It's like the short film Rendezvous that was done in 1976 in which an unnamed Formula 1 driver does a speed run across Paris, imperiling groggy early-morning Parisians at up to 160 mph, careening around corners, driving the wrong way and blowing through traffic signals.
I'm all in favor of one's freedom to perform reckless stunts like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, but, like just about everyone else here, I'd like to see people who do stuff like this punished severely. No amount of self-glorification can justify putting others at risk. Indeed, it is placing others at risk that robs such deeds of all glory.
If you isolate the power going to your racks from that going to your cooling, can't you simply clamp an ammeter around the power cables going to your racks and assume that every watt going in turns to heat, then multiply watts by 3.4 to get btu/hr cooling?
Some enterprising insurance company should start pandering to parent's fears and begin offering RIAA lawsuit insurance. Since the insurance company would be vitally interested in reducing the cost of any claim, they could afford to provide competent representation for their clients in court. Since the odds of any particular file-sharer being sued are pretty low, I would imagine an insurance company could offer $250,000 of coverage for a very modest premium. The hassle and cost of going after any file-sharer with such insurance might be enough to deter RIAA litigation against those who are insured.
TR provides the overall vibe of a design team with no real passion for their game. Everything felt very generic to me. It's as if the developers were just punching the clock, going down their checklist of schedule tasks, completing each one without any particular interest or enthusiasm.
WoW, for all it's faults, at least conveys a sense of wonder, and the stylized characters generally convey a vibe of humor and fun. Characters and settings in TR are like dead wooden tokens that simply stand in as placeholders while you navigate the game.
If communication between parallel universes were to be attempted, it would naturally have to flow backward in time, through a point where both universes share a common ancestor. Although tachyons are said not to exist, or, if they were to exist, could not possibly bear information, perhaps there is some physical phenomenon which could carry information backward across the time dimension, allowing progeny universes to send messages?
We've long had superhuman levels of intelligence composed, first, of groups of people who collectively surpass the ability of single humans, and, second, we have computer-human composites that easily surpass human intelligence. (I.E. - Your mind, plus a computer, can easily solve a wide range of problems that your mind alone cannot).
It is also true that each generation of integrated circuits requires exponentially more computation to create. So we are already beyond a certain tipping-point: non-biological intelligence is now increasingly required to recursively design itself, and each generation of this recursion is required in order to design the next.
Now, if only they could zap each metastatic cell that passes under their instrument, they'd be able to limit the spread (or, at least, limit those metastases that spend quite a while surfing the blood before finally lodging somewhere else).
Faronics Deep Freeze will allow users complete admin rights from which they can download whatever virii, trojans or other malware they want, experiment to their heart's content with any kind of software or configuration, delete whatever they want. Then, when the system is inevitably fouled up, all they (or you) have to do is push the reset button, and the system reverts to its "frozen" image. A buddy of mine ran a cyber cafe using Deep Freeze. Everybody had admin access to the machines. Needless to say, the young male demographic that such a place attracts had its share of folks bent on malevolence. All he had to do was push reset. Worked every time.
Amiestreet.com is showing media companies and artists a new model. New tracks by any artist start out free. As demand warrants, the price of a track rises. Max price is $.98/track. Amiestreet keeps the first $5.00 to cover overhead, then passes along 70% of the gross to the artist after that. Much better deal than any other music distribution scheme.
In an oscillating universe, intelligence that is around at the end of a 'big crunch' will, of course, attempt to arrange things so that out of the next 'big bang', intelligence will precipitate sooner and will have some sort of leg up on understanding what is going on. So, kind of like the guy in the movie 'Momento', they tattoo the universe in ways that they hope will ultimately be decipherable to a future naive intelligence. Communication via matter arrangement preceeding a 'big crunch' is a pretty tough thing to pull off. One doesn't know what the future precipitant intelligence will think like and I suspect it is pretty difficult to encode specific messages, the hardest perhaps being the message that prods the precipitants into reading your dammned message in the first place. Creating a fundamentally huge, glowing neon arrow telling the precipitants where to start might be as simple as creating unbelievably improbable arrangements of matter. As we look closer, we may find ever more statistically improbable arrangements, layered in a complex way.
Theft is broadly defined as denying someone access to or enjoyment of something they would have otherwise have had, through action or inaction on your part. So by failing to point out the mistake in change, you would be comitting theft by inaction.
As an interesting aside, this definition of theft makes file-sharing a sort of contingent theft - it is only theft if you would otherwise have paid money for the file.
You wouldn't go to jail for some guy's programming error, you'd go to jail for not returning what wasn't yours. Why do we feel this compulsion to take advantage of somebody else's bad luck, when that other entity is a corporation? The bank doesn't deserve to 'eat it' just because they're a bank. And insurance is merely a way to average out the cost of disasters over time and people, it doesn't wave a magic wand and make the cost go away. When there is a claim, insurance premiums go up, by more than the claims. What were your parents teaching you when you grew up?
But we've always had materials spanning all ranges of size, from nanometer-sized molecules through tire-sized molecules (a tire being the best example). Many commonly used synthetic and biological polymers span the "nanotech" sizes you mention. Any time there is a mist of solution, the solvent evaporating will leave an airborn clump of solute that is "nanotech-sized", often having a very specific-sized population. We've always had an obligation to investigate the material properties of specific ingredients. It has always been the case that materials in specific forms can have properties different from that of their bulk or single-molecule forms. We have always had to consider whether a particular substance, say, modified to increase its surface area, or provided in the presence of other catalytic substances, will exhibit new properties, desirable or otherwise. There is nothing new in this. To claim that some molecules or clumps of molecules are suddenly more worthy of scrutiny or regulation simply because they have been marketed as "nanotech" is transparent rubbish.
Anything now posing under the rubric of "nanotechnology" is just pretending to be new and different technology. So far, it's all just molecules, most of which are produced using the same old chemical processes we've always used, and which have the same inherent benefits and risks as any other new molecule. I am disturbed that this fashion trend of dubbing new molecular products "nanotech" is now being used as an excuse for specific regulatory actions. We already have laws and regulations governing testing and deployment of new molecules.
To rephrase the problem in your simpler terms - You cut the cake and leave the room. The frosting congeals across the cut, making it appear uncut. You tell your brother to go ahead and choose. Is it reasonable for your brother to take the whole cake because of a technical fault with your cutting process? No, and your brother would be a self-serving asshole for insisting on taking the whole cake. Those who pretend omniscience of businessmen or governments and dishonestly exploit any mistake made by them are similary self-serving assholes.
No, just because a casino might not give you a refund if a machine jams, it is not morally, ethically or legally right for you to exploit a fault in a machine, any more than it would be right to keep a sack of money that fell off of a slot-manager's cart without their having noticed. Nor is it right to keep extra change given by any cashier. Many dishonest people would do so, but that doesn't make it right, either.
About the only honest defenses I can think of would be if a player thought the casino was running some kind of promotion, giving $10 in bonus for every $1 entered. (No reasonable person who is familiar with casinos or slots would believe that, though). Or if a person were so oblivious from free cocktails or OCD playing behavior that they really didn't notice. Other than that, though, there's no question which side of the honest/dishonest fence this lies on.
To be safe, the bank would have to require that you be able to prove that you have all the latest security add-ons and proper configuration, and that you have maintained these without a break, on every computer you've used to access their website (including, presumably, computers at work, school, your public library, etc). If their user agreement places that burden of proof on the user, then the bank will probably end up washing their hands of every fraud case. Of course, most consumers just skip the fine print and will only become aware of this requirement once they have no recourse for having been defrauded.
Yep, anytime a marketing person needs a little free exposure, all he has to do is file a 'publicity suit' that features OSS or MS, and he can count on/. to scoop up the story and help flog whatever he's trying to sell.
Now that warmer weather is here, I sometimes like to take a couple of spoonsful of instant coffee, (yeah, yeah, but try it this way - you might like it), in the bottom of a 16-oz tumbler and add about a half-inch of milk and enough sweetner for a whole glass. Microwave it until it boils (usually about 20-30 sec, so watch it closely), then take it out and swirl it to make sure all the coffee nuggets have dissolved. Put it in the freezer for 10 minutes to bring it back down to cool. Fill the tumbler the rest of the way with ice-cold milk. Enjoy.
It's an obvious attempt to mooch free advertising. And here we are, giving them exactly what they want. All for the cost of having their lawyer send a couple of C&D letters. Sad. (But instructive).
Aside from all the aforementioned problems, we have a small design flaw in our form of organic life: DNA is inherently unstable. Thymine dimerization is energetically favored, and is catalyzed by UV and other forms of radiation. But even apart from radiation, these dimers will form given the passage of time and non-absolute-zero temperatures. Our DNA-based life requires constant molecular upkeep to repair these problems. Any putative bacterial hitch-hikers would have had to sporulate to be able to continue existing without any metabolism, so no upkeep will be possible. Even if they become detached from the booster and are able to avoid a fiery re-entry onto a hospitable planet, they still have to hit it within a few centuries or their information will be irretrievably corrupted.
One of the factors TFA skips over is that there are a tremendous number of high-quality songs available legally, for free. There is so much talent out there that would never be heard under the old label-production-distribution model. The average Joe can now write some great stuff in his bedroom using just his PC and get worldwide publishing overnight, for free. My favorite example of this is Amie Street, where songs start out free, and ones that get popular rise in price until they reach a maximum of 98 cents.
Check out AmieStreet. Artists upload their tunes, and the price for each track is a function of how popular it is. All tracks are DRM-free. Many excellent tracks are also free-as-in-beer free (until they get popular, anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
Far Cry. Not Flash, but now free (ad supported). Definitely one of the best FPS games.
I'm all in favor of one's freedom to perform reckless stunts like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, but, like just about everyone else here, I'd like to see people who do stuff like this punished severely. No amount of self-glorification can justify putting others at risk. Indeed, it is placing others at risk that robs such deeds of all glory.
If you isolate the power going to your racks from that going to your cooling, can't you simply clamp an ammeter around the power cables going to your racks and assume that every watt going in turns to heat, then multiply watts by 3.4 to get btu/hr cooling?
Some enterprising insurance company should start pandering to parent's fears and begin offering RIAA lawsuit insurance. Since the insurance company would be vitally interested in reducing the cost of any claim, they could afford to provide competent representation for their clients in court. Since the odds of any particular file-sharer being sued are pretty low, I would imagine an insurance company could offer $250,000 of coverage for a very modest premium. The hassle and cost of going after any file-sharer with such insurance might be enough to deter RIAA litigation against those who are insured.
WoW, for all it's faults, at least conveys a sense of wonder, and the stylized characters generally convey a vibe of humor and fun. Characters and settings in TR are like dead wooden tokens that simply stand in as placeholders while you navigate the game.
If communication between parallel universes were to be attempted, it would naturally have to flow backward in time, through a point where both universes share a common ancestor. Although tachyons are said not to exist, or, if they were to exist, could not possibly bear information, perhaps there is some physical phenomenon which could carry information backward across the time dimension, allowing progeny universes to send messages?
We've long had superhuman levels of intelligence composed, first, of groups of people who collectively surpass the ability of single humans, and, second, we have computer-human composites that easily surpass human intelligence. (I.E. - Your mind, plus a computer, can easily solve a wide range of problems that your mind alone cannot). It is also true that each generation of integrated circuits requires exponentially more computation to create. So we are already beyond a certain tipping-point: non-biological intelligence is now increasingly required to recursively design itself, and each generation of this recursion is required in order to design the next.
Now, if only they could zap each metastatic cell that passes under their instrument, they'd be able to limit the spread (or, at least, limit those metastases that spend quite a while surfing the blood before finally lodging somewhere else).
Faronics Deep Freeze will allow users complete admin rights from which they can download whatever virii, trojans or other malware they want, experiment to their heart's content with any kind of software or configuration, delete whatever they want. Then, when the system is inevitably fouled up, all they (or you) have to do is push the reset button, and the system reverts to its "frozen" image. A buddy of mine ran a cyber cafe using Deep Freeze. Everybody had admin access to the machines. Needless to say, the young male demographic that such a place attracts had its share of folks bent on malevolence. All he had to do was push reset. Worked every time.
Amiestreet.com is showing media companies and artists a new model. New tracks by any artist start out free. As demand warrants, the price of a track rises. Max price is $.98/track. Amiestreet keeps the first $5.00 to cover overhead, then passes along 70% of the gross to the artist after that. Much better deal than any other music distribution scheme.
In an oscillating universe, intelligence that is around at the end of a 'big crunch' will, of course, attempt to arrange things so that out of the next 'big bang', intelligence will precipitate sooner and will have some sort of leg up on understanding what is going on. So, kind of like the guy in the movie 'Momento', they tattoo the universe in ways that they hope will ultimately be decipherable to a future naive intelligence. Communication via matter arrangement preceeding a 'big crunch' is a pretty tough thing to pull off. One doesn't know what the future precipitant intelligence will think like and I suspect it is pretty difficult to encode specific messages, the hardest perhaps being the message that prods the precipitants into reading your dammned message in the first place. Creating a fundamentally huge, glowing neon arrow telling the precipitants where to start might be as simple as creating unbelievably improbable arrangements of matter. As we look closer, we may find ever more statistically improbable arrangements, layered in a complex way.
As an interesting aside, this definition of theft makes file-sharing a sort of contingent theft - it is only theft if you would otherwise have paid money for the file.
You wouldn't go to jail for some guy's programming error, you'd go to jail for not returning what wasn't yours. Why do we feel this compulsion to take advantage of somebody else's bad luck, when that other entity is a corporation? The bank doesn't deserve to 'eat it' just because they're a bank. And insurance is merely a way to average out the cost of disasters over time and people, it doesn't wave a magic wand and make the cost go away. When there is a claim, insurance premiums go up, by more than the claims. What were your parents teaching you when you grew up?
But we've always had materials spanning all ranges of size, from nanometer-sized molecules through tire-sized molecules (a tire being the best example). Many commonly used synthetic and biological polymers span the "nanotech" sizes you mention. Any time there is a mist of solution, the solvent evaporating will leave an airborn clump of solute that is "nanotech-sized", often having a very specific-sized population. We've always had an obligation to investigate the material properties of specific ingredients. It has always been the case that materials in specific forms can have properties different from that of their bulk or single-molecule forms. We have always had to consider whether a particular substance, say, modified to increase its surface area, or provided in the presence of other catalytic substances, will exhibit new properties, desirable or otherwise. There is nothing new in this. To claim that some molecules or clumps of molecules are suddenly more worthy of scrutiny or regulation simply because they have been marketed as "nanotech" is transparent rubbish.
Anything now posing under the rubric of "nanotechnology" is just pretending to be new and different technology. So far, it's all just molecules, most of which are produced using the same old chemical processes we've always used, and which have the same inherent benefits and risks as any other new molecule. I am disturbed that this fashion trend of dubbing new molecular products "nanotech" is now being used as an excuse for specific regulatory actions. We already have laws and regulations governing testing and deployment of new molecules.
To rephrase the problem in your simpler terms - You cut the cake and leave the room. The frosting congeals across the cut, making it appear uncut. You tell your brother to go ahead and choose. Is it reasonable for your brother to take the whole cake because of a technical fault with your cutting process? No, and your brother would be a self-serving asshole for insisting on taking the whole cake. Those who pretend omniscience of businessmen or governments and dishonestly exploit any mistake made by them are similary self-serving assholes.
No, just because a casino might not give you a refund if a machine jams, it is not morally, ethically or legally right for you to exploit a fault in a machine, any more than it would be right to keep a sack of money that fell off of a slot-manager's cart without their having noticed. Nor is it right to keep extra change given by any cashier. Many dishonest people would do so, but that doesn't make it right, either.
About the only honest defenses I can think of would be if a player thought the casino was running some kind of promotion, giving $10 in bonus for every $1 entered. (No reasonable person who is familiar with casinos or slots would believe that, though). Or if a person were so oblivious from free cocktails or OCD playing behavior that they really didn't notice. Other than that, though, there's no question which side of the honest/dishonest fence this lies on.
DOE has ponied up $385 million to six different cellulosic ethanol plants, one of which is Range Fuels.
To be safe, the bank would have to require that you be able to prove that you have all the latest security add-ons and proper configuration, and that you have maintained these without a break, on every computer you've used to access their website (including, presumably, computers at work, school, your public library, etc). If their user agreement places that burden of proof on the user, then the bank will probably end up washing their hands of every fraud case. Of course, most consumers just skip the fine print and will only become aware of this requirement once they have no recourse for having been defrauded.
Yep, anytime a marketing person needs a little free exposure, all he has to do is file a 'publicity suit' that features OSS or MS, and he can count on /. to scoop up the story and help flog whatever he's trying to sell.
Now that warmer weather is here, I sometimes like to take a couple of spoonsful of instant coffee, (yeah, yeah, but try it this way - you might like it), in the bottom of a 16-oz tumbler and add about a half-inch of milk and enough sweetner for a whole glass. Microwave it until it boils (usually about 20-30 sec, so watch it closely), then take it out and swirl it to make sure all the coffee nuggets have dissolved. Put it in the freezer for 10 minutes to bring it back down to cool. Fill the tumbler the rest of the way with ice-cold milk. Enjoy.
It's an obvious attempt to mooch free advertising. And here we are, giving them exactly what they want. All for the cost of having their lawyer send a couple of C&D letters. Sad. (But instructive).
Aside from all the aforementioned problems, we have a small design flaw in our form of organic life: DNA is inherently unstable. Thymine dimerization is energetically favored, and is catalyzed by UV and other forms of radiation. But even apart from radiation, these dimers will form given the passage of time and non-absolute-zero temperatures. Our DNA-based life requires constant molecular upkeep to repair these problems. Any putative bacterial hitch-hikers would have had to sporulate to be able to continue existing without any metabolism, so no upkeep will be possible. Even if they become detached from the booster and are able to avoid a fiery re-entry onto a hospitable planet, they still have to hit it within a few centuries or their information will be irretrievably corrupted.
One of the factors TFA skips over is that there are a tremendous number of high-quality songs available legally, for free. There is so much talent out there that would never be heard under the old label-production-distribution model. The average Joe can now write some great stuff in his bedroom using just his PC and get worldwide publishing overnight, for free. My favorite example of this is Amie Street, where songs start out free, and ones that get popular rise in price until they reach a maximum of 98 cents.
Check out AmieStreet. Artists upload their tunes, and the price for each track is a function of how popular it is. All tracks are DRM-free. Many excellent tracks are also free-as-in-beer free (until they get popular, anyway).