Religious argument has nothing to do with it. From the moment of fertilization, a fetus, embryo or whatever you want to call it is a human being. Homo Sapiens. That's a biological fact. Stage of development does not define a species.
A single cell is hardly a human being. Are two cells a person? Three? A fetus is an undeveloped person, thats why it is called a fetus and not a person.
What makes humans different than animals that we raise to eat? What makes it wrong to kill people and not wrong to kill animals? Just because we are the same species? I would argue that it is self awareness that sets us apart, people are able to suffer in ways that animals cannot because they just aren't conscious of things.
Abortion is a personal choice, akin to using birth control or not. One stops the development of a group of cells that may become a person. Another stops the whole process before it begins, not even giving the group of cells a chance. The cells grow inside of a womans body, thus she has rightful control over them, they are part of her. If she doesn't want them there its her choice to do so. If you have the same choice you are free to make it however you want.
Stem-cell research has moral problems? Like what? That sounds like a unsubstantiated religious argument to me. Next you'll claim that unborn fetuses are people when they aren't self aware or independent of the mother.
And speaking of smart decisions, Bush's environmental record isn't great. He continues to press for drilling in the arctic when the amount of oil from that drilling is very small by even the high estimates making the cost of damage to the environment close to the benefit of the oil to the country.
When Bush announced his whole plan to move to hydrogen fuel and more efficent vehicles there was a big automaker conference at the Whitehouse where the big 3 announced hybrid and hydrogen vehicles, but wouldn't let Honda and Toyota make an appearance with the hybrid cars they have been selling for a couple of years. Maybe because it would have made 2005 look a bit late and not so innovative.
Europe and the rest of the world would be foolish to let any one country control damn near anything, including a global positioning system. It is a better thing for world peace as it establishes some kind of balance of power.
It's a very bad idea for a company to upset the big boys and this may have been part of the reason that ReplayTV hit the ground hard. So by eliminating these features, you get more support from companies such as Disney and Viacom.
What's the next step in keeping them "happy"? Forcing you to watch shows from Time Warner/Disney/Viacom? Prevent you from recording shows they don't want recorded?
Who cares if they aren't happy? Their only concern is for their bottom line, they couldn't care less about society and yet society is who gives them the right to carry on business. Capitalism is a reasonable way of assigning wealth based on individuals being able to perform valuable work for others. Like anything it needs to be kept in line and appeasing companies because they are somehow offended that you skip their commercials is a load of crap.
Between that and the 30 second skip function, I'm surprised ReplayTV has lasted this long!
So skipping commercials isn't allowed? How about getting up to use the bathroom when a commercial comes on? Give me a break, as much as the networks will complain about commercials being skipped they don't have much choice do they. If they send you the data you have every right to record it and play it back at a later time, skipping parts of shows, commercials, anything you want.
Being a developer on wine and other oss projects I can say that the reason it works with wine is due to Alexandre's consistent work in checking and merging in patches. He does an excellent job. Some other oss projects have a handful of people that can commit files but none of them that choose to actually do any work to merge in other peoples changes.
I'm still hoping someone will release the source code for this game or that someone will make a port of it to a recent os. Adding networking support over TCP wouldn't be all that difficult.
Other people have pointed out that to distinguish between multiple sources you need to have multiple sensors. Then you need signal processing to handle the time and phase shifting so you can put the signals back together correctly. This isn't cheap by any means.
If you switch to a different type of sensor or encoding scheme - for example, utilize frequency hopping (aka spread spectrum) then you could easily broadcast the two signals over the same range of frequencies (colors).
This is foolish. Frequency hopping means that you are not using the same frequency, thus if the two original signals creating interference were both green, now one is green and the other is some other color. You didn't solve the problem of interference, all you did was to change the frequencies so they aren't the same, kind of like we do things today with radio and other forms of communication.
Chris
"it's more important than the Internet" - Metcalf
on
Buy a Segway... Please
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· Score: 1
Wait until they find out that without nicotine there is absolutely no reason for someone to use their product. I mean look at the stunning sales of alcohol free beer.
Chris
little 'X' button to close tabs?
on
KDE 3.1 Released
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· Score: 1
Where is the little 'X' that lets you close a tab? Or are users expected to right click and select close?
What? in the arena of skeptics, proof means scientific proof. Period. My experience is a lot of skeptics are, in fact, religous. there is a difference in faith in a God and a bending spoon.
There is no difference. They are both things that you believe without any evidence. There is no proof of spoon bending other than unconfirmed or unprovable hearsay, the same that exists with the believe in god.
The performance of the IDE drives are almost the same as their SCSI counterparts. Amazing!
Not very amazing. The average throughput of a ide vs. scsi drive is about the same, so if you only do sequential access of your harddrive you won't notice much difference between the two. On the other hand the access time of a scsi drive is almost 1/3 that of a ide drive, so if you do any kind of seeking the scsi drive will bury the ide drive. AND scsi supports command queueing that allows the drive to reorder your commands to give you even better performance with less host based processing being required. The drive always knows best what data is quickest to get at.
Ever since 40MB/sec SCSI came out...there really is no need for anything faster in a workstation...until hard drives become dramatically faster. Most workstations have no more than two hard drives (get it? 2 X 20MB/sec = 40MB/sec).
This is quite bogus. A single drive can easily exceed 40MB/s sequential transfer and your hard drive is the slowest storage device on most pcs.
I still don't see 10,000 or 15,000RPM IDE drives, do you?
It is quite a bit more difficult to build a 10k or 15k drive than it is to build a 7.2k rpm drive. You don't see 10 or 15k ide drives only because of cost. Probably in the next year or so you'll see the first 10k ide drive. 10k is almost a necessity with todays computers as 7200 has such a high average access time.
I enjoyed the first game so much, wonder when Blizzard is going to make a second one... I've even been playing through the original games single player missions again under Wine.
Sure, drives will fail in continuous use, but running them for an hour every two weeks, and in this case, doing an archive (dd if=/dev/hda1 of dev=/hdb1) where the head isn't skittering back and forth a million times, isn't going to cause much wear and tear.
Huh? The head doesn't touch the media so there is no wear there. The coil doesn't touch the magnets so also no wear. And somehow I think the wear on the pivot bearing of the actuator is the least of your worries with drive reliability. More of an issue is head degredadion although this is planned for in the design of drives, and bearing failure due to overheating. Most harddrives should last through 5+ years of continuous use.
It requires Wine. Blech! And to think I thought they had actually cracked the codec.
I'm not sure what the issue is here. They can make it require only the wine libraries that are responsible for loading and interfacing with the dll, this would be seamless and would be packaged with the mplayer binaries. You probably wouldn't even notice. Running the native dlls is much easier and legal, compared with reverse engineering a copyrighted and patented codec.
These huge blacktop lots get damned hot in the summer, so why no provide structures to shade then and put solar pannels on the structures?
A very neat idea. Of course this is contingent upon solar cells becoming efficent enough to pay for themselves in a shorter period of time, but even still it makes a lot of sense. Too bad people can't look beyond the next 20 years. We are far too slow when it comes to increasing efficency. Now if we started running out of oil... then we would see some change;-)
And some Atheist would keep telling us that such contradictions disprove Christianity in general (which they don't)
These contraditions are in fact errors, and there are a great many errors in the bible at that. If you accept that these errors(contradicions) exist then you have to resonably believe that other facts presented might also be incorrect. Without the bible as a source of truth Christianity becomes arbitrary, something that people believe in because they were told they should(not that this excludes all other religions though).
In retrospect, however, I wish he had won his re-election bid for Senate. He's doing much more harm now than he ever did as a Senator.
Then couldn't he have appointed a replacement for his Senate seat when he moved into his position as Attorney General? He would have done more harm in that case I would think.
The advantages are proof (i.e. unbreakable) against brute force attacks and known-plaintext attacks (unlike the OTP). The disadvantage is carrying around a very large digital key (which could easily fit on one of those USB memory key fobs).
This sounds just like the dozens of crypto products that Bruce Schneier routinely pokes fun of in his cryptogram newsletters on www.counterpane.com
Now, the real reason why this is bogus is that OTPs require a key of the same length as the original message. If you can securely transmit a key as large as the orignal file then why didn't you just transmit the original message via the same mechanism? The whole reason people spend years developing encryption such as AES/DES/RSA is to keep the key length short for any arbitrary length message. The shorter his "many time pad" is or the more it repeats the weaker it becomes. The whole strength behind the OTP is the randomness of the encrypted result, something lost if a short pad is used over and over again. His scheme may be novel but is more than likely not at all secure and practical at the same time.
That's something that's always bugged me. Why is it that the heads are allowed enough flexibility to touch the heads in the first place? Why not make them rigid enough so they stay in a fixed location relative to the platter regardless of air movement?
Like other people have replied already, tolerances are the issue. The gap between the head and disk during operation of the drive is crazy small. The wobble in the spindle bearing is easily more than this gap, if your head was in a fixed position at one point it would be too far away from the surface to operate, at another it would be digging into the surface. The only real solution is to have it fly above the surface. If it flies too high then there won't be enough lift and it will fly lower, if it flies too low then there will be extra lift so it flies higher. It is a continuously adjusting system based on the flow of air in the drive and it certainly works quite well. I don't think any harddrive today could be built with a fixed height head, there just isn't enough precision in a device as large as a harddrive.
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Religious argument has nothing to do with it. From the moment of fertilization, a fetus, embryo or whatever you want to call it is a human being. Homo Sapiens. That's a biological fact. Stage of development does not define a species.
A single cell is hardly a human being. Are two cells a person? Three? A fetus is an undeveloped person, thats why it is called a fetus and not a person.
What makes humans different than animals that we raise to eat? What makes it wrong to kill people and not wrong to kill animals? Just because we are the same species? I would argue that it is self awareness that sets us apart, people are able to suffer in ways that animals cannot because they just aren't conscious of things.
Abortion is a personal choice, akin to using birth control or not. One stops the development of a group of cells that may become a person. Another stops the whole process before it begins, not even giving the group of cells a chance. The cells grow inside of a womans body, thus she has rightful control over them, they are part of her. If she doesn't want them there its her choice to do so. If you have the same choice you are free to make it however you want.
Chris
Stem-cell research has moral problems? Like what? That sounds like a unsubstantiated religious argument to me. Next you'll claim that unborn fetuses are people when they aren't self aware or independent of the mother.
And speaking of smart decisions, Bush's environmental record isn't great. He continues to press for drilling in the arctic when the amount of oil from that drilling is very small by even the high estimates making the cost of damage to the environment close to the benefit of the oil to the country.
When Bush announced his whole plan to move to hydrogen fuel and more efficent vehicles there was a big automaker conference at the Whitehouse where the big 3 announced hybrid and hydrogen vehicles, but wouldn't let Honda and Toyota make an appearance with the hybrid cars they have been selling for a couple of years. Maybe because it would have made 2005 look a bit late and not so innovative.
Chris
Europe and the rest of the world would be foolish to let any one country control damn near anything, including a global positioning system. It is a better thing for world peace as it establishes some kind of balance of power.
Chris
What's the next step in keeping them "happy"? Forcing you to watch shows from Time Warner/Disney/Viacom? Prevent you from recording shows they don't want recorded?
Who cares if they aren't happy? Their only concern is for their bottom line, they couldn't care less about society and yet society is who gives them the right to carry on business. Capitalism is a reasonable way of assigning wealth based on individuals being able to perform valuable work for others. Like anything it needs to be kept in line and appeasing companies because they are somehow offended that you skip their commercials is a load of crap.
Chris
So skipping commercials isn't allowed? How about getting up to use the bathroom when a commercial comes on? Give me a break, as much as the networks will complain about commercials being skipped they don't have much choice do they. If they send you the data you have every right to record it and play it back at a later time, skipping parts of shows, commercials, anything you want.
Chris
Being a developer on wine and other oss projects I can say that the reason it works with wine is due to Alexandre's consistent work in checking and merging in patches. He does an excellent job. Some other oss projects have a handful of people that can commit files but none of them that choose to actually do any work to merge in other peoples changes.
I'm still hoping someone will release the source code for this game or that someone will make a port of it to a recent os. Adding networking support over TCP wouldn't be all that difficult.
Other people have pointed out that to distinguish between multiple sources you need to have multiple sensors. Then you need signal processing to handle the time and phase shifting so you can put the signals back together correctly. This isn't cheap by any means.
Chris
If you switch to a different type of sensor or encoding scheme - for example, utilize frequency hopping (aka spread spectrum) then you could easily broadcast the two signals over the same range of frequencies (colors).
This is foolish. Frequency hopping means that you are not using the same frequency, thus if the two original signals creating interference were both green, now one is green and the other is some other color. You didn't solve the problem of interference, all you did was to change the frequencies so they aren't the same, kind of like we do things today with radio and other forms of communication.
Chris
Hahahahahahah ABCNews story
Wine works quite well for a large number of applications and support is improving daily.
Chris
Wait until they find out that without nicotine there is absolutely no reason for someone to use their product. I mean look at the stunning sales of alcohol free beer.
Chris
Where is the little 'X' that lets you close a tab? Or are users expected to right click and select close?
Chris
What? in the arena of skeptics, proof means scientific proof. Period.
My experience is a lot of skeptics are, in fact, religous. there is a difference in faith in a God and a bending spoon.
There is no difference. They are both things that you believe without any evidence. There is no proof of spoon bending other than unconfirmed or unprovable hearsay, the same that exists with the believe in god.
The performance of the IDE drives are almost the same as their SCSI counterparts. Amazing!
Not very amazing. The average throughput of a ide vs. scsi drive is about the same, so if you only do sequential access of your harddrive you won't notice much difference between the two. On the other hand the access time of a scsi drive is almost 1/3 that of a ide drive, so if you do any kind of seeking the scsi drive will bury the ide drive. AND scsi supports command queueing that allows the drive to reorder your commands to give you even better performance with less host based processing being required. The drive always knows best what data is quickest to get at.
Chris
Ever since 40MB/sec SCSI came out...there really is no need for anything faster in a workstation...until hard drives become dramatically faster. Most workstations have no more than two hard drives (get it? 2 X 20MB/sec = 40MB/sec).
This is quite bogus. A single drive can easily exceed 40MB/s sequential transfer and your hard drive is the slowest storage device on most pcs.
I still don't see 10,000 or 15,000RPM IDE drives, do you?
It is quite a bit more difficult to build a 10k or 15k drive than it is to build a 7.2k rpm drive. You don't see 10 or 15k ide drives only because of cost. Probably in the next year or so you'll see the first 10k ide drive. 10k is almost a necessity with todays computers as 7200 has such a high average access time.
Chris
I enjoyed the first game so much, wonder when Blizzard is going to make a second one... I've even been playing through the original games single player missions again under Wine.
Chris
Sure, drives will fail in continuous use, but running them for an hour every two weeks, and in this case, doing an archive (dd if=/dev/hda1 of dev=/hdb1) where the head isn't skittering back and forth a million times, isn't going to cause much wear and tear.
Huh? The head doesn't touch the media so there is no wear there. The coil doesn't touch the magnets so also no wear. And somehow I think the wear on the pivot bearing of the actuator is the least of your worries with drive reliability. More of an issue is head degredadion although this is planned for in the design of drives, and bearing failure due to overheating. Most harddrives should last through 5+ years of continuous use.
It requires Wine. Blech! And to think I thought they had actually cracked the codec.
I'm not sure what the issue is here. They can make it require only the wine libraries that are responsible for loading and interfacing with the dll, this would be seamless and would be packaged with the mplayer binaries. You probably wouldn't even notice. Running the native dlls is much easier and legal, compared with reverse engineering a copyrighted and patented codec.
These huge blacktop lots get damned hot in the summer, so why no provide structures to shade then and put solar pannels on the structures?
;-)
A very neat idea. Of course this is contingent upon solar cells becoming efficent enough to pay for themselves in a shorter period of time, but even still it makes a lot of sense. Too bad people can't look beyond the next 20 years. We are far too slow when it comes to increasing efficency. Now if we started running out of oil... then we would see some change
Does anyone actually use P2P networks for legal uses?!?!?!?!?!? e.g. not mp3/porn..
Since when was porn illegal? mp3 is just a file format, there are loads of stuff in mp3 form that is legal like bootlegs, private recordings etc.
And some Atheist would keep telling us that such contradictions disprove Christianity in general (which they don't)
These contraditions are in fact errors, and there are a great many errors in the bible at that. If you accept that these errors(contradicions) exist then you have to resonably believe that other facts presented might also be incorrect. Without the bible as a source of truth Christianity becomes arbitrary, something that people believe in because they were told they should(not that this excludes all other religions though).
In retrospect, however, I wish he had won his re-election bid for Senate. He's doing much more harm now than he ever did as a Senator.
Then couldn't he have appointed a replacement for his Senate seat when he moved into his position as Attorney General? He would have done more harm in that case I would think.
The advantages are proof (i.e. unbreakable) against brute force attacks and known-plaintext attacks (unlike the OTP). The disadvantage is carrying around a very large digital key (which could easily fit on one of those USB memory key fobs).
This sounds just like the dozens of crypto products that Bruce Schneier routinely pokes fun of in his cryptogram newsletters on www.counterpane.com
Now, the real reason why this is bogus is that OTPs require a key of the same length as the original message. If you can securely transmit a key as large as the orignal file then why didn't you just transmit the original message via the same mechanism? The whole reason people spend years developing encryption such as AES/DES/RSA is to keep the key length short for any arbitrary length message. The shorter his "many time pad" is or the more it repeats the weaker it becomes. The whole strength behind the OTP is the randomness of the encrypted result, something lost if a short pad is used over and over again. His scheme may be novel but is more than likely not at all secure and practical at the same time.
That's something that's always bugged me. Why is it that the heads are allowed enough flexibility to touch the heads in the first place? Why not make them rigid enough so they stay in a fixed location relative to the platter regardless of air movement?
Like other people have replied already, tolerances are the issue. The gap between the head and disk during operation of the drive is crazy small. The wobble in the spindle bearing is easily more than this gap, if your head was in a fixed position at one point it would be too far away from the surface to operate, at another it would be digging into the surface. The only real solution is to have it fly above the surface. If it flies too high then there won't be enough lift and it will fly lower, if it flies too low then there will be extra lift so it flies higher. It is a continuously adjusting system based on the flow of air in the drive and it certainly works quite well. I don't think any harddrive today could be built with a fixed height head, there just isn't enough precision in a device as large as a harddrive.