IF you go into a resteraunt, do you refuse to pay just because you didnt like what you ordered off the menu?
Well, yeah, actually, I do refuse. I've done it before and wouldn't hesitate to do it again. And I would just love to hear you tell me that if a restaurant serves me swill I can't stomach I'm somehow obligated to pay for it.
Huh? Nobody ever hears about the scriptwriter. I would be pleased beyond all measure if the scripwriter got the same fame and recognition that, say, the lead actors and director got. It's a lot harder to screw up a good story than to turn a bad story into a good movie. Yet nobody pays any attention to who wrote the story.
Re:Nice technology
on
Broadband Blimps
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· Score: 2, Informative
135 _micro_seconds. Times two to get back down to ground-based networks, and you're at a whopping 0.270 milliseconds. I just pinged google and got return times of around 100 milliseconds. So the signal propogation time is essentially totally insignificant.
I thought that too! How the hell can they be running out of namespace when by my calculations there should be 31^17 total available codes? That's like 2.2x10^25; at 60 million new ones every year it ought to last 7 million times longer than the current age of the universe. If they're running out, it's due to atrociously lousy allocation of subsets, not inherent problems with the length of the VIN.
I dunno about this one. Did a globexplorer.com satellite photo search on that address. It's a pretty posh neighborhood, but doesn't have the outrageously ostentatious, "fiddling while Rome burns" feel that I think someone like McBride would demand. He's made a boatload of money from his antics, and I can't believe that SLC real estate is altogether expensive.
Though to confirm another followup post, Darl's middle initial is indeed C.
Hmmm, perhaps a poor choice of words. It means that you get 1/5th as much per unit area as solar cells (2% instead of 10%). But the area doesn't consist of solar cells, just simple plastic sheeting, pennies per square meter. The only thing you really have to spend money on is the tower and the turbines. And they can outlast solar cells by an order of magnitude.
Australia is the one building a 200MW solar chimney. Totally clean, ridiculously simple, virtually no maintenance. The test plant in Spain ran on automatic for months. So I'm willing to cut them a little slack in this area. The USA, OTOH, went to war to make sure it can keep burning its oil.
Depends on the type of solar power. Solar cells deny the land any other use, but a solar chimney, while only 1/5th as efficient, makes the land even easier to farm. And the ground-covering equipment is cheap as all hell.
Orbital dynamics is fun stuff. Think of it this way. You reach earth orbit with your cargo, point your rocket at the sun, and fire away. Now you have imparted some sun-ward motion onto your ship. _But_, you have not cancelled any of the lateral motion you had to begin with. So now you are still in orbit, just a slightly funkier one. The only way to take your simple approach is if your starting point is one with little or no relative motion to the sun, which would make this a moot point since the sun would start pulling you in regardless. As the parent said, to correctly plunge yourself into the sun, you have to remove your movement relative to it. This causes your orbit to degrade and you fall into the gravity well and stabilize at a new orbit dictated by your final speed. You officially dead when this orbit lies inside the photosphere.
(By Larry Niven. Written assuming the direction of your orbit is west to east) East takes you Out (gives you a larger orbit) Out takes you West (ellipsizes your orbit) West takes you In (gives you a smaller orbit) In takes you East (ellipsizes your orbit at 90 degrees to the other)
When NASA sends a probe out, they don't actually 'send' it anywhere (Engage!). They just screw around with its orbit at the right time and the right way so that they get one that takes the probe where they want it to go. This often means applying thrust in what seems like the wrong direction.
They could charge $1000/ton and it'd still be orders of magnitude less than current launch prices.
Re:Blimps do not necesarily crash due to leaks
on
Blimps... In... Space...
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Helium _might_ make sense for the first leg of the trip, if only to placate the "But the Hindenburg!" crowd. But past a few dozen thousand feet, there's no point. As you said, there's not really enough internal overpressure for the incredible diffusive properties of H2 to matter so much, and there's not even enough oxygen around for it to combust with! You'd quadruple your payload capacity at a stroke. And both H2 and He have liquification points far below the temperature around LEO, so no worries there.
No good, because in the world with the RIAA, $.05 copies are illegal, even though photocopiers are commonplace. Legally, you have to buy the whole book or not use any of it at all.
Remember the tests on how people reacted to increasingly life-like renderings? Everyone could handle talking manikins and things that were obviously not really human. But past a certain point, they looked almost totally real, but there were enough visual and emotive cues that were just _wrong_ that the audiences likened it to watching a reanimated corpse.
So if you can't be utterly realistic, then you might as well take the artistic license as far as you can go.
The process we do most efficiently is turning steam into electricity...turning fast moving energetic nuclear particles into steam is something we aren't really good at doing.
That depends. Fission reactions usually produce neutrons, which are very hard to turn into electricity. About all we can do is put something heavy in front of them to turn the escaping neutrons into heat, which we then turn into steam, etc, etc.
But if a reaction produced, say, free protons? Much easier! They have an electric charge, so we don't need old-fashioned matter to capture their kinetic energy. We can use magnetic fields, and converting forces applied to magnetic fields to electricity is something we do even better than steam. Isn't there a form of fusion that does exactly that?
Magnetohydrodynamics is sort of a cross between the two. Use heat to propel an electrically conductive fluid through a magnetic field. It's like a steam generator but with (theoretically) no moving parts.
Great. You can't fly because a computer thinks your life is shifty-looking.
Kindly remember the US government's idea of what qualifies as 'suspicious'. People clenching their fists. People carrying an almanac. People who publicly oppose Bush and his adminstration's policies. People with names vaguely similar to that of other suspicious people. All of them have either been officially declared suspicious or unofficially red-flagged because someone higher up didn't like them. You want to be the one to tell a person they're never allowed to leave town because they once wore a 'suspiciously' heavy jacket on a warm day?
Ahhh, so in other words, once you are convicted, mere evidence of innocence is no grounds to overturn a judgment? Since when does due process stop once they find you guilty? For that matter, since when does it stop once they execute you, i.e. is it impossible to get a family member's name cleared posthumously?
First off, I am not the first poster; there may be some other quote he had in mind. This was simply the most relevent and striking example I could find.
Secondly, how about "nor shall any person... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"?
Now call me crazy, but "specifically ignoring evidence proving one's innocence", even if it is post-conviction, doesn't really strike me as falling in line with 'due process'. There's nothing in the Constitution about appeals, or the principle of "innocent until proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt", but we don't claim they shouldn't exist either. There's more than a few cases in text, tradition, and contemporary practice that all of these things are part and parcel and getting a fair trial, and hence, part of the law of the land.
And as the first response to my post asked, if the Justice system claims that it is under no obligation to ensure that it has dispensed justice correctly, then just what is it's job? To erect big Greco-Roman buildings and destroy innocent lives whenever possible?
"There is no basis in text, tradition, or even contemporary practice for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction."
"If the system shocks the dissenter's conscience perhaps they should doubt the calibration of their consciences."
True on all counts, and all things being equal, it would probably be a fair enough system. But considering the price of attorneys and jury consultants these days, I'd say that things are rather far from being equal. It's a massive advantage to those with deep pockets.
Voir Dire in theory is pretty simple. Attorneys ask the prospective jurors questions trying to locate possible bias against their case. If they feel it's warranted, they can use one of their preemptory challenges to have the juror removed. And I agree with you that this sort of thing is a must have.
But some states let it go wayyy too far. North Carolina, for instance, allows for 16 total challenges in civil cases, 8 from each side. Capital cases are even worse, with 12 for each. It's almost like an entire trial before the trial. Now I have to ask, if you are having such a hard time finding 'fair and impartial' jurors that you have to be able to replace the entire jury box once and perhaps twice, isn't it a good sign that A) you have no case or B) you should have filed for a change of venue?
My feelings on jury nullification are mixed. On the one hand, it is a fantastic way to have stupid and bad laws nixed when some fool prosecutor tries to apply them. But like everything else, it can be taken to unhealthy extremes. Frankly, I just think that if one side is allowed to say, "You _have_ to judge the facts according to the letter of the law", which is patently untrue, then the other should be allowed to explain nullification. As it stands, judges almost always allow the former but never the latter. For instance, the federal prosecution of the medical marijuana guy a few months back; after the trial the jury was _livid_ when they found out that the 'crime' was explicitly legal by state law and that they had been prohibited from learning that. The feds completely ignored the state laws, and while this can be either good or bad (e.g., Brown vs Board of Education), the jury has to be informed of not only the facts of the case but the facts of the law as well. I mean, what's the point of having a jury be the final arbiter of law and order if we're then not even allowed to tell them the rules of the game?
Your always gonna have problems lifting a body in one piece. Apparently, the best thing to do is cut up a corpse into six pieces and pile it all together. Then when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because there's no good in leaving it in a deep freeze for your mum to discover now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You gotta starve the pigs for a few days then the sight of a chopped up body would look like curry to a pissant. You gotta shave the head of your victim and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggy's digestion. You could do this afterwards of course but you don't wanna go sifting through pig shit now do ya? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to do the job in one sitting so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs two-hundred pounds in about...eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of un-cooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression: "as greedy as a pig."
The potential for abuse by people with an axe to grind are horrendous, but how do you propose to solve it? As it stands, attorneys are given the power to get a fair and impartial jury by... by selecting only people they think will vote in their favor? It's like affirmative action; it's still racism/sexism/jury tampering/whatever, but since it's "to make things fair", then it's all right. Huh?
We want a way of removing jurors who can be shown to be totally unsuitable for the case, I agree, but not so much that it becomes just another tool of the lawyers. I would suggest that each side gets to arbitrarily remove exactly _one_ juror with an option for one more _if_ they can convince the judge that he or she is not fit for the job. This business with 4 to 10 challenges has to stop.
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Well, yeah, actually, I do refuse. I've done it before and wouldn't hesitate to do it again. And I would just love to hear you tell me that if a restaurant serves me swill I can't stomach I'm somehow obligated to pay for it.
Huh? Nobody ever hears about the scriptwriter. I would be pleased beyond all measure if the scripwriter got the same fame and recognition that, say, the lead actors and director got. It's a lot harder to screw up a good story than to turn a bad story into a good movie. Yet nobody pays any attention to who wrote the story.
135 _micro_seconds. Times two to get back down to ground-based networks, and you're at a whopping 0.270 milliseconds. I just pinged google and got return times of around 100 milliseconds. So the signal propogation time is essentially totally insignificant.
I thought that too! How the hell can they be running out of namespace when by my calculations there should be 31^17 total available codes? That's like 2.2x10^25; at 60 million new ones every year it ought to last 7 million times longer than the current age of the universe. If they're running out, it's due to atrociously lousy allocation of subsets, not inherent problems with the length of the VIN.
Though to confirm another followup post, Darl's middle initial is indeed C.
No, guessing a combination shouldn't be a crime. Stealing your luggage and the stuff in it is the crime here.
Hmmm, perhaps a poor choice of words. It means that you get 1/5th as much per unit area as solar cells (2% instead of 10%). But the area doesn't consist of solar cells, just simple plastic sheeting, pennies per square meter. The only thing you really have to spend money on is the tower and the turbines. And they can outlast solar cells by an order of magnitude.
Australia is the one building a 200MW solar chimney. Totally clean, ridiculously simple, virtually no maintenance. The test plant in Spain ran on automatic for months. So I'm willing to cut them a little slack in this area. The USA, OTOH, went to war to make sure it can keep burning its oil.
Depends on the type of solar power. Solar cells deny the land any other use, but a solar chimney, while only 1/5th as efficient, makes the land even easier to farm. And the ground-covering equipment is cheap as all hell.
(By Larry Niven. Written assuming the direction of your orbit is west to east)
East takes you Out (gives you a larger orbit)
Out takes you West (ellipsizes your orbit)
West takes you In (gives you a smaller orbit)
In takes you East (ellipsizes your orbit at 90 degrees to the other)
When NASA sends a probe out, they don't actually 'send' it anywhere (Engage!). They just screw around with its orbit at the right time and the right way so that they get one that takes the probe where they want it to go. This often means applying thrust in what seems like the wrong direction.
They could charge $1000/ton and it'd still be orders of magnitude less than current launch prices.
Helium _might_ make sense for the first leg of the trip, if only to placate the "But the Hindenburg!" crowd. But past a few dozen thousand feet, there's no point. As you said, there's not really enough internal overpressure for the incredible diffusive properties of H2 to matter so much, and there's not even enough oxygen around for it to combust with! You'd quadruple your payload capacity at a stroke. And both H2 and He have liquification points far below the temperature around LEO, so no worries there.
No good, because in the world with the RIAA, $.05 copies are illegal, even though photocopiers are commonplace. Legally, you have to buy the whole book or not use any of it at all.
Who was it around here that had as their sig, "After 20 years, MTV has finally completed its evolution into 'The Shiny Things' network"?
It's like the switch to 'talkies' all over again. The looks of the actors will matter less than their ability to emote convincingly into a microphone.
Remember the tests on how people reacted to increasingly life-like renderings? Everyone could handle talking manikins and things that were obviously not really human. But past a certain point, they looked almost totally real, but there were enough visual and emotive cues that were just _wrong_ that the audiences likened it to watching a reanimated corpse.
So if you can't be utterly realistic, then you might as well take the artistic license as far as you can go.
That depends. Fission reactions usually produce neutrons, which are very hard to turn into electricity. About all we can do is put something heavy in front of them to turn the escaping neutrons into heat, which we then turn into steam, etc, etc.
But if a reaction produced, say, free protons? Much easier! They have an electric charge, so we don't need old-fashioned matter to capture their kinetic energy. We can use magnetic fields, and converting forces applied to magnetic fields to electricity is something we do even better than steam. Isn't there a form of fusion that does exactly that?
Magnetohydrodynamics is sort of a cross between the two. Use heat to propel an electrically conductive fluid through a magnetic field. It's like a steam generator but with (theoretically) no moving parts.
Kindly remember the US government's idea of what qualifies as 'suspicious'. People clenching their fists. People carrying an almanac. People who publicly oppose Bush and his adminstration's policies. People with names vaguely similar to that of other suspicious people. All of them have either been officially declared suspicious or unofficially red-flagged because someone higher up didn't like them. You want to be the one to tell a person they're never allowed to leave town because they once wore a 'suspiciously' heavy jacket on a warm day?
Ahhh, so in other words, once you are convicted, mere evidence of innocence is no grounds to overturn a judgment? Since when does due process stop once they find you guilty? For that matter, since when does it stop once they execute you, i.e. is it impossible to get a family member's name cleared posthumously?
Secondly, how about "nor shall any person ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"?
Now call me crazy, but "specifically ignoring evidence proving one's innocence", even if it is post-conviction, doesn't really strike me as falling in line with 'due process'. There's nothing in the Constitution about appeals, or the principle of "innocent until proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt", but we don't claim they shouldn't exist either. There's more than a few cases in text, tradition, and contemporary practice that all of these things are part and parcel and getting a fair trial, and hence, part of the law of the land.
And as the first response to my post asked, if the Justice system claims that it is under no obligation to ensure that it has dispensed justice correctly, then just what is it's job? To erect big Greco-Roman buildings and destroy innocent lives whenever possible?
That most excellent champion of justice and personal role model to everyone here on /., Antonin Scalia
"There is no basis in text, tradition, or even contemporary practice for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction."
"If the system shocks the dissenter's conscience perhaps they should doubt the calibration of their consciences."
Voir Dire in theory is pretty simple. Attorneys ask the prospective jurors questions trying to locate possible bias against their case. If they feel it's warranted, they can use one of their preemptory challenges to have the juror removed. And I agree with you that this sort of thing is a must have.
But some states let it go wayyy too far. North Carolina, for instance, allows for 16 total challenges in civil cases, 8 from each side. Capital cases are even worse, with 12 for each. It's almost like an entire trial before the trial. Now I have to ask, if you are having such a hard time finding 'fair and impartial' jurors that you have to be able to replace the entire jury box once and perhaps twice, isn't it a good sign that A) you have no case or B) you should have filed for a change of venue?
My feelings on jury nullification are mixed. On the one hand, it is a fantastic way to have stupid and bad laws nixed when some fool prosecutor tries to apply them. But like everything else, it can be taken to unhealthy extremes. Frankly, I just think that if one side is allowed to say, "You _have_ to judge the facts according to the letter of the law", which is patently untrue, then the other should be allowed to explain nullification. As it stands, judges almost always allow the former but never the latter. For instance, the federal prosecution of the medical marijuana guy a few months back; after the trial the jury was _livid_ when they found out that the 'crime' was explicitly legal by state law and that they had been prohibited from learning that. The feds completely ignored the state laws, and while this can be either good or bad (e.g., Brown vs Board of Education), the jury has to be informed of not only the facts of the case but the facts of the law as well. I mean, what's the point of having a jury be the final arbiter of law and order if we're then not even allowed to tell them the rules of the game?
In NC we have a LOT of hog farms
I think I'll avoid North Carolina from now on.
We want a way of removing jurors who can be shown to be totally unsuitable for the case, I agree, but not so much that it becomes just another tool of the lawyers. I would suggest that each side gets to arbitrarily remove exactly _one_ juror with an option for one more _if_ they can convince the judge that he or she is not fit for the job. This business with 4 to 10 challenges has to stop.