Yeah, you can produce hydrocarbons using H2O, CO2 and photosynthesizing organisms. But those organisms do need other nutrients, so the "no feedstock" bit can't be true.
I believe they call it "no feedstock" because those materials aren't used in the fuel you extract - unlike other bacteria who use the hydrocarbons from a feedstock to produce the fuel.
"Leftist" indeed. Not leftist though. The social democrats and the moderates were traditionally the biggest parties for left/right politics, but now they are both moving towards a middle point somewhere to the right of where the old center used to be. (Moderates are changing their rhethoric to be more appealing to workers, while still running a policy that's a lot better for people with high incomes, while the social democrats are copying the moderate ideas and recently said that they must stop trying to be a voice for unemployed or too-sick-to-work people)
Also, since some of your politicians have suggested killing Assange we could not extradite him if there was any danger of this happening. Almost all countries in Europe (UK and Sweden definitely anyway) consider the death penalty to be so barbaric that we refuse to extradite people to face it regardless of the crime they are accused of.
Oh yeah, cause we Swedes care so much about not turning over people to countries where they might be killed or tortured (1). And Sweden will surely stand up to the US when informal requests are made to handle the issue (2).
Can't seem to paste in the links for some reason, but for (1) Google for "extradition egypt torture sweden". As for (2), remember what happened to the Pirate Bay servers here in Sweden?
> The easiest way to protect yourself from Wikileaks is to ensure your > organization doesn't do anything worth leaking. Simple as that.
Are you trying to say, "If your organization has done nothing wrong, you've nothing to fear from Wikileaks."??
Seems to me that my government has been saying that kind of thing to me, as they extend their surveillance powers.
This has more to do with the power imbalance between the individual and his/her government than the exposition of moral wrongs. Today's societies work by the state holding a monopoly on violence. To make up for this imbalance, the individual person has a much greater right to secrecy than the state does. While there is to a large degree an unfortunate mixing of public and private regarding e.g. politicians not paying taxes for their housekeepers, the government should be held to a higher standard than the individual, because when it steps outside its boundaries, the government can cause much more damage.
It's not rape because he didn't have a condom, it's rape because he had a condom on that broke during intercourse, the woman claims she told him to stop, and he didn't. In my book, if the woman tells you to stop and you don't, then yes, that does qualify as rape. Of course to this date only Assange and the woman in question know what actually happened that night, but there's definitely grounds for the police to suspect him of rape.
---
In this particular instance, I do believe that this has more to do with his connection to Wikipedia than his connection with these two Swedish women, but rape trials are hard enough on the defendant without that kind of stories being spread around.
In the case of fire: Calmly exit the building For no reason, re-enter the building until given the OK by emergency responders
This is so that when the fire trucks come, they can be told how many people are still inside. It's not only to not risk your own life, but to make their job easier and safer.
Nice try, but it's fairly common knowledge (ie, taught early in algebra) that the square root breaks equality. Ie, sqrt(x^2) != x but sqrt(x^2) = |x|. Add that to your proof and no contradiction occurs.
>>>the teabaggers would go apeshit if the US-DOJ Antitrust stepped in and forced another set of breakups in telecom
No I wouldn't.
The breakup of AT&T Monopoly was one of the best things to happen, but only because it gave us choice in our telephone services. If the Comcast or Verizon Monopoly are broken apart, what would it achieve? We'd still be stuck with just one cable down the middle of the street.
What we really need is 10-20 cables running down the middle of the street, each one offering a different ISP. Imagine the present: Comcast or Verizon. Imagine the future: Comcast or Cox or Time-Warner or AppleTV or MSN or Verizon or Quest or Mediacom or Google ISP or.....
Of course that won't happen so long as local governments keep insisting upon holding a monopoly.
No, what you really need is one cable running down the street, operated as a government utility like the road itself is. Then you let anyone set up shop as ISP and run traffic over that cable. Individual cables mean it's more expensive to startup a competing business, which in turn gives you as a customer a higher price for less service.
How can anyone say with a straight face that a progressive tax is more fair than a flat tax? All else being equal. (If it's not, then that is what we should focus on fixing)
Easy, when you include the costs of living as well. Someone making $100k a year has a lot less money after rent/housing tax and food than someone making $1m, even if the first person pays 20% tax and the second person pays 40% tax. A roof over your head and food on the table is not an optional expense or some kind of luxury that you can forego when times are lean.
And despite what some people here on/. seem to think, the US is not willing to let its people starve to death in the streets (at least not en masse), so with a flat tax you would simply have more people depending on welfare, meaning the flat tax rate has to be made higher to pay for that... Spread out over the entire population, you'd have a group that owes more in taxes than they have left after food and rent is payed.
Net effect: people who earn more money would pay more than the original percentage in tax anyway, so why not use a progressive tax rate from the start and at the same time have fewer people dependent on the government for their daily survival?
If a player has the industrial muscle to build one, what whine is that of yours? Build your own stack of doom to counter it, or shut up and lose.
Disclaimer; it's been a while since I hung out on the fan forums, but here's my impression of why SoDs are unpopular: it's the AI handicap.
Sure, on lower levels (noble, prince, monarch) it's not a big issue, cause the AI only gets a small bonus. But when you get up to emperor or immortal, it's very hard to keep up. Not only are the AI armies cheaper to build, they are cheaper to maintain as well. Trying to keep up with Monty or Shaka past the medieval age is a good way to see your economy grind to a halt.
If, on the other hand, you can guess the private crypto keys out of a DRMed PMP just by clipping a 15 dollar device from some shady mod-chip vendor to the recharging port and waiting a few days, heads will roll. There are a lot of devices these days that are designed to keep keys secret from the owners of the hardware. Particularly for common ones, voltage attack devices might well become fairly common advanced hobbyist and/or grey market items...
Worth noticing is that the 100 hours mentioned in TFS was on a 81-box cluster. They estimated it to be about a year on a 2.4GHz CPU. Of course, for the purposes of cracking DRM keys, it is not unreasonable to imagine a distributed network cooperating.
More interesting, in my opinion, was that it has 50% chance to guess the key in O(n * log n) time, and their example needed only 650 faulty messages (extrapolating from a 12% single-bit-error rate, it should work with a bit over 5000 total messages generated).
From TFS: "reduces the computational complexity[...]by two orders of magnitude[...] Additionally, the process used just one percent of the energy that would typically be required" Well, duh, what's so shocking about a computation taking 1% of the time previously needed now only takes 1% of the energy as well?
Modded funny for some reason... of course, I'm not sure this still holds true for today's cars, but what used to happen when you shift into neutral is that the engine gets disconnected physically from the wheels - it can keep accelerating all it wants but the car will slow down.
[quote]Let's say you and the plumber are both paying 25%. Then, you initially earned $133; the government taxed you 25%, which is $33.33, and now you have $100 left. Now you give that $100 to the plumber, who in turn has to give $25 of that income (25%) to the government. $75 of your $133 has arrived in the plumber's hands, actually paying for the plumbing work. Your actual tax rate here is 75/133 which is about 56% - not the 25% that it initially appears to be.[/quote]
But in that scenario, the plumber is paying 0% tax. You can't count the $25 he sends to the IRS as taxation both for you and him. Your personal tax payment to the government is exactly the 25% they say it is. I'm not a big fan of sales tax either (it's far too heavy a burden for people with low incomes), but since the alternative would be heavier taxation of properties and wealth, you can guess the odds of that happening...
Clearly, to lift the ban on stem cell research, we must come up with a weapon application for it, or describe how it can be used to catch terrorists...
but instead office workers at the firm and bank(s). So they are hassling people that have nothing to do directly with the MPAA/RIAA/etc.
Admittedly, this is not the issue, but this is still the people who will keep the money you pay on Wednesday until Monday before passing it on to the company you paid the bill to. And this is the computer age...
[...] have received threats, as has the head of Sweden's anti-piracy board
Worse (IMO), the head of Sweden's anti-piracy board's kids has been threatened. While I certainly don't agree with the lawsuit, I don't agree with the methods emplyed by people fighting back either.
It IS that exploitable, I once paid a bill twice and a few weeks later I received a cash order for the amount I paid (once). I'm not sure if the lawyer's firm has these routines, but most big companies in Sweden will keep track of bills paid and if they receive payment with an ID that's already paid (OCR-nubmer, as it's called in Swedish), they will send a cash order for the amount.
Bit of a name mixup here, what he meant was that USA has not agreed to be bound by the international warcrime court in Hague. And while the US may have signed the Geneva Convention, Guantanamo and similar stories from Iraq demonstrate a clear disregard for it by the previous administration.
IMNAL- But, I was looking and frightened by this. Due to imlications for future trials, like in a rape case. I can easily seeing this being used as proof to validate the facebook profile being used against the victim. Look- she said she was feeling sexy and horny- *that* made it consensual. And on her myspace page she talks about promiscuity. Dangerous, Dangerous territory.
What if it actually was consensual? What if the "victim" was actually the man, falsely accused because the woman got pissed off at him later? If it's otherwise her word against his (which is skewed way in her favor nowadays), then that facebook profile might be the only thing that keeps an innocent guy from getting his life ruined.
Dude... the reason it's so often a word-against-word case is because most rape victims tend to get home as fast as they can, take a loooong shower and often throwing away or maybe even burning the clothes they wore. If it goes as far as trial (which it usually doesn't), it's often described as a second rape, with the defense attorney doing his/her best to show that the accuser has a history of random sexual encounters and that the defendant could not have realised that it was not consentual. There's a crapload of books and reports based on court cases if you'd like to know what reality looks like.
I should know, since I'm a rapist. And as far as I know, the girl never even reported it to the police, because she just wanted to forget it ever happend. The "falsly accuse someone of rape to get revenge for something else" is just a myth, and one that continues to destroy their victims every day.
most european countries have no laws against nakedness as such, except if it is pornographic.
This might just be because we Swedes are prudes, but it is actually illegal to walk around naked in a public place here. I can't say what it's like in other European countries but I believe that public nudity is generally illegal, with special "nude beaches" and suchlike thrown in here and there.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, you can produce hydrocarbons using H2O, CO2 and photosynthesizing organisms. But those organisms do need other nutrients, so the "no feedstock" bit can't be true.
I believe they call it "no feedstock" because those materials aren't used in the fuel you extract - unlike other bacteria who use the hydrocarbons from a feedstock to produce the fuel.
If you read the article [...] This whole article is a whole lot of silliness. Who reads this stuff?
Oh the irony.
"Leftist" indeed. Not leftist though. The social democrats and the moderates were traditionally the biggest parties for left/right politics, but now they are both moving towards a middle point somewhere to the right of where the old center used to be. (Moderates are changing their rhethoric to be more appealing to workers, while still running a policy that's a lot better for people with high incomes, while the social democrats are copying the moderate ideas and recently said that they must stop trying to be a voice for unemployed or too-sick-to-work people)
Also, since some of your politicians have suggested killing Assange we could not extradite him if there was any danger of this happening. Almost all countries in Europe (UK and Sweden definitely anyway) consider the death penalty to be so barbaric that we refuse to extradite people to face it regardless of the crime they are accused of.
Oh yeah, cause we Swedes care so much about not turning over people to countries where they might be killed or tortured (1). And Sweden will surely stand up to the US when informal requests are made to handle the issue (2).
Can't seem to paste in the links for some reason, but for (1) Google for "extradition egypt torture sweden". As for (2), remember what happened to the Pirate Bay servers here in Sweden?
> The easiest way to protect yourself from Wikileaks is to ensure your
> organization doesn't do anything worth leaking. Simple as that.
Are you trying to say, "If your organization has done nothing wrong, you've nothing to fear from Wikileaks."??
Seems to me that my government has been saying that kind of thing to me, as they extend their surveillance powers.
This has more to do with the power imbalance between the individual and his/her government than the exposition of moral wrongs. Today's societies work by the state holding a monopoly on violence. To make up for this imbalance, the individual person has a much greater right to secrecy than the state does. While there is to a large degree an unfortunate mixing of public and private regarding e.g. politicians not paying taxes for their housekeepers, the government should be held to a higher standard than the individual, because when it steps outside its boundaries, the government can cause much more damage.
It's not rape because he didn't have a condom, it's rape because he had a condom on that broke during intercourse, the woman claims she told him to stop, and he didn't. In my book, if the woman tells you to stop and you don't, then yes, that does qualify as rape. Of course to this date only Assange and the woman in question know what actually happened that night, but there's definitely grounds for the police to suspect him of rape.
---
In this particular instance, I do believe that this has more to do with his connection to Wikipedia than his connection with these two Swedish women, but rape trials are hard enough on the defendant without that kind of stories being spread around.
The nations that produce the majority of oil are not staunch allies>
Wasn't that why you invaded Iraq?
In the case of fire:
Calmly exit the building
For no reason, re-enter the building until given the OK by emergency responders
This is so that when the fire trucks come, they can be told how many people are still inside. It's not only to not risk your own life, but to make their job easier and safer.
Nice try, but it's fairly common knowledge (ie, taught early in algebra) that the square root breaks equality. Ie, sqrt(x^2) != x but sqrt(x^2) = |x|. Add that to your proof and no contradiction occurs.
>>>the teabaggers would go apeshit if the US-DOJ Antitrust stepped in and forced another set of breakups in telecom
No I wouldn't.
The breakup of AT&T Monopoly was one of the best things to happen, but only because it gave us choice in our telephone services. If the Comcast or Verizon Monopoly are broken apart, what would it achieve? We'd still be stuck with just one cable down the middle of the street.
What we really need is 10-20 cables running down the middle of the street, each one offering a different ISP. Imagine the present: Comcast or Verizon. Imagine the future: Comcast or Cox or Time-Warner or AppleTV or MSN or Verizon or Quest or Mediacom or Google ISP or.....
Of course that won't happen so long as local governments keep insisting upon holding a monopoly.
No, what you really need is one cable running down the street, operated as a government utility like the road itself is. Then you let anyone set up shop as ISP and run traffic over that cable. Individual cables mean it's more expensive to startup a competing business, which in turn gives you as a customer a higher price for less service.
Not really.
With combustion, you have the same amount of matter you started with. What you are doing is releasing energy tied up in the chemical bonds.
Yes really.
E=mc^2 works both ways, you know. The high-energy bonds in gasoline have a greater mass than the bonds that plop out the other end.
How can anyone say with a straight face that a progressive tax is more fair than a flat tax? All else being equal. (If it's not, then that is what we should focus on fixing)
Easy, when you include the costs of living as well. Someone making $100k a year has a lot less money after rent/housing tax and food than someone making $1m, even if the first person pays 20% tax and the second person pays 40% tax. A roof over your head and food on the table is not an optional expense or some kind of luxury that you can forego when times are lean.
And despite what some people here on /. seem to think, the US is not willing to let its people starve to death in the streets (at least not en masse), so with a flat tax you would simply have more people depending on welfare, meaning the flat tax rate has to be made higher to pay for that ... Spread out over the entire population, you'd have a group that owes more in taxes than they have left after food and rent is payed.
Net effect: people who earn more money would pay more than the original percentage in tax anyway, so why not use a progressive tax rate from the start and at the same time have fewer people dependent on the government for their daily survival?
If a player has the industrial muscle to build one, what whine is that of yours? Build your own stack of doom to counter it, or shut up and lose.
Disclaimer; it's been a while since I hung out on the fan forums, but here's my impression of why SoDs are unpopular: it's the AI handicap.
Sure, on lower levels (noble, prince, monarch) it's not a big issue, cause the AI only gets a small bonus. But when you get up to emperor or immortal, it's very hard to keep up. Not only are the AI armies cheaper to build, they are cheaper to maintain as well. Trying to keep up with Monty or Shaka past the medieval age is a good way to see your economy grind to a halt.
If, on the other hand, you can guess the private crypto keys out of a DRMed PMP just by clipping a 15 dollar device from some shady mod-chip vendor to the recharging port and waiting a few days, heads will roll. There are a lot of devices these days that are designed to keep keys secret from the owners of the hardware. Particularly for common ones, voltage attack devices might well become fairly common advanced hobbyist and/or grey market items...
Worth noticing is that the 100 hours mentioned in TFS was on a 81-box cluster. They estimated it to be about a year on a 2.4GHz CPU. Of course, for the purposes of cracking DRM keys, it is not unreasonable to imagine a distributed network cooperating.
More interesting, in my opinion, was that it has 50% chance to guess the key in O(n * log n) time, and their example needed only 650 faulty messages (extrapolating from a 12% single-bit-error rate, it should work with a bit over 5000 total messages generated).
From TFS:
"reduces the computational complexity[...]by two orders of magnitude[...]
Additionally, the process used just one percent of the energy that would typically be required"
Well, duh, what's so shocking about a computation taking 1% of the time previously needed now only takes 1% of the energy as well?
Modded funny for some reason ... of course, I'm not sure this still holds true for today's cars, but what used to happen when you shift into neutral is that the engine gets disconnected physically from the wheels - it can keep accelerating all it wants but the car will slow down.
[quote]Let's say you and the plumber are both paying 25%. Then, you initially earned $133; the government taxed you 25%, which is $33.33, and now you have $100 left. Now you give that $100 to the plumber, who in turn has to give $25 of that income (25%) to the government. $75 of your $133 has arrived in the plumber's hands, actually paying for the plumbing work. Your actual tax rate here is 75/133 which is about 56% - not the 25% that it initially appears to be.[/quote]
But in that scenario, the plumber is paying 0% tax. You can't count the $25 he sends to the IRS as taxation both for you and him. Your personal tax payment to the government is exactly the 25% they say it is. I'm not a big fan of sales tax either (it's far too heavy a burden for people with low incomes), but since the alternative would be heavier taxation of properties and wealth, you can guess the odds of that happening ...
---
Why yes, I _am_ a card-carrying communist!
Clearly, to lift the ban on stem cell research, we must come up with a weapon application for it, or describe how it can be used to catch terrorists ...
but instead office workers at the firm and bank(s). So they are hassling people that have nothing to do directly with the MPAA/RIAA/etc.
Admittedly, this is not the issue, but this is still the people who will keep the money you pay on Wednesday until Monday before passing it on to the company you paid the bill to. And this is the computer age ...
A financial revolution is long overdue.
[...] have received threats, as has the head of Sweden's anti-piracy board
Worse (IMO), the head of Sweden's anti-piracy board's kids has been threatened. While I certainly don't agree with the lawsuit, I don't agree with the methods emplyed by people fighting back either.
It IS that exploitable, I once paid a bill twice and a few weeks later I received a cash order for the amount I paid (once). I'm not sure if the lawyer's firm has these routines, but most big companies in Sweden will keep track of bills paid and if they receive payment with an ID that's already paid (OCR-nubmer, as it's called in Swedish), they will send a cash order for the amount.
Bit of a name mixup here, what he meant was that USA has not agreed to be bound by the international warcrime court in Hague. And while the US may have signed the Geneva Convention, Guantanamo and similar stories from Iraq demonstrate a clear disregard for it by the previous administration.
How in the hell is racist comments insightful?
How in the hell is calling STUDness a porn name racist?
What if it actually was consensual? What if the "victim" was actually the man, falsely accused because the woman got pissed off at him later? If it's otherwise her word against his (which is skewed way in her favor nowadays), then that facebook profile might be the only thing that keeps an innocent guy from getting his life ruined.
Dude ... the reason it's so often a word-against-word case is because most rape victims tend to get home as fast as they can, take a loooong shower and often throwing away or maybe even burning the clothes they wore. If it goes as far as trial (which it usually doesn't), it's often described as a second rape, with the defense attorney doing his/her best to show that the accuser has a history of random sexual encounters and that the defendant could not have realised that it was not consentual. There's a crapload of books and reports based on court cases if you'd like to know what reality looks like.
I should know, since I'm a rapist. And as far as I know, the girl never even reported it to the police, because she just wanted to forget it ever happend. The "falsly accuse someone of rape to get revenge for something else" is just a myth, and one that continues to destroy their victims every day.
many western countries nowadays equals the USA?
most european countries have no laws against nakedness as such, except if it is pornographic.
This might just be because we Swedes are prudes, but it is actually illegal to walk around naked in a public place here. I can't say what it's like in other European countries but I believe that public nudity is generally illegal, with special "nude beaches" and suchlike thrown in here and there.