If you were to crush society as it exists today and just let humans ferment for a few hundred years, I doubt many if any of the "natural rights" would exist any more.
Right to free speech? Only if you can manage to keep yourself from getting killed by those who didn't like what you just said. Right to bear weapons? All right, that'll probably be around. Right to be free and not a slave? Doubtful. Right not to be raped? Doubtful. Right to travel? Maybe, but if you encroach on someone else's territory, I'd expect you'd need to exercise your right to bear weapons.
Just because someone decided that something should be a "natural right", doesn't mean it's something that'll remain so without a vigilant society maintaining it.
Well, I quite like the smart card system I have with my bank (Nordea, Sweden). The smart card is built into the bank card I already have. That way I only need to carry my card and calculator with me. If I drop either, it's not a big deal. Nor is it if I drop both in the same location, as I need a code in addition to the card (something I know + something I have) to do any transactions.
That can't always be the case though. Let's use a different example:
"Do you want your cheese with or without cumin?"
Ignoring that this is a stupid question (because the correct answer always will be "yes"), if that doesn't translate as XOR, you can end up with a situation where you want cheese that both has and doesn't have cumin in it.
One could argue that the "I don't care" answer would cover that, but realistically your cheese either has cumin or it doesn't.
The question is then is this because of really bad English usage, or because people don't understand the question they're posing...
Insist you make dinner. Claim you've read an awesome recipe that you want to try and deliberately screw it up. Think half-burnt sauce stuck to the bottom of the pot (if done properly this makes the sauce look great and taste horrible), not slightly over-salted potatoes (should just be enough to make you gag slightly) and over-cooked vegetables (to make them soggy, squishy and mix the remaining taste). When she then complains that it's rubbish, order take-out.
Do it four or five times, each time insisting that you can do it properly, and she'll soon insist that SHE does the cooking.
The trick isn't to come up with an excuse - the trick is to be plausibly bad at it and make her suffer through your attempts.
There are thousands of albums that are great, start to finish.
Your picks easily span 30 years, so we're down to about 35 great albums a year.
If I'm being generous, I can pretend we're closer to 100 albums a year. World wide. In all genres. In all countries. In all languages.
Compare the number of albums that are great, start to finish with the number of albums released in the same timespan.
I would, quite honestly, be extremely surprised to see a signal to noise ratio above 1:500 myself. And keep in mind that "Absolute Dance #187" counts as an album as well.
Well, your honour, I would have told her the house was on fire, but you told me that if I communicate with her in any way, shape or form, I'd be thrown in jail...
then i got a job at an internet company that had tables with over 80 million rows. all that normalization stuff i learned in school had to be thrown out.
Why is normalization useless just because you have 80,000,000 rows? I'm genuinely curious
Silly question, but why aren't they using that waste heat for domestic heating instead? Not just radiators, but hot water heaters run off of those would give a lot of free hot water as well.
The idea is to avoid costly precision. Just shoot it up there, track it's orbit and go get it. (yeah, not quite THAT simple...)
Well, just ensure that the container has a decent amount of fuel, engines and built in automatic guidance systems for the last bit.
Once you're in orbit, you can probably settle for small amounts of fuel to change your trajectory, especially if you don't need to have the payload in a specific place for say a year. If we're sending up supplies (food, water, medicine), all we really need to do is keep chucking the stuff up there.
Bonus points if you can make the containers attach to each other for stability.
So now we just need a cracker to track down every robots.txt on News Corp's servers and change them to disallow Google's robot from spidering the site.
That way we, the readers, get what we want (Karma/poetic justice), Murdoch gets what he says he wants (Google won't 'steal' his content), and Google get what they want (a way to wash their hands of responsibility, when Murdoch goes nuts and files suit for deindexing his sites).
So, this is my silent plea to the crackers (or hackers if that'll placate their ego) of the world: Give News Corp what they want - a robots.txt that stops Google from indexing their sites.
The best bit is that it could easily take weeks or months for the people running the sites to notice the change. All they'll see is a decline in traffic (big or small).
Also, you mention "tons of pollutants"? Over what time frame?
From the article:
Last year, the Capitol Power Plant burned 17,108 tons of coal.
If the coal:sulfur ratio by weight is 1:17,108, it will release exactly one ton of sulfur. This will be as sulfur dioxide (SO2), which weighs 64.07 g/mol, half of which is from sulfur (32.065 g/mol). In other words, one ton of sulfur becomes two tons of sulfur dioxide.
From what I could find (ufl.edu), coal usually contains more than 1 percent of sulfur by weight.
That means we're looking at a minimum of 171 tons of sulfur last year, and 342 tons of sulfur dioxide. That definitely qualifies as "tons of pollutants".
Well, there hasn't really been a market for localized ebooks in any of the smaller countries around the world so far.
Only place you could get them in large quantities were the reader's manufacturer's websites, and they only catered to large markets.
Why would any Finnish publisher even bother with making any of their books available as ebooks, when there were probably less than a thousand ebook readers in all of Finland. Same with Denmark, Norway, Sweden and all the other small locales.
The big push will come, when someone manages to put together a device that supports DRM (to placate the publishers) and local delivery of books, in such a fashion that I can either go to the publisher's/author's website and download the book onto my reader, or go to my local book store and buy it in some way.
For that to work, you'd probably need to have some kind of public/private key exchange working, where the book is encrypted with your public key before being sent to you.
Yes, DRM sucks, but as long as the publishers are suffering from irrational fears, it's going to stay in place.
While a lot of us would like something in that size, I think quite a lot of manufacturers are looking at the netbook market for inspiration.
We don't see many netbooks with a 14.3" (A4 diagonal) or 13.9" (Letter diagonal) size screens. They're all around 10" (you mentioned the 10.4" coming out).
And once you have the screen, you still need a bezel, and some kind of input device as well, unless you want it to be an expensive touch screen model as well. I wouldn't mind, as it'd be nice to add notes, comments and stuff directly to the pages.
If you could get a display that allows you to fold it in half, you'd get something quite a lot better of course. You'd get a built in screen protector, it'd fold up for a smaller storage foot print, you would get A5 sized pages as used in most books and rotate it for A4 when needed. On the downside I suspect you'd end up with a deep bezel, as I doubt you could get a display that allows you to fold all that tightly, but I think most of us could live with something slightly larger than a 400 page hard cover book.
Using my copy of The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a reference, I end up with something that is 245x170x35 mm (9.7x6.7x1.4 inches). Too big to fit perfectly into your coat pocket, but only slightly bigger than the Eee 701 (8.9x6.5x1.4 in).
The sizes I gave leaves space for the bezel around the A4 sized screen, but considering the thickness of most E-readers, I don't think it allows you enough space to actually fold the display. Might have to go to almost double the thickness for that, and then you're looking at a device the actual size of The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and that is actuallly quite bulky.
You could save thickness for folding it, if you used two A5 sized screens instead, but unless you make them touch perfectly, you won't get it to look good when doing A4-viewing. You could do it with a flat, rigid screen, but then we're pretty much going to end up with something the size of a thin ring binder.
Essentially you are going to have to make a choice: 1) Read A4/letter sized documents on a small screen 2) Read paperback books on a huge screen that doesn't fit well on an airplane 3) Buy one of each.
And we haven't even touched on colour or refresh speed.
I somewhat doubt that anybody spends their spare time hacking away on electronic health record databases.
So hacking away at some obscure thing that no-one apart from themselves use is perfectly reasonable, but hacking away at something you think would be able to improve the world is completely unlikely?
I suppose no-one would want to work on making a completely open (source, design) and free (charge and speech) electronic voting system either - I mean, it's not like you can show up at a voting booth with your own computer and use that instead of the already provided option.
And yet the 3 billion transistors is only 50% more than the AMD Radeon HD5800 series.
Considering that they're adding general purpose functionality and direct C++ programming onto the chip, it might not be an entirely unreasonable result adding an extra billion transistors. But, time will tell.
[T]he company [is] backing away from its plans to develop a DMI-based chipset for Intel's Lynnfield processors due to legal pressure from Intel and debates over licensing restrictions.
I'll let you decide, which of these two questions that quote is relevant for:
Are the profit margins too slim on integrated graphics chips? Or are they just tired of dealing with Intel's legal dept?
Sometimes you simply cannot risk exposing yourself as the source of a leak.
While a random leak about how a bank's managing board essentially granted themselves free loans might raise investigative pressure, the most they can do is use the justice system to get at the journalist, and they have quite iron clad protections in a lot of countries.
Now imagine a leak about how a government's covert espionage agency has been conducting kidnappings, torture and murder on its country's own soil and against its country's own citizens, and it becomes easy to imagine that the journalist won't have any kind of protection other than the fact that it was leaked via Wikileaks.
While torture is problematic at best, I sincerely doubt that any kind of journalist would keep their mouth shut about who their sources are, once their kneecaps are being slowly crushed by a vice. And if Wikileaks have no records of who uploaded this information either, then that also protects the source.
Once you have uploaded the information to Wikileaks you then either have to wait for someone else to stumble upon it and notify the relevant media OR you contact them yourself. The latter risks exposing you - having a "leak through Wikileaks" contact form will be more secure.
I just hope it isn't implemented as a trackable link on the journalist's website. Then the offended parties can "just" get their hands on a list of IPs and other info that used that link.
Slashdot Mirror
Natural rights are legal rights.
If you were to crush society as it exists today and just let humans ferment for a few hundred years, I doubt many if any of the "natural rights" would exist any more.
Right to free speech? Only if you can manage to keep yourself from getting killed by those who didn't like what you just said.
Right to bear weapons? All right, that'll probably be around.
Right to be free and not a slave? Doubtful.
Right not to be raped? Doubtful.
Right to travel? Maybe, but if you encroach on someone else's territory, I'd expect you'd need to exercise your right to bear weapons.
Just because someone decided that something should be a "natural right", doesn't mean it's something that'll remain so without a vigilant society maintaining it.
Negative mass is easy.
You take one 1 kg of regular mass and place on a scale. The scale reads out 1 kg.
Now you place 1 kg of anti matter on the scale on top of the regular matter. Now there's no weight on the scale.
There's also no scale any more, but that's irrelevant for this thought experiment.
Well, I quite like the smart card system I have with my bank (Nordea, Sweden). The smart card is built into the bank card I already have. That way I only need to carry my card and calculator with me. If I drop either, it's not a big deal. Nor is it if I drop both in the same location, as I need a code in addition to the card (something I know + something I have) to do any transactions.
That can't always be the case though. Let's use a different example:
"Do you want your cheese with or without cumin?"
Ignoring that this is a stupid question (because the correct answer always will be "yes"), if that doesn't translate as XOR, you can end up with a situation where you want cheese that both has and doesn't have cumin in it.
One could argue that the "I don't care" answer would cover that, but realistically your cheese either has cumin or it doesn't.
The question is then is this because of really bad English usage, or because people don't understand the question they're posing ...
That's the incorrect way out.
Insist you make dinner. Claim you've read an awesome recipe that you want to try and deliberately screw it up. Think half-burnt sauce stuck to the bottom of the pot (if done properly this makes the sauce look great and taste horrible), not slightly over-salted potatoes (should just be enough to make you gag slightly) and over-cooked vegetables (to make them soggy, squishy and mix the remaining taste). When she then complains that it's rubbish, order take-out.
Do it four or five times, each time insisting that you can do it properly, and she'll soon insist that SHE does the cooking.
The trick isn't to come up with an excuse - the trick is to be plausibly bad at it and make her suffer through your attempts.
Your picks easily span 30 years, so we're down to about 35 great albums a year.
If I'm being generous, I can pretend we're closer to 100 albums a year. World wide. In all genres. In all countries. In all languages.
Compare the number of albums that are great, start to finish with the number of albums released in the same timespan.
I would, quite honestly, be extremely surprised to see a signal to noise ratio above 1:500 myself. And keep in mind that "Absolute Dance #187" counts as an album as well.
Are you talking about attending organized religion or about gambling?
Well, your honour, I would have told her the house was on fire, but you told me that if I communicate with her in any way, shape or form, I'd be thrown in jail ...
</joke>
Why is normalization useless just because you have 80,000,000 rows? I'm genuinely curious
Silly question, but why aren't they using that waste heat for domestic heating instead? Not just radiators, but hot water heaters run off of those would give a lot of free hot water as well.
Well, just ensure that the container has a decent amount of fuel, engines and built in automatic guidance systems for the last bit.
Once you're in orbit, you can probably settle for small amounts of fuel to change your trajectory, especially if you don't need to have the payload in a specific place for say a year. If we're sending up supplies (food, water, medicine), all we really need to do is keep chucking the stuff up there.
Bonus points if you can make the containers attach to each other for stability.
1st RULE: You do not talk about USENET.
2nd RULE: You DO NOT talk about USENET.
3rd RULE: If someone says "stop" or throws up, passes out the post is over.
4th RULE: Only two girls to a cup.
5th RULE: One tubgirl at a time.
6th RULE: No shirts, no shoes.
7th RULE: Flame wars will go on as long as they have to.
8th RULE: If this is your first night at USENET, you HAVE to goatse.
As people have pointed out several times, http://www.foxnews.com/robots.txt contains the following:
So now we just need a cracker to track down every robots.txt on News Corp's servers and change them to disallow Google's robot from spidering the site.
That way we, the readers, get what we want (Karma/poetic justice), Murdoch gets what he says he wants (Google won't 'steal' his content), and Google get what they want (a way to wash their hands of responsibility, when Murdoch goes nuts and files suit for deindexing his sites).
So, this is my silent plea to the crackers (or hackers if that'll placate their ego) of the world: Give News Corp what they want - a robots.txt that stops Google from indexing their sites.
The best bit is that it could easily take weeks or months for the people running the sites to notice the change. All they'll see is a decline in traffic (big or small).
From the article:
If the coal:sulfur ratio by weight is 1:17,108, it will release exactly one ton of sulfur. This will be as sulfur dioxide (SO2), which weighs 64.07 g/mol, half of which is from sulfur (32.065 g/mol). In other words, one ton of sulfur becomes two tons of sulfur dioxide.
From what I could find (ufl.edu), coal usually contains more than 1 percent of sulfur by weight.
That means we're looking at a minimum of 171 tons of sulfur last year, and 342 tons of sulfur dioxide. That definitely qualifies as "tons of pollutants".
Well, there hasn't really been a market for localized ebooks in any of the smaller countries around the world so far.
Only place you could get them in large quantities were the reader's manufacturer's websites, and they only catered to large markets.
Why would any Finnish publisher even bother with making any of their books available as ebooks, when there were probably less than a thousand ebook readers in all of Finland. Same with Denmark, Norway, Sweden and all the other small locales.
The big push will come, when someone manages to put together a device that supports DRM (to placate the publishers) and local delivery of books, in such a fashion that I can either go to the publisher's/author's website and download the book onto my reader, or go to my local book store and buy it in some way.
For that to work, you'd probably need to have some kind of public/private key exchange working, where the book is encrypted with your public key before being sent to you.
Yes, DRM sucks, but as long as the publishers are suffering from irrational fears, it's going to stay in place.
While a lot of us would like something in that size, I think quite a lot of manufacturers are looking at the netbook market for inspiration.
We don't see many netbooks with a 14.3" (A4 diagonal) or 13.9" (Letter diagonal) size screens. They're all around 10" (you mentioned the 10.4" coming out).
And once you have the screen, you still need a bezel, and some kind of input device as well, unless you want it to be an expensive touch screen model as well. I wouldn't mind, as it'd be nice to add notes, comments and stuff directly to the pages.
If you could get a display that allows you to fold it in half, you'd get something quite a lot better of course. You'd get a built in screen protector, it'd fold up for a smaller storage foot print, you would get A5 sized pages as used in most books and rotate it for A4 when needed. On the downside I suspect you'd end up with a deep bezel, as I doubt you could get a display that allows you to fold all that tightly, but I think most of us could live with something slightly larger than a 400 page hard cover book.
Using my copy of The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a reference, I end up with something that is 245x170x35 mm (9.7x6.7x1.4 inches). Too big to fit perfectly into your coat pocket, but only slightly bigger than the Eee 701 (8.9x6.5x1.4 in).
The sizes I gave leaves space for the bezel around the A4 sized screen, but considering the thickness of most E-readers, I don't think it allows you enough space to actually fold the display. Might have to go to almost double the thickness for that, and then you're looking at a device the actual size of The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and that is actuallly quite bulky.
You could save thickness for folding it, if you used two A5 sized screens instead, but unless you make them touch perfectly, you won't get it to look good when doing A4-viewing. You could do it with a flat, rigid screen, but then we're pretty much going to end up with something the size of a thin ring binder.
Essentially you are going to have to make a choice:
1) Read A4/letter sized documents on a small screen
2) Read paperback books on a huge screen that doesn't fit well on an airplane
3) Buy one of each.
And we haven't even touched on colour or refresh speed.
Ahhhh
I tried googling for audiotext and came up with absolutely nothing useful. No wonder ...
What the hell is audio text?
Is that like visual smell?
So hacking away at some obscure thing that no-one apart from themselves use is perfectly reasonable, but hacking away at something you think would be able to improve the world is completely unlikely?
I suppose no-one would want to work on making a completely open (source, design) and free (charge and speech) electronic voting system either - I mean, it's not like you can show up at a voting booth with your own computer and use that instead of the already provided option.
And yet the 3 billion transistors is only 50% more than the AMD Radeon HD5800 series.
Considering that they're adding general purpose functionality and direct C++ programming onto the chip, it might not be an entirely unreasonable result adding an extra billion transistors. But, time will tell.
Let me quote the fine summary:
I'll let you decide, which of these two questions that quote is relevant for:
Sometimes you simply cannot risk exposing yourself as the source of a leak.
While a random leak about how a bank's managing board essentially granted themselves free loans might raise investigative pressure, the most they can do is use the justice system to get at the journalist, and they have quite iron clad protections in a lot of countries.
Now imagine a leak about how a government's covert espionage agency has been conducting kidnappings, torture and murder on its country's own soil and against its country's own citizens, and it becomes easy to imagine that the journalist won't have any kind of protection other than the fact that it was leaked via Wikileaks.
While torture is problematic at best, I sincerely doubt that any kind of journalist would keep their mouth shut about who their sources are, once their kneecaps are being slowly crushed by a vice. And if Wikileaks have no records of who uploaded this information either, then that also protects the source.
Once you have uploaded the information to Wikileaks you then either have to wait for someone else to stumble upon it and notify the relevant media OR you contact them yourself. The latter risks exposing you - having a "leak through Wikileaks" contact form will be more secure.
I just hope it isn't implemented as a trackable link on the journalist's website. Then the offended parties can "just" get their hands on a list of IPs and other info that used that link.
Here's the link to that particular thread.
That was my first thought: "How dangerous could a hacked 20 mm Gatling gun firing upwards of 4,500 rounds per minute be?" Very!
Are you ENTIRELY certain, that nuking Japan is against the law in other countries?
Personally I'd be surprised if you could find that in the books anywhere except perhaps Japan.
I'm not endorsing, just saying that it might not be as illegal as you think.