Come on, it was just an example. I just picked Firefly because it's the last (and only) DVD set I've bought. Replace it with Lost or Desperate Housewives or whatever show you want and it's still a valid example.
If they can stop you from recording something, or stop you from keeping what you've recorded, then they can push you into spending money on the DVDs that you wouldn't otherwise have spent.
Why would stations want to delete shows? The amount of money they make doesn't have anything to do with how long King of the Hill lives on somebody's PVR.
Stations probably don't care, but the network probably does. If, say, I had the entire series run of Firefly on my Tivo, I would have been less likely to buy the DVD set. (I don't have a Tivo, but it's just an example.)
I'm surprised more networks aren't doing this. If they can limit you to only being able to keep stuff for a limited time, say a few weeks, they can drive you into renting or buying the DVD to catch up on that critical episode of Lost (or whatever) that you missed.
How about Acrylamide? What is Acrylamide? It is just a chemical that food manufacturors put in French Fries and Chips.
Actually, that's incorrect. Acrylamide is not added to food by manufacturers. While the exact mechanism of its formation is not fully understood, it seems to form naturally when starchy foods are cooked at high temperatures. McDonald's does not have a 55-gallon drum of acrylamide that they add to the french fries.
Furthermore, whether or not acrylamide is definetely a carcinogen has not been fully determined. It, however, has been massively over-hyped in the press. And more recent studies have suggested that a diet high in acrylamide-containing foods does not lead to cancer.
Do you remember sacchrinne? It was used in diet soda, then they discovered it caused cancer.
Actually, it looks like the studies done back in the 1970s which led to the scare about saccharin weren't well-done. They used ridiculously high doses of saccharin, and the high doses may have caused cancer rather than the substance itself. There has been no link between saccharin and caner in humans. Saccharin hasn't been required to be labeled in the US since 2000.
There are thousands of more chemicals which will kill a person than a person can eat.
Of course. There are probably hundreds of carcinogenic substances. There are thousands of toxic substances. But there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of chemicals. The number of toxins and carcinogens that exist has no relevance to the relative risk from them.
And of course many of them will kill you if you eat them. They're not food! Salt will probably kill you if you eat an entire bucket of it. So will ethanol or aspirin. Toxins are not carcinogens.
I don't want to trust a chemist to tell me eating something that he made in test tubes is good for me
Believe it or not, there is no vast conspiracy of scientists to poision our food supply. We have been performing chemical modification of food since the discovery of fire and the beginning of cooking. The whole point of cooking food is to make the proteins and starches more digestible and so our bodies can absorb its nutrients better.
I rather eat what my great grandfather ate, and he lived to be 104 and very sharp, no mental slowdown like people get today. Speaking of mental slowdowns, do you know where it comes from? Aluminum in the diet. Where does the Aluminum come from? From all the machines that process food.
Again, this is not true. I'm not sure what you mean by "mental slowdown" but I'm not aware of any link suggested between aluminum and senile dementia. There was some worry early on about Alzheimer's and aluminum, but it did not hold up under further study.
Sour Cream. Sour Cream used to be made with bacteria and acidophilus. This is very healthy for people. Do you know how Sour Cream is made today? They take guar gum or starch and thicken milk. It is not even Sour Cream, but they keep calling the thick product that name
Ingredients: Grade A Cultured Cream. One ingredient. Maybe you should switch brands? I don't know about it being healthy for you, it's rather high in saturated fat.
Look up Free Radicals. Most foods are filled with them, and they cause people to age and get old and get sick and get cancer.
Food is not "full" of free radicals. Radicals are so amazingly reactive they aren't stable enough to last very long in food. In fact, preservatives like BHT are added to packaged foods in order to prevent the formation of radicals, which cause the product to break down quickly and have a shorter shelf life.
To nitpick, a fat can be trans or saturated, but not both. In order to make the cis/trans distinction, there must be at least one point of unsaturation (i.e. a multiple bond in the carbon chain).
You are, of course, correct. I think the simplest of the hydrogenation reactions gives you a 50/50 ratio of cis to trans since it's basically a random selection.
To further criticize my original post, a lot of hydrogenated fats are only partially hydrogenated, so they're not 100% saturated, either. The vegetable oils often start out as polyunsaturated. I think the amount of saturated fat is higher, although not 100%, in the end product.
With the exception of hydrogenated fats which are dangerous because they are (a) trans and (b) saturated, all edible oils are natural. Canola, peanut, corn... yup, natural.
Unless there's a big trend in the food industry that I'm not aware of to use mineral oil.
What will kill people is all the new manufactured foods, that are filled with chemicals our bodies can't expell. They will fill cells with toxic substances that will cause cancer.
This statement is completely, flat-out wrong. There aren't all that many chemicals that cause cancer. There are even less in food. Trans and saturated fats causing heart disease? Yeah, sure. Cancer? Not so much.
And don't even get me started with using the word "chemicals" as a scary bugaboo word to mean "evil substance that doesn't have a natural origin and is therefore dangerous."
RXF1 is remarkably strong and light: it has 3 times the tensile strength of aluminum, yet is 2.6 times lighter -- impressive even by aerospace standards.
"Since it is a ballistic shield, it also deflects micrometeorites," says Kaul, who had previously worked with similar materials in developing helicopter armor. "Since it's a fabric, it can be draped around molds and shaped into specific spacecraft components."
So this stuff is a fabric, so the implausible tensile strength numbers are probably for the individual fibers, not for a solid piece of the material. (The photo has him holding a "brick" of the material though.) Spider silk is as strong as high strength steel, and is very tough, but no one is suggesting building spaceships out of it. 2.6 times less dense than aluminum gives it about a density of 1, which is what polyethylenes typically are.
So they've managed to build a tough fibrous material. That's good, and it might make for a good micrometorite shield, and possibly a radiation shield. But it's not going to be a replacement for steel, titanium, or aluminum.
How exactly do you steal backup tapes from a website?
I just meant that as a joke. All I meant was, just because this government data isn't classified, doesn't mean it should be accessible by anyone and everyone.
People are using computers to gather publicly available information.
TFA doesn't say this is "publicly available information," just that these networks are are unclassified. Just because this stuff isn't Top Secret doesn't mean we should ship off all the Pentagon's backup tapes to China with a red bow on top.
On the other hand, the vagueness of the article makes me wonder if these are just spammers looking for compromisable computers they can use to send spam.
I recently ran into this issue with our mailing list which consists of about 55,000 people. This list is 100% opt-in but regardless, someone didn't like us, so they submitted spamcops trap email address to our list. We included them in our email blast and naturally received a complaint.
From that description, it sounds like you're running an unconfirmed opt-in list. Is there something to stop me from signing up a few thousand of my closest "friends" to the list?
That's like saying convenience stores are the worst offenders in armed robbery. Surely the offender is the perpetrator, not the victim.
True. But at some point, the operator of an easily- and widely-abused resource must bear some responsibility for the abuse initiated by others but through his system. Much like how various "affiliate" programs are widely abused on the Web.
Also, it is in Google's own best interests to minimize this kind of abuse. It dilutes their Blogger brand, and poisons their own search index.
Not necessarily. Your point makes sense, and may be true on one level. But maybe not always.
I figure most no-sale calls are quick. "Hi, we have an exciting offer for you on... No thanks. Click." There, done. And, I figure that no-sale calls are also most of what telemarketers get. People probably buy from them only a small percentage of the time. Maybe one in ten? There will be some fraction of the people on the DNC list that will still buy if called by a telemarketer. As long as that percentage is high enough to justify the effort of making all the no-sale calls to people on the DNC list, it's cost-effective for marketers to call the DNC list people.
Also, it might have the unintuituve effect of making them more likely to buy. If you were getting two or three telemarketing calls a night, you'd be very quick to hang up on them. Now that you're on the DNC, maybe you only get one a month or so. That means you might be more likely to hang on the phone long enough to get tempted and buy something. (Not me, but someone out there will be.)
I think the Catholic church would argue that the whole extra-marital sex sin should take care of this pretty well.
Remember, one of the big mechanisms of the spread of AIDS in Africa is because a man away from home has sex with prostitutes and then goes home and has sex with his wife. Sure he was unfaithful, but why should she have to die because of it? Oh, yeah, to save her soul, I forgot.
Re:Boiling Point, Stupid!
on
How Ice Melts
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· Score: 1
Hey, I love the fudge analogy. I've just always thought it was more applicable to crystallization than boiling. Then again, I'm a materials scientist and that's what we do.:-)
It bans some email. It doesn't tell you which email; you have to guess. Lots of spam is ok under the statute. It's not limited to bulk email, one is enough
No but it is limited to commercial email, and not all commercial email at that:
Sec. 5. A person shall not send, cause to be sent, or conspire with a third party to send a message to a contact point that has been
registered for more than 30 calendar days with the department if the primary purpose of the message is to, directly or indirectly, advertise or otherwise link to a message that advertises a product or service that a minor is prohibited by law from purchasing, viewing,
possessing, participating in, or otherwise receiving.
Now I haven't seen a lot of gun or booze spam, so basically, this is talking about porn.
Melting does generally begin at a surface or crystal defect, which is doesn't really require nucleation, like crystallization does. Many metals (which are just the materials I'm familiar with) actually have a nanometers-thin, liquid-like layer at their surface below their melting temperature. Therefore, the liquid has already nucleated before the material gets to its melting temperature.
It is possible to superheat crystalline solids but it requires ultrafast heating (multiple thousands of degrees per second and up), and is not possible in all materials systems.
You are also right in that "dangling bonds" at the surface of a crystal are odd. Surface atoms will often rearrange into particular structures to reduce the surface energy of just the bare surface. It's called reconstruction, and has been widely studied in silicon.
Nope, freezing and melting are both entirely reversible processes, in the thermodynamic sense. For them to not be reversible, there would have to be an increase in entropy somewhere.
And it's the same "process" involved. The biggest difference between melting and freezing is that freezing requires the nucleation of a crystal, which is a time-dependent process. Melting can generally occur without it.
Re:Boiling Point, Stupid!
on
How Ice Melts
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· Score: 2, Informative
The key is that water has a high specific energy, so it can absorb a lot of energy without actually increasing in temperature. The other types of molecules in your gravy solution can happily be heated to over 212 degrees without boiling; only the water boils.
You are right in the broad overview, but wrong on the details. The boiling temperature of a mixture is not necessarily due to the boiling temperatures of its two components. The boiling temperature of a solution is not a linear combination of the boiling temperatures of its constituents. It's often close, which is why we have Raoult's law (although it technically deals with vapor pressure, not boiling temperature).
Ethanol and water, for example form an azeotrope, a constant boiling solution, at something like 96% ethanol. It's why you can't distill alcohol to 100% purity. At the boiling temperature of the azeotrope, ethanol and water molecules are evaporating at the same rate, even though the solution is not at the boiling temperature of either.
p.s. what moron designs the next generation space vehicle that is so advanced it cannot go to the moon or basically do much of anything besides flop around in orbit for a few days? Do we also design submarines that can't go into the ocean?
Yeah, because the people that work at NASA are really actually all pretty stupid. I'm sure they never thought of making a Shuttle that would go to the Moon.
The Shuttle wasn't needed to go to the Moon. It was intended to service low Earth orbit. We have a vastly greater need to access orbiting devices than to go to the Moon, therefore that's where the Shuttle goes.
Going from orbit to the Moon isn't like going down to the corner store for a carton of milk. The farthest from Earth the Shuttle can go is 400 miles. The Moon is on average 240,000 miles away from Earth. That's six hundred times farther away. Hardly trivial.
No, we don't design submarines that don't go to the ocean, but we don't design all of them to go to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, either.
I never finished college and it has yet to hurt me professionally, financially or emotionally (partly I didn't have the money, mostly I didn't really find it useful for my goals to bother coming up w/ the money - and I went to a good 4 year east coast school with an extremely good comp sci program).
Counterexample. A friend of mine is a smart and talented graphic designer with well over ten years experience. No college degree, however. He's currently in a job where his talents are underutilized, and constantly second-guessed by management that has no experience in the area. He's like to get a different job, but can't even get an interview with any other company because he doesn't have a degree.
Even if a degree only gets your foot in the door, it's still better than having the door slammed in your face.
Copyright law allows me to install and run the program, so I can fail to agree to the EULA and still have that right
AFAIK, no, it doesn't. Since to do both of those things (i.e. copy from CD to hard drive, then from HD to RAM) you need to copy the software, which requires permission from the author. Usually in the form of a EULA. I don't believe the fair use exemption of copyright law has a "usability" clause.
Just because it's insane and stupid doesn't mean it's not the law.
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Come on, it was just an example. I just picked Firefly because it's the last (and only) DVD set I've bought. Replace it with Lost or Desperate Housewives or whatever show you want and it's still a valid example.
If they can stop you from recording something, or stop you from keeping what you've recorded, then they can push you into spending money on the DVDs that you wouldn't otherwise have spent.
Stations probably don't care, but the network probably does. If, say, I had the entire series run of Firefly on my Tivo, I would have been less likely to buy the DVD set. (I don't have a Tivo, but it's just an example.)
I'm surprised more networks aren't doing this. If they can limit you to only being able to keep stuff for a limited time, say a few weeks, they can drive you into renting or buying the DVD to catch up on that critical episode of Lost (or whatever) that you missed.
Remember, it's supposed to be: shiny side OUT.
Have you ever heard of carcinogens?
Of course I have, there's no need to be snippy.
How about Acrylamide? What is Acrylamide? It is just a chemical that food manufacturors put in French Fries and Chips.
Actually, that's incorrect. Acrylamide is not added to food by manufacturers. While the exact mechanism of its formation is not fully understood, it seems to form naturally when starchy foods are cooked at high temperatures. McDonald's does not have a 55-gallon drum of acrylamide that they add to the french fries.
Furthermore, whether or not acrylamide is definetely a carcinogen has not been fully determined. It, however, has been massively over-hyped in the press. And more recent studies have suggested that a diet high in acrylamide-containing foods does not lead to cancer.
Do you remember sacchrinne? It was used in diet soda, then they discovered it caused cancer.
Actually, it looks like the studies done back in the 1970s which led to the scare about saccharin weren't well-done. They used ridiculously high doses of saccharin, and the high doses may have caused cancer rather than the substance itself. There has been no link between saccharin and caner in humans. Saccharin hasn't been required to be labeled in the US since 2000.
There are thousands of more chemicals which will kill a person than a person can eat.
Of course. There are probably hundreds of carcinogenic substances. There are thousands of toxic substances. But there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of chemicals. The number of toxins and carcinogens that exist has no relevance to the relative risk from them.
And of course many of them will kill you if you eat them. They're not food! Salt will probably kill you if you eat an entire bucket of it. So will ethanol or aspirin. Toxins are not carcinogens.
I don't want to trust a chemist to tell me eating something that he made in test tubes is good for me
Believe it or not, there is no vast conspiracy of scientists to poision our food supply. We have been performing chemical modification of food since the discovery of fire and the beginning of cooking. The whole point of cooking food is to make the proteins and starches more digestible and so our bodies can absorb its nutrients better.
I rather eat what my great grandfather ate, and he lived to be 104 and very sharp, no mental slowdown like people get today. Speaking of mental slowdowns, do you know where it comes from? Aluminum in the diet. Where does the Aluminum come from? From all the machines that process food.
Again, this is not true. I'm not sure what you mean by "mental slowdown" but I'm not aware of any link suggested between aluminum and senile dementia. There was some worry early on about Alzheimer's and aluminum, but it did not hold up under further study.
Sour Cream. Sour Cream used to be made with bacteria and acidophilus. This is very healthy for people. Do you know how Sour Cream is made today? They take guar gum or starch and thicken milk. It is not even Sour Cream, but they keep calling the thick product that name
Ingredients: Grade A Cultured Cream. One ingredient. Maybe you should switch brands? I don't know about it being healthy for you, it's rather high in saturated fat.
Look up Free Radicals. Most foods are filled with them, and they cause people to age and get old and get sick and get cancer.
Food is not "full" of free radicals. Radicals are so amazingly reactive they aren't stable enough to last very long in food. In fact, preservatives like BHT are added to packaged foods in order to prevent the formation of radicals, which cause the product to break down quickly and have a shorter shelf life.
You are, of course, correct. I think the simplest of the hydrogenation reactions gives you a 50/50 ratio of cis to trans since it's basically a random selection.
To further criticize my original post, a lot of hydrogenated fats are only partially hydrogenated, so they're not 100% saturated, either. The vegetable oils often start out as polyunsaturated. I think the amount of saturated fat is higher, although not 100%, in the end product.
With the exception of hydrogenated fats which are dangerous because they are (a) trans and (b) saturated, all edible oils are natural. Canola, peanut, corn... yup, natural.
Unless there's a big trend in the food industry that I'm not aware of to use mineral oil.
This statement is completely, flat-out wrong. There aren't all that many chemicals that cause cancer. There are even less in food. Trans and saturated fats causing heart disease? Yeah, sure. Cancer? Not so much.
And don't even get me started with using the word "chemicals" as a scary bugaboo word to mean "evil substance that doesn't have a natural origin and is therefore dangerous."
So this stuff is a fabric, so the implausible tensile strength numbers are probably for the individual fibers, not for a solid piece of the material. (The photo has him holding a "brick" of the material though.) Spider silk is as strong as high strength steel, and is very tough, but no one is suggesting building spaceships out of it. 2.6 times less dense than aluminum gives it about a density of 1, which is what polyethylenes typically are.
So they've managed to build a tough fibrous material. That's good, and it might make for a good micrometorite shield, and possibly a radiation shield. But it's not going to be a replacement for steel, titanium, or aluminum.
I just meant that as a joke. All I meant was, just because this government data isn't classified, doesn't mean it should be accessible by anyone and everyone.
TFA doesn't say this is "publicly available information," just that these networks are are unclassified. Just because this stuff isn't Top Secret doesn't mean we should ship off all the Pentagon's backup tapes to China with a red bow on top.
On the other hand, the vagueness of the article makes me wonder if these are just spammers looking for compromisable computers they can use to send spam.
From that description, it sounds like you're running an unconfirmed opt-in list. Is there something to stop me from signing up a few thousand of my closest "friends" to the list?
Then how do you get a copy of it?
True. But at some point, the operator of an easily- and widely-abused resource must bear some responsibility for the abuse initiated by others but through his system. Much like how various "affiliate" programs are widely abused on the Web.
Also, it is in Google's own best interests to minimize this kind of abuse. It dilutes their Blogger brand, and poisons their own search index.
Not necessarily. Your point makes sense, and may be true on one level. But maybe not always.
I figure most no-sale calls are quick. "Hi, we have an exciting offer for you on ... No thanks. Click." There, done. And, I figure that no-sale calls are also most of what telemarketers get. People probably buy from them only a small percentage of the time. Maybe one in ten? There will be some fraction of the people on the DNC list that will still buy if called by a telemarketer. As long as that percentage is high enough to justify the effort of making all the no-sale calls to people on the DNC list, it's cost-effective for marketers to call the DNC list people.
Also, it might have the unintuituve effect of making them more likely to buy. If you were getting two or three telemarketing calls a night, you'd be very quick to hang up on them. Now that you're on the DNC, maybe you only get one a month or so. That means you might be more likely to hang on the phone long enough to get tempted and buy something. (Not me, but someone out there will be.)
You're the one that has it wrong. They understand perfectly. They don't want to obey your wishes.
Yeah, because if there's one thing that can be said about New Yorkers, it's that they want the terrorists to win.
Remember, one of the big mechanisms of the spread of AIDS in Africa is because a man away from home has sex with prostitutes and then goes home and has sex with his wife. Sure he was unfaithful, but why should she have to die because of it? Oh, yeah, to save her soul, I forgot.
Hey, I love the fudge analogy. I've just always thought it was more applicable to crystallization than boiling. Then again, I'm a materials scientist and that's what we do. :-)
No but it is limited to commercial email, and not all commercial email at that:
Now I haven't seen a lot of gun or booze spam, so basically, this is talking about porn.
Melting does generally begin at a surface or crystal defect, which is doesn't really require nucleation, like crystallization does. Many metals (which are just the materials I'm familiar with) actually have a nanometers-thin, liquid-like layer at their surface below their melting temperature. Therefore, the liquid has already nucleated before the material gets to its melting temperature.
It is possible to superheat crystalline solids but it requires ultrafast heating (multiple thousands of degrees per second and up), and is not possible in all materials systems.
You are also right in that "dangling bonds" at the surface of a crystal are odd. Surface atoms will often rearrange into particular structures to reduce the surface energy of just the bare surface. It's called reconstruction, and has been widely studied in silicon.
Nope, freezing and melting are both entirely reversible processes, in the thermodynamic sense. For them to not be reversible, there would have to be an increase in entropy somewhere.
And it's the same "process" involved. The biggest difference between melting and freezing is that freezing requires the nucleation of a crystal, which is a time-dependent process. Melting can generally occur without it.
You are right in the broad overview, but wrong on the details. The boiling temperature of a mixture is not necessarily due to the boiling temperatures of its two components. The boiling temperature of a solution is not a linear combination of the boiling temperatures of its constituents. It's often close, which is why we have Raoult's law (although it technically deals with vapor pressure, not boiling temperature).
Ethanol and water, for example form an azeotrope, a constant boiling solution, at something like 96% ethanol. It's why you can't distill alcohol to 100% purity. At the boiling temperature of the azeotrope, ethanol and water molecules are evaporating at the same rate, even though the solution is not at the boiling temperature of either.
Yeah, because the people that work at NASA are really actually all pretty stupid. I'm sure they never thought of making a Shuttle that would go to the Moon.
The Shuttle wasn't needed to go to the Moon. It was intended to service low Earth orbit. We have a vastly greater need to access orbiting devices than to go to the Moon, therefore that's where the Shuttle goes.
Going from orbit to the Moon isn't like going down to the corner store for a carton of milk. The farthest from Earth the Shuttle can go is 400 miles. The Moon is on average 240,000 miles away from Earth. That's six hundred times farther away. Hardly trivial.
No, we don't design submarines that don't go to the ocean, but we don't design all of them to go to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, either.
Counterexample. A friend of mine is a smart and talented graphic designer with well over ten years experience. No college degree, however. He's currently in a job where his talents are underutilized, and constantly second-guessed by management that has no experience in the area. He's like to get a different job, but can't even get an interview with any other company because he doesn't have a degree.
Even if a degree only gets your foot in the door, it's still better than having the door slammed in your face.
Frankly, I think building a space station with windows that can be opened is a pretty dumb idea to begin with.
(And, yes, I know it will actually be deployed on a spacewalk.)
AFAIK, no, it doesn't. Since to do both of those things (i.e. copy from CD to hard drive, then from HD to RAM) you need to copy the software, which requires permission from the author. Usually in the form of a EULA. I don't believe the fair use exemption of copyright law has a "usability" clause.
Just because it's insane and stupid doesn't mean it's not the law.