In the abstract, it mentions that they were exposed to an average of 1.4 W/kg. That's several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything you'd encounter outside the laboratory, which is less than 1W total. Unless you have a kilowatt tower on your nightstand, you have nothing to worry about.
There have been many attempts at an ebook reader in the past; why does Amazon think it can do any better?
Because they have an established, influential relationship with every book publisher. An eBook reader can only succeed if the publishers rally behind it, but the publishers are afraid that eBooks will destroy their print-book sales. Companies like Palm and Sony couldn't care less if that happened; they make their money on hardware, not on content. Amazon, on the other hand, makes its money selling books, so what's good for Amazon is good for the publishers and vise versa.
Or, to put it another way: If Adobe asked for permission to sell Harry Potter as an eBook, the publisher would tell them to get lost. If Amazon asked the same thing, they'd be much more likely to agree.
Dear Choir:
I teach a high school theology course. We were scheduled to get new books this year but due to several pointy haired bosses, no books were ordered. The books I have to teach are (god help me) pagan scrolls from the 3rd century BC. The question is: is it better to teach old religions or their open text counterparts (Christianity, Hinduism, etc)? Is the steep learning curve and slightly less uniform world view worth a little damnation to teach them religion founded in the past 5000 years?
Except that this ignores the truth behind the spam problem, that many people don't seem to care about. Spam is, at its root, an economic problem. Spam is sent by people who are making money helping someone sell something. The spam you got this afternoon for discount v!@gra or 0EM software is making money for someone. And as long as someone can still make money off of it, they'll keep doing it.
Not exactly. It's making money for the spammer, but it probably isn't making money for the person who hired him. You see, even if no one ever bought anything advertised in spam, it would still be sent. The problem is multilevel marketing, which creates a lot of people desperate to sell unsellable inventory, some of whom pay spammers to advertise it for them. A perceived economic incentive is enough, even if there isn't a real one.
Even funnier: They don't see the contradiction.</blockquote> No one's claiming Bush masterminded anything. Bush is, in fact, as stupid as people say he is. Vice President Cheney, on the other hand, has James Bond suspended over a shark pit, and Bush does all and only the things Cheney tells him to. That's the genius of this administration; all the publicity focuses on the dumb monkey, while all the power is in the hands of the evil genius. There is no contradiction.
The purpose of this is not to tell you where you are. It's to get you to the right map, without needing to type a location using clumsy cell-phone input. Once you're looking at a map, you can figure out where you are by looking at street signs. Think of it as a road atlas which always opens to the right page.
According to the article, Google released the blogger's identity when he failed to respond within 72 hours. That is MUCH too fast. Even if he dropped what he was doing and acted immediately, it would still take longer than that to figure out what's going on, get a lawyer, and draft a response. That's ignoring the fact that he probably didn't receive the message immediately (subtract 24 hours), probably had other things on his plate (subtract another 24 hours) and may not have even realized that the notice was legit. (An e-mail is not a legitimate court summon. If you receive one which claims to be, it is probably a scam.)
But then, to be honest, I'd rather have no web browser bundled with a Windows install, thanks very much.
What tool do you propose users use to download their first browser, then? FTP? Average users won't know how. And before you say that they should read the manual, I'd like to point out that the Windows manual is, in fact, entirely in HTML. (The Windows help viewer is a thin wrapper around Internet Explorer's rendering engine, and the help files themselves are zip-like bundles of HTML files.)
Yes, but the bacteria are producing it from decaying plant material. You'd have to see how much greenhouse gases are being produced by the bacteria as they decompose the vinegar/cellulose/whatever before calling this a better solution than conventional electrolysis.
Incorrect. The bacteria will release carbon dioxide, yes, but that same carbon was taken out of the air by the plants they're decomposing. Electrolysis doesn't release carbon dioxide per se, but it uses electricity which comes from coal or oil, to produce hydrogen that contains less energy than the oil you had to burn to make it.
There are two issues which network neutrality avoids, which are only loosely related. Suppose ISP A calls up site S and says "your site's traffic will get low priority unless you pay us". Now, you might think that if site S wants fast Internet access, they should pay for it. The thing is, site S is already paying for fast access - to ISP B, which is ISP A's competitor. The first consequence of network neutrality is that you can't try to bill your competitors' customers. (In this case, ISP B would probably have grounds to sue.)
The second issue is false advertising. Customer C sees that an ISP is advertising x MB/s connections for y dollars, says "great, I'll be able to download z really fast!", and signs up. Then he finds out that he can't download z as fast as he thought, because BitTorrent/sftp/whatever is blocked or throttled. This is why people are angry at Comcast - it's not just that they throttle BitTorrent, it's that they lie and say they don't.
Network neutrality is actually a redundant rule, to ban things which already unlawful for different reasons.
The trend for simplification is positively there, and the math is right -- the more complex and often-used it is, the bigger the pressure to simplify.
No, that is the OPPOSITE of what happens (and what this paper says)! The more often something is used, the LESS likely it is to be simplified. These simplifications aren't the result of someone deciding to change the way they speak; rather, they're the result of successive generations learning their parents' language imperfectly. If an irregular verb is used all the time, you have to learn it or you'll sound like an idiot. Thus, all native English speakers know all of the conjugations of 'to be'. On the other hand, if you only use an irregular verb twice in your lifetime, you probably won't remember its conjugation, so you'll fall back on general rules. When everyone does this, the regular conjugation becomes the standard.
Additionally, do not kill members of my party off without giving me some way to rescue them. If I completely dominate the boss that was supposed to beat my party and kill that guy, don't kill that guy.
No, that would be a huge mistake, and it's one that many JRPGs have made. If the player has too much control over which characters are around, it becomes impossible to write good dialog. The writers won't know which characters are part of the conversation, so they have to spend all their time writing alternative dialog for each combination of characters that may be present. Instead of railroading the player onto one well-written path, the player gets to choose between many poorly considered ones, characters don't get fully developed and the story suffers.
Because you could just push your cart, and in about 1 second it would give you your total. If you have a card on file, you could just walk out the door and get your receipt.
That won't happen, because it invites shoplifting: just remove or disable the RFID tag on an expensive item and you get it free.
What I want to know is why Covad can't run their own lines to your home themselves.
Because it is illegal for them to do so. Running cables requires either permission from every person whose property the cables cross (impossible to get because there are so many) or permission from the city or town (impossible because of Verizon lobbying).
Not likely. Intel is currently developing their 32nm technology, and IBM has tested 29.9nm lithography. That's only around 600 times the Bohr radius (radius of a hydrogen atom). Within the next 10 years or so, we will have reached the fundamental limits on the size of a silicon transistor, and once those chips are brought to market, that's it. If Moore's law continues at all, it will be applied to something like quantum computers, not semiconductors.
Actually, Moore's Law doesn't care about fundamental physical limits, because Moore's law is a prediction of *price* per transistor, not density. If density stops increasing, then Moore's Law predicts that either the chips will get exponentially bigger for the same price, or prices will fall exponentially. Either one is good for us consumers.
The Nunavut language has a special word that means "bears are evil", for which there is no English equivalent, as we have no special word that refers specifically to the type of evil that can only be associated with a bear.
No, it does NOT have a special word for that. What Nunavut actually has is a word for "bears", a suffix for "evil", and a highly general rule for making compounds. These compounds wouldn't appear in a dictionary, because they aren't learned individually. This is much like the myth that Eskimos have more than a hundred words for snow; someone noticed that they have more than a hundred adjective suffixes, and any adjective suffix can glued onto the word for snow.
To add to that, if ( FrameBuffer != FALSE ) probably intends to check whether it's a NULL pointer, but NULL isn't guaranteed to be (void*)0. Probably harmless if it happens to work right on that particular architecture, but should they switch to something else it'd be trouble.
I have heard this claim before, but I have never seen any evidence that it's true. Every major compiler and every compiler I've used has had NULL=0, and using if(ptr) to mean if(ptr!=NULL) is a very common C and C++ idiom. Any platform that had a non-zero value for NULL would find that most C code would break. I don't have time to go digging through the standard, but I would be shocked if nonzero values for NULL were allowed.
For anyone confused by the summary: a hard-disk-maker's megabyte is 10^6 (1 million) bytes, whereas an operating system's megabyte is 2^20 (1,048,576) bytes. The summary was supposed to use a superscript, but the superscript got lost so '10 to the 6th' became '106'.
Re:Here's how it works from another perspective
on
How Image Spam Works
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It works because some rat fuckers out there buy the shit that's being advertised.
No, they don't. Even if no one ever bought a single item that was advertised by spam, the spam would still be sent. That's because there are two people involved: the seller and the spammer, usually not the same person. The spammer convinces the seller that a spam campaign will increase sales, and the seller pays the spammer to send them. It doesn't have to be true, it only has to be convincing.
The Supreme Court recently ruled that the courts don't get to pretend that patents on obvious things are valid. It is unlikely that/any/ of these 235 patents will hold up in court. Microsoft is just using them to create FUD; they know they won't get any judgements.
The Internet is a bunch of electronics which let any connected computer communicate with any other connected computer. It is useful because many of those computers provide information and services on request.
That's it. The Internet is not wires, fiber-optic cables, http, TCP/IP, or anything like that, because those are technical details which have changed in the past and may change in the future.
Because of how wealth is created (through voluntary exchange), the truly free market is the most efficient method of wealth generation. A free market operates in pareto efficiency, the most efficient form a market can hope to attain. This means it operates at a level of 99.9999999999% efficiency (ten signifigant digits).
No, it doesn't. Your view of economics is not even close to correct. There are many cases where the free market is very far from optimal, and government intervention is necessary to make it efficient.
The first problem is information. We have laws against false advertisements, and requiring that certain information be included, because the free market can't function without them. The second problem is externalities. An externality is when someone does something which harms an uninvolved third party, without paying for that harm. The classic example (which you got wrong) is pollution. If dumping toxic waste into the river is legal, cars will be cheaper and factories will make more money, but the people who live near that river will have a serious problem.
But the real problem is simply _power_. Large corporations are amoral entities with vast amounts of power which they can and do use to steal natural resources, unfairly destroy smaller competitors, blackmail their enemies and, above all, secure even more power. A strong government is necessary because a small government wouldn't have the power to stand up to a multinational corporation, even if that corporation was committing felonies.
The libertarian dream is admirable, but naive. Instead of giving power back to the people, it transfers power to the rich - a small, unelected elite which answers to no one. I'd rather have a devil I can vote against.
Because his arrest was a direct consequence of him posting a video of a protest on his blog. A grand jury wanted him to release the entirety of the video so they could unmask some of the protesters, but he refused. The thing is, California has a law which says they can't do that, while the Federal government doesn't respect that.
What advantage does Lua have over perl/python/ruby/other existing scripting languages that makes it worth investing the time to learn?
Lua is useful because it's easy to fold into other programs. Lua is what you pull out when you're writing an application in a non-scripting language but you decide to make part of it user-scriptable. Conversely, you may be using one of those applications, in which case there are Lua scripts around for you to play with.
Technically, however, aren't the cooling fans (basically the simplest components in the system) the most critical? If your cooling fans go out, they can take the entire system with them, and then some.
No, they can't, because the critical components have temperature sensors on them to protect from that. A well-built system should never toast any component regardless of fan failures.
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In the abstract, it mentions that they were exposed to an average of 1.4 W/kg. That's several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything you'd encounter outside the laboratory, which is less than 1W total. Unless you have a kilowatt tower on your nightstand, you have nothing to worry about.
Or, to put it another way: If Adobe asked for permission to sell Harry Potter as an eBook, the publisher would tell them to get lost. If Amazon asked the same thing, they'd be much more likely to agree.
Dear Choir:
I teach a high school theology course. We were scheduled to get new books this year but due to several pointy haired bosses, no books were ordered. The books I have to teach are (god help me) pagan scrolls from the 3rd century BC. The question is: is it better to teach old religions or their open text counterparts (Christianity, Hinduism, etc)? Is the steep learning curve and slightly less uniform world view worth a little damnation to teach them religion founded in the past 5000 years?
Even funnier: They don't see the contradiction.</blockquote>
No one's claiming Bush masterminded anything. Bush is, in fact, as stupid as people say he is. Vice President Cheney, on the other hand, has James Bond suspended over a shark pit, and Bush does all and only the things Cheney tells him to. That's the genius of this administration; all the publicity focuses on the dumb monkey, while all the power is in the hands of the evil genius. There is no contradiction.
The purpose of this is not to tell you where you are. It's to get you to the right map, without needing to type a location using clumsy cell-phone input. Once you're looking at a map, you can figure out where you are by looking at street signs. Think of it as a road atlas which always opens to the right page.
According to the article, Google released the blogger's identity when he failed to respond within 72 hours. That is MUCH too fast. Even if he dropped what he was doing and acted immediately, it would still take longer than that to figure out what's going on, get a lawyer, and draft a response. That's ignoring the fact that he probably didn't receive the message immediately (subtract 24 hours), probably had other things on his plate (subtract another 24 hours) and may not have even realized that the notice was legit. (An e-mail is not a legitimate court summon. If you receive one which claims to be, it is probably a scam.)
Incorrect. The bacteria will release carbon dioxide, yes, but that same carbon was taken out of the air by the plants they're decomposing. Electrolysis doesn't release carbon dioxide per se, but it uses electricity which comes from coal or oil, to produce hydrogen that contains less energy than the oil you had to burn to make it.
There are two issues which network neutrality avoids, which are only loosely related. Suppose ISP A calls up site S and says "your site's traffic will get low priority unless you pay us". Now, you might think that if site S wants fast Internet access, they should pay for it. The thing is, site S is already paying for fast access - to ISP B, which is ISP A's competitor. The first consequence of network neutrality is that you can't try to bill your competitors' customers. (In this case, ISP B would probably have grounds to sue.)
The second issue is false advertising. Customer C sees that an ISP is advertising x MB/s connections for y dollars, says "great, I'll be able to download z really fast!", and signs up. Then he finds out that he can't download z as fast as he thought, because BitTorrent/sftp/whatever is blocked or throttled. This is why people are angry at Comcast - it's not just that they throttle BitTorrent, it's that they lie and say they don't.
Network neutrality is actually a redundant rule, to ban things which already unlawful for different reasons.
No, that would be a huge mistake, and it's one that many JRPGs have made. If the player has too much control over which characters are around, it becomes impossible to write good dialog. The writers won't know which characters are part of the conversation, so they have to spend all their time writing alternative dialog for each combination of characters that may be present. Instead of railroading the player onto one well-written path, the player gets to choose between many poorly considered ones, characters don't get fully developed and the story suffers.
Because it is illegal for them to do so. Running cables requires either permission from every person whose property the cables cross (impossible to get because there are so many) or permission from the city or town (impossible because of Verizon lobbying).
For anyone confused by the summary: a hard-disk-maker's megabyte is 10^6 (1 million) bytes, whereas an operating system's megabyte is 2^20 (1,048,576) bytes. The summary was supposed to use a superscript, but the superscript got lost so '10 to the 6th' became '106'.
The Supreme Court recently ruled that the courts don't get to pretend that patents on obvious things are valid. It is unlikely that /any/ of these 235 patents will hold up in court. Microsoft is just using them to create FUD; they know they won't get any judgements.
The Internet is a bunch of electronics which let any connected computer communicate with any other connected computer. It is useful because many of those computers provide information and services on request.
That's it. The Internet is not wires, fiber-optic cables, http, TCP/IP, or anything like that, because those are technical details which have changed in the past and may change in the future.
No, it doesn't. Your view of economics is not even close to correct. There are many cases where the free market is very far from optimal, and government intervention is necessary to make it efficient.
The first problem is information. We have laws against false advertisements, and requiring that certain information be included, because the free market can't function without them. The second problem is externalities. An externality is when someone does something which harms an uninvolved third party, without paying for that harm. The classic example (which you got wrong) is pollution. If dumping toxic waste into the river is legal, cars will be cheaper and factories will make more money, but the people who live near that river will have a serious problem.
But the real problem is simply _power_. Large corporations are amoral entities with vast amounts of power which they can and do use to steal natural resources, unfairly destroy smaller competitors, blackmail their enemies and, above all, secure even more power. A strong government is necessary because a small government wouldn't have the power to stand up to a multinational corporation, even if that corporation was committing felonies.
The libertarian dream is admirable, but naive. Instead of giving power back to the people, it transfers power to the rich - a small, unelected elite which answers to no one. I'd rather have a devil I can vote against.
Because his arrest was a direct consequence of him posting a video of a protest on his blog. A grand jury wanted him to release the entirety of the video so they could unmask some of the protesters, but he refused. The thing is, California has a law which says they can't do that, while the Federal government doesn't respect that.
Lua is useful because it's easy to fold into other programs. Lua is what you pull out when you're writing an application in a non-scripting language but you decide to make part of it user-scriptable. Conversely, you may be using one of those applications, in which case there are Lua scripts around for you to play with.
No, they can't, because the critical components have temperature sensors on them to protect from that. A well-built system should never toast any component regardless of fan failures.