revenue but if no one bought cigarettes anymore and no tax was being collected, the advocates of the cigarette tax are going to be happy.
The economy did not fall on its ass because of progressive taxation. What happened was that the hot shots on Wall Street were engaging in a ridiculous business enterprise and the deregulation that conservatives fawn over stopped anyone from catching it on time. Progressive taxation had nothing to do with anything.
Moreover, your rant against taxes is retarded. Conservative neo-cons in the Bush Administration went for a little trip in Iraq that cost three trillion dollars. Now we have a budget deficit of $500 billion next year, and our national debt tripled to $9 trillion under the Bush Administration. This debt was incurred by the American people--and if you are a conservative, you probably supported it. The American people allowed this to happen, and now the tab has to be paid. Who are you going to tax if not the rich? The poor? Try squeezing more blood from a stone--that's a good idea.
Taxing cigarettes is not meant to bring in more revenue. It's meant to reduce cigarette smoking, which places a huge burden on the public health system. You want to talk about pointless orthodoxy, then let's focus on the conservative war against marijuana and other drugs. If you like smoking so much, why don't you legalize marijuana and save on the billions we've spent on the war on drugs? It'd also free up more prison space.
Even if this were true, the World Trade Center Towers were also the first buildings to be hit by a large passenger jet loaded with jet fuel (enough to fly from Boston to California) at over 500 mph. The B-25 that collided with the Empire State Building had a maximum takeoff weight of 41,800 lb and a 230 mph cruising speed. The 757 has a maximum takeoff weight of 255,000 lb and 530 mph cruising speed. Yeah--six times more weight and over double the velocity. If you count kinetic energy alone (1/2mv^2) then that's twelve times more energy. You'd also have to take into account the extra chemical energy carried by all the jet fuel on board the 757.
Also, WTC1 and 2 were built with the weight-bearing structure on the outside, and this was severely defeated by the airplanes striking and penetrating the building. Regular skyscrapers have the skeleton built into it. The fire-extinguishing systems were also compromised when they were severed by the jet.
So, yeah, saying that the WTC towers were the only ones to collapse due to fire is not saying much. Getting hit by a huge passenger jet loaded with fuel at high speeds is kind of a big distinction that explains the difference neatly.
I agree 100% with you on the lies propagated by the "Truthers." They keep arguing that 1 and 2 World Trade Center "fell into their own footprints" but that's not true. Lots of debris from the falling towers smashed into surrounding structures and caused massive damage. They were finding body parts from the passengers on the hijacked planes in buildings around the Towers (including a pair of a flight attendant's hands that were still plasticuffed together by the hijackers).
What did the Truthers expect--for the towers to keel over and fall sideways? People saw airplanes hit the towers, which then burned for a while before collapsing. The towers were hit at about the 100 floor. Did they expect the top of the building to fall over?
More to the point, the Towers very clearly fell from the top down. Imagine there were well-timed explosives placed in the building to destroy them perfectly. The explosives would have to be placed near the top above the point of collision with the jets because that's where the collapse began. After a jet loaded with fuel slammed in the building at hundreds of miles an hour and burned for an hour, how did the explosives still manage to go off so perfectly? The burning jet fuel would have set off the explosives or burned them away. The heat would have at least interfered with the electronics and wiring needed to trigger the demolition explosives.
Nah. Don't think about the details. You're a sheep if you ever believe the government!
The "good old days" were freaking terrifying. Children went to the pool and ended up in an iron lung for the rest of their lives. You'd eat beef, get TB from the cow, and die. A factory worker would stub his toe, get an abscess, and then die. Little kids were forced to work in mines and sweatshops. No one who lived in the good old days can honesty say they preferred it back then.
I took a photo of an outside Christmas display once and a security guard asked me to hand over the camera so he could delete the images. I dropped the camera into my pants and said, go and get it. He told me to "get the fuck out" of their property but I was on the sidewalk outside his boundary, which I pointed out to him. At that point, he walked away cursing at me. I took a photo of him walking away, and then I ran the heck away from there.
Slashdot Mirror
This is really the big problem here: we like to imagine black holes as object that suck everything in, but that's only true of black holes that have star-level masses. A black hole sounds impressive until you realize it could weigh as much as a proton. At that scale, it's gravitational pull isn't really going to be big enough to be a big deal on the femtoscale. And at that collapsed size, there is no reason that it will go and contact anything it can suck in.
It's not even that. I can walk around and take photos of people in public areas for my own edification without requiring a license. But if I do the same thing for pay as an investigator for a third party, I may be required to obtain a license. The same logic applies here. MediaSentry is conducting itself as a private investigator so it needs a license to do so. The fact a private citizen can access the P2P has no bearing on MediaSentry's obligations.
Toyota claims that
I agree. The TJX break-in that revealed the private information of hundreds of thousands of consumers was recent but also groundbreaking because it brought to the fore the importance of data security. Before TJX, IT budgets were probably being cut to make room for Sarbanne-Oxley compliance. After TJX got screwed, I'm sure IT security budgets went through the roof.
I think it's great that they are using liquid coolants for their system. Whenever I see a traditional server farm, I just can't help but think that air conditioners are so inefficient for the task of cooling computers. Not only do you have to cool the air, you also have to blow it around. The floors in some data centers are raised just to allow better airflow. And if you think about it, only the insides of the computers have to be cooled, not the entire freaking room. I hope this ushers in a new age of more power-efficient computing.
I also think it's pretty funny that a supercomputer is used to make movies.
Yeah. It sounds that the patent in question was meant to knock out a similarly over-broad patent that was asserted against Apple. It's not like Apple bought this guy out to keep him quiet; he probably knows a lot about the state of the art around the time personal audio devices were being invented.
This guy's patents would have expired before the iPod reached the market. It sounds like Apple used the inventor's testimony to establish the prior art in order to invalidate some patentee's claims.
The STS was an inherently dumb idea. Putting the crew capsule on the side of the cryogenic tanks would assure that it will be hit with ice chunks on every takeoff. There's also no way to provide an escape capsule or an launch escape system. We could provide Shuttle-like capabilities by having a small man-rated capsule dock with a larger station launched on a cheaper expendable booster. With every Shuttle launch costing $400 million, it's easier to drop the fiction that reusing the components is saving any money. Time to move to cheaper, more reliable boosters based on Apollo and proven Shuttle technology.
In Iraq, the US Air Force operates unmanned aerial vehicles to follow suspected insurgents. For instance, they will find a dude who just fired mortars and follow him around Iraq as he makes his getaway. He's unaware that he's being followed from the sky. Sometimes, he gets together with some other guys in a pickup truck with RPGs in the back. Then an Apache goes and blows that car up to hell. You can see videos like this at Liveleak.com. It's pretty fucking scary.
I definitely wouldn't use gait analysis alone to make a kill call, but I'd definitely send ground troops to a guy's house if I had enough confidence in the gait analysis.
Until the government starts following the guy who walks like has a two-inch lift in one shoe. Any sort of military intelligence operation hopefully has people with common sense.
"And from the same sources, the original Hubble "mirror flaw" occured because they shipped a Keyhole part by mistake. Not hard to believe since they built both systems. Left unsaid was how similar the Hubble/Keyhole airframes were."
The Hubble mirror flaw occurred due to an inaccurately-assembled null compensator that was used to guide the shaping of the mirror. The assembly was guided by the reflection of a laser beam off a mirrored circle at the end of a pole but instead the beam bounced off the raised rim over the mirror. The rim, it seems, was not completely non-reflective. Without wondering why the device had a 1.3 mm error, the engineers just shimmed it using a flattened washer. The Perkin Elmer engineers ignored other instruments telling them that the mirror was flawed.
The change is supposed to be retroactive, according to their blogger. Since Google is the party giving up a contractual right, they are barred from enforcing that right based on estoppel.
According to the article, "Federal laws also prohibit the export of state-of-the-art microprocessors from the United States to China, meaning that microchips shipped to China are usually a few generations behind the newest ones in the West." Thus, a native Chinese microprocessor project does not need to be state-of-the-art. It just has to be good enough to compete with the older stuff from Intel and AMD. Once the Chinese build up their own knowledge base in microprocessor design, then nationalism and Communism will help foist it upon their populace as they demand computers. It'll be interesting to see how this dovetails with any effort to create Red Flag Linux to move away from the Wintel-opoly.
Dude. The license users grant to Google are for the "sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services." The term "promote" concerns me because I don't want the Facebook photos I upload to be used in a Google ad campaign, but it's not like Google can run off and publish all of my submissions to Wikipedia for its own profit.
The FDA regime tests a sample of cows over 36 months, at which time the test will work, and all cows that flop. (Cows that cannot get up on their own and just fall the floor twitching, to put it lightly, are likely to have mad cow disease.)
The 100% testing proposed by the company would give false assurances that their cattle was safe, and would be very expensive to do so. Basically, they want to scam the foreign countries that desire assurances that US cattle was safe. If they were allowed to do so, then all US manufacturers would have to perform this ineffective and expensive test on all their cattle as well. Then someone will get sick from CJD from "tested" US cattle and then US cattle will be forever off limits to the rest of the world (if our tests don't even work....)
Credit cards can be insecure but if someone uses my credit card, I'm protected by the company. I never use debit cards or direct withdrawal to pay my bills online. If there is a dispute, I can always challenge it and I don't risk having my bank account overdrawn. The only exception is my student loan: the servicer provides an interest rate discount for direct deposit; the servicer is well-known and reputable so that's the only exception.
The Iraq War has cost $1 trillion SO FAR. It will cost $3 trillion before it ends. Imagine if only we spent that money researching alternative fuels five years ago. We would have been on the path energy independence from foreign sources!!!
Cigarette taxes bring in revenue but if no one bought cigarettes anymore and no tax was being collected, the advocates of the cigarette tax are going to be happy.
The economy did not fall on its ass because of progressive taxation. What happened was that the hot shots on Wall Street were engaging in a ridiculous business enterprise and the deregulation that conservatives fawn over stopped anyone from catching it on time. Progressive taxation had nothing to do with anything.
Moreover, your rant against taxes is retarded. Conservative neo-cons in the Bush Administration went for a little trip in Iraq that cost three trillion dollars. Now we have a budget deficit of $500 billion next year, and our national debt tripled to $9 trillion under the Bush Administration. This debt was incurred by the American people--and if you are a conservative, you probably supported it. The American people allowed this to happen, and now the tab has to be paid. Who are you going to tax if not the rich? The poor? Try squeezing more blood from a stone--that's a good idea.
Taxing cigarettes is not meant to bring in more revenue. It's meant to reduce cigarette smoking, which places a huge burden on the public health system. You want to talk about pointless orthodoxy, then let's focus on the conservative war against marijuana and other drugs. If you like smoking so much, why don't you legalize marijuana and save on the billions we've spent on the war on drugs? It'd also free up more prison space.
In short, your post was stupid.
Even if this were true, the World Trade Center Towers were also the first buildings to be hit by a large passenger jet loaded with jet fuel (enough to fly from Boston to California) at over 500 mph. The B-25 that collided with the Empire State Building had a maximum takeoff weight of 41,800 lb and a 230 mph cruising speed. The 757 has a maximum takeoff weight of 255,000 lb and 530 mph cruising speed. Yeah--six times more weight and over double the velocity. If you count kinetic energy alone (1/2mv^2) then that's twelve times more energy. You'd also have to take into account the extra chemical energy carried by all the jet fuel on board the 757.
Also, WTC1 and 2 were built with the weight-bearing structure on the outside, and this was severely defeated by the airplanes striking and penetrating the building. Regular skyscrapers have the skeleton built into it. The fire-extinguishing systems were also compromised when they were severed by the jet.
So, yeah, saying that the WTC towers were the only ones to collapse due to fire is not saying much. Getting hit by a huge passenger jet loaded with fuel at high speeds is kind of a big distinction that explains the difference neatly.
I agree 100% with you on the lies propagated by the "Truthers." They keep arguing that 1 and 2 World Trade Center "fell into their own footprints" but that's not true. Lots of debris from the falling towers smashed into surrounding structures and caused massive damage. They were finding body parts from the passengers on the hijacked planes in buildings around the Towers (including a pair of a flight attendant's hands that were still plasticuffed together by the hijackers).
What did the Truthers expect--for the towers to keel over and fall sideways? People saw airplanes hit the towers, which then burned for a while before collapsing. The towers were hit at about the 100 floor. Did they expect the top of the building to fall over?
More to the point, the Towers very clearly fell from the top down. Imagine there were well-timed explosives placed in the building to destroy them perfectly. The explosives would have to be placed near the top above the point of collision with the jets because that's where the collapse began. After a jet loaded with fuel slammed in the building at hundreds of miles an hour and burned for an hour, how did the explosives still manage to go off so perfectly? The burning jet fuel would have set off the explosives or burned them away. The heat would have at least interfered with the electronics and wiring needed to trigger the demolition explosives.
Nah. Don't think about the details. You're a sheep if you ever believe the government!
The "good old days" were freaking terrifying. Children went to the pool and ended up in an iron lung for the rest of their lives. You'd eat beef, get TB from the cow, and die. A factory worker would stub his toe, get an abscess, and then die. Little kids were forced to work in mines and sweatshops. No one who lived in the good old days can honesty say they preferred it back then.
Yeah. All the milk crates I've ever seen said that they were the property of the milk company and should be returned to them.
It is immaterial whether or not something is a crime if no one is going to bother enforcing it. See, the Constitution in the hands of Bush.
I took a photo of an outside Christmas display once and a security guard asked me to hand over the camera so he could delete the images. I dropped the camera into my pants and said, go and get it. He told me to "get the fuck out" of their property but I was on the sidewalk outside his boundary, which I pointed out to him. At that point, he walked away cursing at me. I took a photo of him walking away, and then I ran the heck away from there.
I'm kind of an asshole.
The law was different back then. Intellectual property protections are now much, much stronger in the United States.