I've got to admit that when I read that they were looking to build the world's largest Tesla Coils, I was wondering how loud the music they would be playing on them would be.
And like earlier commenters, I think they're missing out on too many variables as to how lightning accomplishes what they're trying to duplicate in order for this endeavor to be of any practical use or gain any substantial further useful knowledge.
A change in bias is actually the norm for SCOTUS Justices. Most gain a more Liberal interpretation the longer that they serve.
This would seem to be a logical change to be expected from them performing their duties properly. They are supposed to be interpreting cases based on the Constitution and the mindset of that document's authors.
Given that the mindset of the Founding Fathers of the USA and the rights they attempted to set forth for the people that would be governed, they were very Liberal for the time (one could even call them Radicals considering that they had just gone through a bloody revolution). Going through the Founding Father's other writings to solidify an image of their mindset, shows them to be even more Liberal than their general historic portrayal.
Looking at that, on the basis of the principles of resolving cognitive dissonance in Psychology, a SCOTUS Justice that properly preforms their duties becoming more Liberal in their interpretations is to be expected.
This leads one to wonder why the Conservative appointees from the Reagan-era onwards are mostly acting as exceptions to this norm.
Right now it's probably police/gov't doing their violation of the 4th amendment.
In the future, it could be anybody sticking a tracker on you, since even if the government starts putting 'Property of U.S. government' on it, so could anyone else. It's not like you know the difference. This is also a nice way for criminals to disguise a bomb now.
So, take that last one to heart now. If you find one of these things, call 911 and tell them "I found a suspicious black box planted on my vehicle. I don't know what it is or who put it there. I'm scared it might be a bomb, please send the bomb squad."
The bomb squad getting deployed always causes lots of attention and gets on the news. It's also expensive for them to deploy. Suddenly, warantless GPS tracker deployment will start looking much less attractive to the police/gov't with the bad publicity and the actual expenses racking up.
Wouldn't this be solved by building a ring ship with artificial gravity?
Inevitably, we have a comment from the "didn't RTFA crowd" (since that's generally the majority of/. readers for the past ~7 years), though at least this one isn't as bad as most. FTFA:
"The vision loss seems to be due to a swelling of the optic nerve, a condition similar to a disease on Earth called pseudotumor cerebri, which mostly afflicts heavy women. Nobody knows why pseudotumor cerebri occurs... Doctors believe the redistribution of cerebral spinal fluid in weightlessness is to blame, though that doesn't fully explain the situation."
It is extraordinarily unlikely that artificial gravity will help given that they really don't know exactly what's causing this. Especially since this is similar to a condition experienced by people who could be (euphemistically speaking) considered to be living under conditions of "slightly higher than average gravity".
If this were a permanent change, one would wonder why all those Southeast Asian people who consume white rice regularly don't end up with high LDL counts counts and subsequently a high per-capita rate of heart attacks.
Is this a short-lived change, like until the affected cells undergo Mitosis again (~30 mins.), or is there another food in tyhese people's diets that counteracts this genetic change?
Since you are "one of the engineers that run the DNS at Comcast", can you answer a question is not answered by the FAQ that you have pointed everyone to:
Will your DNS servers running DNSSEC be implementing NSEC3 to regain some of the "security through obscurity" lost in the DNSSEC protocol?
Yes, keeping the fire ants in "more of a natural check" is the most that could be accomplished by the insects that are being introduced this time.
According to TFA, this is the 4th phorid species introduced to Texas. The 1st was released in 1999.
The article notes there are 23 known phorid species. Even those, with native pathogens, only keep South American fire ant populations "controlled".
When you've seen pictures of the 5 to 6 foot tall fire ant nests that can occasionally spring up in South America (where these have managed to cross paths with expanding cattle farms, there are cases of cows being killed by attacks from the ants when the cow in question brushes up against the nest), you'll probably be inclined to indulge the introduction of another "control" every now and then...
The whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag is obviously from someone who has neither RTFA nor knows how bad fire ant populations can get.
Er, why would you want to stop a good thing from happening?
With the current SciFi channel changing their name to Syfy, there's a chance that someone who wants to make a real science fiction channel could finally come along and use the name 'SciFi'. You know, a channel that wouldn't air pro-wrestling, "reality" shows, and an unending stream of movies featuring giant snakes...
The question of whether these cells can be re-differentiated without using a virus to reprogram the cells is an important question yet to be answered from this research.
There is another important question to be addressed with this technique, however.
The article mentions cancer as a side effect for virus-engineered stem cells and immune rejection for stem cells from other people.
Would this technique manage to create stem cell-derived new cells without their own set of side effects?
Cancer is assumed as a side effect of the virus-engineered stem cells only. Since any tissue being made from converted stem cells is put through accelerated growth, what safeguards are there against tumor growth (cancerous or non-cancerous) with this new technique?
I ask this since I read another article noted tumor growth at stem-cell graft sites is common. That article didn't note whether these cases were from virus-engineered stem cells or not.
At the same time, it makes me wonder even more if the Major's original organic body may in fact have been male, with little to no adaptation discomfort after the procedure...
If you read the original manga and got the pages to fill in the abridged portions from the English version, then you wouldn't wonder about it. The Major was originally female.
It's one of many themes about what defines our humanity amidst the cybernetic changes that the manga successfully explores (albeit circuitously in many cases) where all of the animated versions failed miserably (as in the original manga is not "hyper-complicated trash").
The specific sequence for this is one in which the Major is enjoying some virtual vacation time with two female friends. Batou jumps into the Major's head to inform her about developments of an op-in-progress.
The abridged version has the Major and her two friends enjoying time on a boat on the water. When Batou jumps in, the Major berates him for the serious interruption and back in the real world he looks appropriately beaten-down.
In the un-abridged version, the Major and her two friends have moved into full-on girl-on-girl action. Batou jumps into the Major's head in the middle of this and almost loses his real-world lunch since the sensations are ones that a guy shouldn't be feeling and are rejected by his brain.
And, oh yeah, the Major chews out Batou because he was told not to jump into her head during downtime. Back in the real world, Batou looks appropriately beaten down.
I guess it comes down to what we can learn versus the risks. I think the one thing we might be able to learn from h. neanderthalensis is how we as a species look to an outside observer. Do we really want them to look us in the eyes and tell us what they see?
Assuming they are cognitively capable of expressing an opinion as an outside observer, what horrible thing could they say about us that hasn't already been said about us by us (and is for a certain percentage of the population, depending upon what is said, absolutely true)?
So, yes, I would be interested in knowing how an outside observer views us. It may also prove of some use in girding us for reactions from an intelligent alien species, should we ever come across any.
I would also have to say that a living example of the genome would confirm information about its capabilities, where we could only ever be "almost certain" about a dead one. Besides, the technology on reading a genome and determining capabilities in that manner is much further away than that of creating a living example and seeing what it really is capable of doing.
Of course, all of this is coming from someone who will have no responsibilities as to the care of the life that is created by this experiment. The opinion of those who will have to change the kid's diapers carries alot more weight than mine does.
Thats the point, who says? Who says Einstein and Newton want to be cloned?
Well, since nothing of their possible respective opinions on the matter is recorded, the only way we'll ever know the answer is to ask them.
Considering that we have no reliable method for communicating with the dead, the only way we can ask whether or not to they would want to be is to clone them.
Nice Catch-22 for when cloning individual human beings is a reliable, proven technology. Also something for consideration since the technology isn't too far off, people should consider putting cloning clauses in their wills, assuming there's reason to believe that someone would actually want to clone you.
the idea that fingerprints are unique is stupid, especially for anyone who is actually in law enforcement or forensics. you need 12 count it TWELVE different points of matching to even get a fingerprint submitted for evidence. so if this odor is just as effective that means its pretty much a scare tactic as much as "we got your fingerprints at the scene!" is
I wouldn't call it stupid, just incorrect when all possibilities are tried.
Aside from genetically-identical twins, there are a rare few known cases where people do have matching fingerprints (it's been awhile since I read the article but I seem to recall a resolution of around a thousand comparison points in one such case). However, with the incredibly low occurrence rate for this duplication, fingerprints still reign as the current top method for human identity verification (DNA matching takes alot more time and still isn't 100% accurate).
The article and summary are misleading, as well. This study was only performed on mice, not humans. There is additional doubt introduced from the lack of description of the experimental procedure. If the mice weren't separated long enough after the diet change, then a sufficient amount of the recognized scent may have remained for the other mice to make correct identifications.
The comment about dogs in the summary may be incorrect as well, but I don't really know. I have never read about any studies that tried to have a dog track a person from a previous scent marker after they've undergone a radical diet change and sufficient time for the body to remove the chemical traces of the old diet. They usually give dogs an item that someone has used recently in order to track them by scent.
I do know two things from my personal experiences as a person with a strong sense of smell:
1. In favor of the results that the articles puts forward as 'fact' - without perfumes, colognes, other scented body products or even any noticeable sweat; a woman definitely smells different than a man.
2. Disagreeing with the postulate from the results of the study - How best to put this delicately? The scent of certain subsets of people that stereotypically consume specific diets does indeed match scents from those diets when their scent becomes strong enough.
Of course, I'm not a canine, so regardless of my personal experience, there may indeed be elements of a person's scent that are as unique as their DNA. Actually, if a dog's sense of smell is advanced enough, their olfactory processing could be doing on-the-fly DNA matching. Though, I've never seen someone even postulate a study that could confirm that little bit of information.
I do agree with a couple of the other comments so far. This news has enough merit to be under a section other than Idle.
It gets down to philosophical differences about economic value and the role of government. According to one point of view, the government should above all do no harm to any business. If a business wants to sell government weather data, the government ought to make it hard for individuals to get the data directly. By the same token, if a private company wants to provide network services in an area, the government has no business providing better or cheaper services.
That is one point of view regarding government, but there are others.
In this case I would say that the more relevant point of view is this: A government's purpose is to use the resources available to it to provide as best as it can for its citizens.
That is exactly what this city government was doing. The first attempt to do so included its corporate citizens, an attempt to utilize and provide for a corporate citizen while providing for the normal citizens as well. The corporate citizen decided against benefiting from that help.
The government moved on with a plan to benefit all the other citizens, and now the corporate citizen is trying to stop the government for providing for any of its citizens.
And that is where the corporate citizen is completely in the wrong. Not only did it opt out of getting greater benefits before, but it could still lease bandwidth in the new system to remain competitive. Their profits won't be as high as if there were no competition on the fiber network, but they can still make a profit. Instead, they want to interfere with the proper role of government so they can maintain their profits (or expand them) at the cost of the other citizens.
From this point of view, the corporate citizen is clearly doing wrong to both the government and the citizens that that government is responsible for. In that point of view, the corporate citizen should be removed from where it can do further harm to that government and its other citizens (much like how we send people to prison when they assault other people).
Hopefully, the courts will also see things from this point of view and act appropriately.
Have any of the news articles made it clear who the 3 kids in the story are? TFA makes it clear that the dead 3 year-old was Davidson's daughter, but they keep calling the older girl "a teenage girl" and the infant "a 8 month-old boy" and such. Since they aren't attaching a family relationship to Davidson, I'm left wondering who they are and what their involvement is.
Why would an unrelated teenage girl and an infant be with a guy about to kill himself and his family? What else was going on here besides a jailbreak and a murder-suicide?
TFA notes that court documents do not identify his girlfriend/wife, just note that he has one in order to shield her from repercussions from his crimes.
TFA also notes that he has three children, but does not identify them. Parse this information and you should have all your answers.
That "makemake" is from Japanese or some other language... and that the guy who named it wasn't really just a complete loser.
Do we need to start telling people to RTFS (Read the Fucking Summary) as well as the usual RTFA now?
C/P directly from the Summary: "The object was referred to by the team of discoverers by the codename Easterbunny, and the name Makemake comes from the creation deity of Easter Island, in accordance with IAU rules on naming Kuiper belt objects."
Real abuse of power is far more mundane, and as such, is something we can actually do something about. It's a GOOD thing that there is no Illuminati to contend with.
Personally, I would prefer if there was an Illuminati to contend with over the manipulations and abuses of power.
Even a very-well hidden criminal/illegal organization that subtly manipulated many other organizations to perform counter-productive/destructive/disruptive acts is easier to combat than a large number of scattered small groups performing c-p/d/d acts for their personal gain. That single group controlling all the others will eventually make a slip that exposes them to be chipped away until they fall or smashed outright, leaving all the organizations they controlled without their direction and therefore unable to perform the acts they did before. Even if the large number of small scattered groups working for their own gain only require 1/10th the vigilance and action to take down as the Illuminati-esque subtle manipulator group, there will still be many more than 10 of them, and therefore require much more effort in order to stop them from causing harm.
Put more simply, if the controller of a thousand semi-autonomous robots is exposed, it is simpler to take out the controller and render the robots relatively harmless then it is to make an ad-hoc cluster of a million Brazilian wandering spiders equally harmless.
Well, I own a Wii and I can tell you that the responsiveness of the Wiimote depends greatly upon the programming of the game.
For instance in the Boxing mini-game of WiiSports, when I first got the system and got together with some friends, I tried doing actual punches with it (jabs, straights, crosses, and hooks) and got almost no response. Somebody else there who already knew what the game responded to just flicked the controls one way or another as needed and handed everybody their butts.
A very small number of games have great responsiveness, but most are poor to mediocre. Even with mediocre responsiveness it can handle quick thrusts and parries though (as demonstrated to me in SoulCalibur Legends), but it's not enough to really make you feel totally in control of things.
This may be why so few games have been aimed at taking full advantage of the Wii's functionality (or any advantage for that matter). It appears to be very difficult to program a game to get the most out of the Wiimote.
However, I still don't see it as impossible to make a good sword/lightsaber game for the Wii. It does require two things, though: 1. The programming skill to get the most out of the Wiimote 2. Training (penalizing) the player to overcome the limitations of the Wiimote. By this I mean the suggestions of using the rumble feature to signify when the blade has hit something that would make it stop. Then having the virtual blade fall away in the direction the Wiimote continues if the player doesn't stop. After this lets the opponent's blade skim along the player's blade and into the player enough times, the player will learn to respond to the feedback when making their motions.
Not much chance of seeing that actually happen with the way things are going right now, though...
Then I'm all for that. If this can miraculously find what I'm actually looking for (unlike the mountains of garbage that I have to sift through when I put a query into a search engine these days), then I would love this thing enough to actually kill for it (not kidding or exaggerating in any way).
Somehow, I doubt that it's going to live up to that, however.
The rest of it just sounds like bloatware creeping into an otherwise good browser.
Maybe they should shoot for more useful goals. Things like 100% Acid3 score, selective javascript control, and sandboxing Flash or other resource-intensive web technologies.
Actually, that won't work in the US. We have something known as the 5th amendment to the Constitution. I think this is the relevant part: "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself".
It goes like this:
Lawyer: Your honor, my client wishes to not take the stand based on the rights granted to him under the 5th amendment. Evidence gathered there could be damaging in either this trial or another unspecified one, I cannot reveal which as that information goes against the spirit of the protections from the 5th amendment.
So, the person on trial may be guilty of something, but it may not be what they're actually on trial for, and it may be a much lesser crime, but they still don't want to get themselves incriminated for that if they can avoid it.
As for the other kinds of lawyers, how does it get rid of the RIAA lawyers or other frivilous lawsuits which take up massive amounts of taxpayer money? How does it stop the lawyers whose job as a corporate attorney is to keep sending out Motions to Delay in order to keep something from getting to court or stop them having to pay when a judgement goes against them?
Slashdot Mirror
I've got to admit that when I read that they were looking to build the world's largest Tesla Coils, I was wondering how loud the music they would be playing on them would be.
The show from playing the Dr. Who theme with Tesla coils that huge would be unbelievable.
And like earlier commenters, I think they're missing out on too many variables as to how lightning accomplishes what they're trying to duplicate in order for this endeavor to be of any practical use or gain any substantial further useful knowledge.
A change in bias is actually the norm for SCOTUS Justices. Most gain a more Liberal interpretation the longer that they serve.
This would seem to be a logical change to be expected from them performing their duties properly. They are supposed to be interpreting cases based on the Constitution and the mindset of that document's authors.
Given that the mindset of the Founding Fathers of the USA and the rights they attempted to set forth for the people that would be governed, they were very Liberal for the time (one could even call them Radicals considering that they had just gone through a bloody revolution). Going through the Founding Father's other writings to solidify an image of their mindset, shows them to be even more Liberal than their general historic portrayal.
Looking at that, on the basis of the principles of resolving cognitive dissonance in Psychology, a SCOTUS Justice that properly preforms their duties becoming more Liberal in their interpretations is to be expected.
This leads one to wonder why the Conservative appointees from the Reagan-era onwards are mostly acting as exceptions to this norm.
Don't take it off.
Right now it's probably police/gov't doing their violation of the 4th amendment.
In the future, it could be anybody sticking a tracker on you, since even if the government starts putting 'Property of U.S. government' on it, so could anyone else. It's not like you know the difference. This is also a nice way for criminals to disguise a bomb now.
So, take that last one to heart now. If you find one of these things, call 911 and tell them "I found a suspicious black box planted on my vehicle. I don't know what it is or who put it there. I'm scared it might be a bomb, please send the bomb squad."
The bomb squad getting deployed always causes lots of attention and gets on the news. It's also expensive for them to deploy. Suddenly, warantless GPS tracker deployment will start looking much less attractive to the police/gov't with the bad publicity and the actual expenses racking up.
Wouldn't this be solved by building a ring ship with artificial gravity?
Inevitably, we have a comment from the "didn't RTFA crowd" (since that's generally the majority of /. readers for the past ~7 years), though at least this one isn't as bad as most. FTFA:
"The vision loss seems to be due to a swelling of the optic nerve, a condition similar to a disease on Earth called pseudotumor cerebri, which mostly afflicts heavy women. Nobody knows why pseudotumor cerebri occurs ... Doctors believe the redistribution of cerebral spinal fluid in weightlessness is to blame, though that doesn't fully explain the situation."
It is extraordinarily unlikely that artificial gravity will help given that they really don't know exactly what's causing this. Especially since this is similar to a condition experienced by people who could be (euphemistically speaking) considered to be living under conditions of "slightly higher than average gravity".
How long do these changes last?
If this were a permanent change, one would wonder why all those Southeast Asian people who consume white rice regularly don't end up with high LDL counts counts and subsequently a high per-capita rate of heart attacks.
Is this a short-lived change, like until the affected cells undergo Mitosis again (~30 mins.), or is there another food in tyhese people's diets that counteracts this genetic change?
Since you are "one of the engineers that run the DNS at Comcast", can you answer a question is not answered by the FAQ that you have pointed everyone to:
Will your DNS servers running DNSSEC be implementing NSEC3 to regain some of the "security through obscurity" lost in the DNSSEC protocol?
Yes, keeping the fire ants in "more of a natural check" is the most that could be accomplished by the insects that are being introduced this time.
According to TFA, this is the 4th phorid species introduced to Texas. The 1st was released in 1999.
The article notes there are 23 known phorid species. Even those, with native pathogens, only keep South American fire ant populations "controlled".
When you've seen pictures of the 5 to 6 foot tall fire ant nests that can occasionally spring up in South America (where these have managed to cross paths with expanding cattle farms, there are cases of cows being killed by attacks from the ants when the cow in question brushes up against the nest), you'll probably be inclined to indulge the introduction of another "control" every now and then...
The whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag is obviously from someone who has neither RTFA nor knows how bad fire ant populations can get.
Er, why would you want to stop a good thing from happening?
With the current SciFi channel changing their name to Syfy, there's a chance that someone who wants to make a real science fiction channel could finally come along and use the name 'SciFi'. You know, a channel that wouldn't air pro-wrestling, "reality" shows, and an unending stream of movies featuring giant snakes...
The question of whether these cells can be re-differentiated without using a virus to reprogram the cells is an important question yet to be answered from this research.
There is another important question to be addressed with this technique, however.
The article mentions cancer as a side effect for virus-engineered stem cells and immune rejection for stem cells from other people.
Would this technique manage to create stem cell-derived new cells without their own set of side effects?
Cancer is assumed as a side effect of the virus-engineered stem cells only. Since any tissue being made from converted stem cells is put through accelerated growth, what safeguards are there against tumor growth (cancerous or non-cancerous) with this new technique?
I ask this since I read another article noted tumor growth at stem-cell graft sites is common. That article didn't note whether these cases were from virus-engineered stem cells or not.
At the same time, it makes me wonder even more if the Major's original organic body may in fact have been male, with little to no adaptation discomfort after the procedure...
If you read the original manga and got the pages to fill in the abridged portions from the English version, then you wouldn't wonder about it. The Major was originally female.
It's one of many themes about what defines our humanity amidst the cybernetic changes that the manga successfully explores (albeit circuitously in many cases) where all of the animated versions failed miserably (as in the original manga is not "hyper-complicated trash").
The specific sequence for this is one in which the Major is enjoying some virtual vacation time with two female friends. Batou jumps into the Major's head to inform her about developments of an op-in-progress.
The abridged version has the Major and her two friends enjoying time on a boat on the water. When Batou jumps in, the Major berates him for the serious interruption and back in the real world he looks appropriately beaten-down.
In the un-abridged version, the Major and her two friends have moved into full-on girl-on-girl action. Batou jumps into the Major's head in the middle of this and almost loses his real-world lunch since the sensations are ones that a guy shouldn't be feeling and are rejected by his brain.
And, oh yeah, the Major chews out Batou because he was told not to jump into her head during downtime. Back in the real world, Batou looks appropriately beaten down.
I guess it comes down to what we can learn versus the risks. I think the one thing we might be able to learn from h. neanderthalensis is how we as a species look to an outside observer. Do we really want them to look us in the eyes and tell us what they see?
Assuming they are cognitively capable of expressing an opinion as an outside observer, what horrible thing could they say about us that hasn't already been said about us by us (and is for a certain percentage of the population, depending upon what is said, absolutely true)?
So, yes, I would be interested in knowing how an outside observer views us. It may also prove of some use in girding us for reactions from an intelligent alien species, should we ever come across any.
I would also have to say that a living example of the genome would confirm information about its capabilities, where we could only ever be "almost certain" about a dead one. Besides, the technology on reading a genome and determining capabilities in that manner is much further away than that of creating a living example and seeing what it really is capable of doing.
Of course, all of this is coming from someone who will have no responsibilities as to the care of the life that is created by this experiment. The opinion of those who will have to change the kid's diapers carries alot more weight than mine does.
Thats the point, who says? Who says Einstein and Newton want to be cloned?
Well, since nothing of their possible respective opinions on the matter is recorded, the only way we'll ever know the answer is to ask them.
Considering that we have no reliable method for communicating with the dead, the only way we can ask whether or not to they would want to be is to clone them.
Nice Catch-22 for when cloning individual human beings is a reliable, proven technology. Also something for consideration since the technology isn't too far off, people should consider putting cloning clauses in their wills, assuming there's reason to believe that someone would actually want to clone you.
Or do you just like, gouge your opponents eyes out with your bare hands and bite their ears off?
I wonder if that could be incorporated as an update to Mike Tyson's Punch-Out?
the idea that fingerprints are unique is stupid, especially for anyone who is actually in law enforcement or forensics. you need 12 count it TWELVE different points of matching to even get a fingerprint submitted for evidence. so if this odor is just as effective that means its pretty much a scare tactic as much as "we got your fingerprints at the scene!" is
I wouldn't call it stupid, just incorrect when all possibilities are tried.
Aside from genetically-identical twins, there are a rare few known cases where people do have matching fingerprints (it's been awhile since I read the article but I seem to recall a resolution of around a thousand comparison points in one such case). However, with the incredibly low occurrence rate for this duplication, fingerprints still reign as the current top method for human identity verification (DNA matching takes alot more time and still isn't 100% accurate).
The article and summary are misleading, as well. This study was only performed on mice, not humans. There is additional doubt introduced from the lack of description of the experimental procedure. If the mice weren't separated long enough after the diet change, then a sufficient amount of the recognized scent may have remained for the other mice to make correct identifications.
The comment about dogs in the summary may be incorrect as well, but I don't really know. I have never read about any studies that tried to have a dog track a person from a previous scent marker after they've undergone a radical diet change and sufficient time for the body to remove the chemical traces of the old diet. They usually give dogs an item that someone has used recently in order to track them by scent.
I do know two things from my personal experiences as a person with a strong sense of smell:
1. In favor of the results that the articles puts forward as 'fact' - without perfumes, colognes, other scented body products or even any noticeable sweat; a woman definitely smells different than a man.
2. Disagreeing with the postulate from the results of the study - How best to put this delicately? The scent of certain subsets of people that stereotypically consume specific diets does indeed match scents from those diets when their scent becomes strong enough.
Of course, I'm not a canine, so regardless of my personal experience, there may indeed be elements of a person's scent that are as unique as their DNA. Actually, if a dog's sense of smell is advanced enough, their olfactory processing could be doing on-the-fly DNA matching. Though, I've never seen someone even postulate a study that could confirm that little bit of information.
I do agree with a couple of the other comments so far. This news has enough merit to be under a section other than Idle.
It gets down to philosophical differences about economic value and the role of government. According to one point of view, the government should above all do no harm to any business. If a business wants to sell government weather data, the government ought to make it hard for individuals to get the data directly. By the same token, if a private company wants to provide network services in an area, the government has no business providing better or cheaper services.
That is one point of view regarding government, but there are others.
In this case I would say that the more relevant point of view is this: A government's purpose is to use the resources available to it to provide as best as it can for its citizens.
That is exactly what this city government was doing. The first attempt to do so included its corporate citizens, an attempt to utilize and provide for a corporate citizen while providing for the normal citizens as well. The corporate citizen decided against benefiting from that help.
The government moved on with a plan to benefit all the other citizens, and now the corporate citizen is trying to stop the government for providing for any of its citizens.
And that is where the corporate citizen is completely in the wrong. Not only did it opt out of getting greater benefits before, but it could still lease bandwidth in the new system to remain competitive. Their profits won't be as high as if there were no competition on the fiber network, but they can still make a profit. Instead, they want to interfere with the proper role of government so they can maintain their profits (or expand them) at the cost of the other citizens.
From this point of view, the corporate citizen is clearly doing wrong to both the government and the citizens that that government is responsible for. In that point of view, the corporate citizen should be removed from where it can do further harm to that government and its other citizens (much like how we send people to prison when they assault other people).
Hopefully, the courts will also see things from this point of view and act appropriately.
I swear, I've never heard anybody but Americans complain about judging in an event that they WON.
Hunh. You make it sound like they're actually more concerned about fairness in judging than who wins.
I can't imagine somebody doing something so damaging to the spirit of the Olympic games.
Have any of the news articles made it clear who the 3 kids in the story are? TFA makes it clear that the dead 3 year-old was Davidson's daughter, but they keep calling the older girl "a teenage girl" and the infant "a 8 month-old boy" and such. Since they aren't attaching a family relationship to Davidson, I'm left wondering who they are and what their involvement is.
Why would an unrelated teenage girl and an infant be with a guy about to kill himself and his family? What else was going on here besides a jailbreak and a murder-suicide?
TFA notes that court documents do not identify his girlfriend/wife, just note that he has one in order to shield her from repercussions from his crimes.
TFA also notes that he has three children, but does not identify them. Parse this information and you should have all your answers.
That "makemake" is from Japanese or some other language... and that the guy who named it wasn't really just a complete loser.
Do we need to start telling people to RTFS (Read the Fucking Summary) as well as the usual RTFA now?
C/P directly from the Summary:
"The object was referred to by the team of discoverers by the codename Easterbunny, and the name Makemake comes from the creation deity of Easter Island, in accordance with IAU rules on naming Kuiper belt objects."
Real abuse of power is far more mundane, and as such, is something we can actually do something about. It's a GOOD thing that there is no Illuminati to contend with.
Personally, I would prefer if there was an Illuminati to contend with over the manipulations and abuses of power. Even a very-well hidden criminal/illegal organization that subtly manipulated many other organizations to perform counter-productive/destructive/disruptive acts is easier to combat than a large number of scattered small groups performing c-p/d/d acts for their personal gain. That single group controlling all the others will eventually make a slip that exposes them to be chipped away until they fall or smashed outright, leaving all the organizations they controlled without their direction and therefore unable to perform the acts they did before. Even if the large number of small scattered groups working for their own gain only require 1/10th the vigilance and action to take down as the Illuminati-esque subtle manipulator group, there will still be many more than 10 of them, and therefore require much more effort in order to stop them from causing harm. Put more simply, if the controller of a thousand semi-autonomous robots is exposed, it is simpler to take out the controller and render the robots relatively harmless then it is to make an ad-hoc cluster of a million Brazilian wandering spiders equally harmless.
Well, I own a Wii and I can tell you that the responsiveness of the Wiimote depends greatly upon the programming of the game.
For instance in the Boxing mini-game of WiiSports, when I first got the system and got together with some friends, I tried doing actual punches with it (jabs, straights, crosses, and hooks) and got almost no response. Somebody else there who already knew what the game responded to just flicked the controls one way or another as needed and handed everybody their butts.
A very small number of games have great responsiveness, but most are poor to mediocre. Even with mediocre responsiveness it can handle quick thrusts and parries though (as demonstrated to me in SoulCalibur Legends), but it's not enough to really make you feel totally in control of things.
This may be why so few games have been aimed at taking full advantage of the Wii's functionality (or any advantage for that matter). It appears to be very difficult to program a game to get the most out of the Wiimote.
However, I still don't see it as impossible to make a good sword/lightsaber game for the Wii. It does require two things, though:
1. The programming skill to get the most out of the Wiimote
2. Training (penalizing) the player to overcome the limitations of the Wiimote. By this I mean the suggestions of using the rumble feature to signify when the blade has hit something that would make it stop. Then having the virtual blade fall away in the direction the Wiimote continues if the player doesn't stop. After this lets the opponent's blade skim along the player's blade and into the player enough times, the player will learn to respond to the feedback when making their motions.
Not much chance of seeing that actually happen with the way things are going right now, though...
Then I'm all for that. If this can miraculously find what I'm actually looking for (unlike the mountains of garbage that I have to sift through when I put a query into a search engine these days), then I would love this thing enough to actually kill for it (not kidding or exaggerating in any way).
Somehow, I doubt that it's going to live up to that, however.
The rest of it just sounds like bloatware creeping into an otherwise good browser.
Maybe they should shoot for more useful goals. Things like 100% Acid3 score, selective javascript control, and sandboxing Flash or other resource-intensive web technologies.
Actually, that won't work in the US. We have something known as the 5th amendment to the Constitution. I think this is the relevant part: "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself". It goes like this: Lawyer: Your honor, my client wishes to not take the stand based on the rights granted to him under the 5th amendment. Evidence gathered there could be damaging in either this trial or another unspecified one, I cannot reveal which as that information goes against the spirit of the protections from the 5th amendment. So, the person on trial may be guilty of something, but it may not be what they're actually on trial for, and it may be a much lesser crime, but they still don't want to get themselves incriminated for that if they can avoid it. As for the other kinds of lawyers, how does it get rid of the RIAA lawyers or other frivilous lawsuits which take up massive amounts of taxpayer money? How does it stop the lawyers whose job as a corporate attorney is to keep sending out Motions to Delay in order to keep something from getting to court or stop them having to pay when a judgement goes against them?