Bank is very much a protected name in much of the world. Normally to use the name 'bank' you have to be regulated as such by the national regulator. There are different types of banks, some allowed to take deposits, some not but all share the requirement of formal regulation. This just moves the problem around. "much of the world" isn't "all of the world", so it becomes a problem of deciding which countries' regulators are up to par, and which types of banks regulated by each country are acceptable.
I recall a long long time ago, working for a client that we were pretty sure was doing something shady... probably not illegal, but we weren't sure. Anyhow, one day my boss came to me and said they had told him that we'd be getting our wire transfer payments for our work from a different source now. According to him, they said "Citibank decided that we were laundering too much money, so they closed our account. We had to set up our own bank in Antigua, so that's where you'll be getting your transfers from now on." This of course led to the obvious question: Just how much money does Citibank think is just the right amount to launder? But the other question is, would their new bank qualify for a.bank name? I've investigated cases of wire fraud where the funds were moved to overseas banks that, while regulated by their country, I'm fairly certain were complicit in the fraud being perpetrated.
No one's going to seriously argue that Barclays or Bank of America aren't banks and don't deserve a domain in a.bank hierarchy. It's a bank you've never heard of in a country you've never heard of that's going to be a problematic decision.
Unfortunately, this isn't the worst idea ever, at least for ICANN. Extortion it is, but extortion isn't really a bad idea if you're the one doing it, else it wouldn't be so popular.
However, opening the TLD floodgates doesn't help anyone other than ICANN and the registrars. Additional TLD's which are functionally equivalent to the existing TLD's are not useful. Additional TLD's are useful with respect to any exclusivity they enforce..com,.net,.org, are all functionally equivalent these days..edu,.gov, and.mil are actually, in fact, useful. They are useful specifically becauseI can't get one. The proposed.bank had some hope of being useful, although it suffers from the endemic problem of appointing someone or some organization to decide for the whole world, what constitutes a bank..xxx or.porn has some hope of being useful, because it is self-exclusive in that there's somewhat of a disincentive to having a.porn domain if you are not, in fact, in the business of providing porn.
Of course, nothing useful will come to pass. It's too tempting to sell domains to everyone, and the useful things that could be done with TLD's could be done with SLD's as well, but aren't. It would be useful, for example, to have a company that already does work in the field of corporate information such as Dunn & Bradstreet, to start offering "vetted" corporate listings, such as "yourcompanyhere".dnb.com. But they don't do it, because a) it wouldn't really be all that useful, and b) because very few people would use it and thus c) very few companies would buy it.
Interestingly, from the picture, it appears that this isn't actually an Ethernet cable. At the length that it is, it would certainly work as one, but it looks to me like the "cable porn" portion shows W/O:O/W:W/B:B/W:W/G:G/W:W/Br:Br/W, which would put one pair of an Ethernet connection on the orange twisted pair, but the other pair would be split between the white/blue and the green/white. So, one pair would not actually be twisted.
They don't actually call it an Ethernet cable, and I'd bet that they're using the pairs that are appropriately twisted, which means that an actual Ethernet cable will have the "wrong" pairs twisted for their application, and thus have a higher rate of errors. It's even possible that they're sending data across this cable at a high enough rate, and without sufficient error checking/correcting, that it would make a difference. If that is, in fact, the case, then they are not so much being complete dicks for selling this cable at this price, but instead are being complete dicks for having such a shoddy and poorly thought-out design for their component interconnects that it requires a $500 cable to mask their incompetence.
So there's just no conflict of interest here. If we say there is, we have to accept that any judge who's had or had a significant other that's had an abortion cannot rule on abortion cases. And we also have to accept that any judge that's refused to have or be party to an abortion cannot rule on abortion cases. Basically, we're saying that they cannot have taken a position on anything in their personal lives if they're to form a legal interpretation on that thing from the bench. Stupid.
That's not the half of it. If this is a conflict of interest, then I would posit that a judge would have a conflict of interest on a child molestation case if he has a child himself. Or has ever been a child himself. Good luck finding judges that don't meet that criterion.
Now, if this particular porn happened to come from the defendant in this case, then I could see a possible grounds for viewing it as a conflict of interest. If it is specifically from the material that the defendant is in trouble for distributing, then it probably is a conflict of interest. But from my reading, it's just random mostly-unrelated porn.
I recall reading an article long ago, where it discussed the possibility of negative matter (distinct from antimatter, although if it does exist, then there's probably also negative antimatter)
It's negative because it has a negative inertial mass. Thus, since F=MA, if you apply a force in the Northerly direction to it, it will accelerate more Southerly. Gravitationally, it causes an inverse curvature of space-time, so, IIRC from the article, if you had two objects, a mass and a negative mass, then the mass would be repelled from the negative mass (because the force of the gravitational equation would be negative), but the negative mass, because the force is in the direction away from the normal mass, would accelerate towards the normal mass. Thus, they would just sort of chase each other. Where the energy to do this comes from is a mystery to me, and I don't believe it was mentioned in the article.
Of course, I think this was in an issue of Analog, so it's not like it was a peer reviewed scientific journal, but I thought it was pretty interesting nonetheless.
...He noted that when a cycle turns, it leans inward. That's good - just like an animal. But when braking, it tends to lean forward, and when accelerating it leans back. Both of those are the wrong way.
This vehicle may finally be doing it right on the acceleration. To do it right when braking would require that the arms extend foraward and the rider lean back. From the image, it appears that the front wheels both have disc brakes, however, given the design inspiration, I wouldn't be too surprised if "slow" braking were done via regenerative braking on the rear wheel, which seems a bit more "cheetah-like", saving the front brakes for quick stops that wouldn't be accompanied by much of an angle change.
To me, the concept of being more like an animal is great for acceleration and turning, but not so great for stopping. My gut feeling is that animals just don't stop very well. Evolutionarily, there's not too much reason to. If there's something in your way, it's easier to turn to miss it than to stop. With a vehicle, your options are more limited because you generally want to keep on the pavement, so there can be a need for quick stopping. When I watch my cats try and avoid running into a wall, they sometimes hunch down and put out their front legs (which is how I'd envision this vehicle would stop if it needed to quickly - by fully extending the front wheels and applying the front disc brakes), but most times they just turn sideways and re-vector their momentum parallel to the wall.
My understanding is that electric motors (which this vehicle uses) have significantly different torque characteristics than an IC engine. I believe that it's very normal for an electric motor to be able to come up to its maximum speed very quickly, and with a large amount of torque available, while for an IC engine, if it has sufficient torque to get up to a reasonable speed in a reasonable time, there's still a whole lot of room left before it gets to its top speed.
I think the main problem would be bugs with this thing. Imagine your helmet, as well as other parts of your body looking like the front of your car. It isn't pretty and its hell to wash off. Which isn't all that different from a normal motorcycle these days. Some motorcycles have windshields, which sometimes keep some bugs off. Many motorcyclists wear full-face helmets or helmets with full face shields. Those that don't almost always wear glasses and/or goggles, and tend to be very tight-lipped while riding. I haven't done it myself, but I have been told that a 60 mph dragonfly sandwich is quite unpleasant. I will accept that as fact without any desire for personal experience.
"With seven artificial vertebrae behind the helmet that support the rider's head you could control the 'Deus Ex Machina' via 36 pneumatic muscles and 2 linear actuators with your body. Leaning forward the rider extends into the more traditional riding position but there is nothing traditional about this machine."
So, I believe you are entirely correct. My guess is that the rear wheel is powered, and the two arms allow you to lean forward for acceleration, and that that the arms have independent angle control, allowing you to modify the overall side-to-side lean, thus achieving steer.
I think it's a fascinating design, and I'd dearly love to ride one. As the article states though, I seriously doubt that'll ever happen.
Obviously, some students are having fun reporting to the police that they're scared that the obviously harmless nerf guns might actually be real guns. That's their game, and I'm sure they enjoy it.
The retaliation is this: organize a group of students around the premise that the obviously real badges on the local police officers are, in fact, fake. Any time anyone in this group sees a police officer on campus, call the police and report a man with a gun stalking the campus. If necessary, include that he may be wearing a fake uniform. Now that humans vs. zombies is illegal, I'm sure there's a group that would be willing to play this new game.
"Yes officer, I just saw him, he was wearing all black, and had a belt on with a pistol, a flashlight, and some sort of blunt weapon. My god! what is he planning to do to those poor students!"
yeah, somehow the idea of flying over the barren arctic in the middle of winter while giant balls of flaming death hurtle down from the sky just doesn't sound like a good idea...
One other point: What this Nimrod is suggesting is that you can't trust Google to respect the privacy of your data, but that you can trust them to encrypt it for you. I don't quite see how that works...
I do hate the term "renewable". Talk to me about renewable solar in 4 billion years. The oil we burn that turns into CO2, which gets fixed by plants and subducted to form the oil fields of a few million years from now. (of course, this process requires an input of solar energy, so if we don't call solar renewable, we can't call oil renewable either). So maybe renewable should mean that it doesn't use up entropy. So Google should get cracking on changing the laws of thermodynamics.
What I think most people mean when they say "renewable energy" is an energy resource that's being used up at a fixed rate whether we tap into it or not. That's a bit more of a mouthful than "renewable", but seems more accurate. The problem with these is that they are a fixed-rate resource. So they can supply all the power we need, right up to the point where our needs exceed that rate. In the case of solar, that fixed rate is very high, so we're not looking to bump into it anytime soon.
Personally, I'm strongly in favor of nuclear fission and fusion power. Fortunately, we happen to have a nice big fusion reactor located at a reasonably comfortable 93 million miles away that we can use until we get our own online.
I'd be somewhat skeptical of those statistics. It seems to me that a murderer is either 1) in jail for his/her crime, 2) trying to avoid being caught, or 3) has been released after a lengthy prison stay. Case 1 makes recidivism difficult. In case 2, the murderer can be expected to be a bit cautious. In case 3, the murderer is at least a decade or two older, and my understanding is that the vast majority of crimes in general are committed by the youth (which may be due to similar statistical influences).
However, that aside, most people agree that there should be *some* consequence for lawbreaking. From what I've seen, there are 4 basic reasons that people want that consequence applied, and many people seem to weight those reasons wildly differently. This leads to some people having a completely reasonable and consistent opinion that still makes absolutely no sense to someone else. The four reasons I've seen are: 1) revenge 2) deterrent 3) rehabilitation 4) prevention of recidivism (in the aspect that someone can't easily commit some crimes while in jail)
So, for someone who weighs 3 and 4 heavily, the sentence for a first murder should be fairly light, as the criminal is unlikely to commit that crime again. If you weigh 1 and 2 heavily, then the consequence should be correlated to the seriousness of the crime, not the chance of the criminal committing the crime again, so a hefty sentence for murder makes sense.
But even if 3 and 4 are the only concerns, there's got to be a reason why one would want to prevent recidivism. That reason is probably the potential for damage that the crime being committed again poses. Even though the recidivism rate for shoplifting is probably incredibly high, if it happens it's still *just shoplifting*. It costs someone some money. Similarly, even though the recidivism rate for murder may be extremely low, when it happens someone still dies, and that can significantly impact a lot of people. (I'm not trying to imply that you think murderers should receive a sentence lighter than shoplifters, it's just two things that tend to be on opposite ends of the scale for both recidivism and the impact of the crime's effects)
On a practical note, although it probably would have helped bring down communism for Levi Strauss to leaflet bomb East Germany with ads for their jeans and a note that it'd be easier to buy them after getting rid of communism, I don't think it was done. The first reason is that there probably wasn't a good ROI for Levi to do it. The second reason is that it isn't really the place of private enterprise to attempt the overthrow of sovereign foreign nations.
Similarly, I don't think that spamming China with pay-for-unrestricted-proxy sites, (or even proxy sites that are free but insert advertising or some such... although what would you advertise to the Chinese? Probably Viagra...) would be very lucrative for a US (or wherever) company. It also shouldn't be done by a private company, but by a government, and more specifically, by a government that is more actively hostile towards the target country than the US (or anywhere else I know of off the top of my head) currently is towards China. Of course, once the government does decide to do this, it's probably more effective for them to farm it out to private enterprise. But the difference is one of intention and who's paying for it.
I don't like evil empires any more than the next guy (although I think their most defining characteristic is how they treat people who want to leave and go somewhere else. My gut feeling is that there do exist people who would actually rather live in a totalitarian state. I'd love for those people to have a place to go instead of voting for my next president. I don't actually know how China stacks up in this respect.) So I'm certainly in favor of finding methods to help those members of any society who want to seek freedom. But I'm not convinced this is really an effective or reasonable way to do it.
Hold on a second here... They say that they've exceeded the speed of light with (drumroll please) Photons! But, wait a minute, isn't that light? However fast those photons were going, *is* the speed of light. It's just that they've discovered that all the rest of the photons in the universe just really aren't giving it their all.
(by the way, this is a joke. I know what they mean, it just seems funny to me.)
To: Corporate Computer Users From: IT department Re: Biometric authentication update
Dear users,
As you may know, we here in IT are always on the cutting edge of technology and security. We have been investigating new methods of user authentication for some time, and have finally selected the technology that we intend to use. From now on, all user authentication will be done using facial recognition biometric technology. This will, unfortunately, force us to make some changes to several of our long-standing policies with respect to authentication. These changes are necessary, as users will no longer have a "password" in the normal sense of the word. Instead, a user's face will play the part of a "password" on the company network. The following is a set of changes to our corporate password policy:
It has long been company policy that passwords must be changed every 45 days. To this end, the company has hired Vinnie, who will be circulating amongst our offices with a baseball bat, which he will use to assist users in "changing" their "passwords".
The company has always had a very strict policy that passwords must never be written down, shared, or in any way be made vulnerable to surreptitious capture. In order to apply this requirement to the new authentication methods, the company will be distributing ski masks to all employees. Employees are required to wear these masks at all times, in or out of the office, unless the employee is in the process of logging on to his or her computer. This is necessary to prevent attackers from surreptitiously capturing their "passwords". You may feel that this is an imposition, however, trust us, after the first few visits from Vinnie, it will become a welcome addition to your wardrobe.
The company has long had a policy of using technology to enforce certain minimum complexity requirements for passwords. This policy required that users use a mix of upper and lower case characters, numbers, and symbols in their password, and prevented them from using dictionary words. In order to adapt this policy to the new authentication paradigm, we will be hiring plastic surgeons to assist our users who look a little too "normal". We have noticed that most of our users have a very similar complement of two ears, two eyes, one nose with two nostrils, and one mouth. This is far too insecure, and the new requirement will force users to abandon at least one of those features, and add a unique mixture of piercings, scars, burns and tattoos to their "password" in order to make it less likely that an attacker could guess what our users might look like.
We realize these changes may take some getting used to, but we are certain that you will all feel better knowing that our corporate data is secure. After all, everything we read seems to agree that biometric authentication is the next big thing, so we are certain that within a few years, everyone will be doing this.
Yeah... but. There aren't that many movies that I like that can really benefit from a good home theater. Maybe a dozen or so. Last I checked, a really good system would cost me about $3K. So that would be about $250 per really good movie. That's a bit much. Of course, all the crappy movies would look at least a little better on a good home theater. But as the saying goes, you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear. Of course, as components of mine die, I'll probably replace them with much nicer ones. But I'm in no hurry to do a massive overhaul.
Well, yes and no. I do go out on my own... and work. My wife's stuck at home with the kids on her own 50 hours a week or so, and she tends to get a bit stir crazy. I don't. So it's fine with me if she goes out to see a movie now and then, which she does. If I really wanted to push the issue, we could probably come to some agreement, but it's just not worth it to me to do so. The other factor is, most of the movies I like, she likes also. However, there are many movies that she likes that I have zero interest in. So me seeing a movie on my own not only keeps her stuck in the house with the kids for even longer, it likely ends up as a movie that she wants to see that we can't watch for the first time together. If that makes any sense...
I'm not saying that this is how most married people live... It's how I live, and I'm fine with it. It may not be perfect, but it sure does beat the alternatives (for me). And even for me, it's a temporary situation. My wife is a stay-at-home mom. We have an expectation that once our youngest goes into Kindergarten, she'll go back to having a W2 job, and things will be a bit more relaxed - she won't go stir crazy in the house, and so we can take turns escaping on our own. But for now, she's taking care of the kids 9 hours a day while I'm at work, so I feel it's only fair for me to put in a similar amount of time when I'm home. YMMV.
Well, first off, your experience isn't universal. You can see a matinée for five to seven bucks. It costs me about $50-60. I *could* go off and watch a movie and leave the kids home with my wife... but the divorce would probably cost quite a bit more. So I start out paying two tickets, plus gas, call it $15. It's a two hour movie, plus a half hour drive time each way, plus some fudge factor, call it 4 hours. Cheap babysitters are $10/hr. There have been movies I've taken my kids to. "Cars" was excellent. Other movies, I've gotten to see the opening credits, 5 minutes of movie... and then had to leave. And many movies that I'd like to see, I wouldn't take them to even if I knew they would be well-behaved throughout.
So, if I want to see Transformers (actually, I kinda do...) I have three options: 1) bite the bullet, pay $60, and go see the movie. 2) Arrrrrr... get it from a pirate. 3) wait for it to come out on DVD.
#1 has happened, but not in years. After the first few times I've paid $60 to see a movie that sucked, I pretty much decided not to do that anymore. It would have been worth it for some, but there's little way to know beforehand.
#2 I don't do, but I certainly understand the motivation for.
so I'm stuck waiting for the DVD. And once the DVD comes out, if I think the movie really rocks, and is actually *worth* paying $60 to see on a big screen with big-theater sound, I'm SOL, because if it's out on DVD, it's probably not in theaters anymore.
So yeah, the systems sucks for me. I seem to recall that some movies have had a DVD release coincide with the theatrical release, which would solve all my problems, but the idea doesn't seem to have caught on widely.
Well, yes, but the gamma ray burst is traveling at 100% of the speed of light, it being light and all. So the matter, travelling at 99.9997% of the speed of light, is trailing the gamma rays by an extra.000003 lightyears (94 light-seconds) every year.
So yes, the event happened 1 million years ago. The gamma rays took 1 million years to travel the distance, and arrived this year. The matter takes 1,000,003 years to make the same trip, and so it will arrive in 3 years.
This made me think of that too... I kind of wonder, how far away from us are these things? Because, according to the article, the matter is moving at 99.9997% the speed of light. To my mind, that means that if it's coming in our direction, then if the origin is, says 1 million light years away from us, then the matter will get here about 3 years after the gamma ray burst.
So, the follow up question would be, which has more energy, the gamma rays, or the relativistic matter?
Of course, it's one of those things that's a combination of highly unlikely, yet, if it happens, there's not much anyone can do about it. Unless, of course, we send Bruce Willis out to personally steer that blob of near-light-speed matter away from our planet.
Quite true. Obscurity is probably the best defense overall, because spammers are lazy and are looking for low-hanging fruit, or high-value, um, fruit.
There's an analogy to the real world there... If you're fort knox, you need some serious locks. If you're not, then you're probably completely safe if you're marginally more secure than your neighbors, and you're probably 99% safe even if you aren't.
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I recall a long long time ago, working for a client that we were pretty sure was doing something shady... probably not illegal, but we weren't sure. Anyhow, one day my boss came to me and said they had told him that we'd be getting our wire transfer payments for our work from a different source now. According to him, they said "Citibank decided that we were laundering too much money, so they closed our account. We had to set up our own bank in Antigua, so that's where you'll be getting your transfers from now on." This of course led to the obvious question: Just how much money does Citibank think is just the right amount to launder? But the other question is, would their new bank qualify for a .bank name? I've investigated cases of wire fraud where the funds were moved to overseas banks that, while regulated by their country, I'm fairly certain were complicit in the fraud being perpetrated.
No one's going to seriously argue that Barclays or Bank of America aren't banks and don't deserve a domain in a .bank hierarchy. It's a bank you've never heard of in a country you've never heard of that's going to be a problematic decision.
Unfortunately, this isn't the worst idea ever, at least for ICANN. Extortion it is, but extortion isn't really a bad idea if you're the one doing it, else it wouldn't be so popular.
However, opening the TLD floodgates doesn't help anyone other than ICANN and the registrars. Additional TLD's which are functionally equivalent to the existing TLD's are not useful. Additional TLD's are useful with respect to any exclusivity they enforce. .com, .net, .org, are all functionally equivalent these days. .edu, .gov, and .mil are actually, in fact, useful. They are useful specifically because I can't get one. The proposed .bank had some hope of being useful, although it suffers from the endemic problem of appointing someone or some organization to decide for the whole world, what constitutes a bank. .xxx or .porn has some hope of being useful, because it is self-exclusive in that there's somewhat of a disincentive to having a .porn domain if you are not, in fact, in the business of providing porn.
Of course, nothing useful will come to pass. It's too tempting to sell domains to everyone, and the useful things that could be done with TLD's could be done with SLD's as well, but aren't. It would be useful, for example, to have a company that already does work in the field of corporate information such as Dunn & Bradstreet, to start offering "vetted" corporate listings, such as "yourcompanyhere".dnb.com. But they don't do it, because a) it wouldn't really be all that useful, and b) because very few people would use it and thus c) very few companies would buy it.
Interestingly, from the picture, it appears that this isn't actually an Ethernet cable. At the length that it is, it would certainly work as one, but it looks to me like the "cable porn" portion shows W/O:O/W:W/B:B/W:W/G:G/W:W/Br:Br/W, which would put one pair of an Ethernet connection on the orange twisted pair, but the other pair would be split between the white/blue and the green/white. So, one pair would not actually be twisted.
They don't actually call it an Ethernet cable, and I'd bet that they're using the pairs that are appropriately twisted, which means that an actual Ethernet cable will have the "wrong" pairs twisted for their application, and thus have a higher rate of errors. It's even possible that they're sending data across this cable at a high enough rate, and without sufficient error checking/correcting, that it would make a difference. If that is, in fact, the case, then they are not so much being complete dicks for selling this cable at this price, but instead are being complete dicks for having such a shoddy and poorly thought-out design for their component interconnects that it requires a $500 cable to mask their incompetence.
So there's just no conflict of interest here. If we say there is, we have to accept that any judge who's had or had a significant other that's had an abortion cannot rule on abortion cases. And we also have to accept that any judge that's refused to have or be party to an abortion cannot rule on abortion cases. Basically, we're saying that they cannot have taken a position on anything in their personal lives if they're to form a legal interpretation on that thing from the bench. Stupid.
That's not the half of it. If this is a conflict of interest, then I would posit that a judge would have a conflict of interest on a child molestation case if he has a child himself. Or has ever been a child himself. Good luck finding judges that don't meet that criterion.Now, if this particular porn happened to come from the defendant in this case, then I could see a possible grounds for viewing it as a conflict of interest. If it is specifically from the material that the defendant is in trouble for distributing, then it probably is a conflict of interest. But from my reading, it's just random mostly-unrelated porn.
I recall reading an article long ago, where it discussed the possibility of negative matter (distinct from antimatter, although if it does exist, then there's probably also negative antimatter)
It's negative because it has a negative inertial mass. Thus, since F=MA, if you apply a force in the Northerly direction to it, it will accelerate more Southerly. Gravitationally, it causes an inverse curvature of space-time, so, IIRC from the article, if you had two objects, a mass and a negative mass, then the mass would be repelled from the negative mass (because the force of the gravitational equation would be negative), but the negative mass, because the force is in the direction away from the normal mass, would accelerate towards the normal mass. Thus, they would just sort of chase each other. Where the energy to do this comes from is a mystery to me, and I don't believe it was mentioned in the article.
Of course, I think this was in an issue of Analog, so it's not like it was a peer reviewed scientific journal, but I thought it was pretty interesting nonetheless.
It's been done. It's being done. I find it interesting that Renaissance Technologies' Nova fund, which is basically a computer program, from my understanding, some days makes over 10% of the total volume of trades on the NASDAQ.
...He noted that when a cycle turns, it leans inward. That's good - just like an animal. But when braking, it tends to lean forward, and when accelerating it leans back. Both of those are the wrong way.This vehicle may finally be doing it right on the acceleration. To do it right when braking would require that the arms extend foraward and the rider lean back. From the image, it appears that the front wheels both have disc brakes, however, given the design inspiration, I wouldn't be too surprised if "slow" braking were done via regenerative braking on the rear wheel, which seems a bit more "cheetah-like", saving the front brakes for quick stops that wouldn't be accompanied by much of an angle change.
To me, the concept of being more like an animal is great for acceleration and turning, but not so great for stopping. My gut feeling is that animals just don't stop very well. Evolutionarily, there's not too much reason to. If there's something in your way, it's easier to turn to miss it than to stop. With a vehicle, your options are more limited because you generally want to keep on the pavement, so there can be a need for quick stopping. When I watch my cats try and avoid running into a wall, they sometimes hunch down and put out their front legs (which is how I'd envision this vehicle would stop if it needed to quickly - by fully extending the front wheels and applying the front disc brakes), but most times they just turn sideways and re-vector their momentum parallel to the wall.
My understanding is that electric motors (which this vehicle uses) have significantly different torque characteristics than an IC engine. I believe that it's very normal for an electric motor to be able to come up to its maximum speed very quickly, and with a large amount of torque available, while for an IC engine, if it has sufficient torque to get up to a reasonable speed in a reasonable time, there's still a whole lot of room left before it gets to its top speed.
But I could just be wrong.
From the article that the article links to:
"With seven artificial vertebrae behind the helmet that support the rider's head you could control the 'Deus Ex Machina' via 36 pneumatic muscles and 2 linear actuators with your body. Leaning forward the rider extends into the more traditional riding position but there is nothing traditional about this machine."
So, I believe you are entirely correct. My guess is that the rear wheel is powered, and the two arms allow you to lean forward for acceleration, and that that the arms have independent angle control, allowing you to modify the overall side-to-side lean, thus achieving steer.
I think it's a fascinating design, and I'd dearly love to ride one. As the article states though, I seriously doubt that'll ever happen.
Obviously, some students are having fun reporting to the police that they're scared that the obviously harmless nerf guns might actually be real guns. That's their game, and I'm sure they enjoy it.
The retaliation is this: organize a group of students around the premise that the obviously real badges on the local police officers are, in fact, fake. Any time anyone in this group sees a police officer on campus, call the police and report a man with a gun stalking the campus. If necessary, include that he may be wearing a fake uniform. Now that humans vs. zombies is illegal, I'm sure there's a group that would be willing to play this new game.
"Yes officer, I just saw him, he was wearing all black, and had a belt on with a pistol, a flashlight, and some sort of blunt weapon. My god! what is he planning to do to those poor students!"
yeah, somehow the idea of flying over the barren arctic in the middle of winter while giant balls of flaming death hurtle down from the sky just doesn't sound like a good idea...
The chimps scored better than the college students on memory tests, but their term papers were only marginally better.
One other point: What this Nimrod is suggesting is that you can't trust Google to respect the privacy of your data, but that you can trust them to encrypt it for you. I don't quite see how that works...
I do hate the term "renewable". Talk to me about renewable solar in 4 billion years. The oil we burn that turns into CO2, which gets fixed by plants and subducted to form the oil fields of a few million years from now. (of course, this process requires an input of solar energy, so if we don't call solar renewable, we can't call oil renewable either). So maybe renewable should mean that it doesn't use up entropy. So Google should get cracking on changing the laws of thermodynamics.
What I think most people mean when they say "renewable energy" is an energy resource that's being used up at a fixed rate whether we tap into it or not. That's a bit more of a mouthful than "renewable", but seems more accurate. The problem with these is that they are a fixed-rate resource. So they can supply all the power we need, right up to the point where our needs exceed that rate. In the case of solar, that fixed rate is very high, so we're not looking to bump into it anytime soon.
Personally, I'm strongly in favor of nuclear fission and fusion power. Fortunately, we happen to have a nice big fusion reactor located at a reasonably comfortable 93 million miles away that we can use until we get our own online.
I'd be somewhat skeptical of those statistics. It seems to me that a murderer is either 1) in jail for his/her crime, 2) trying to avoid being caught, or 3) has been released after a lengthy prison stay. Case 1 makes recidivism difficult. In case 2, the murderer can be expected to be a bit cautious. In case 3, the murderer is at least a decade or two older, and my understanding is that the vast majority of crimes in general are committed by the youth (which may be due to similar statistical influences).
However, that aside, most people agree that there should be *some* consequence for lawbreaking. From what I've seen, there are 4 basic reasons that people want that consequence applied, and many people seem to weight those reasons wildly differently. This leads to some people having a completely reasonable and consistent opinion that still makes absolutely no sense to someone else. The four reasons I've seen are:
1) revenge
2) deterrent
3) rehabilitation
4) prevention of recidivism (in the aspect that someone can't easily commit some crimes while in jail)
So, for someone who weighs 3 and 4 heavily, the sentence for a first murder should be fairly light, as the criminal is unlikely to commit that crime again. If you weigh 1 and 2 heavily, then the consequence should be correlated to the seriousness of the crime, not the chance of the criminal committing the crime again, so a hefty sentence for murder makes sense.
But even if 3 and 4 are the only concerns, there's got to be a reason why one would want to prevent recidivism. That reason is probably the potential for damage that the crime being committed again poses. Even though the recidivism rate for shoplifting is probably incredibly high, if it happens it's still *just shoplifting*. It costs someone some money. Similarly, even though the recidivism rate for murder may be extremely low, when it happens someone still dies, and that can significantly impact a lot of people. (I'm not trying to imply that you think murderers should receive a sentence lighter than shoplifters, it's just two things that tend to be on opposite ends of the scale for both recidivism and the impact of the crime's effects)
Is sending out this sort of thing spam? yes. Is distributing airborne leaflet propaganda littering? Yes.
On a practical note, although it probably would have helped bring down communism for Levi Strauss to leaflet bomb East Germany with ads for their jeans and a note that it'd be easier to buy them after getting rid of communism, I don't think it was done. The first reason is that there probably wasn't a good ROI for Levi to do it. The second reason is that it isn't really the place of private enterprise to attempt the overthrow of sovereign foreign nations.
Similarly, I don't think that spamming China with pay-for-unrestricted-proxy sites, (or even proxy sites that are free but insert advertising or some such... although what would you advertise to the Chinese? Probably Viagra...) would be very lucrative for a US (or wherever) company. It also shouldn't be done by a private company, but by a government, and more specifically, by a government that is more actively hostile towards the target country than the US (or anywhere else I know of off the top of my head) currently is towards China. Of course, once the government does decide to do this, it's probably more effective for them to farm it out to private enterprise. But the difference is one of intention and who's paying for it.
I don't like evil empires any more than the next guy (although I think their most defining characteristic is how they treat people who want to leave and go somewhere else. My gut feeling is that there do exist people who would actually rather live in a totalitarian state. I'd love for those people to have a place to go instead of voting for my next president. I don't actually know how China stacks up in this respect.) So I'm certainly in favor of finding methods to help those members of any society who want to seek freedom. But I'm not convinced this is really an effective or reasonable way to do it.
Hold on a second here... They say that they've exceeded the speed of light with (drumroll please) Photons! But, wait a minute, isn't that light? However fast those photons were going, *is* the speed of light. It's just that they've discovered that all the rest of the photons in the universe just really aren't giving it their all.
(by the way, this is a joke. I know what they mean, it just seems funny to me.)
From: IT department
Re: Biometric authentication update
Dear users,
As you may know, we here in IT are always on the cutting edge of technology and security. We have been investigating new methods of user authentication for some time, and have finally selected the technology that we intend to use. From now on, all user authentication will be done using facial recognition biometric technology. This will, unfortunately, force us to make some changes to several of our long-standing policies with respect to authentication. These changes are necessary, as users will no longer have a "password" in the normal sense of the word. Instead, a user's face will play the part of a "password" on the company network. The following is a set of changes to our corporate password policy:
We realize these changes may take some getting used to, but we are certain that you will all feel better knowing that our corporate data is secure. After all, everything we read seems to agree that biometric authentication is the next big thing, so we are certain that within a few years, everyone will be doing this.
Sincerely,
Your IT department.
Yeah... but. There aren't that many movies that I like that can really benefit from a good home theater. Maybe a dozen or so. Last I checked, a really good system would cost me about $3K. So that would be about $250 per really good movie. That's a bit much. Of course, all the crappy movies would look at least a little better on a good home theater. But as the saying goes, you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear. Of course, as components of mine die, I'll probably replace them with much nicer ones. But I'm in no hurry to do a massive overhaul.
Well, yes and no. I do go out on my own... and work. My wife's stuck at home with the kids on her own 50 hours a week or so, and she tends to get a bit stir crazy. I don't. So it's fine with me if she goes out to see a movie now and then, which she does. If I really wanted to push the issue, we could probably come to some agreement, but it's just not worth it to me to do so. The other factor is, most of the movies I like, she likes also. However, there are many movies that she likes that I have zero interest in. So me seeing a movie on my own not only keeps her stuck in the house with the kids for even longer, it likely ends up as a movie that she wants to see that we can't watch for the first time together. If that makes any sense...
I'm not saying that this is how most married people live... It's how I live, and I'm fine with it. It may not be perfect, but it sure does beat the alternatives (for me). And even for me, it's a temporary situation. My wife is a stay-at-home mom. We have an expectation that once our youngest goes into Kindergarten, she'll go back to having a W2 job, and things will be a bit more relaxed - she won't go stir crazy in the house, and so we can take turns escaping on our own. But for now, she's taking care of the kids 9 hours a day while I'm at work, so I feel it's only fair for me to put in a similar amount of time when I'm home. YMMV.
Well, first off, your experience isn't universal. You can see a matinée for five to seven bucks. It costs me about $50-60. I *could* go off and watch a movie and leave the kids home with my wife... but the divorce would probably cost quite a bit more. So I start out paying two tickets, plus gas, call it $15. It's a two hour movie, plus a half hour drive time each way, plus some fudge factor, call it 4 hours. Cheap babysitters are $10/hr. There have been movies I've taken my kids to. "Cars" was excellent. Other movies, I've gotten to see the opening credits, 5 minutes of movie... and then had to leave. And many movies that I'd like to see, I wouldn't take them to even if I knew they would be well-behaved throughout.
So, if I want to see Transformers (actually, I kinda do...) I have three options:
1) bite the bullet, pay $60, and go see the movie.
2) Arrrrrr... get it from a pirate.
3) wait for it to come out on DVD.
#1 has happened, but not in years. After the first few times I've paid $60 to see a movie that sucked, I pretty much decided not to do that anymore. It would have been worth it for some, but there's little way to know beforehand.
#2 I don't do, but I certainly understand the motivation for.
so I'm stuck waiting for the DVD. And once the DVD comes out, if I think the movie really rocks, and is actually *worth* paying $60 to see on a big screen with big-theater sound, I'm SOL, because if it's out on DVD, it's probably not in theaters anymore.
So yeah, the systems sucks for me. I seem to recall that some movies have had a DVD release coincide with the theatrical release, which would solve all my problems, but the idea doesn't seem to have caught on widely.
Well, yes, but the gamma ray burst is traveling at 100% of the speed of light, it being light and all. So the matter, travelling at 99.9997% of the speed of light, is trailing the gamma rays by an extra .000003 lightyears (94 light-seconds) every year.
So yes, the event happened 1 million years ago. The gamma rays took 1 million years to travel the distance, and arrived this year. The matter takes 1,000,003 years to make the same trip, and so it will arrive in 3 years.
This made me think of that too... I kind of wonder, how far away from us are these things? Because, according to the article, the matter is moving at 99.9997% the speed of light. To my mind, that means that if it's coming in our direction, then if the origin is, says 1 million light years away from us, then the matter will get here about 3 years after the gamma ray burst.
So, the follow up question would be, which has more energy, the gamma rays, or the relativistic matter?
Of course, it's one of those things that's a combination of highly unlikely, yet, if it happens, there's not much anyone can do about it. Unless, of course, we send Bruce Willis out to personally steer that blob of near-light-speed matter away from our planet.
Yeah.
Quite true. Obscurity is probably the best defense overall, because spammers are lazy and are looking for low-hanging fruit, or high-value, um, fruit.
There's an analogy to the real world there... If you're fort knox, you need some serious locks. If you're not, then you're probably completely safe if you're marginally more secure than your neighbors, and you're probably 99% safe even if you aren't.