It is posts like this that make censorship look like a good idea.
No, it's not.
What this whole situation shows is that "intellectual property" is still a good idea, if legislators hadn't completely distorted it. The pictures exploit the public image of Nikki Catsouras, they should be the property of her family. Aside from use in police investigations, the CHP has no right in delivering those photographs to anyone.
I think the two investigators who leaked those photos should be permanently removed from any police work, they have shown they do not have the moral preparation for such work.
you can't expect privacy as soon as you leave your door, right? So I'm sure you won't mind if I know, right?
You can try wearing a ski mask.
In fact, all this "privacy in public places" argument is kind of weird. The effect of these technologies is to bring the global village to a practical reality. You don't have too much privacy if you live in a small village. Everybody knows you were at Sally's house last night.
Slashdot is certainly a public place and so hiding behind a nickname should not be expected. Could you give us your real name please?
No, you got it wrong. Slashdot is a public place, but you aren't forced to walk naked in public places. Think of the Slashdot nick as digital clothes.
But still there's no real privacy here or anywhere else. Remember the Unabomber? He was caught because the sentences he used in his manifesto seemed familiar to his brother who hadn't seen or talked to him in ten years.
It seems perfectly possible that the police may use a software to analyze an AC posting in Slashdot and compare it to every signed blog in the web to find the true identity of the author.
They hold to the idea that the author's opinion of his or her works isn't particularly important - other views are equally valid
Perhaps they should listen to authors about this. An interesting piece is Isaac Asimov's "The Immortal Bard".
In this very short (about 2.5 pages) story, Dr. Phineas Welch, a physics professor, talks with Scott Robertson, a Literature instructor in a university party. Dr. Welch says he has invented a time machine and has brought some historical characters to the twentieth century.
Ancient scientists were a disappointment, the progress in the intervening centuries was too much for them, so Dr. Welch had to send them back. Therefore he tried a noted humanist, he brought William Shakesperare.
In order to show him how significant his work had been, Dr. Welch enrolled Shakespeare, under an assumed name, in Robertson's evening extension course on Shakespeare.
It didn't work out, Shakespeare was flunked.
I think this story pretty much sums up the opinion of a writer on the worth and validity of critics' and scholars' opinions about writers' works.
Linux will have gained enough steam with things like Suse 13 and Mighty Mandrake that they'll change the name to make sure they don't look inferior. It'll be called Windows 9000: Accounting Alan.
Followed, no doubt, by Bookkeeping Bernie. Or would it be Beancounting Bob?
Furthermore to say he hates rats without citing a source is to rely upon your own interpretation of what is going on in the story, and that is Original Research and strictly not allowed. Unless you are citing the author saying "the character of mr.fantasticman hates rats", then you are performing your own research into the character. citing the novel or comic itself is NOT a reliable source as to what the novel or comic objectively means. It doesn't matter if the the character is shown as flat out stating "I hate rats". It is still open to interpretation what that ultimately says about the plotline.
[Head explodes] WTF??? Why should my interpretation of what the novel said be *less* reliable than my interpretation of what some critic said about that novel???
Let's have here a specific example: in the article about P.G Wodehouse's character Jeeves it's stated that his first name was "Reginald". But the only mention of his first name in all of Wodehouse's works is the greeting "Hullo, Reggie" in one of his last novels, "Much Obliged, Jeeves".
How would you classify this conclusion? Who said "Reggie" is a nickname for "Reginald" in this case? That's a conclusion drawn from a lecture of that story alone, not supported by any citation in the article. There are at least two other male names that could have a "Reggie" nickname: Regan and Regulus. Or he could be called that because his initial were "R.G." Shouldn't someone put a [citation needed] there?
And the most ironic is that in the first paragraph of this article someone did put an entirely unnecessary [citation needed]: "A "Jeeves" is now a generic term in references such as the Oxford English Dictionary.[citation needed]" The citation is right there, the Oxford English Dictionary...
"1. of the nature of or involving a figure of speech, esp. a metaphor; metaphorical; not literal: a figurative expression."
Otherwise, if you believe every sense of the example you quoted is equally deserving of punishment, shouldn't the subject of this definition of "steal" also be prosecuted by the RIAA: "7. to gain or seize more than one's share of attention in, as by giving a superior performance: The comedian stole the show."?
I wish a super talented artist would redesign the widget set for Gnome, it's very very dated as it stands now. KDE is far better looking but even it is getting long in the tooth.
I wish people would stop redesigning widget sets once and for all. Let's face it, icons aren't put there for your visual enjoyment, they are there for a purpose. Symbols should be easy to read at a glance.
I use Kubuntu in all my machines, work and home, except for an eeePC where I keep the Xnadros that came in it. In each of those computers I have installed and use the kdeclassic icon theme. This is important to me because I click so many times in different icons when I use a computer that lost fractions of a second add up in the end. I don't want "pretty" icons, I want familiar and easily distinguished icons.
They have established a totally free online encyclopedia. No ads. They have had to balance quality with quantity. They have established rules that define what is encyclopedic.
I look at Wikipedia's failings more in wonder than in anger. They gave us one of the most valuable sites in the web for free, that's true, and we should be grateful for that. But then they go and shoot themselves in the foot.
What I have tried to do about this is to bring my contribution in a positive way. Whenever I see something that strikes me as being too pedantic at Wikipedia I try to correct it, often with good results. I have removed several of those ridiculous warning boxes from their articles, and, more often than not, no one put the boxes back.
Take, for instance, an article about a fiction novel or short story. The best reference about that, the book where it was first published, is cited in the references. How does that article lack references? Or boxes complaining that in some way the article is not written in a style suited for an encyclopedia. Well, if you think so, do us a favor, stop complaining and *show* how it should be written.
I think that because of the vast amount of life on our planet, the handedness would be (statistically speaking) about the same in both directions
If life evolved from simpler forms then one would expect each species to inherit the handedness of its ancestors, all the way to the very first living being.
OTOH, if life was designed by a creator, then one would expect that creator to have some preference for one handedness over the other.
In WWII the Germans managed to build V2's essentially from scratch in country that was by today's standards very low tech
I once read an anecdote about Von Braun that might explain this.
In his engineering training there was a six month course where each student was given a rough lump of cast iron at the start of the course. The goal was to convert that lump into a cube. The size didn't matter, but it had to have six flat faces, each edge had to have the same length, and all angles had to be ninety degrees.
Each student was left to his own, he had to research among the different tools and processes available at the university labs how to perform the task. In the end, the student was graded on how perfect the cube was.
I think this anecdote (if it's true, I don't know) would explain a lot about how Germany was able to rebuild itself into a technological superpower twice after being destroyed at war in the twentieth century. Their engineers were trained at solving problems, they were trained to research and find practical solutions.
Unfortunately, too many engineering students in many countries today do not have the slightest idea on how machines work, they are trained in management instead, because becoming a manager is the only way an engineer can reach a higher salary level.
You don't even need to go all the way to Boeing to get to the truth in this case, since the fake Boeing blended wing has a glaring technical error that's obvious at first glance to any aerospace engineer: the turbine intakes are located above the wing in a low-pressure region. If you compare it with existing blended wing or large delta wing aircraft, the turbine intakes are either at or near the front edge of the wing, as in the B-2, or under the wing, as in the Concorde or the XB-70
Also, passenger airplanes need a big pressurized cabin. Making it different from the cylindrical shape used today would be wasteful, it would need much more strength at the walls and would be heavier.
You really are going to suggest that Transportation from China is CLOSE in costs to the above, once oil prices rise this summer?
Yes, I am. It takes roughly from two to five times as much fuel to send cargo by truck from Flagstaff, Arizona, to Los Angeles than from Shanghai to Los Angeles by sea.
Finding organic material will be hard short of landing on the surface
If we do an absorption spectrum reading of the atmosphere, which can be done at astronomical distances, and find free oxygen that would be a strong evidence for life on that planet. Oxygen is so reactive that it wouldn't exist very long in a planet's atmosphere before combining with something, unless here is a process like life to replenish it.
In addition, we are far more likely to see our manufacturing lines come back as oil prices rise
Then I have some bad news for you. Ocean liners are the most efficient transportation in terms of fuel consumption per ton transported. The last mile, getting the goods from the warehose to your home, costs proportionally much more than getting them from Shanghai to LA.
Just being a creationist doesn't make someone "snide".
Since English is not my first language, I had to consult a dictionary on this: snide - sly and malicious, which got me to sly - skillful at trickery or deceit
Well, yes, "snide" pretty much describes every creationist person I ever knew or heard about.
Under what legal authority does Brazil have the right to facilitate this request?
Under the Brazilian law statutes that regulate radio transmissions. If Brazilians are allowed to interfere with US satellites, then US citizens could also hijack Brazilian satellites
quantum entanglement doesn't allow instantaneous communication
True, for our current knowledge of relativity and quantum physics.
According to the special theory of relativity (SR), instantaneous communications would violate causality because it would allow one to transmit information backwards in time under some circumstances. Special relativity has been *very* well tested, so scientists are pretty much sure that FTL communications is impossible.
OK, let's see how they tested SR. They did measurements here on earth, and in satellites circling the earth. In particular, the Michelson-Morley experiment has been repeated many times by many different researchers to a very high level of precision. So this seems to close all loopholes, right?
Not quite. First of all, an absolute frame of reference exists, it's the background radiation of the universe. We are moving at 370km/s against this background. So, one of the basic premises of SR, that the laws of physics are independent of the frame of reference, needs a qualifier added: measuring the background radiation temperature of the universe depends on the absolute velocity of the observer.
There has been conjectures for over a hundred years that inertia is caused by acceleration against this background, so maybe absolute velocity must be considered too for some effects, as well as absolute acceleration. Perhaps instantaneous communications can only be performed in some but not all reference frames, that would exclude the possibility of causality violation.
I'm not saying that FTL communications is possible, not even that it's probable to exist, all I'm saying is that one must be careful to observe the limitations of our experiments before we extrapolate too far our theories.
Are you aware that Indira Gandhi is not the same person one usually refers to as simply "Gandhi"?
But I must say I agree with the rest of your comment, the US is the biggest polluter and owes the rest of the world some respect. We all share the same planet.
And going back to the article, this shows the typical tactics of people who don't want to do their part in fighting global warming. They try to imply that the enormous amount of evidence that has been collected demonstrating the anthropogenic influence in global warming is just a bunch of isolated data. Yet they want to use one single measurement as evidence that there really isn't something like a sudden raise in temperatures over the last few hundred years that's more abrupt than anything ever seen on earth.
Would Obama with his RIAA lawyer friends declare Sweden to be part of axis of evil and will actually bomb them to bring in the democracy US style
Considering that Hitler was afraid of invading Sweden, Obama should be careful.
I lived in Sweden for a while years ago, and the whole country is a fortress. When you walk in the woods, sometimes you find a little concrete house, surrounded by a barbed wire fence and full of warning signs. Those are elevator shafts that go down to underground military installations.
I wouldn't be surprised if "Sweden" means "land of bunkers" in some old dialect...;)
Slashdot Mirror
Stock in Anheuser-Busch is no longer available
No, it's not.
What this whole situation shows is that "intellectual property" is still a good idea, if legislators hadn't completely distorted it. The pictures exploit the public image of Nikki Catsouras, they should be the property of her family. Aside from use in police investigations, the CHP has no right in delivering those photographs to anyone.
I think the two investigators who leaked those photos should be permanently removed from any police work, they have shown they do not have the moral preparation for such work.
You can try wearing a ski mask.
In fact, all this "privacy in public places" argument is kind of weird. The effect of these technologies is to bring the global village to a practical reality. You don't have too much privacy if you live in a small village. Everybody knows you were at Sally's house last night.
No, you got it wrong. Slashdot is a public place, but you aren't forced to walk naked in public places. Think of the Slashdot nick as digital clothes.
But still there's no real privacy here or anywhere else. Remember the Unabomber? He was caught because the sentences he used in his manifesto seemed familiar to his brother who hadn't seen or talked to him in ten years.
It seems perfectly possible that the police may use a software to analyze an AC posting in Slashdot and compare it to every signed blog in the web to find the true identity of the author.
Perhaps they should listen to authors about this. An interesting piece is Isaac Asimov's "The Immortal Bard".
In this very short (about 2.5 pages) story, Dr. Phineas Welch, a physics professor, talks with Scott Robertson, a Literature instructor in a university party. Dr. Welch says he has invented a time machine and has brought some historical characters to the twentieth century.
Ancient scientists were a disappointment, the progress in the intervening centuries was too much for them, so Dr. Welch had to send them back. Therefore he tried a noted humanist, he brought William Shakesperare.
In order to show him how significant his work had been, Dr. Welch enrolled Shakespeare, under an assumed name, in Robertson's evening extension course on Shakespeare.
It didn't work out, Shakespeare was flunked.
I think this story pretty much sums up the opinion of a writer on the worth and validity of critics' and scholars' opinions about writers' works.
Followed, no doubt, by Bookkeeping Bernie. Or would it be Beancounting Bob?
Well, I'd say that Microsoft dying would be a *huge* step towards more competition...
[Head explodes] WTF??? Why should my interpretation of what the novel said be *less* reliable than my interpretation of what some critic said about that novel???
Let's have here a specific example: in the article about P.G Wodehouse's character Jeeves it's stated that his first name was "Reginald". But the only mention of his first name in all of Wodehouse's works is the greeting "Hullo, Reggie" in one of his last novels, "Much Obliged, Jeeves".
How would you classify this conclusion? Who said "Reggie" is a nickname for "Reginald" in this case? That's a conclusion drawn from a lecture of that story alone, not supported by any citation in the article. There are at least two other male names that could have a "Reggie" nickname: Regan and Regulus. Or he could be called that because his initial were "R.G." Shouldn't someone put a [citation needed] there?
And the most ironic is that in the first paragraph of this article someone did put an entirely unnecessary [citation needed]: "A "Jeeves" is now a generic term in references such as the Oxford English Dictionary.[citation needed]" The citation is right there, the Oxford English Dictionary...
Please check your dictionary. For example Dictionary.com ( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/figurative )lists the following definition:
"1. of the nature of or involving a figure of speech, esp. a metaphor; metaphorical; not literal: a figurative expression."
Otherwise, if you believe every sense of the example you quoted is equally deserving of punishment, shouldn't the subject of this definition of "steal" also be prosecuted by the RIAA: "7. to gain or seize more than one's share of attention in, as by giving a superior performance: The comedian stole the show."?
Unauthorized copying is not stealing because nothing was taken away from the original owner.
Distorting the accusation is, by itself, violating due process and the constitutional protection the accused deserves.
I wish people would stop redesigning widget sets once and for all. Let's face it, icons aren't put there for your visual enjoyment, they are there for a purpose. Symbols should be easy to read at a glance.
I use Kubuntu in all my machines, work and home, except for an eeePC where I keep the Xnadros that came in it. In each of those computers I have installed and use the kdeclassic icon theme. This is important to me because I click so many times in different icons when I use a computer that lost fractions of a second add up in the end. I don't want "pretty" icons, I want familiar and easily distinguished icons.
I look at Wikipedia's failings more in wonder than in anger. They gave us one of the most valuable sites in the web for free, that's true, and we should be grateful for that. But then they go and shoot themselves in the foot.
What I have tried to do about this is to bring my contribution in a positive way. Whenever I see something that strikes me as being too pedantic at Wikipedia I try to correct it, often with good results. I have removed several of those ridiculous warning boxes from their articles, and, more often than not, no one put the boxes back.
Take, for instance, an article about a fiction novel or short story. The best reference about that, the book where it was first published, is cited in the references. How does that article lack references? Or boxes complaining that in some way the article is not written in a style suited for an encyclopedia. Well, if you think so, do us a favor, stop complaining and *show* how it should be written.
If life evolved from simpler forms then one would expect each species to inherit the handedness of its ancestors, all the way to the very first living being.
OTOH, if life was designed by a creator, then one would expect that creator to have some preference for one handedness over the other.
I once read an anecdote about Von Braun that might explain this.
In his engineering training there was a six month course where each student was given a rough lump of cast iron at the start of the course. The goal was to convert that lump into a cube. The size didn't matter, but it had to have six flat faces, each edge had to have the same length, and all angles had to be ninety degrees.
Each student was left to his own, he had to research among the different tools and processes available at the university labs how to perform the task. In the end, the student was graded on how perfect the cube was.
I think this anecdote (if it's true, I don't know) would explain a lot about how Germany was able to rebuild itself into a technological superpower twice after being destroyed at war in the twentieth century. Their engineers were trained at solving problems, they were trained to research and find practical solutions.
Unfortunately, too many engineering students in many countries today do not have the slightest idea on how machines work, they are trained in management instead, because becoming a manager is the only way an engineer can reach a higher salary level.
The picture in the link you posted has been reported as a fake.
You don't even need to go all the way to Boeing to get to the truth in this case, since the fake Boeing blended wing has a glaring technical error that's obvious at first glance to any aerospace engineer: the turbine intakes are located above the wing in a low-pressure region. If you compare it with existing blended wing or large delta wing aircraft, the turbine intakes are either at or near the front edge of the wing, as in the B-2, or under the wing, as in the Concorde or the XB-70
Also, passenger airplanes need a big pressurized cabin. Making it different from the cylindrical shape used today would be wasteful, it would need much more strength at the walls and would be heavier.
Yes, I am. It takes roughly from two to five times as much fuel to send cargo by truck from Flagstaff, Arizona, to Los Angeles than from Shanghai to Los Angeles by sea.
If we do an absorption spectrum reading of the atmosphere, which can be done at astronomical distances, and find free oxygen that would be a strong evidence for life on that planet. Oxygen is so reactive that it wouldn't exist very long in a planet's atmosphere before combining with something, unless here is a process like life to replenish it.
Then I have some bad news for you. Ocean liners are the most efficient transportation in terms of fuel consumption per ton transported. The last mile, getting the goods from the warehose to your home, costs proportionally much more than getting them from Shanghai to LA.
Since English is not my first language, I had to consult a dictionary on this: snide - sly and malicious, which got me to sly - skillful at trickery or deceit
Well, yes, "snide" pretty much describes every creationist person I ever knew or heard about.
Under the Brazilian law statutes that regulate radio transmissions. If Brazilians are allowed to interfere with US satellites, then US citizens could also hijack Brazilian satellites
I'm not sure of that, how much power does it take to send a radio signal over 1373.81 km?
There are companies specialized in those pricing matters. The Sistine Chapel would be an absolutely awesome meeting room for an awesomely rich organization with cash to spare that already has everything it could reasonably need.
Oh, wait... Doh!
True, for our current knowledge of relativity and quantum physics.
According to the special theory of relativity (SR), instantaneous communications would violate causality because it would allow one to transmit information backwards in time under some circumstances. Special relativity has been *very* well tested, so scientists are pretty much sure that FTL communications is impossible.
OK, let's see how they tested SR. They did measurements here on earth, and in satellites circling the earth. In particular, the Michelson-Morley experiment has been repeated many times by many different researchers to a very high level of precision. So this seems to close all loopholes, right?
Not quite. First of all, an absolute frame of reference exists, it's the background radiation of the universe. We are moving at 370km/s against this background. So, one of the basic premises of SR, that the laws of physics are independent of the frame of reference, needs a qualifier added: measuring the background radiation temperature of the universe depends on the absolute velocity of the observer.
There has been conjectures for over a hundred years that inertia is caused by acceleration against this background, so maybe absolute velocity must be considered too for some effects, as well as absolute acceleration. Perhaps instantaneous communications can only be performed in some but not all reference frames, that would exclude the possibility of causality violation.
I'm not saying that FTL communications is possible, not even that it's probable to exist, all I'm saying is that one must be careful to observe the limitations of our experiments before we extrapolate too far our theories.
Are you aware that Indira Gandhi is not the same person one usually refers to as simply "Gandhi"?
But I must say I agree with the rest of your comment, the US is the biggest polluter and owes the rest of the world some respect. We all share the same planet.
And going back to the article, this shows the typical tactics of people who don't want to do their part in fighting global warming. They try to imply that the enormous amount of evidence that has been collected demonstrating the anthropogenic influence in global warming is just a bunch of isolated data. Yet they want to use one single measurement as evidence that there really isn't something like a sudden raise in temperatures over the last few hundred years that's more abrupt than anything ever seen on earth.
Considering that Hitler was afraid of invading Sweden, Obama should be careful.
I lived in Sweden for a while years ago, and the whole country is a fortress. When you walk in the woods, sometimes you find a little concrete house, surrounded by a barbed wire fence and full of warning signs. Those are elevator shafts that go down to underground military installations.
I wouldn't be surprised if "Sweden" means "land of bunkers" in some old dialect... ;)
What if the leather coat is sewn inside your body, and without it you die? For instance, there are people who get heart valves transplanted from cows or pigs.
I think these people could be called hybrids. They have functioning body parts from other animals in their bodies.
What definition of "hybrid" would allow for a centaur, for instance, but not for someone who has a pig's heart valve?