And the Taliban is going deep, deep... and INTERCEPTION!... US just bombed the entire defensive line and stole the ball! 90, 80, 70... they're going all the way... wait... you're saying we just blew half the crowd away and a referee? 50! 40, 30...
Yeah. Well, I suppose it would be my country that would turn killing people into a sport.;(
when I was in school, when I turned in a homework assignment, I was told where I messed up, and then went on to the next assignment.
Me too. They changed that though when the parents complained that their precious snowflake wasn't getting first place in everything; So they abolished competitions. Now there's no such thing as an 'F' in many schools, and they have about half a dozen more letters to represent just how exactly their kid didn't 'F'ail. It is (as my teenage sis would say) "ridonkulus".
Yes, sometimes due to deadlines (or simple cost-benefit analysis), not everything will always be perfect when it ships, but I'd certainly always take code written by a company and designed to be shipped, over code designed to be written and turned in as a homework assignment...
So would I: Because there's a use for one, rarely for the other. Articles like this are like saying "We shouldn't use cars because they pollute" and then suggest we all switch to bicycles until the One Perfect And True Green Solution(tm) arises, perhaps powered by crystals shoved up your butt or some other damn thing. There are programmers who build things academically, and there are programmers who build things like engineers. Engineers give you a best fit solution for a given amount of resources. Academics will always be trying to modify your requirements to fit with this latest paper by some guy who said that the bogo sorting genetic algorithm has the lowest O notation for your use case ever and... zzzzzz... you're already asleep. -_-
This just in: Examples provided in school have no practical real world application. Duh. In the real world you have things like deadlines, bosses, and clueless managers. When you screw up in class, the teacher tells you where you messed up and you get a chance to do it again. In the real world, when you screw up you probably won't know what you did, at least not right away. And you're going to have to figure it out while everyone is mad at you, calling your phone, and asking why it died.
I don't know where this idea of the Zen Programmer(tm) comes from with visions of calm blue waters and bright bleached sand and everything is calm, thought out, and composed. Programmers I know hammer down mountain dew like it's nobody's business. They do not spend months debugging and thinking about it academically: If it works, you move on to the next thing. Don't bitch about the quality of the code (manager or academic) in the real world because there are almost no programmers in the corporate world that sit around thinking in O notation and figuring out the best and worst case scenario for every line of code. They bang out 500 lines in a few hours and then hit compile and hope to god it works on the first go.
That's reality people -- you don't have the time, the resources, and if you took the academic attitude to work with you, you'd be cut up and used as shark food by everyone else for being so damn slow and pragmatic when they need things working tonight so they can go home after being there for 15 effing hours to make the latest milestone.
A monopoly *prevents* competition and maintains a lock on the market by means beyond being, you know, a good product (in the eyes of consumers relative to other options).
Well, that's a nice 5 paragraphs worth of missing the point. Impressive. Unfortunately, the OP's assertion was that monopolies can only come into being due to government intercession. Microsoft came into being without it, invalidating that point. In other words, my point was that a market can produce a monopoly without government regulation. I won't even bother addressing the remainder of your post, which was simultaniously condescending and also so totally off base as to be laughable.
1) Creating barriers to entry on behalf of corporate lobbyists that make competition illegal (as only government can do) except for the existing major players who coincidentally* are the only entities with the infrastructure to meet the arbitrary legal (government) requirements.
Microsoft. There are no legal requirements about the creation of an Operating System.
2) Looking the other way while corporations bribe government agents to allow criminal acts including intimidation and violence to prevent competition in an extrajudicial way.
There's no evidence Microsoft has hired the mafia to break the knees of people who use Linux.
That said, the example I just provided isn't a fair comparison to the natural monopolies regarding land use; specifically easements for access to private property (electricity, gas, sewer, communications, etc.) The government has to regulate access somehow. Unfortunately, our patchwork of municipal, county, state, and federal, plus case law, and then all the various regulations by dozens of agencies makes for a very high barrier to entry. Whatever form of governance is used, these things need regulations or anarchy results. The problem is... we regulated access, but not use. There was never a condition that in order to get these easements, companies have to upgrade their infrastructure by spending a portion of profits on improvements. And once an easement is granted, it is almost always exclusive. The exclusive contract is what fucked us. We need to make it illegal.
This is precisely why capitalism doesn't belong in some markets. Cue rabid "the free market is always right" retorts in 5...4...3... but the truth is when you have any infrastructure service; sewer, electricity, communications, roads, etc., that everyone needs access to (or at least a majority of people in the community use often), without regulation this kind of thing will happen. It creates a natural monopoly; And no, the government doesn't create the monopoly. It would happen whether the government even existed or not. This is the quintessential example of where and when government regulation is needed to rebalance things so that the service provided retains its usefulness to society without becoming parasitic. The government is the only thing besides an even larger monopoly power that can influence this kind of market dynamic.
And yet here we are, getting put over a barrel and raped because of our idealized notion of how the market will "correct itself", and how government regulation "hurts businesses". You know what, fine: Let one company's profits suffer a little for the greater good, rather than letting everyone suffer a little so the company can be massively profitable at our expense. We need to put a stop to the nickle and dime death march that is killing our middle class off. We need regulation.
I don't know why, but I read that initially as "W3C Demonizes the Definition of HTML5". I like my version better. For web developers, the idea of yet another standard to make their site compatible with probably earns the W3C the special hell they reserve for child molesters, standards body members, and people who speak in theatre. Shiny.
I don't believe you do it either. Seems like you are either a super-genius with a lot of time and resources or just a bullshitter. Too may posts where you are an "expert" in divergent areas. I could be wrong, but 99 times out of a 100, it is just bullshit.
I'm not a super-genius, just a regular one. Second, I do have a lot of time, but not a lot of resources. Third, it is possible for someone to be well-versed in many different areas of human understanding, without either time, resources, or intelligence, as long as one is curious and persistent.
Lastly, regarding your "99 times out of a 100"... citation needed. *evil grin*
An FM broadcast antenna is indeed directional, in the vertical plane. It flattens out the signal from a sphere so that most of the power is on a level plane. That's how an antenna creates gain. On the other axis it is most often omnidirectional. That 50KW is ERP (Effective Radiated Power), the transmitter is likely only putting out about 10KW.
Close but not quite. EIRP is where you start; with an idealized transmitter that radiates power equally in every direction. ERP is calculated based on the energy of the antenna's main lobe, which for an FM transmitter typically looks like a small circle and a long oval connected at the antenna. The difference in power between the EIRP model and signal strength in the main lobe of the antenna is the antenna's gain, which is where your ERP calculation comes from. A transmitter with an antenna having 6dB of gain means it can transmit at 10KW and have an equivalent signal strength (in the main lobe) to an ideal antenna radiating in all directions at 40KW.
If this were almost anywhere else in the world, it would be an unconditional "Yes." Germany and a few other countries have been lucky enough to have access to enough alternative energy sources (believe it or not, wind, unlike air, isn't plentiful everywhere) to be close to, if not having already completed, going nuclear free. But Japan is small and it's population density very high. There just isn't enough land for solar or wind. That leaves only two alternatives for base load plants: Coal and nuclear. Coal is not a resource Japan has natively. It would have to depend on imports. Uranium however, can be sucked out of ocean water, albeit not very practical especially in light of their relationship with the US and other countries with stockpiles of uranium.
The only reason I think Japan might not return to nuclear power is because it's the only country to have been hit with nuclear weapons. It has left scars on the public's psyche that no other country really has to contend with. But yeah, any other country with such a high population density and limited land mass I don't see switching off their nuclear power plants no matter how unpopular they are. Those coal plants pump out way more radiation and smoke and other nastiness, and finding a place to locate it in such a densely populated region becomes very problematic.
Though the rest of your post was rather insightful, this is wild hyperbole, unless you are playing this game only with a particularly lawless set of individuals.
Well you don't have to take my word for it. How about a public defender in California who now teaches at Harvard Law and a career detective with 20 years under his belt? This was the video that inspired the game I play, precisely because so many people think like you do.
People like you are in fact so resistant to the idea that they can easily be a criminal too, just like the ones they shun and look at disgust at on TV, that I put my money where my mouth was. $500 seems the magic number for people to give their belief about this aspect of the legal system a spin on the wheel as it were. And it's a real contest, make no mistake man. I take all the footage and logs of what they've done and ask a real and licensed public defender in my state to look over my work and tell me whether it would be actionable or not. A lot of times, I get the interpretation wrong, but never once have I failed to walk out of their offices with a yes vote.
. . . he needs an official declaration that he was never guilty in the first place, and should never have been prosecuted.
I think you're misunderstanding what the Judge is saying. Whether someone's guilty or not does not mean they were right or wrong, ethical or unethical. It means that they met an arbitrary standard based on three criterion; The state of mind of the actor, the actual act itself, and the motivations for doing so. The law is not about right or wrong, good or evil, it is about application of a defined criterion and determining whether it meets it or not. That's it. That is all.
The laws, even back then, were sufficiently complex and vague in many places that everyone commits a criminal offense at least once a day. In the United States, I have played a game with friends I like to call "Who Wants To Be A Felon" -- and then record their daily activities (for one day) and tell them, based on which laws, how many felonies they committed. The rules are: You can't just sit in your house and wait it out, you have to do something you'd ordinarily do on an average day (go to work, use a computer, eat breakfast, etc.) At the end of the day, I collect the cameras and if I can't find a felony you've committed during that 24 hour period, you get $500 bucks. Dozens have tried. Nobody's won so far.
That's the reality of our legal system. It's also why you should never, under any circumstances, talk to the police. I'm serious -- even during a routine traffic stop say "no comment" to every question except your name, address, request for driver's license and other necessary papers. That's why the much maligned 5th amendment was created: Not to protect the guilty, but to protect innocent people that might otherwise, through a lack of understanding of the legal system, wind up convicting themselves for a crime they didn't commit. And yet far too many people give up this right -- 86% of cases never go to trial because of confessions. And let me be frank: When you sit down in an interrogation room, you're going up against an olympic boxer with 20 years of experience questioning people. If you open your mouth, you are going to lose.
Now, with that detailed analysis of why our legal system is completely divorced from the idea of justice, and why the judge was totally correct in saying a pardon should not be issued, let's also consider that Mr. Turing is dead. He won't benefit from a pardon. But we can all benefit from a frank discussion about how society allowed a man to be tortured for being gay, and use that as a stepping stone to more progressive thinking. I think if Mr. Turing were alive, he would be pleasantly shocked to discover in how many places the tides of religious intolerance have been turned back and gays are now given most (if not all) the same legal recognition and protections as heterosexuals are. I think he would also be standing next to people like George Takei in saying that it does get better. And it does.
But only if we remember in the darkness, what we've seen in the light.
1. The equipment may be ridiculously expensive (No problem: Around half the US government's budget goes to defence).
Dude, 30 years ago the idea of a hard drive with a "gigabyte" of capacity was something ridiculously expensive, taking up football-field sized buildings, and everyone thought it'd be a really dumb idea anyway; Tape would be better for storage. Now I can get 64GB of storage to fit on my index finger and it's only a fingernail's thickness. The argument of "it'll be ridiculously expensive" dies over a long enough time span.
It'll need to be such high (analog) bandwidth, it'll not comply with any spectrum or power regulations, anywhere.
Ding! We have a winner. Though, not for the exact reason you're thinking. It could in fact work, and even within certain power requirements. But it'll never get regulatory approval, and it has nothing to do with technical requirements, but the fact that (at least if we're talking about the United States) the people in charge are paid large amounts of money to maintain the status quo. Remember that price fixing scandal for digital TV when the FCC fucked up the transition so badly Congress had to intercede... three times? Yeah... what ever happened to them? Oh right... the FCC made billions, the corporations made billions... the taxpayers lost many billions, and... oh right: They were fined, uhh.. less than a penny on the dollar against their profits.
Every attempt to give the general public access to high speed digital communications for cheap has been blown out of the water faster than you can say "Republican in a bathroom stall at an airport."
How? Is it airborne or something? You are not going to get any straight line reception at that range due to curvature of the earth, even in the plains.
It's assumed that the antenna would be mounted on something like, I don't know, say a tower, or building...
Actually, the next step is for the FCC to ban it under some vague and previously unknown test protocol as causing inteference to devices receiving the signal at -108dB. See also: Every attempt made to bring faster wifi to the masses so far.
We have financial disclosure laws and public-release laws because of situations like this...
The problem is that, as usual, the law hasn't kept up with changes in technology and how people communicate. It's possible to view anything posted on Twitter (to the best of my knowledge) without logging in to view it. That would make it, by definition, "public". Anyone can access it. This differs from Facebook where an account is required to view it.
Thus, Twitter at least would seemingly meet the requirements for public disclosure; The information is available equally to everyone, and at the same time. And yet, here we are. The fact is, social media websites are where people are, and if you want to talk to them, you have to go there. The SEC however hasn't caught up with that, and still believes in pomp and circumstance like quarterly meetings and reports -- information exchange at the speed of molasses in an age where milliseconds matter.
Most social media is talking at each other, not to each other. Forums are already hard enough, but most forums are for a specific purpose and smaller in membership and thus easier to moderate. General purpose forums have proven impossible to moderate with all have access- Usenet was the first example of that.
We should carve up our lives into specific topics and areas of interest. Anything that falls outside of those bounds is of no interest to anyone, certainly not the people we have chosen to bestow the title 'friend' upon. Human relationships would be so much better if we could only subscribe to the parts that we, personally, have an interest in. Rather than taking each relationship as part of a whole person, why can't we just pick and choose the parts we like and discard the rest?
Modern social networking should be thrown away so we can return to the past, when we subscribed only to the parts of each person we were interested in.
Submitter here:, just FYI, I or Timothy didn't offer our opinion here, it's the author of the article's opinion. I happen to like anything space related, and submitted this because it's an interesting video, and thought other people here would think it is too.
My apologies. As I'm sure you're aware, slashdot doesn't exactly go through a lot of effort to delineate quotes by the author, submitter, or editor. You just have to guess on those quotation marks a lot of times. Well then, my comments are directed towards the Bad Astronomy blogger, who should know better because I regularly read his work. The whole space station was an experiment, on many levels both technical, scientific, and cultural. I don't think its value is in whether or not we succeeded in any of those areas, but in how much we learned about each of those things.
Research is rarely profitable. Most of our knowledge of how to do it right comes from testing out all possible ways of doing it wrong. So when you point and say "Well, this particular project didn't pan out" as a reason not to undertake any future projects, you're misrepresenting the facts. It's true, most research fails. But the research that succeeds more than makes up for the costs of all that other research before it. Every technology within your range of vision right now was developed through a iterative process of failure.
And yet, here we are, and I am thankful that, unlike the editor and submitter, I can see the big picture. The space program has contributed way more in commercial developments than it has cost us. Way, way, massively way more. And that's in spite of its bureaucratic failures (of which many have written small books on -- see Appendix D of the Challenger Disaster report for one such example). Research is essential. If you want to argue about the cost of the space program, pick something else -- there are juicier targets than that.
This has to be the cleverest joke I have seen on/. in a long time.
Yes, stereotyping a large portion of the world population because of the actions of miniscule percentage of it is funny and clever as hell. By the way, nice propeller hat there, nerd. When are you going to move out of mom's basement? I bet you get invited to all the cool parties. See how clever I am? x_x
unless that treaty has provisions that provide specific steps for (or prohibit) repudiation.
All of the treaties mentioned that had been ratified had such provisions. The United States ignored those enforcement clauses. But thank you for your legal explanation, even though I had clearly delineated those which had been signed and ratified from those that had not been ratified.
My friends figured out I might know a few things when they said how they wished they could get all their DVDs on their computer without having to put them in one by one and rip them... and I told them to bring over all their DVDs (literally, about a thousand of them) in about a week. A week later, they showed up, and said "How long's this gonna take", and I looked at them and said "About a day." Then I led them around the corner to the robot I'd build that would autoload several drives and rip them.
They said pretty much the same thing; "B-b-but you don't even have a Facebook!" I simply let the silence fill the air, before replying sagely, "And who do you think did all the work to create the network that Facebook runs on?"
To be fair, the US government does have a pretty long and distinguished history of signing agreements (or for that matter, domestic laws or, well, our own constitution) and then ignoring them if whatever administration is in power feels that the other parties can't stop them.
Yes, but pointing that out lands you in "-1, troll" land usually, as my OP demonstrates to great effect. In most developed countries, there's been major historical event that they lost on. Germany lost WWII. Britain was bombed back into the stone age. The French... well... 'nuff said. Poland, Switzerland, every European country has at one point been steamrollered and had to eat crow. So their sense of patriotism is tempered by the understanding that they can lose, that they have lost, and that while they're proud of who they are, they're not insensitive to the fact that they've also screwed up before.
The United States hasn't had that pivotal moment yet where it simply, unquestionably, lost. Failed. Beaten. Destroyed. It will happen, eventually, but until it does, people here are going to be highly resistant to the idea that we can screw up. They have untempered pride in their country, blind patriotism. And that's why so many people are irritated with Americans -- it's the lack of humility, it's the idea we can do whatever we want because we'll always win. But we're paying an enormous cost for this attitude; The south now resembles the living conditions commonly found in the suburbs and smaller towns of Egypt. Detroit is a wasteland full of crime, murder, and destroyed infrastructure. Several of our major cities have been reclaimed by nature due to economic neglect. Many americans are starving or close to it, and our food reserves dangerously low. People talk about the recession like it's over, but it's never been worse. Our pride is killing us. Literally. Every predator drone launched is a denied college education. It's food that could have been put on the table of a hungry family.
We need to jettison that pride, but as you can see, even here on Slashdot, that's amazingly hard for people to do. They'd rather just scream at the top of the lungs "You're wrong! You're wrong!" They're dragged kicking and screaming to the truth, and they hate me for it.
Slashdot Mirror
And the Taliban is going deep, deep... and INTERCEPTION!... US just bombed the entire defensive line and stole the ball! 90, 80, 70... they're going all the way... wait... you're saying we just blew half the crowd away and a referee? 50! 40, 30...
Yeah. Well, I suppose it would be my country that would turn killing people into a sport. ;(
when I was in school, when I turned in a homework assignment, I was told where I messed up, and then went on to the next assignment.
Me too. They changed that though when the parents complained that their precious snowflake wasn't getting first place in everything; So they abolished competitions. Now there's no such thing as an 'F' in many schools, and they have about half a dozen more letters to represent just how exactly their kid didn't 'F'ail. It is (as my teenage sis would say) "ridonkulus".
Yes, sometimes due to deadlines (or simple cost-benefit analysis), not everything will always be perfect when it ships, but I'd certainly always take code written by a company and designed to be shipped, over code designed to be written and turned in as a homework assignment...
So would I: Because there's a use for one, rarely for the other. Articles like this are like saying "We shouldn't use cars because they pollute" and then suggest we all switch to bicycles until the One Perfect And True Green Solution(tm) arises, perhaps powered by crystals shoved up your butt or some other damn thing. There are programmers who build things academically, and there are programmers who build things like engineers. Engineers give you a best fit solution for a given amount of resources. Academics will always be trying to modify your requirements to fit with this latest paper by some guy who said that the bogo sorting genetic algorithm has the lowest O notation for your use case ever and... zzzzzz... you're already asleep. -_-
This just in: Examples provided in school have no practical real world application. Duh. In the real world you have things like deadlines, bosses, and clueless managers. When you screw up in class, the teacher tells you where you messed up and you get a chance to do it again. In the real world, when you screw up you probably won't know what you did, at least not right away. And you're going to have to figure it out while everyone is mad at you, calling your phone, and asking why it died.
I don't know where this idea of the Zen Programmer(tm) comes from with visions of calm blue waters and bright bleached sand and everything is calm, thought out, and composed. Programmers I know hammer down mountain dew like it's nobody's business. They do not spend months debugging and thinking about it academically: If it works, you move on to the next thing. Don't bitch about the quality of the code (manager or academic) in the real world because there are almost no programmers in the corporate world that sit around thinking in O notation and figuring out the best and worst case scenario for every line of code. They bang out 500 lines in a few hours and then hit compile and hope to god it works on the first go.
That's reality people -- you don't have the time, the resources, and if you took the academic attitude to work with you, you'd be cut up and used as shark food by everyone else for being so damn slow and pragmatic when they need things working tonight so they can go home after being there for 15 effing hours to make the latest milestone.
A monopoly *prevents* competition and maintains a lock on the market by means beyond being, you know, a good product (in the eyes of consumers relative to other options).
Well, that's a nice 5 paragraphs worth of missing the point. Impressive. Unfortunately, the OP's assertion was that monopolies can only come into being due to government intercession. Microsoft came into being without it, invalidating that point. In other words, my point was that a market can produce a monopoly without government regulation. I won't even bother addressing the remainder of your post, which was simultaniously condescending and also so totally off base as to be laughable.
1) Creating barriers to entry on behalf of corporate lobbyists that make competition illegal (as only government can do) except for the existing major players who coincidentally* are the only entities with the infrastructure to meet the arbitrary legal (government) requirements.
Microsoft. There are no legal requirements about the creation of an Operating System.
2) Looking the other way while corporations bribe government agents to allow criminal acts including intimidation and violence to prevent competition in an extrajudicial way.
There's no evidence Microsoft has hired the mafia to break the knees of people who use Linux.
That said, the example I just provided isn't a fair comparison to the natural monopolies regarding land use; specifically easements for access to private property (electricity, gas, sewer, communications, etc.) The government has to regulate access somehow. Unfortunately, our patchwork of municipal, county, state, and federal, plus case law, and then all the various regulations by dozens of agencies makes for a very high barrier to entry. Whatever form of governance is used, these things need regulations or anarchy results. The problem is... we regulated access, but not use. There was never a condition that in order to get these easements, companies have to upgrade their infrastructure by spending a portion of profits on improvements. And once an easement is granted, it is almost always exclusive. The exclusive contract is what fucked us. We need to make it illegal.
This is precisely why capitalism doesn't belong in some markets. Cue rabid "the free market is always right" retorts in 5...4...3... but the truth is when you have any infrastructure service; sewer, electricity, communications, roads, etc., that everyone needs access to (or at least a majority of people in the community use often), without regulation this kind of thing will happen. It creates a natural monopoly; And no, the government doesn't create the monopoly. It would happen whether the government even existed or not. This is the quintessential example of where and when government regulation is needed to rebalance things so that the service provided retains its usefulness to society without becoming parasitic. The government is the only thing besides an even larger monopoly power that can influence this kind of market dynamic.
And yet here we are, getting put over a barrel and raped because of our idealized notion of how the market will "correct itself", and how government regulation "hurts businesses". You know what, fine: Let one company's profits suffer a little for the greater good, rather than letting everyone suffer a little so the company can be massively profitable at our expense. We need to put a stop to the nickle and dime death march that is killing our middle class off. We need regulation.
W3C Finalizes the Definition of HTML5
I don't know why, but I read that initially as "W3C Demonizes the Definition of HTML5". I like my version better. For web developers, the idea of yet another standard to make their site compatible with probably earns the W3C the special hell they reserve for child molesters, standards body members, and people who speak in theatre. Shiny.
I don't believe you do it either. Seems like you are either a super-genius with a lot of time and resources or just a bullshitter. Too may posts where you are an "expert" in divergent areas. I could be wrong, but 99 times out of a 100, it is just bullshit.
I'm not a super-genius, just a regular one. Second, I do have a lot of time, but not a lot of resources. Third, it is possible for someone to be well-versed in many different areas of human understanding, without either time, resources, or intelligence, as long as one is curious and persistent.
Lastly, regarding your "99 times out of a 100"... citation needed. *evil grin*
An FM broadcast antenna is indeed directional, in the vertical plane. It flattens out the signal from a sphere so that most of the power is on a level plane. That's how an antenna creates gain. On the other axis it is most often omnidirectional. That 50KW is ERP (Effective Radiated Power), the transmitter is likely only putting out about 10KW.
Close but not quite. EIRP is where you start; with an idealized transmitter that radiates power equally in every direction. ERP is calculated based on the energy of the antenna's main lobe, which for an FM transmitter typically looks like a small circle and a long oval connected at the antenna. The difference in power between the EIRP model and signal strength in the main lobe of the antenna is the antenna's gain, which is where your ERP calculation comes from. A transmitter with an antenna having 6dB of gain means it can transmit at 10KW and have an equivalent signal strength (in the main lobe) to an ideal antenna radiating in all directions at 40KW.
If this were almost anywhere else in the world, it would be an unconditional "Yes." Germany and a few other countries have been lucky enough to have access to enough alternative energy sources (believe it or not, wind, unlike air, isn't plentiful everywhere) to be close to, if not having already completed, going nuclear free. But Japan is small and it's population density very high. There just isn't enough land for solar or wind. That leaves only two alternatives for base load plants: Coal and nuclear. Coal is not a resource Japan has natively. It would have to depend on imports. Uranium however, can be sucked out of ocean water, albeit not very practical especially in light of their relationship with the US and other countries with stockpiles of uranium.
The only reason I think Japan might not return to nuclear power is because it's the only country to have been hit with nuclear weapons. It has left scars on the public's psyche that no other country really has to contend with. But yeah, any other country with such a high population density and limited land mass I don't see switching off their nuclear power plants no matter how unpopular they are. Those coal plants pump out way more radiation and smoke and other nastiness, and finding a place to locate it in such a densely populated region becomes very problematic.
Though the rest of your post was rather insightful, this is wild hyperbole, unless you are playing this game only with a particularly lawless set of individuals.
Well you don't have to take my word for it. How about a public defender in California who now teaches at Harvard Law and a career detective with 20 years under his belt? This was the video that inspired the game I play, precisely because so many people think like you do.
People like you are in fact so resistant to the idea that they can easily be a criminal too, just like the ones they shun and look at disgust at on TV, that I put my money where my mouth was. $500 seems the magic number for people to give their belief about this aspect of the legal system a spin on the wheel as it were. And it's a real contest, make no mistake man. I take all the footage and logs of what they've done and ask a real and licensed public defender in my state to look over my work and tell me whether it would be actionable or not. A lot of times, I get the interpretation wrong, but never once have I failed to walk out of their offices with a yes vote.
. . . he needs an official declaration that he was never guilty in the first place, and should never have been prosecuted.
I think you're misunderstanding what the Judge is saying. Whether someone's guilty or not does not mean they were right or wrong, ethical or unethical. It means that they met an arbitrary standard based on three criterion; The state of mind of the actor, the actual act itself, and the motivations for doing so. The law is not about right or wrong, good or evil, it is about application of a defined criterion and determining whether it meets it or not. That's it. That is all.
The laws, even back then, were sufficiently complex and vague in many places that everyone commits a criminal offense at least once a day. In the United States, I have played a game with friends I like to call "Who Wants To Be A Felon" -- and then record their daily activities (for one day) and tell them, based on which laws, how many felonies they committed. The rules are: You can't just sit in your house and wait it out, you have to do something you'd ordinarily do on an average day (go to work, use a computer, eat breakfast, etc.) At the end of the day, I collect the cameras and if I can't find a felony you've committed during that 24 hour period, you get $500 bucks. Dozens have tried. Nobody's won so far.
That's the reality of our legal system. It's also why you should never, under any circumstances, talk to the police. I'm serious -- even during a routine traffic stop say "no comment" to every question except your name, address, request for driver's license and other necessary papers. That's why the much maligned 5th amendment was created: Not to protect the guilty, but to protect innocent people that might otherwise, through a lack of understanding of the legal system, wind up convicting themselves for a crime they didn't commit. And yet far too many people give up this right -- 86% of cases never go to trial because of confessions. And let me be frank: When you sit down in an interrogation room, you're going up against an olympic boxer with 20 years of experience questioning people. If you open your mouth, you are going to lose.
Now, with that detailed analysis of why our legal system is completely divorced from the idea of justice, and why the judge was totally correct in saying a pardon should not be issued, let's also consider that Mr. Turing is dead. He won't benefit from a pardon. But we can all benefit from a frank discussion about how society allowed a man to be tortured for being gay, and use that as a stepping stone to more progressive thinking. I think if Mr. Turing were alive, he would be pleasantly shocked to discover in how many places the tides of religious intolerance have been turned back and gays are now given most (if not all) the same legal recognition and protections as heterosexuals are. I think he would also be standing next to people like George Takei in saying that it does get better. And it does.
But only if we remember in the darkness, what we've seen in the light.
1. The equipment may be ridiculously expensive (No problem: Around half the US government's budget goes to defence).
Dude, 30 years ago the idea of a hard drive with a "gigabyte" of capacity was something ridiculously expensive, taking up football-field sized buildings, and everyone thought it'd be a really dumb idea anyway; Tape would be better for storage. Now I can get 64GB of storage to fit on my index finger and it's only a fingernail's thickness. The argument of "it'll be ridiculously expensive" dies over a long enough time span.
It'll need to be such high (analog) bandwidth, it'll not comply with any spectrum or power regulations, anywhere.
Ding! We have a winner. Though, not for the exact reason you're thinking. It could in fact work, and even within certain power requirements. But it'll never get regulatory approval, and it has nothing to do with technical requirements, but the fact that (at least if we're talking about the United States) the people in charge are paid large amounts of money to maintain the status quo. Remember that price fixing scandal for digital TV when the FCC fucked up the transition so badly Congress had to intercede... three times? Yeah... what ever happened to them? Oh right... the FCC made billions, the corporations made billions... the taxpayers lost many billions, and... oh right: They were fined, uhh.. less than a penny on the dollar against their profits.
Every attempt to give the general public access to high speed digital communications for cheap has been blown out of the water faster than you can say "Republican in a bathroom stall at an airport."
How? Is it airborne or something? You are not going to get any straight line reception at that range due to curvature of the earth, even in the plains.
It's assumed that the antenna would be mounted on something like, I don't know, say a tower, or building...
Actually, the next step is for the FCC to ban it under some vague and previously unknown test protocol as causing inteference to devices receiving the signal at -108dB. See also: Every attempt made to bring faster wifi to the masses so far.
We have financial disclosure laws and public-release laws because of situations like this...
The problem is that, as usual, the law hasn't kept up with changes in technology and how people communicate. It's possible to view anything posted on Twitter (to the best of my knowledge) without logging in to view it. That would make it, by definition, "public". Anyone can access it. This differs from Facebook where an account is required to view it.
Thus, Twitter at least would seemingly meet the requirements for public disclosure; The information is available equally to everyone, and at the same time. And yet, here we are. The fact is, social media websites are where people are, and if you want to talk to them, you have to go there. The SEC however hasn't caught up with that, and still believes in pomp and circumstance like quarterly meetings and reports -- information exchange at the speed of molasses in an age where milliseconds matter.
Most social media is talking at each other, not to each other. Forums are already hard enough, but most forums are for a specific purpose and smaller in membership and thus easier to moderate. General purpose forums have proven impossible to moderate with all have access- Usenet was the first example of that.
We should carve up our lives into specific topics and areas of interest. Anything that falls outside of those bounds is of no interest to anyone, certainly not the people we have chosen to bestow the title 'friend' upon. Human relationships would be so much better if we could only subscribe to the parts that we, personally, have an interest in. Rather than taking each relationship as part of a whole person, why can't we just pick and choose the parts we like and discard the rest?
Modern social networking should be thrown away so we can return to the past, when we subscribed only to the parts of each person we were interested in.
Submitter here:, just FYI, I or Timothy didn't offer our opinion here, it's the author of the article's opinion. I happen to like anything space related, and submitted this because it's an interesting video, and thought other people here would think it is too.
My apologies. As I'm sure you're aware, slashdot doesn't exactly go through a lot of effort to delineate quotes by the author, submitter, or editor. You just have to guess on those quotation marks a lot of times. Well then, my comments are directed towards the Bad Astronomy blogger, who should know better because I regularly read his work. The whole space station was an experiment, on many levels both technical, scientific, and cultural. I don't think its value is in whether or not we succeeded in any of those areas, but in how much we learned about each of those things.
Research is rarely profitable. Most of our knowledge of how to do it right comes from testing out all possible ways of doing it wrong. So when you point and say "Well, this particular project didn't pan out" as a reason not to undertake any future projects, you're misrepresenting the facts. It's true, most research fails. But the research that succeeds more than makes up for the costs of all that other research before it. Every technology within your range of vision right now was developed through a iterative process of failure.
And yet, here we are, and I am thankful that, unlike the editor and submitter, I can see the big picture. The space program has contributed way more in commercial developments than it has cost us. Way, way, massively way more. And that's in spite of its bureaucratic failures (of which many have written small books on -- see Appendix D of the Challenger Disaster report for one such example). Research is essential. If you want to argue about the cost of the space program, pick something else -- there are juicier targets than that.
I'm not certain, but isn't there a law against messing with your packet stream, and inserting their own content?
There used to be. Nowadays is the law is basically "You, pathetic peon citizen. Them, corporation. They win."
This has to be the cleverest joke I have seen on /. in a long time.
Yes, stereotyping a large portion of the world population because of the actions of miniscule percentage of it is funny and clever as hell. By the way, nice propeller hat there, nerd. When are you going to move out of mom's basement? I bet you get invited to all the cool parties. See how clever I am? x_x
Where can I see the Hobbit in 48FPS?
"Yes."
unless that treaty has provisions that provide specific steps for (or prohibit) repudiation.
All of the treaties mentioned that had been ratified had such provisions. The United States ignored those enforcement clauses. But thank you for your legal explanation, even though I had clearly delineated those which had been signed and ratified from those that had not been ratified.
My friends figured out I might know a few things when they said how they wished they could get all their DVDs on their computer without having to put them in one by one and rip them... and I told them to bring over all their DVDs (literally, about a thousand of them) in about a week. A week later, they showed up, and said "How long's this gonna take", and I looked at them and said "About a day." Then I led them around the corner to the robot I'd build that would autoload several drives and rip them.
They said pretty much the same thing; "B-b-but you don't even have a Facebook!" I simply let the silence fill the air, before replying sagely, "And who do you think did all the work to create the network that Facebook runs on?"
To be fair, the US government does have a pretty long and distinguished history of signing agreements (or for that matter, domestic laws or, well, our own constitution) and then ignoring them if whatever administration is in power feels that the other parties can't stop them.
Yes, but pointing that out lands you in "-1, troll" land usually, as my OP demonstrates to great effect. In most developed countries, there's been major historical event that they lost on. Germany lost WWII. Britain was bombed back into the stone age. The French... well... 'nuff said. Poland, Switzerland, every European country has at one point been steamrollered and had to eat crow. So their sense of patriotism is tempered by the understanding that they can lose, that they have lost, and that while they're proud of who they are, they're not insensitive to the fact that they've also screwed up before.
The United States hasn't had that pivotal moment yet where it simply, unquestionably, lost. Failed. Beaten. Destroyed. It will happen, eventually, but until it does, people here are going to be highly resistant to the idea that we can screw up. They have untempered pride in their country, blind patriotism. And that's why so many people are irritated with Americans -- it's the lack of humility, it's the idea we can do whatever we want because we'll always win. But we're paying an enormous cost for this attitude; The south now resembles the living conditions commonly found in the suburbs and smaller towns of Egypt. Detroit is a wasteland full of crime, murder, and destroyed infrastructure. Several of our major cities have been reclaimed by nature due to economic neglect. Many americans are starving or close to it, and our food reserves dangerously low. People talk about the recession like it's over, but it's never been worse. Our pride is killing us. Literally. Every predator drone launched is a denied college education. It's food that could have been put on the table of a hungry family.
We need to jettison that pride, but as you can see, even here on Slashdot, that's amazingly hard for people to do. They'd rather just scream at the top of the lungs "You're wrong! You're wrong!" They're dragged kicking and screaming to the truth, and they hate me for it.