The court is not supposed to know shit. The judges are supposed to listen to experts and form their opinion based upon that - and from reading the decision, I would say they indeed did. Everything working as intended. That aside, all hail the CCC!
Well, at least they demand some serious restrictions - asymmetric encryption with separately stored keys, no central storage of the data under direct government control, no access without a judge's order, no access without a well-founded and substantiated suspicion, access only for prosecution of serious crimes (exceptions for simple lookup of dynamic IPs), severe penalties for illegitime access. This is way better than what we had before.
That aside, thank the FSM for our constitutional court. They basically struck down every security-theatre related law in the last couple of years. I am starting to think about a three-strikes law for politicians - vote for three unconstitutional laws and you are out. Loss of eligibility for any political office for 4 years at last. Ahh, well, a man can dream...
Some protons in the nucleotide biosynthesis do indeed come from water, some from other sources. Additionaly, some protons, for example the protons of the -OH groups of the sugar component of nucleotides, can exchange with water along the lines of -OH + T2O -> -OT + TOH. So tritium can indeed be incorporated into DNA. While doing tritium labeling experiments in the lab, I always treated the stuff with respect.
Well, around here we had judges like that during the Nazi Regime. Look up this asshole for example. And no, we do not want the likes of them in our courts again. Never.
Him being a hack from the beginning might have been a bit over the top. I am just getting fed up with the sheer height of the pedestal on which the original trilogy is placed in geek circles, so I tend to overreact a bit. The Kurosawa angle is interesting, and I agree that the influence can be seen. Thanks for the link - I'll have a look at it when I find some time.
Well, technically that commandment only covers bearing false witness, which is probably rather a legal term. False accusations in legal matters are forbidden, but, hey, god has no problem with you lying to your heart's content. To forbid lying would not be that productive if you want to spread a cult....
I kinda disagree. Tatooine is not Arrakis, it is simply north africa. Lucas did not pay homage to any prior SF in any meaningful way. He just upgraded the imagery for Percival, the fool becoming knight and savior. I don't get why Star Wars became the holy grail (haha) of geeks. Lucas was a hack from the beginning. Reading Herbert and Doc Smith into it is overinterpretation, in my opinion.
If you think 2001 is too slowly paced for modern audiences, I give you the original Solaris as filmed by Tarkovski. And, of course, Stalker. 2001 Both are INCREDIBLY slow, Stalker comes without any special effects and is burdened by heavy symbolism - a great film, though. In my personal universe, Lem and the Strugatzki brothers are the greatest SF writers - and they found their congenial filmmaker in Tarkovski. It is possible to turn great SF into great movies. Perhaps not in Hollywood, though...
The other end would not move at the same time. The force you enact on the first end has to "get" to the second end. This happens by molecular interactions in the material of the bar, which are (mostly) electromagnetic in nature. So, the force travels with the speed of light. By moving the first end, you basically create a compression wave that travels with roughly c through the bar. The second end moves 1.5 years later. Of course, the bar breaks first anyway...
Well, the effect for 12C/13C should be rather small, but there are isotope effects on bonding energies. This is in particular due to the lower vibrational frequency of the bond involving a heavier isotope. This is equivalent to a lower zero-point energy state of the bond, which again means that the activation energy for the separation of the bond is higher. The effect is of course most visible for light atoms, where a neutron more or less makes a significant difference - H/D shows the strongest isotopic effect. It should still be noticable for carbon, though.
After some google exercises, I actually found something on Science Daily. The 1000-year figure indeed comes from statistics that ignored mobility. Interestingly, a more advanced model taking mobility, social mating barriers and the like into account, gives about 3000 years for the most recent common ancestor. Still seems awfully close to me. I can't get access to the original paper in Nature from home, but I'll look into it when I find the time.
That might work on a pure mathematical level, but I seriously doubt that the calculations take mobility into account. I can see no way how I could share a common ancestor within the last 1000 years with, say, an amazon Indian or an Australian aborigine. Everyone within certain subpopulations, e.g. every European, that I could believe. Do you by chance have a link to this story? Interesting topic.
The overhead panel usually contains the systems control - electrics, hydraulics, air, engine startups and external lights. During normal flight, those controls are rarely used. So, this is not an example of bad design. All the controls essential in flight usually directly in front of the pilot (autopilot controls for example) or on the center console - flaps, slats, spoilers, radios, FMC etc.
So, the controls used mostly during startup and shutdown are kept in a still reachable place where they don't clutter up the essential stuff in the direct field of view of the pilots. Modern panels use an all dark logic, too. Basically, if nothing on the overhead is lit up, everything is working as intended. So the overhead can be checked with a quick glance during flight. Even if something goes wrong in flight and the overhead has to be worked, this is the job of the pilot not flying, while the pilot flying can still focus on the instruments and safely control and navigate the plane.
Airliners are complex systems and the controls have to be put somewhere. A lot of thought went into the interface design and crew resource management, which is very similar among all current airliners.
(IANAP, just an aviation geek, so any pilots around here feel free to correct me where I am wrong.)
You might want to have a look at DCS. Haven't tried it myself, but it looks like a pretty decent hardcore helicopter combat sim. Also Rise of Flight is said to have pretty decent flying physics. So the genre is not totally dead (yet).
Seriously, also on page 4, "mushroom"? OK, you could argue that's like the stem of a mushroom. So why are the very similar figures on previous pages marked "forget" (eh? unless in some medieval italian slang that apparently both dante and da vinci spoke a "forget" was a mushroom of some sort), "waste" (eh? this is the bit of the mushroom, or forget, that you're meant to waste? seriously?), "rapid" (evidently if you eat this particular mushroom, or forget, you rapidly produce waste) or two question marks
Makes totally sense. Magic mushrooms. Like, dude, if you eat them shrooms, you'll get rapidly wasted and forget about all that shit'n'stuff, like totally, man.
Like... Drop into boiling water until ready? Nope, we have to use this technology to its full potential. Use the laser to scan the exact geometry of the potato, then determine its weight. Inscription: "Based on the weight, density and geometry of this potato, cooking time will be 18 minutes, 26 seconds at standard atmospheric pressure. To adjust for your local air pressure, see table with correction factors etched on the backside."
That might be a problem indeed. Would be interesting what is more important - refueling the air itself or changing the filtering/AC components on a regular basis. Still, I don't think that this is a show-stopper. Worst possibility is that we would have to carry more resources on a long trip to keep the systems clean.
Well, we had people on long term space missions on Mir and ISS that are comparable in time with a mars mission, without them being eaten alive by E. coli, Salmonella and whatnot. What was the problem again?
Well, around here, the dismantling of a single reactor - the experimental reactor at Jülich, Germany - cost about 500 million euro. Dismantling started 2003 and will probably take until 2015. I wouldn't call that easy. The reactor in question was a government funded research project. No commercial reactor around here has ever been dismantled, but I have no doubt, that the energy corporations will dump those costs on society when it comes to that. I wouldn't call that an easy cleanup.
Don't get me wrong, I am by no means anti-nuclear. I sincerely believe that we can run nuclear plant safely - and we will need to. But the externalities can't just be dumped on society, while the profits are funneled to some corporation.
I wish it was. I had the "pleasure" of growing up in a town that became the German equivalent to an EPA superfund site. You see, we had that chemical factory right in the middle of town. A thing of pride, one of the oldest chemical factories in the country, more than 200 years of tradition and all. Heck, Goethe visited it on one of his journeys. They made organo-mercury compounds for seed treatment. In the process, they spilled mercury all over the town. The stuff was rolling around in nice little balls all over their factory halls, organometallics leaked into the soil, the river, the air. Complete, utter disregard of all safety and environmental considerations. The regulatory authorities were obviously bribed for years, never noticing the gross misconduct going on there...
Then, in the 80s, at least someone leaked information to the press about the conditions at the plant. It was closed, cleaned up for millions. They had to remove the topsoil in gardens of about half the cities houses. Below the plant was a vast system of catacombs, where waste had been illegally stored for 200 years. The guys running the factory bankrupted their way out, managed to dodge criminal charges and lived happily ever after. The workers, a lot of them having severe brain damage due to years of mercury exposure, never got compensated. There was a lengthy legal battle about it, but the factory owners bought the better crooked "toxicologist", who basically convinced the judge that you could gargle organomercury compounds without a problem. I wish I'd meet the fucker in a dark alley one day.
That's the joy of corporatist capitalism. Privatize the gains, socialize the losses, dump the externalities on society and get outta Dodge City when things heat up, leaving everyone fucked thoroughly.
From the sparse data I can gather, probably 120 kts - depending on weight and atmospheric conditions of course. Slow enough to stay at the side of commercial civilian aircraft, slow enough to do a slow flyby of smaller and slower GA aircraft, I guess.
While I do agree that the content industry has turned evil, I do not think that they are on the level of weapons dealer, military industrial complex evilness that Dylan is singing about in that song.
Operation Flashpoint 2 is OpF in name only. Codemasters has the right to the title, but none of the original developers from Bohemia were involved with Flashpoint 2. The real successor to OpF is Armed Assault and the recent Armed Assault II - which has definitely gone forwards in my opinion.
Actually that's a scary point. If we ever get to a state like that, intellectual property will be the only way for people to make money, so everything will be patented or copywritten. They might even have to come up with some more terms. It'll be a choice of socialism or infinite copywrite.
You got it wrong, as there would be no need for money. Intellectual property will be the only way to exert control over people. And that is when the (r)evolution will come. Capitalism is a means of allocating scarce ressources. There is no place for it in a post-scarcity era.
Slashdot Mirror
The court is not supposed to know shit. The judges are supposed to listen to experts and form their opinion based upon that - and from reading the decision, I would say they indeed did. Everything working as intended. That aside, all hail the CCC!
Well, at least they demand some serious restrictions - asymmetric encryption with separately stored keys, no central storage of the data under direct government control, no access without a judge's order, no access without a well-founded and substantiated suspicion, access only for prosecution of serious crimes (exceptions for simple lookup of dynamic IPs), severe penalties for illegitime access. This is way better than what we had before.
That aside, thank the FSM for our constitutional court. They basically struck down every security-theatre related law in the last couple of years. I am starting to think about a three-strikes law for politicians - vote for three unconstitutional laws and you are out. Loss of eligibility for any political office for 4 years at last. Ahh, well, a man can dream...
Some protons in the nucleotide biosynthesis do indeed come from water, some from other sources. Additionaly, some protons, for example the protons of the -OH groups of the sugar component of nucleotides, can exchange with water along the lines of -OH + T2O -> -OT + TOH. So tritium can indeed be incorporated into DNA. While doing tritium labeling experiments in the lab, I always treated the stuff with respect.
Well, around here we had judges like that during the Nazi Regime. Look up this asshole for example. And no, we do not want the likes of them in our courts again. Never.
Step 3b(I): Get forced to "grant" compulsory licenses in most countries which have that option in their patent system (for the common good, ofc).
Him being a hack from the beginning might have been a bit over the top. I am just getting fed up with the sheer height of the pedestal on which the original trilogy is placed in geek circles, so I tend to overreact a bit. The Kurosawa angle is interesting, and I agree that the influence can be seen. Thanks for the link - I'll have a look at it when I find some time.
Well, technically that commandment only covers bearing false witness, which is probably rather a legal term. False accusations in legal matters are forbidden, but, hey, god has no problem with you lying to your heart's content. To forbid lying would not be that productive if you want to spread a cult....
I kinda disagree. Tatooine is not Arrakis, it is simply north africa. Lucas did not pay homage to any prior SF in any meaningful way. He just upgraded the imagery for Percival, the fool becoming knight and savior. I don't get why Star Wars became the holy grail (haha) of geeks. Lucas was a hack from the beginning. Reading Herbert and Doc Smith into it is overinterpretation, in my opinion.
If you think 2001 is too slowly paced for modern audiences, I give you the original Solaris as filmed by Tarkovski. And, of course, Stalker. 2001 Both are INCREDIBLY slow, Stalker comes without any special effects and is burdened by heavy symbolism - a great film, though. In my personal universe, Lem and the Strugatzki brothers are the greatest SF writers - and they found their congenial filmmaker in Tarkovski. It is possible to turn great SF into great movies. Perhaps not in Hollywood, though...
The other end would not move at the same time. The force you enact on the first end has to "get" to the second end. This happens by molecular interactions in the material of the bar, which are (mostly) electromagnetic in nature. So, the force travels with the speed of light. By moving the first end, you basically create a compression wave that travels with roughly c through the bar. The second end moves 1.5 years later. Of course, the bar breaks first anyway...
Well, the effect for 12C/13C should be rather small, but there are isotope effects on bonding energies. This is in particular due to the lower vibrational frequency of the bond involving a heavier isotope. This is equivalent to a lower zero-point energy state of the bond, which again means that the activation energy for the separation of the bond is higher. The effect is of course most visible for light atoms, where a neutron more or less makes a significant difference - H/D shows the strongest isotopic effect. It should still be noticable for carbon, though.
After some google exercises, I actually found something on Science Daily. The 1000-year figure indeed comes from statistics that ignored mobility. Interestingly, a more advanced model taking mobility, social mating barriers and the like into account, gives about 3000 years for the most recent common ancestor. Still seems awfully close to me. I can't get access to the original paper in Nature from home, but I'll look into it when I find the time.
That might work on a pure mathematical level, but I seriously doubt that the calculations take mobility into account. I can see no way how I could share a common ancestor within the last 1000 years with, say, an amazon Indian or an Australian aborigine. Everyone within certain subpopulations, e.g. every European, that I could believe. Do you by chance have a link to this story? Interesting topic.
The overhead panel usually contains the systems control - electrics, hydraulics, air, engine startups and external lights. During normal flight, those controls are rarely used. So, this is not an example of bad design. All the controls essential in flight usually directly in front of the pilot (autopilot controls for example) or on the center console - flaps, slats, spoilers, radios, FMC etc.
So, the controls used mostly during startup and shutdown are kept in a still reachable place where they don't clutter up the essential stuff in the direct field of view of the pilots. Modern panels use an all dark logic, too. Basically, if nothing on the overhead is lit up, everything is working as intended. So the overhead can be checked with a quick glance during flight. Even if something goes wrong in flight and the overhead has to be worked, this is the job of the pilot not flying, while the pilot flying can still focus on the instruments and safely control and navigate the plane.
Airliners are complex systems and the controls have to be put somewhere. A lot of thought went into the interface design and crew resource management, which is very similar among all current airliners.
(IANAP, just an aviation geek, so any pilots around here feel free to correct me where I am wrong.)
You might want to have a look at DCS. Haven't tried it myself, but it looks like a pretty decent hardcore helicopter combat sim. Also Rise of Flight is said to have pretty decent flying physics. So the genre is not totally dead (yet).
Seriously, also on page 4, "mushroom"? OK, you could argue that's like the stem of a mushroom. So why are the very similar figures on previous pages marked "forget" (eh? unless in some medieval italian slang that apparently both dante and da vinci spoke a "forget" was a mushroom of some sort), "waste" (eh? this is the bit of the mushroom, or forget, that you're meant to waste? seriously?), "rapid" (evidently if you eat this particular mushroom, or forget, you rapidly produce waste) or two question marks
Makes totally sense. Magic mushrooms. Like, dude, if you eat them shrooms, you'll get rapidly wasted and forget about all that shit'n'stuff, like totally, man.
Potatoes with cooking instructions.
Like... Drop into boiling water until ready? Nope, we have to use this technology to its full potential. Use the laser to scan the exact geometry of the potato, then determine its weight. Inscription: "Based on the weight, density and geometry of this potato, cooking time will be 18 minutes, 26 seconds at standard atmospheric pressure. To adjust for your local air pressure, see table with correction factors etched on the backside."
That might be a problem indeed. Would be interesting what is more important - refueling the air itself or changing the filtering/AC components on a regular basis. Still, I don't think that this is a show-stopper. Worst possibility is that we would have to carry more resources on a long trip to keep the systems clean.
Well, we had people on long term space missions on Mir and ISS that are comparable in time with a mars mission, without them being eaten alive by E. coli, Salmonella and whatnot. What was the problem again?
Well, around here, the dismantling of a single reactor - the experimental reactor at Jülich, Germany - cost about 500 million euro. Dismantling started 2003 and will probably take until 2015. I wouldn't call that easy. The reactor in question was a government funded research project. No commercial reactor around here has ever been dismantled, but I have no doubt, that the energy corporations will dump those costs on society when it comes to that. I wouldn't call that an easy cleanup.
Don't get me wrong, I am by no means anti-nuclear. I sincerely believe that we can run nuclear plant safely - and we will need to. But the externalities can't just be dumped on society, while the profits are funneled to some corporation.
I wish it was. I had the "pleasure" of growing up in a town that became the German equivalent to an EPA superfund site. You see, we had that chemical factory right in the middle of town. A thing of pride, one of the oldest chemical factories in the country, more than 200 years of tradition and all. Heck, Goethe visited it on one of his journeys. They made organo-mercury compounds for seed treatment. In the process, they spilled mercury all over the town. The stuff was rolling around in nice little balls all over their factory halls, organometallics leaked into the soil, the river, the air. Complete, utter disregard of all safety and environmental considerations. The regulatory authorities were obviously bribed for years, never noticing the gross misconduct going on there...
Then, in the 80s, at least someone leaked information to the press about the conditions at the plant. It was closed, cleaned up for millions. They had to remove the topsoil in gardens of about half the cities houses. Below the plant was a vast system of catacombs, where waste had been illegally stored for 200 years. The guys running the factory bankrupted their way out, managed to dodge criminal charges and lived happily ever after. The workers, a lot of them having severe brain damage due to years of mercury exposure, never got compensated. There was a lengthy legal battle about it, but the factory owners bought the better crooked "toxicologist", who basically convinced the judge that you could gargle organomercury compounds without a problem. I wish I'd meet the fucker in a dark alley one day.
That's the joy of corporatist capitalism. Privatize the gains, socialize the losses, dump the externalities on society and get outta Dodge City when things heat up, leaving everyone fucked thoroughly.
From the sparse data I can gather, probably 120 kts - depending on weight and atmospheric conditions of course. Slow enough to stay at the side of commercial civilian aircraft, slow enough to do a slow flyby of smaller and slower GA aircraft, I guess.
While I do agree that the content industry has turned evil, I do not think that they are on the level of weapons dealer, military industrial complex evilness that Dylan is singing about in that song.
Operation Flashpoint 2 is OpF in name only. Codemasters has the right to the title, but none of the original developers from Bohemia were involved with Flashpoint 2. The real successor to OpF is Armed Assault and the recent Armed Assault II - which has definitely gone forwards in my opinion.
Actually that's a scary point. If we ever get to a state like that, intellectual property will be the only way for people to make money, so everything will be patented or copywritten. They might even have to come up with some more terms. It'll be a choice of socialism or infinite copywrite.
You got it wrong, as there would be no need for money. Intellectual property will be the only way to exert control over people. And that is when the (r)evolution will come. Capitalism is a means of allocating scarce ressources. There is no place for it in a post-scarcity era.