I am not quite sure what the story is here. Okay, so it is a bit rought that a business was put out of operation because it was being used to VPN up some torrent files - but it certainly didn't look like they were trying to hide it.
I mean "Hey, we offer great ways to avoid being caught when uploading torrents..." then "Awww.... we got shut down for uploading torrents..." really aren't to far apart in any business plan that starts with the first.
On the upside, the article points out that new EU rules take any sniffing out of the requirements for an ISP. So maybe this won't happen again.
I am really unsure which side to take here. I don't support the ludicrous fines and penalties that all of the **AA goons are trying to enforce, but I also don't support a business model that seems to be basically aimed at people breaking copyright of others.
There are currently three known ways to trigger lightning which might be plausible. 1) Launch a rocket - Some rockets unspool wire as they launch which acts as a lovely lightning rod back to the ground - however somewhat obvious if this is supposed to be a clean as a whistle murder though. 2) Have a volcano erupt - Volcanos often form lightning storms near their volcanic plume. This stunning picture was captured in 1994 at the Rinjani eruption. 3) Have a super powered laser creating the ionized beam into the clouds - however even the military who have been trying this since the 1970's have only managed to notice a slight increase small local discharges within the cloud itself, rather than a cloud to ground strike.
Whatever way you look at it, it's a really really long shot.
If you really want to get away with it, make it the most obvious weapon. If someone is killed by anthrax, they can get a sample and depending on the exact genetics, they can trace it back to the lab it came from. If the protagonist in the novel needs to kill someone on the hush, have the guy hit by a car then burn the car or throw it into a chop shop. Or steal the car. Things that are "unlikely" tend to be only able to be performed by a select few - meaning that the pool of possible suspects is already a really small pool. Getting away from the fuzz at that point is oh so much harder. Even setting it up to look like something else - get the guy in the novel drunk, drug him with something easily masked by alcohol, strip him and leave him in freezing mountains - maybe full of bears and wolves and other things that eat tasty human sized morsels.
Okay, so running someone over isn't going to be as cool or have the same "Whoa..." impact in a science fiction novel as setting up lightning to strike the fellow when he happens to answer a call - but it would be much more likely that the person got away without so much as being interviewed by police.
Lastly, being struck by ligthning doesn't always kill - check out Roy Sullivan - the Human Lightning Rod who has now survived seven (no shit!) lightning strikes. Also, about one in ten thousand people will be struck by lightning over a lifespan of eighty years. Of course, being outdoors a lot and in an area prone to lightning storms drastically raises those odds.
More to the point, fishes that were once considered garbage bait fish, like squid, are now haute cuisine and are on every damn menu. Salmon eggs are often sold as fish-bait, but you put 'em on sushi and their worth is jacked up by hundreds of percents.
Different fish (and food in general for that matter) have always been a rather location specific taste. In many parts of Europe, Cod is considered very good eating, yet here in Australia it is considered rubbish. Kippers (especially smoked) are good eating in Britain, but you can't get them in many parts of the world. Eastern Europeans (and a few other European countries like Germany and Belgium and Norway) love smoked and pickled Herring. Aside from a few measily jars in the back isle of a supermarket it is almost impossible to find outside of there. The Russians have always loved caviar.
It isn't so much that what was once rubbish is now considered fine dining, but rather that due to multiculturalism, many foods that were once unpopular in a foreign country are being driven by populations that are made up of many more nationalities.
Of course, from a practical standpoint you might as well just cook him with the thing and forget the lightning.
Yup, it could in theory be done, but by the time you address all the things that you would need to, there would be a multitude of other ways to achieve the same purpose that were more reliable, easier and more believable to a reader of a science fiction story.
the electromagnetic field between the phone and antenna tower would provide a path for the lightening
To make the lightning actually hit the poor sod on the phone, you would need to ensure that the bridge generated by the field between the phone and tower was the path of leaast resistance for the lightning to follow. While it may create a path of (microscopically lower than the air) lower resistance, it would still need to become the optimal path - which is where it would fall down.
You would have more luck trying to get the guy to play golf swinging metal sticks around, or better yet stand on top of a sand dune in the desert during a storm. In fact it would be much easier to try to rig the house of the person and call their landline (as long as it isn't a wireless phone, but one of the old fashioned curly cord types) and get the lightning to to id that way. There are many more documented cases where lightning has travelled along phone cables. This is because the resistance differential offered by a metal cable is in the order of many many magnitudes higher then the resistance differential offered by an EM field.
It's like trying to divert a huge river with two options, one is a path in the sand drawn with your finger (That's the EM field) and the other option to divert is with a Panama sized canal (that's the metal phone cable). The lightning will try to pick the path of least resistance from the clouds to the ground, but the likelihood that the path just happens to be the EM field caused by the phone signal is so miniscule that it is almost not plausible. A wet tree, a telegraph pole, an overhead wire, a nearby hill or even a lightning rod would almost always provide a path of lower resistance.
Not saying it isn't theoretically possible, but to be able to "set it up" to happen just at the right moment when a call is made to "kill" the person isn't realistically plausible.
Actually having read through these comments and actually spent more time thinking about it today than probably ever in my life, I think Aussies just generally like a tougher game of football than most other nations. It's not about hurting the other players, it's simply about playing with all your heart. It's a cultural thing, I had a quick look around and found a few insightful comments that might make more sense.
The Australian national character has been forged by the difficulty of subduing the land. Unlike other cultures based on a nurturing landscape that they seek to protect from others, Australian settlers experienced great hardship and had to support each other in order to survive. The battle against the elements led to the nickname of a member of Australia's working class being the 'Aussie battler'.
The need to laugh in the face of danger while battling the landscape has provoked a strange view of the world, with a distinctive upside-down sense of humour. Times of hardship or even disaster are ridiculed, and this extends to the Australian delight in dubbing a tall man "Shorty," a quiet one "Rowdy," a bald man "Curly" and a redhead "Bluey".
As well as the prevalence of the tall poppy syndrome bringing back to Earth the high fliers, the egalitarian Australian society has a traditional Australian support for the "underdog". Australians will show support for those who appear to be at a disadvantage even when the underdog is competing against fellow Australians.
This underdog attitude is most evident in sport, as sport is also a large part of Australian culture. Should an Australian be asked to choose between two unknown competitors, very often they will choose the one least likely to win, such as swimmer Eric the Eel during the 2000 Olympics. The success of Steven Bradbury in the 2002 Winter Olympics who won a skating gold medal after all his competitors crashed has coined the expression 'doing a Bradbury' which underpins the spirit of the underdog, positive thinking and never giving up.
During the 2003 Rugby World Cup, the Georgian rugby team arrived in Perth with a crowd of Perth residents welcoming them with colourful support, and a similar occurrence was noted in Townsville, Queensland where the Japanese rugby team was preferred to that of the French.
Australian rules football culture - Injuries, Health Issues and Prevention Australian rules football is known for its high level of physical body contact compared to other sports such as soccer and basketball. High impact collisions can occur from any direction. Unlike gridiron, padding is not mandatory and is rarely worn. Combined with the range of activity including jumping, running, kicking, twisting and turning this means that injury rates are relatively high in comparison to other sports.
Australian rules football does not have the range or severity of health issues of American football however players have been known to die whilst playing Aussie Rules, though the most common cause is heart failure. The Victorian State Coroner reported five sudden deaths in that state among Australian rules footballers aged under 38 years between 1990-1997. Three of these deaths were attributed to Ischaemic heart disease (mean age, 31.7 years), and the other two to physical trauma.
(Emphasis mine)
Aussies have a "Harden Up" attitude when it comes to adversity. There are some hilarious comedy sketches that aussies love becuase they are so on the mark for aussie culture. A person who is seen to overcome difficult odds is generally championed. A tough guy (good or bad) can end up being an Australian Icon such as Ned Kelly who we even depicted during the opening of the Sydney Olympics in 2000!
But more importantly, why the fuck do you consider it a selling point that people get hit hard in a sport with no padding?
Because AFL is a contact sport. The idea of a contact sport is to have a challenge between the opposing players. It is challenging other players to be as fit, as nimble and as athletic as you are. Yes, AFL has more injuries then other forms of football. That's the game that has been played here, and that's the game that will continue to be played here.
Aussie rules always ruled higher in the opinion of parents’ when compared to rugby-codes. But this opinion stands challenged, as new research has pointed out that Australian football accounts for the highest injuries as compared to all other types of football.// The aussie code seems to have topped the charts of contact sports injuries, the second place being occupied by league , the third by rugby union and the last , being soccer.
A report published today by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows that among Australian rules players who are 15 and above, there were 734.3 cases of hospital treatments per 100,000 participants, compared with 677.9 for rugby league. Union and Soccer were way behind to even compete – on 316.9 and 242 hospital treatments per 100,000 participants. Touch football was by far considered the safest, with 121.2 per 100,000 participants. The frequent type of injury was Fractures.
Having said that, do yourself a favour and watch the second video, it forcuses much more some amazing plays rather than big hit ups.
I abbreviated because that's one of the dozen or so words that I can never remember how to spell correctly, no matter how much I try or how embarrassing it is personally, due to rare use and asinine spelling it always manages to slip through the cracks.
Well, at least you chaps over in the US aren't alone. I submitted a story about six weeks ago about two malls in Australia that were using the exact same technology. It made the local papers here, but never prominently.
It's okay, soon, we will forget about it and given that other countries are also doing it, we will accept it as the norm.
I'm sure a private company like Eastern Research Group could have done it for much less than that!
That depends on if it was a smart private company. Private companies are there to make money. If someone is waving around a huge fat wad of cash calling for an app, you really need to quote just under that amount, but deliver the best that money can buy for that price. Especially with governments, it isn't about offering the cheapest price (though that does come into it) but often if a budget has already been set and approved, anything under that budget is fair game the b'cats won't flinch. Now, I am not saying sell them a $10 app for $200k, but if you have $200k of development funds to use, give the customer an app that is worth what they paid for it.
This is where truly good companies stand out. If you have a ship of fools running a company, they will likely burn through development costs, making mistakes, paying the wrong developers and end up with a rubbish product. If you have a strong tight company, they will also go through the same budget, but the final product will be fantastic.
The problem is that sometimes it is hard to differentiate the the ship of fools company from the legend company - especially by b'cats who think that a power point presentation is a wonderful way to demo what a final product can do.
She's had her own PC since she was 3. She also plays softball, soccer, and chess.
And I think that is the silver bullet right there. It's not so much a case of "technology is baaaaadddd!" but rather all things are good in moderation. This means it is excellent for kids to have some exposure to technology as this is a wonderful way to learn logical thinking and problem solving, but these two things alone do not make a person. Children need social interaction, and this means spending time with parents, siblings or other children and interacting with them. This will give them many other valuable life skills that they need.
When I was young, I was programming at the age of ten, but at the same time, my parents in their wisdom limited my time in front of the PC (okay, Amiga at the time) and I spent a lot of time with my father, with neighbourhood kids and doing simple things like taking the dog for a walk - or my favorite passtime back then, reading. I am very glad that I had access to technology from that young age, it has gave me the foundation that I have built my career on, but I am also very grateful that I wasn't allowed to utterly sink into my own little PC world. I see a lot of programmers or other IT professionals who are much better at what they do than I would be, but they lack the social skills to be able to truly thrive in the workplace. I think that due to these shortcomings many of these folks are doomed to live out the stereotypes that shows like the IT Crowd love to mock (in a nice way).
Lying. Saving your money but telling your kid you ran the test anyway, and what it said.
Given that it is only $160, I think it will more likely be used to put a "scientific" backing to parents berating/nagging their kids for not working hard enough... "Jimmy, you have all this potential, the scientific test we ran on you proves it, you need to run faster to get gold medals! Stop slacking off and train harder already - make us proud!"
While I also think that this is a bit rough, it may be within the bounds of acceptable for some start-ups. I can imagine that normally VC companies would take a bigger slice of the pie then 6%, but I am also thinking that the 6% is really just the ticket inside the door. If in order to get more money you have to sacrifice more of your stock, then this becomes less and less appealing - even to a one or two man startup with an idea for a cool use.
The article does come up with a few very interesting apps that are out there - such as giving a doctor the ability to view different x-ray images without having to touch anything. I can imagine that this sort of thing would be VERY useful to an operating room where the doctors aren't supposed to touch anything after they have scrubbed down.
The ".com" domain is the domain for US commercial entities; there is no other. Because the US is fairly laissez-faire about it, a lot of foreign registrants have been able to get.com domains, but that doesn't make the TLD "international".
Europe has jurisdiction over.eu,.fr,.de, and other TLDs. The US has jurisdiction over.com,.edu,.org,..net and a few others.
Why on earth is this +4 Insightful? This is the sort of information that most/.'ers mock Fox News for. Seriously.
The TLD for the US is *gasp*.us - unsurprisingly similar to just about any other TLD suffix denoting a particular country. Spend 5 seconds researching something before modding this rubbish up.
but if you think you have the right to tell another sovereign nation what they can and cant do like this
Surely you are saying this in a tongue in cheek manner? The bill is behind this which is from the US does exactly what you say. It effectively kills a website off the internet because the US doesn't like it. At least all the other "Great Firewall" countries have the decency to only kill it off for their own countries. Do you really think that it is okay for the US to vanish a website hosted in another country, under a.com or.net TLD (which has nothing to do with the US) just because a judge in the US says it is okay? Can you really be that hypocritical?
I agree that the EU is doing this to protect themselves, but I can assure you, the countries offering money aren't going short themselves by handing over some cash to bail out Greece. Yes, they are handing over some Euros to protect their own dollars, but they won't be going through any austerity measures back home.
If you want to export more than you take in, you end up with less goods in your market than elsewhere.
Not at all. Manufacture more than you consume. Look at Germany for example. It exports a bit more than the US and imports buckets of goods - you can't say that a German has less access to goods than someone in America. Yet the German economy exports more than it imports. The german people had a trade surplus of around 150 billion euros (that's around 200 billion US).
Furthermore, with the amount of money those foreign governments hold, it's the US that owns them, not the other way around. The same way that if I owe a bank 100 grand, the bank owns me, but if I owe the bank 50 billion, I own the bank.
That's a total fallacy. Take Greece for example, it's loaded to the eyeballs with debt, they are being forced to accept massive austerity measures to continue getting assistance. If you are really saying say that Greece owns the EU then I think (hope) you might start to see why that statement is a joke.
This isn't about debt (more on that later though), it's about trade deficit.
The U.S. has held a trade deficit starting late in the 1960s. Its trade deficit has been increasing at a large rate since 1997 (See chart) and increased by 49.8 billion dollars between 2005 and 2006, setting a record high of 817.3 billion dollars, up from 767.5 billion dollars the previous year. The US last had a trade surplus in 1975. Every year there has been a major reduction in economic growth, it is followed by a reduction in the US trade deficit.
Using the last few years, the US is literally giving other countries around five hundred billion dollars each year more than it is taking from them. That sort of economy simply cannot in any way, shape or form continue forever. It will eventually bottom out.
Now, moving on to who does own US debt.
As of January 2011, foreigners owned $4.45 trillion of U.S. debt, or approximately 47% of the debt held by the public of $9.49 trillion and 32% of the total debt of $14.1 trillion. The largest holders were the central banks of China, Japan, the United Kingdom and Brazil. The share held by foreign governments has grown over time, rising from 13% of the public debt in 1988 to 25% in 2007.
Maybe that's not "most", but that's certainly some scary numbers. Sourced from United States Public Debt.
Hey Maztuhblastah, yes, my PCs are made in the same place that your PCs are made. That's not how it has always been though has it - which is my point. The first microprocessors (Intel 4004) were built by Intel, which is an American company based in Santa Clara. The first microcontroller/microcomputer was built by the Texas Instruments, which was the TMS 1000. That company is in Texas.
My point is that it isn't enough just to have a great R&D department in America. If you really want to keep profits, you need to have that great R&D and then build it at home. Will that mean that a US built computer (assuming all the manufacturing plants were there) would cost buckets more than a computer built with the same specs in China? Absolutely.
The problem is that in trying to maintain profits companies look at (for the most part) fairly short term horizons. Will they be able to make more money by having a product built overseas where workers are payed a handful of beans per week? What isn't factored into the equation is whether that overseas manufacture will cause the plant down the road to close down due to lack of demand. Companies are insular in that they don't look for the best outcome of their community, their state or their country. That's where the government should be stepping in to either increase taxes on products coming in from overseas, or offering incentives to keep that industry on their own soil. Now, it can get stupid (see American sugar cane growers for a perfect example of this) but if the American people refused to buy sugar made from cane grown overseas, then the cane farmers would be quite happily able to maintain their own industry at home.
While the choice to buy local can be difficult, do you think that GM or Ford would be in such a pickle if the American public were thinking of their country first and refused to buy Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi and all those Hyundais?
I live in Australia and while I understand that I cannot buy EVERYTHING I need as an Australian made product, I make sure to buy everything I can. That often means I pay a premium. We don't grow much rice in Australia these days, which is a bit of a shame. I also make a point to write to supermarket chains to point out a lack of choice. Recently I went to my local supermarket (one of the two large supermarket chains in Australia) and found that I wasn't able to buy beans that were made in Australia. There were even a number of bean tins that were branded by the supermarket - but made in Italy. If enough people made the choice to speak what they wanted - and they spoke with more than "I want the cheapest!" then we would have a much better debt position. People like Dick Smith do wonders to point these sort of things out in the media - and I really wish that more people listened and did something rather than just nodding and forgetting five minutes later. For example, he has a product that competes with Redheads matches. It's called Dickheads. The back of the box reads: We would have to be complete dickheads to let most of our famous Australian brands be taken over by foreign companies. Brands such as Vegemite, Aeroplane Jelly, Arnott's, Speedo and Redhead Matches are in overseas hands. This means the profit and wealth created goes overseas and robs our children and grandchildren of a future. A protest from Dick Smith Foods. As Australian as you can get..
You make the bed you will sleep in later. I am trying to make the best bed I can, and try to encourage others to do so too. That's all I can do.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not quite sure what the story is here. Okay, so it is a bit rought that a business was put out of operation because it was being used to VPN up some torrent files - but it certainly didn't look like they were trying to hide it.
I mean "Hey, we offer great ways to avoid being caught when uploading torrents..." then "Awww.... we got shut down for uploading torrents..." really aren't to far apart in any business plan that starts with the first.
On the upside, the article points out that new EU rules take any sniffing out of the requirements for an ISP. So maybe this won't happen again.
I am really unsure which side to take here. I don't support the ludicrous fines and penalties that all of the **AA goons are trying to enforce, but I also don't support a business model that seems to be basically aimed at people breaking copyright of others.
along with the cloud seeding blimp to encourage the lightning to start at the right time
Actually, cloud seeding is likely to supress lightning rather than create it mainly by supressing hail that can cause intracloud lightning.
There are currently three known ways to trigger lightning which might be plausible.
1) Launch a rocket - Some rockets unspool wire as they launch which acts as a lovely lightning rod back to the ground - however somewhat obvious if this is supposed to be a clean as a whistle murder though.
2) Have a volcano erupt - Volcanos often form lightning storms near their volcanic plume. This stunning picture was captured in 1994 at the Rinjani eruption.
3) Have a super powered laser creating the ionized beam into the clouds - however even the military who have been trying this since the 1970's have only managed to notice a slight increase small local discharges within the cloud itself, rather than a cloud to ground strike.
Whatever way you look at it, it's a really really long shot.
If you really want to get away with it, make it the most obvious weapon. If someone is killed by anthrax, they can get a sample and depending on the exact genetics, they can trace it back to the lab it came from. If the protagonist in the novel needs to kill someone on the hush, have the guy hit by a car then burn the car or throw it into a chop shop. Or steal the car. Things that are "unlikely" tend to be only able to be performed by a select few - meaning that the pool of possible suspects is already a really small pool. Getting away from the fuzz at that point is oh so much harder. Even setting it up to look like something else - get the guy in the novel drunk, drug him with something easily masked by alcohol, strip him and leave him in freezing mountains - maybe full of bears and wolves and other things that eat tasty human sized morsels.
Okay, so running someone over isn't going to be as cool or have the same "Whoa..." impact in a science fiction novel as setting up lightning to strike the fellow when he happens to answer a call - but it would be much more likely that the person got away without so much as being interviewed by police.
Lastly, being struck by ligthning doesn't always kill - check out Roy Sullivan - the Human Lightning Rod who has now survived seven (no shit!) lightning strikes. Also, about one in ten thousand people will be struck by lightning over a lifespan of eighty years. Of course, being outdoors a lot and in an area prone to lightning storms drastically raises those odds.
More to the point, fishes that were once considered garbage bait fish, like squid, are now haute cuisine and are on every damn menu. Salmon eggs are often sold as fish-bait, but you put 'em on sushi and their worth is jacked up by hundreds of percents.
Different fish (and food in general for that matter) have always been a rather location specific taste. In many parts of Europe, Cod is considered very good eating, yet here in Australia it is considered rubbish. Kippers (especially smoked) are good eating in Britain, but you can't get them in many parts of the world. Eastern Europeans (and a few other European countries like Germany and Belgium and Norway) love smoked and pickled Herring. Aside from a few measily jars in the back isle of a supermarket it is almost impossible to find outside of there. The Russians have always loved caviar.
It isn't so much that what was once rubbish is now considered fine dining, but rather that due to multiculturalism, many foods that were once unpopular in a foreign country are being driven by populations that are made up of many more nationalities.
Of course, from a practical standpoint you might as well just cook him with the thing and forget the lightning.
Yup, it could in theory be done, but by the time you address all the things that you would need to, there would be a multitude of other ways to achieve the same purpose that were more reliable, easier and more believable to a reader of a science fiction story.
the electromagnetic field between the phone and antenna tower would provide a path for the lightening
To make the lightning actually hit the poor sod on the phone, you would need to ensure that the bridge generated by the field between the phone and tower was the path of leaast resistance for the lightning to follow. While it may create a path of (microscopically lower than the air) lower resistance, it would still need to become the optimal path - which is where it would fall down.
You would have more luck trying to get the guy to play golf swinging metal sticks around, or better yet stand on top of a sand dune in the desert during a storm. In fact it would be much easier to try to rig the house of the person and call their landline (as long as it isn't a wireless phone, but one of the old fashioned curly cord types) and get the lightning to to id that way. There are many more documented cases where lightning has travelled along phone cables. This is because the resistance differential offered by a metal cable is in the order of many many magnitudes higher then the resistance differential offered by an EM field.
It's like trying to divert a huge river with two options, one is a path in the sand drawn with your finger (That's the EM field) and the other option to divert is with a Panama sized canal (that's the metal phone cable). The lightning will try to pick the path of least resistance from the clouds to the ground, but the likelihood that the path just happens to be the EM field caused by the phone signal is so miniscule that it is almost not plausible. A wet tree, a telegraph pole, an overhead wire, a nearby hill or even a lightning rod would almost always provide a path of lower resistance.
Not saying it isn't theoretically possible, but to be able to "set it up" to happen just at the right moment when a call is made to "kill" the person isn't realistically plausible.
Actually having read through these comments and actually spent more time thinking about it today than probably ever in my life, I think Aussies just generally like a tougher game of football than most other nations. It's not about hurting the other players, it's simply about playing with all your heart. It's a cultural thing, I had a quick look around and found a few insightful comments that might make more sense.
The Australian national character has been forged by the difficulty of subduing the land. Unlike other cultures based on a nurturing landscape that they seek to protect from others, Australian settlers experienced great hardship and had to support each other in order to survive. The battle against the elements led to the nickname of a member of Australia's working class being the 'Aussie battler'.
The need to laugh in the face of danger while battling the landscape has provoked a strange view of the world, with a distinctive upside-down sense of humour. Times of hardship or even disaster are ridiculed, and this extends to the Australian delight in dubbing a tall man "Shorty," a quiet one "Rowdy," a bald man "Curly" and a redhead "Bluey".
As well as the prevalence of the tall poppy syndrome bringing back to Earth the high fliers, the egalitarian Australian society has a traditional Australian support for the "underdog". Australians will show support for those who appear to be at a disadvantage even when the underdog is competing against fellow Australians.
This underdog attitude is most evident in sport, as sport is also a large part of Australian culture. Should an Australian be asked to choose between two unknown competitors, very often they will choose the one least likely to win, such as swimmer Eric the Eel during the 2000 Olympics. The success of Steven Bradbury in the 2002 Winter Olympics who won a skating gold medal after all his competitors crashed has coined the expression 'doing a Bradbury' which underpins the spirit of the underdog, positive thinking and never giving up.
During the 2003 Rugby World Cup, the Georgian rugby team arrived in Perth with a crowd of Perth residents welcoming them with colourful support, and a similar occurrence was noted in Townsville, Queensland where the Japanese rugby team was preferred to that of the French.
And lastly, this little gem from Wikipedia:
Australian rules football culture - Injuries, Health Issues and Prevention
Australian rules football is known for its high level of physical body contact compared to other sports such as soccer and basketball. High impact collisions can occur from any direction. Unlike gridiron, padding is not mandatory and is rarely worn. Combined with the range of activity including jumping, running, kicking, twisting and turning this means that injury rates are relatively high in comparison to other sports.
Australian rules football does not have the range or severity of health issues of American football however players have been known to die whilst playing Aussie Rules, though the most common cause is heart failure. The Victorian State Coroner reported five sudden deaths in that state among Australian rules footballers aged under 38 years between 1990-1997. Three of these deaths were attributed to Ischaemic heart disease (mean age, 31.7 years), and the other two to physical trauma.
(Emphasis mine)
Aussies have a "Harden Up" attitude when it comes to adversity. There are some hilarious comedy sketches that aussies love becuase they are so on the mark for aussie culture. A person who is seen to overcome difficult odds is generally championed. A tough guy (good or bad) can end up being an Australian Icon such as Ned Kelly who we even depicted during the opening of the Sydney Olympics in 2000!
But more importantly, why the fuck do you consider it a selling point that people get hit hard in a sport with no padding?
Because AFL is a contact sport. The idea of a contact sport is to have a challenge between the opposing players. It is challenging other players to be as fit, as nimble and as athletic as you are. Yes, AFL has more injuries then other forms of football. That's the game that has been played here, and that's the game that will continue to be played here.
Aussie rules always ruled higher in the opinion of parents’ when compared to rugby-codes. But this opinion stands challenged, as new research has pointed out that Australian football accounts for the highest injuries as compared to all other types of football. // The aussie code seems to have topped the charts of contact sports injuries, the second place being occupied by league , the third by rugby union and the last , being soccer.
A report published today by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows that among Australian rules players who are 15 and above, there were 734.3 cases of hospital treatments per 100,000 participants, compared with 677.9 for rugby league. Union and Soccer were way behind to even compete – on 316.9 and 242 hospital treatments per 100,000 participants. Touch football was by far considered the safest, with 121.2 per 100,000 participants. The frequent type of injury was Fractures.
Having said that, do yourself a favour and watch the second video, it forcuses much more some amazing plays rather than big hit ups.
Next best thing.
From TFA:
Stanford, however, has developed a new battery electrode that can survive 40,000 charge/discharge cycles — enough for 30 years of use on the grid.
Just to piss you off.
You know what you should do? You should give it a clever name like "handegg" and then pat yourself on the back for being so amazingly observant.
Come on mods, this is the funniest comment in this topic now, and it will be the funniest when the last post is added. +1 Funny
Isn't this also the same game where the players stop playing the game during commercials? Yeah, paint me surprised.
I will stick to watching a really tough hitting football game where the althetisism of the players is second to none.
b'cat == Bureaucrat
I abbreviated because that's one of the dozen or so words that I can never remember how to spell correctly, no matter how much I try or how embarrassing it is personally, due to rare use and asinine spelling it always manages to slip through the cracks.
Well, at least you chaps over in the US aren't alone. I submitted a story about six weeks ago about two malls in Australia that were using the exact same technology. It made the local papers here, but never prominently.
It's okay, soon, we will forget about it and given that other countries are also doing it, we will accept it as the norm.
*sips coffee*
I'm sure a private company like Eastern Research Group could have done it for much less than that!
That depends on if it was a smart private company. Private companies are there to make money. If someone is waving around a huge fat wad of cash calling for an app, you really need to quote just under that amount, but deliver the best that money can buy for that price. Especially with governments, it isn't about offering the cheapest price (though that does come into it) but often if a budget has already been set and approved, anything under that budget is fair game the b'cats won't flinch. Now, I am not saying sell them a $10 app for $200k, but if you have $200k of development funds to use, give the customer an app that is worth what they paid for it.
This is where truly good companies stand out. If you have a ship of fools running a company, they will likely burn through development costs, making mistakes, paying the wrong developers and end up with a rubbish product. If you have a strong tight company, they will also go through the same budget, but the final product will be fantastic.
The problem is that sometimes it is hard to differentiate the the ship of fools company from the legend company - especially by b'cats who think that a power point presentation is a wonderful way to demo what a final product can do.
Great, now the internet is being Aquaturfed, not just astroturfed....
She's had her own PC since she was 3. She also plays softball, soccer, and chess.
And I think that is the silver bullet right there. It's not so much a case of "technology is baaaaadddd!" but rather all things are good in moderation. This means it is excellent for kids to have some exposure to technology as this is a wonderful way to learn logical thinking and problem solving, but these two things alone do not make a person. Children need social interaction, and this means spending time with parents, siblings or other children and interacting with them. This will give them many other valuable life skills that they need.
When I was young, I was programming at the age of ten, but at the same time, my parents in their wisdom limited my time in front of the PC (okay, Amiga at the time) and I spent a lot of time with my father, with neighbourhood kids and doing simple things like taking the dog for a walk - or my favorite passtime back then, reading. I am very glad that I had access to technology from that young age, it has gave me the foundation that I have built my career on, but I am also very grateful that I wasn't allowed to utterly sink into my own little PC world. I see a lot of programmers or other IT professionals who are much better at what they do than I would be, but they lack the social skills to be able to truly thrive in the workplace. I think that due to these shortcomings many of these folks are doomed to live out the stereotypes that shows like the IT Crowd love to mock (in a nice way).
Lying. Saving your money but telling your kid you ran the test anyway, and what it said.
Given that it is only $160, I think it will more likely be used to put a "scientific" backing to parents berating/nagging their kids for not working hard enough... "Jimmy, you have all this potential, the scientific test we ran on you proves it, you need to run faster to get gold medals! Stop slacking off and train harder already - make us proud!"
While I also think that this is a bit rough, it may be within the bounds of acceptable for some start-ups. I can imagine that normally VC companies would take a bigger slice of the pie then 6%, but I am also thinking that the 6% is really just the ticket inside the door. If in order to get more money you have to sacrifice more of your stock, then this becomes less and less appealing - even to a one or two man startup with an idea for a cool use.
The article does come up with a few very interesting apps that are out there - such as giving a doctor the ability to view different x-ray images without having to touch anything. I can imagine that this sort of thing would be VERY useful to an operating room where the doctors aren't supposed to touch anything after they have scrubbed down.
The ".com" domain is the domain for US commercial entities; there is no other. Because the US is fairly laissez-faire about it, a lot of foreign registrants have been able to get .com domains, but that doesn't make the TLD "international".
Europe has jurisdiction over .eu, .fr, .de, and other TLDs. The US has jurisdiction over .com, .edu, .org, ..net and a few others.
Why on earth is this +4 Insightful? This is the sort of information that most /.'ers mock Fox News for. Seriously.
The TLD for the US is *gasp* .us - unsurprisingly similar to just about any other TLD suffix denoting a particular country. Spend 5 seconds researching something before modding this rubbish up.
but if you think you have the right to tell another sovereign nation what they can and cant do like this
Surely you are saying this in a tongue in cheek manner? The bill is behind this which is from the US does exactly what you say. It effectively kills a website off the internet because the US doesn't like it. At least all the other "Great Firewall" countries have the decency to only kill it off for their own countries. Do you really think that it is okay for the US to vanish a website hosted in another country, under a .com or .net TLD (which has nothing to do with the US) just because a judge in the US says it is okay? Can you really be that hypocritical?
I agree that the EU is doing this to protect themselves, but I can assure you, the countries offering money aren't going short themselves by handing over some cash to bail out Greece. Yes, they are handing over some Euros to protect their own dollars, but they won't be going through any austerity measures back home.
If you want to export more than you take in, you end up with less goods in your market than elsewhere.
Not at all. Manufacture more than you consume. Look at Germany for example. It exports a bit more than the US and imports buckets of goods - you can't say that a German has less access to goods than someone in America. Yet the German economy exports more than it imports. The german people had a trade surplus of around 150 billion euros (that's around 200 billion US).
Furthermore, with the amount of money those foreign governments hold, it's the US that owns them, not the other way around. The same way that if I owe a bank 100 grand, the bank owns me, but if I owe the bank 50 billion, I own the bank.
That's a total fallacy. Take Greece for example, it's loaded to the eyeballs with debt, they are being forced to accept massive austerity measures to continue getting assistance. If you are really saying say that Greece owns the EU then I think (hope) you might start to see why that statement is a joke.
This isn't about debt (more on that later though), it's about trade deficit.
The U.S. has held a trade deficit starting late in the 1960s. Its trade deficit has been increasing at a large rate since 1997 (See chart) and increased by 49.8 billion dollars between 2005 and 2006, setting a record high of 817.3 billion dollars, up from 767.5 billion dollars the previous year. The US last had a trade surplus in 1975. Every year there has been a major reduction in economic growth, it is followed by a reduction in the US trade deficit.
Using the last few years, the US is literally giving other countries around five hundred billion dollars each year more than it is taking from them. That sort of economy simply cannot in any way, shape or form continue forever. It will eventually bottom out.
Now, moving on to who does own US debt.
As of January 2011, foreigners owned $4.45 trillion of U.S. debt, or approximately 47% of the debt held by the public of $9.49 trillion and 32% of the total debt of $14.1 trillion. The largest holders were the central banks of China, Japan, the United Kingdom and Brazil. The share held by foreign governments has grown over time, rising from 13% of the public debt in 1988 to 25% in 2007.
Maybe that's not "most", but that's certainly some scary numbers. Sourced from United States Public Debt.
Hey Maztuhblastah, yes, my PCs are made in the same place that your PCs are made. That's not how it has always been though has it - which is my point. The first microprocessors (Intel 4004) were built by Intel, which is an American company based in Santa Clara. The first microcontroller/microcomputer was built by the Texas Instruments, which was the TMS 1000. That company is in Texas.
My point is that it isn't enough just to have a great R&D department in America. If you really want to keep profits, you need to have that great R&D and then build it at home. Will that mean that a US built computer (assuming all the manufacturing plants were there) would cost buckets more than a computer built with the same specs in China? Absolutely.
The problem is that in trying to maintain profits companies look at (for the most part) fairly short term horizons. Will they be able to make more money by having a product built overseas where workers are payed a handful of beans per week? What isn't factored into the equation is whether that overseas manufacture will cause the plant down the road to close down due to lack of demand. Companies are insular in that they don't look for the best outcome of their community, their state or their country. That's where the government should be stepping in to either increase taxes on products coming in from overseas, or offering incentives to keep that industry on their own soil. Now, it can get stupid (see American sugar cane growers for a perfect example of this) but if the American people refused to buy sugar made from cane grown overseas, then the cane farmers would be quite happily able to maintain their own industry at home.
While the choice to buy local can be difficult, do you think that GM or Ford would be in such a pickle if the American public were thinking of their country first and refused to buy Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi and all those Hyundais?
I live in Australia and while I understand that I cannot buy EVERYTHING I need as an Australian made product, I make sure to buy everything I can. That often means I pay a premium. We don't grow much rice in Australia these days, which is a bit of a shame. I also make a point to write to supermarket chains to point out a lack of choice. Recently I went to my local supermarket (one of the two large supermarket chains in Australia) and found that I wasn't able to buy beans that were made in Australia. There were even a number of bean tins that were branded by the supermarket - but made in Italy. If enough people made the choice to speak what they wanted - and they spoke with more than "I want the cheapest!" then we would have a much better debt position. People like Dick Smith do wonders to point these sort of things out in the media - and I really wish that more people listened and did something rather than just nodding and forgetting five minutes later. For example, he has a product that competes with Redheads matches. It's called Dickheads. The back of the box reads: We would have to be complete dickheads to let most of our famous Australian brands be taken over by foreign companies. Brands such as Vegemite, Aeroplane Jelly, Arnott's, Speedo and Redhead Matches are in overseas hands. This means the profit and wealth created goes overseas and robs our children and grandchildren of a future. A protest from Dick Smith Foods. As Australian as you can get..
You make the bed you will sleep in later. I am trying to make the best bed I can, and try to encourage others to do so too. That's all I can do.