Until you solve groundwater pollution (Hanford), plutonium release during weapons storage lifetime, spent radioactive shell pollution, depleted uranium dust (a major health risk in the Middle East), and potential pollution over the many many thousands of years of lifespan of the nuclear waste, than you can't say they don't have pollution.
Weapons storage and depleted uranium dust have nothing to do with power generation, and will be problems for any nuclear power whether they have commercial nuclear reactors or not.
Actually, I believe that the law says that a red light means that you must stop, not that you must stop if it is safe to do so; certainly that's the case in the UK at least. Amber is stop if it's safe, red is stop. If you're going too fast to stop then either you were speeding (illegal) or driving without due care and attention (also illegal).
The cameras are unforgiving. They are totally biased
No, the camera merely records the fact that you ran the light. It is the human who uses this information to instigate legal proceedings against you that presumes your guilt. The camera does no such thing; it can't, it's just a machine.
Oil means high energy in a small mass, gasoline, and no amount of solar energy research could replace gasoline, unless you make all your driving in the sun.
You must not be familiar with how waves interact. The light waves and the material's "atom waves" are interacting so that maximum destructive interference is achieved; same frequency but half a wavelength out of phase of each other. The resulting wave of the atoms in the material should then have close to zero energy because other waves in the system may add constructively interfere with the atom waves.
The thing about wave interactions is that neither wave is altered by the interaction.
Therefore, if you are considering the system to be composed of waves representing the atoms and waves representing the laser, neither can affect the other. In other words, your explanation is wrong - the fact that the "atomic waves" and "laser waves" interfere cannot affect the energy of the "atomic waves". That cannot be why the material is cooled.
killing and dying is okay if you are in a combat zone...while that causes trouble far away.
Besides, you're comparing apples to oranges - just try "killing and dying" for your country if you're too young to serve. Now if you want to argue that the legal age for serving in the armed forces should be more in line with that for drinking, voting, etc, then I'd be inclined to agree. Here in the UK legal drinking age is 18; I never did understand the whole 21 thing you seem to have in (parts of?) the States. Over here, at 21, you can run a pub...
You're right, it doesn't matter at all to a company in Finland.
It does matter to a company doing business in Utah though. All they're saying in effect is "We don't like this, so you're not going to do it in our jurisdiction." The fact that they can't stop you from doing it outside their jurisdiction is pretty much irrelevant; it's the principle of the thing that matters to them.
Not that I agree with them, but anyone who does nothing about something they dislike simply because they can't change the whole world on their own is part of the problem (whatever that problem is).
Speaking as a non-flier with a mobile phone, to me that seems very much the lesser of the two evils. I do sympathise though, even as I consider that perhaps not only will they pass on the charges to all passengers, but perhaps even eventually charge a premium for seats on mobile free planes (or areas of planes)...
That can be annoying as all hell, but babies cry, they can't know any better, and so I deal with it. But if someone was talking loudly on their cell phone for a half hour, subjecting everyone around them to half of their conversation, I just don't know if I could take it.
I had a similar situation on a Tube train a few weeks ago. It was running slowly, taking an age to get anywhere. There was a woman with a baby nearby, and the kid was crying. The woman was trying to sush it, but it wasn't happening. Fine, babies cry, just ignore it. The woman next to me, however, huffed and puffed a bit then put her iPod on, so loud I could hear it over my own mp3 player. That *did* annoy me, while the kid crying didn't.
Luckily a friend of hers spotted her and came over to chat. Unluckily she talked pretty loud too; I can only imagine she's either generally just loud, or has actually damaged her hearing.
Anyone using the term "Intellectual Property" to group the three of them is either confused or is trying to mislead others.
No, they're using a convenient (if somewhat misleading) shortcut. Another poster has already pointed out the similarity to using the word "religion" to cover faiths that have little in common. Another example - at work, at various times, I do team leading, requirements gathering, specification writing, estimation, research, work on bids, write code, design software, and so no. My title is "Senior Programmer", even though actual programming may well be a relatively small part of my duties on any given project.
Patents, trademarks and copyright all refer to abstract things that many (most?) people treat as though they were property. As they're essentially ideas, they are in a very real sense "intellectual" in nature. Hence, "intellectual property". I don't really see it as being any less accurate than calling me just a programmer is. The problem only arises when people forget about the qualifier "intellectual" and start thinking in the same terms as they do for physical property.
Well, here in the UK a friend of mine had to get better locks fitted before his insurance company would cover his Mac. Personally I'd assume that if I go out and leave the house unsecured and I'm burgled, then my insurance company is going to fight very hard not to pay up. (That's going on the general assumption that insurance companies do their absolute best not to pay up whenever possible, mind...)
That done, it recommends maybe 50 or 60 updates. Reboot. Go back to the site, spend a half hour downloading SP2 and another 2 installing it.
You do realise that a hell of a lot of those "50 or 60" updates will be included in SP2, don't you? I'm not disagreeing that going from a fresh install of XP SP1 to a fully-patched system isn't time consuming, especially over a slower connection, but you're not helping yourself at all by doing it that way round.
The vast majority of viruses require user intervention to run and infect a machine, and aren't considered news (or at least, not individually). I assume that this one is because it's the first for this particular platform.
Well in the UK the law gives insufficient protection to the state and the law-abiding masses and too much to the criminals. Crazy eh?
You do realise that our prisons are currently full, don't you? We're not locking as many people up as some people would like because there simply isn't space. As you say, a hardcore minority of people treat ASBOs as some kind of badge of honour; given that they can't be jailed and fining them is a waste of time (as they have no substantial assets or money to speak of) and we can't deport them, what would you do?
(If the answer is "build more prisons" realise that this is being done, but takes time - and there are protests from residents near proposed sites, of course...)
Yup, that's exactly what it says in my passport - "This person is the property of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth".
Oh wait, no it doesn't, it calls me a "British Citizen".
Your friend could be brought up on charges for damaging the property of the crown.
Actually it would be assault, but if you refused to press charges I really can't see it making it to court - the police are far too busy to piss about with things like that.
(I know slashdot is getting worse all the time, but this is "Insightful"? Please.)
I was assuming that the government of the United States could never be as fucked up as the one in, say, China
Irrelevant. No one country should have control of a global resource. Even ignoring the potential for abuse, global resources should be managed globally, it's as simple as that.
I cannot believe that I am actually looking to foreign nations to ensure the neutrality and openness of the Internet
Yeah, because us dirty foreigners don't even know how to spell "freedom", let alone have any respect for it.
Actually, there has never ever ever ever been any causal link demonstrated between antibiotic prescriptions for personal, in-home use and the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.
Fixed that for you. Remember, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I'm not saying that you're wrong (I don't have the data to do that), just pointing out that you're making something of a leap in your conclusion.
I've been thinking that more and more recently. Over here in the UK there seems to be an increasing number of products advertised as killing some large percentage of all-known germs, typically 99% or more. There is also now a product you can carry with you to disinfect your hands to help protect yourself from the cold virus and other skin-borne nasties you come into contact daily.
With the tone of some of the adverts ("There is more bacteria on your chopping board/table/baby's high chair than your toilet seat/a pavement!!!") I have been given to wonder how on earth we managed to survive this long as a species without all of these anti-bacterial cleaning products... Oh, that's right, we develop immunities - immunities we're in danger of losing because of our increasing over-reliance on these products, misuse of antibiotics, etc.
It all seems to come down to the same basic truth; people are just plain scared of life. Scared of bacteria, scared of terrorism, of crime, of people who look a bit different (foreigners, kids, etc). I can't imagine what living like that must be like, but sometimes it feels like I'm one of the few who don't.
A friend of mine at work had a similar problem; some guy was linking to images on his site, claiming that he'd taken the photos. Unfortunately for him, we're programmers at a web agency...
One of the designers knocked up a quick image of a stick figure man holding up a placard, saying something like "I'm a bandwidth stealing arsehole!" on it, and my mate set up the appropriate rules to have it served in place of the image that had been deep-linked to.
The only question remains what are you going to do about it? Are you going to sit there and accept it, complying by judging people in those ways? Or are you going to speak out, and work against such petty prejudices in yourself and in others?
The world isn't perfect, but it sure as hell isn't going to change itself.
$30 for the physical USB key and duplication plus engineer time to deliver it doesn't sound unreasonable to me, assuming that you're getting the source. Also, I don't see anything in the quoted text that says anything at all about physical distribution, so you really can't say "oh, because it says 'download' you're not allowed to charge unless it's a download".
Blimey, €300 is £203 (according to Google), that's about £80 or %28 less than here in the UK.
Mind you, Argos isn't generally the cheapest source for any given product, so shopping around might get a better price, but I doubt it would be that low.
I couldn't care less how many PS3s Sony sells. All I know is that when you can buy a Wii and an XBox 360 together for only a little more than a PS3, they're too expensive for me. Everyone else I've spoken to* likewise thinks the PS3 is too expensive. On the other hand, if Wiis were easier to get hold of, I may well have bought one by now and my ex almost certainly would have, and several of my friends already have. The bastards.
(* a massive sample size of "a couple of blokes at work", so hardly statistically significant I'll grant you)
Slashdot Mirror
Until you solve groundwater pollution (Hanford), plutonium release during weapons storage lifetime, spent radioactive shell pollution, depleted uranium dust (a major health risk in the Middle East), and potential pollution over the many many thousands of years of lifespan of the nuclear waste, than you can't say they don't have pollution.
Weapons storage and depleted uranium dust have nothing to do with power generation, and will be problems for any nuclear power whether they have commercial nuclear reactors or not.
Is it too much to ask that the "editors" read their own site?
Actually, I believe that the law says that a red light means that you must stop, not that you must stop if it is safe to do so; certainly that's the case in the UK at least. Amber is stop if it's safe, red is stop. If you're going too fast to stop then either you were speeding (illegal) or driving without due care and attention (also illegal).
The cameras are unforgiving. They are totally biased
No, the camera merely records the fact that you ran the light. It is the human who uses this information to instigate legal proceedings against you that presumes your guilt. The camera does no such thing; it can't, it's just a machine.
It's not even a particularly low 5-digit UID either. Newbs, eh?
Oil means high energy in a small mass, gasoline, and no amount of solar energy research could replace gasoline, unless you make all your driving in the sun.
Or, you know, charge up some batteries.
You must not be familiar with how waves interact. The light waves and the material's "atom waves" are interacting so that maximum destructive interference is achieved; same frequency but half a wavelength out of phase of each other. The resulting wave of the atoms in the material should then have close to zero energy because other waves in the system may add constructively interfere with the atom waves.
The thing about wave interactions is that neither wave is altered by the interaction.
Therefore, if you are considering the system to be composed of waves representing the atoms and waves representing the laser, neither can affect the other. In other words, your explanation is wrong - the fact that the "atomic waves" and "laser waves" interfere cannot affect the energy of the "atomic waves". That cannot be why the material is cooled.
Underage drinking... are punishable by law
...while that causes trouble far away.
That (potentially) causes trouble locally...
killing and dying is okay if you are in a combat zone
Besides, you're comparing apples to oranges - just try "killing and dying" for your country if you're too young to serve. Now if you want to argue that the legal age for serving in the armed forces should be more in line with that for drinking, voting, etc, then I'd be inclined to agree. Here in the UK legal drinking age is 18; I never did understand the whole 21 thing you seem to have in (parts of?) the States. Over here, at 21, you can run a pub...
You're right, it doesn't matter at all to a company in Finland.
It does matter to a company doing business in Utah though. All they're saying in effect is "We don't like this, so you're not going to do it in our jurisdiction." The fact that they can't stop you from doing it outside their jurisdiction is pretty much irrelevant; it's the principle of the thing that matters to them.
Not that I agree with them, but anyone who does nothing about something they dislike simply because they can't change the whole world on their own is part of the problem (whatever that problem is).
Won't that just encourage the phone to try even harder to connect to as many as possible and so boost its signal to an acceptable level?
Speaking as a non-flier with a mobile phone, to me that seems very much the lesser of the two evils. I do sympathise though, even as I consider that perhaps not only will they pass on the charges to all passengers, but perhaps even eventually charge a premium for seats on mobile free planes (or areas of planes)...
That can be annoying as all hell, but babies cry, they can't know any better, and so I deal with it. But if someone was talking loudly on their cell phone for a half hour, subjecting everyone around them to half of their conversation, I just don't know if I could take it.
I had a similar situation on a Tube train a few weeks ago. It was running slowly, taking an age to get anywhere. There was a woman with a baby nearby, and the kid was crying. The woman was trying to sush it, but it wasn't happening. Fine, babies cry, just ignore it. The woman next to me, however, huffed and puffed a bit then put her iPod on, so loud I could hear it over my own mp3 player. That *did* annoy me, while the kid crying didn't.
Luckily a friend of hers spotted her and came over to chat. Unluckily she talked pretty loud too; I can only imagine she's either generally just loud, or has actually damaged her hearing.
Anyone using the term "Intellectual Property" to group the three of them is either confused or is trying to mislead others.
No, they're using a convenient (if somewhat misleading) shortcut. Another poster has already pointed out the similarity to using the word "religion" to cover faiths that have little in common. Another example - at work, at various times, I do team leading, requirements gathering, specification writing, estimation, research, work on bids, write code, design software, and so no. My title is "Senior Programmer", even though actual programming may well be a relatively small part of my duties on any given project.
Patents, trademarks and copyright all refer to abstract things that many (most?) people treat as though they were property. As they're essentially ideas, they are in a very real sense "intellectual" in nature. Hence, "intellectual property". I don't really see it as being any less accurate than calling me just a programmer is. The problem only arises when people forget about the qualifier "intellectual" and start thinking in the same terms as they do for physical property.
Well, here in the UK a friend of mine had to get better locks fitted before his insurance company would cover his Mac. Personally I'd assume that if I go out and leave the house unsecured and I'm burgled, then my insurance company is going to fight very hard not to pay up. (That's going on the general assumption that insurance companies do their absolute best not to pay up whenever possible, mind...)
That done, it recommends maybe 50 or 60 updates. Reboot. Go back to the site, spend a half hour downloading SP2 and another 2 installing it.
You do realise that a hell of a lot of those "50 or 60" updates will be included in SP2, don't you? I'm not disagreeing that going from a fresh install of XP SP1 to a fully-patched system isn't time consuming, especially over a slower connection, but you're not helping yourself at all by doing it that way round.
The vast majority of viruses require user intervention to run and infect a machine, and aren't considered news (or at least, not individually). I assume that this one is because it's the first for this particular platform.
Well in the UK the law gives insufficient protection to the state and the law-abiding masses and too much to the criminals. Crazy eh?
You do realise that our prisons are currently full, don't you? We're not locking as many people up as some people would like because there simply isn't space. As you say, a hardcore minority of people treat ASBOs as some kind of badge of honour; given that they can't be jailed and fining them is a waste of time (as they have no substantial assets or money to speak of) and we can't deport them, what would you do?
(If the answer is "build more prisons" realise that this is being done, but takes time - and there are protests from residents near proposed sites, of course...)
Yup, that's exactly what it says in my passport - "This person is the property of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth".
Oh wait, no it doesn't, it calls me a "British Citizen".
Your friend could be brought up on charges for damaging the property of the crown.
Actually it would be assault, but if you refused to press charges I really can't see it making it to court - the police are far too busy to piss about with things like that.
(I know slashdot is getting worse all the time, but this is "Insightful"? Please.)
I was assuming that the government of the United States could never be as fucked up as the one in, say, China
Irrelevant. No one country should have control of a global resource. Even ignoring the potential for abuse, global resources should be managed globally, it's as simple as that.
I cannot believe that I am actually looking to foreign nations to ensure the neutrality and openness of the Internet
Yeah, because us dirty foreigners don't even know how to spell "freedom", let alone have any respect for it.
Actually, there has never ever ever ever been any causal link demonstrated between antibiotic prescriptions for personal, in-home use and the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.
Fixed that for you. Remember, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I'm not saying that you're wrong (I don't have the data to do that), just pointing out that you're making something of a leap in your conclusion.
I've been thinking that more and more recently. Over here in the UK there seems to be an increasing number of products advertised as killing some large percentage of all-known germs, typically 99% or more. There is also now a product you can carry with you to disinfect your hands to help protect yourself from the cold virus and other skin-borne nasties you come into contact daily.
With the tone of some of the adverts ("There is more bacteria on your chopping board/table/baby's high chair than your toilet seat/a pavement!!!") I have been given to wonder how on earth we managed to survive this long as a species without all of these anti-bacterial cleaning products... Oh, that's right, we develop immunities - immunities we're in danger of losing because of our increasing over-reliance on these products, misuse of antibiotics, etc.
It all seems to come down to the same basic truth; people are just plain scared of life. Scared of bacteria, scared of terrorism, of crime, of people who look a bit different (foreigners, kids, etc). I can't imagine what living like that must be like, but sometimes it feels like I'm one of the few who don't.
A friend of mine at work had a similar problem; some guy was linking to images on his site, claiming that he'd taken the photos. Unfortunately for him, we're programmers at a web agency...
One of the designers knocked up a quick image of a stick figure man holding up a placard, saying something like "I'm a bandwidth stealing arsehole!" on it, and my mate set up the appropriate rules to have it served in place of the image that had been deep-linked to.
So this world is imperfect. I agree.
The only question remains what are you going to do about it? Are you going to sit there and accept it, complying by judging people in those ways? Or are you going to speak out, and work against such petty prejudices in yourself and in others?
The world isn't perfect, but it sure as hell isn't going to change itself.
$30 for the physical USB key and duplication plus engineer time to deliver it doesn't sound unreasonable to me, assuming that you're getting the source. Also, I don't see anything in the quoted text that says anything at all about physical distribution, so you really can't say "oh, because it says 'download' you're not allowed to charge unless it's a download".
Blimey, €300 is £203 (according to Google), that's about £80 or %28 less than here in the UK.
Mind you, Argos isn't generally the cheapest source for any given product, so shopping around might get a better price, but I doubt it would be that low.
I couldn't care less how many PS3s Sony sells. All I know is that when you can buy a Wii and an XBox 360 together for only a little more than a PS3, they're too expensive for me. Everyone else I've spoken to* likewise thinks the PS3 is too expensive. On the other hand, if Wiis were easier to get hold of, I may well have bought one by now and my ex almost certainly would have, and several of my friends already have. The bastards.
(* a massive sample size of "a couple of blokes at work", so hardly statistically significant I'll grant you)