You apparantly believe it is unrelated to oil. Then why the hatred? Is it because the West is so free? Are they jealous? Are they greedy?
Actually, if you tune out the CNN carping, and read something intelligible about the region--I recommend Noam Chomsky--you would see that it is exactly oil that causes the hatred. If this fuel cell somehow magically ended oils reign as the single most important resource the Middle East would no longer find itself a victim of Western brutality.
The West puts tyrants in power that are hated by the populace so that they are totally reliant on the West to stay in power. Middle Easterners have never understood why they have not been able to benefit from their regions natural wealth. Don't be fooled by the riches of the minority ruling class, the Middle East is a place of astounding poverty. And the West has kept it that way with violence and oppression. That is the reason for the hatred.
The money is mostly flowing to the same place the oil is flowing.
Haven't you ever wondered why oil cost about the same amount as bottled water? Doesn't that seem unnatural to you? Don't you think there must be something more than market forces keeping it that way?
You are arguing that conservation of mass-energy forbids you from creating a mass, m, of anti-matter using less than mc^2 of energy. But, you say, this is no problem, because when you combine it with its anti-particle, also of mass m, which is likely freely available you will liberate 2mc^2 of energy. So as long as you use less than 2mc^2 of energy to produce a anti-particle of mass, m, you are ahead.
But fundamental particles are always produced as matter anti-matter pairs. So you will find when you try to make your anti-particle of mass m you can't do it without making a particle of mass m at the same time.
Fortunately, coming out on top is not the point of a fuel source anyway, as many others have pointed out.
Re:Let's not kill each other, let's go on BattleBo
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 1
Right On
Maybe the writer forgot that there were a large number of Northern Alliance troops that did alot of the dirty work for us.
It's not that Microsoft will be going out of their way to make sure things break on Win95; they just won't pay any attention to Win95 anymore. Stuff might even work, especially since MS will still be testing against Win98, which is similar to Win95.
Ahahahahhahahhahahhahahhaha! Have you ever written a line of code? Man I thought I was an optimist.
Perhaps our logically flawed inductive reasoning will someday leads us to a theory that is self evident. In other words, maybe experiments guide us today, but someday we will will find a theory that is so clearly true that no further experimentation is needed. This was the goal of the early physicists; they despised experiment.
Man I can hardly wait! Then I can go build boats with my little bother!
What we really need is more Albert Einsteins working in the Patent Office!
Seriously, it's always tempting to blame stuff like this on "stupidity" either from the company or the patent office, but I don't think that's the problem.
The root of the problem is that corporations have been granted personhood and have enormous resources--more than any person--to defend their rights. No matter how you perfect the guidelines for granting patents, corporations can still abuse them at the expense of the general public, because they have the money to fight things out in court. Even though we all think this patent is absurd, how are the courts going to hear our opinion?
Here's how it works: You can buy a license to use your existing
Windows XP disc to install the software on another PC for up to 10
percent less than the original cost of the program. So, for example,
at Microsoft's own Web-based store, if you bought the Windows XP Home
Upgrade version for $99, you can buy an additional license for that
product for $89. If you bought a full version of the software for
$199, a second license will run you about $189.
Thats an unbelievably inefficient solution you have proposed. The problem is that we are studying quantum mechanical effects so everything we do is extremely statistical. Most of the time when an event happens in our detector, it is some trivial well understood event. If we didn't somehow ignore some (not all!) of these events, we wouldn't have enough space left over for interesting events that involve rare processes.
But how is this Science? Because it is extremely reproducible. We take enough unbiased data to understand the effect of more biased triggers. Then the biased triggers give us lots of rare events to study.
Keep an mind that our analysis still happens offline, we just have to work very hard to extract a signal while we are taking data
Sadly, I don't think that the increcible growth of corporate power is restricted to the USA... think WTO.
Its amazing how ballsy these guys are getting! It reminds me of a quote from the Princess "The more you tighten you grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." These idiots will lose in the long run.
Domestic Terrorism as defined in section 803 of the USA Act (S.1510) and section 309 of the PATRIOT Act (H.R.2975) includes activities that are dangerous to human life, violate criminal law, and appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.
This definition goes far beyond the usual meaning of the word terrorist. For instance, it includes political protests in cases where the protests are dangerous and illegal, as in the WTO protests. These laws will be used to crack down on dissenters; Federal Racketeering laws (RICO) were used to prosecute anti-Abortion activists! So don't tell me that these laws will only effect terrorists. And despite the title, many of the changes are not even restricted to cases of domestic terrorism.
And you are completely wrong about the probable cause issue! The removal of judicial oversight is the main objection organizations like the ACLU have against this bill. For instance section 101 of the PATRIOT Act and Section 216 of the USA extend Pen Register or Trap Trace Orders to cover "dialing, routing and addressing". These orders, which formely were used to obtain a list of phone numbers called from a particular phone, have essentially no judicial oversight. They only require that an agent of law enforcement state that the information is likely to be useful in an investigation and the Judge must sign the order. There is no probable cause requirement for Pen Register or Trap Trace Orders, and now they are being extended to cover things like Web Sites visited, e-mails sent, and so on.
Current law gives the FBI the authority to conduct secret physical searches and wiretaps to obtain "foreign intelligence information." Section 218 of the USA Act and 153 of the PATRIOT Act replaces the requirement that intelligence gathering is the primary purpose with the requirement that it is a significant purpose. So the FBI can run around the probable cause requirement of a criminal investigation by tacking a foreign intelligence justification on the side. And there is no judicial review because this is a secret.
Amazing. You hit on all three of the major objections in your attempt to console us. Now do you see why those of us who read the legislation (or just visited the ACLU or similar home pages) are alarmed!!!
Doing away with the electoral college so that a vote from Rhode Island counts as much as a vote from California? Not on your life!
Alot of people get this backwards. The electoral college favors states like RI by giving them more representatives per citizen. The number of electoral college votes is the number of senators plus the number of representatives. Since the number of representatives are proportional to population but the number of senators is always two this favors smaller states in the electoral college. In other words, the two senate votes are shared by fewer people. Candidates may spend more time in big states but that wouldn't and shouldn't change if the electoral college was revoked...
Can Someone please explain how encryption alone can be used to hurt someone?
We regulate things like guns, explosives, automobiles and airplanes because these things, if used maliciously or even just incorrectly, can hurt people. When something can be used to hurt someone, most people don't mind giving up some freedom with respect to that thing.
But Encryption is NOT in the class of things like guns, explosives, automobiles and airplanes that can hurt people. I'm not saying that encryption can't be used by people who want to aquire the kinds of things that can hurt people, but only that encryption is not one of those things.
So if law enforcement wants to stop people from hurting people, they don't NEED to regulate encryption the way they regulate hand guns. They can stop people from hurting people when they do something BESIDES talk.
That is why I am willing to give up my right to a hand gun, but NOT to give up my right to a private conversation.
Its hard for me to imagine a copy-prevention scheme that will work. Whatever reassurances the hardware needs that an operation is permissible have to be provided by the operating system. And while we may have to buy there hardware, we can write our own OSs. They can build whatever protections they want, but they have to trust the OS, and an OS can always lie.
But its even worse because Napster users aren't even committing a crime! Listen to this steaming pile from the fated decision:
Napster users engage in commercail use of the copyrighted materials
largely because (1) "a host user sending a file cannot be said to engage
in a personal use when distributing that file to an anonymous requester"
and (2) "Napster users get for free something they would ordinarily have
to buy."
By this logic a canned food drive is a commercial activity because food (which ordinarily one has to buy) is given to anonymous recipients. Man this upsets me. An ordinary person would think that charging money is what constitutes commercial use.
The music industry stole music from us. We are just taking it back!
No its not the same, because music isn't licensed . Try calling Sony the next time your Bob Dylan album starts skipping halfway through Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.
The copy prevention zealots are fighting a losing battle. People are running around copying mp3s because they intuitively understand that artificially limiting an unlimited resource for the purpose of recompense is absurd. Imagine you could print out a steak dinner dinner or new sports car at home. How long would people stand to go hungry or carless in large numbers, just because its the only way we can think of to ensure that the inventors of cars and steaks are repayed?
Just think how much more aware people are becoming! I had no idea about "Fair Use" until the Napster issue took off. I thought everytime you made a mix for a friend you were breaking a law! Now I am aware of a new right that I will vigorously defend.
Evolution has nothing to do with the Big Bang. One theory could be overthrown without disturbing the other.
Evolution is the theory that species change and new species emerge through the combined actions of mutation and natural selection.
Cosmology is the branch of physics which attempts to explain the large scale dynamics of the universe. The standard model of cosmology begins with a big bang.
Although we cannot replicate the entire effect of either theory in the laboratory (I
sure hope the Relativistic Heavy-ion Collider (RHC) doesn't accidently replicate the latter...) that does not place them outside the realm of scientific inquiry. A scientists makes predictions using a theory and checks those predictions. If they agree, she gains confidence in the theory. If they do not, she reconsiders the theory.
With respect to cosmology, we make predictions about observable phenomena in the current universe based on the standard model of cosmology. If our predictions are correct, as with the spectacular discovery of the Cosmic Background Radiation after its prediction, we begin to gain confidence in the theory. But we never claim to be right .
No one can prove anything to arbitrary philosophical confidence, but that doesn't stop a scientist from doing his job, or make science a meaningless pursuit. It does not make science and religion the same thing.
We are more than welcome to "get along". Personally, I think that religion plays an important role in society.
But this does not mean that a Creationist's beliefs are fundamentally the same as a scientist's beliefs. In particular, it doesn't mean that Creationism needs to be taught as an alternative to evolution, or that there even is a reasonable "God vs Darwin" debate.
See it isn't a problem for a scientist that This particle appeared out of NOWHERE as long as the resulting theory has predictive power (e.g. the Cosmic Background Radiation).
But lets not lump cosmology and evolution together. Evolution is a theory because it has predictive power. We expect to see the emergence of new species under certain laboratory conditions, and we do. We expect that species diversity varies proportionally to the stability of the climate, and sure enough, the bottom of the ocean is hostile yet diverse.
Scientific Creationism has no predictive power, and hence it is not scientific.
There's no need for a scientist to be offended by the idea of God or Creationism (I agree some do), but she is entitled to be upset if they are considered scientific.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does the Middle East hate the West?
You apparantly believe it is unrelated to oil. Then why the hatred? Is it because the West is so free? Are they jealous? Are they greedy?
Actually, if you tune out the CNN carping, and read something intelligible about the region--I recommend Noam Chomsky--you would see that it is exactly oil that causes the hatred. If this fuel cell somehow magically ended oils reign as the single most important resource the Middle East would no longer find itself a victim of Western brutality.
The West puts tyrants in power that are hated by the populace so that they are totally reliant on the West to stay in power. Middle Easterners have never understood why they have not been able to benefit from their regions natural wealth. Don't be fooled by the riches of the minority ruling class, the Middle East is a place of astounding poverty. And the West has kept it that way with violence and oppression. That is the reason for the hatred.
The money is mostly flowing to the same place the oil is flowing.
Haven't you ever wondered why oil cost about the same amount as bottled water? Doesn't that seem unnatural to you? Don't you think there must be something more than market forces keeping it that way?
Unfortunately this is impossible.
You are arguing that conservation of mass-energy forbids you from creating a mass, m, of anti-matter using less than mc^2 of energy. But, you say, this is no problem, because when you combine it with its anti-particle, also of mass m, which is likely freely available you will liberate 2mc^2 of energy. So as long as you use less than 2mc^2 of energy to produce a anti-particle of mass, m, you are ahead.
But fundamental particles are always produced as matter anti-matter pairs. So you will find when you try to make your anti-particle of mass m you can't do it without making a particle of mass m at the same time.
Fortunately, coming out on top is not the point of a fuel source anyway, as many others have pointed out.
Right On
Maybe the writer forgot that there were a large number of Northern Alliance troops that did alot of the dirty work for us.
It's not that Microsoft will be going out of their way to make sure things break on Win95; they just won't pay any attention to Win95 anymore. Stuff might even work, especially since MS will still be testing against Win98, which is similar to Win95.
Ahahahahhahahhahahhahahhaha! Have you ever written a line of code? Man I thought I was an optimist.
I'm not sure that is necessarily true.
Perhaps our logically flawed inductive reasoning will someday leads us to a theory that is self evident. In other words, maybe experiments guide us today, but someday we will will find a theory that is so clearly true that no further experimentation is needed. This was the goal of the early physicists; they despised experiment.
Man I can hardly wait! Then I can go build boats with my little bother!
What we really need is more Albert Einsteins working in the Patent Office!
Seriously, it's always tempting to blame stuff like this on "stupidity" either from the company or the patent office, but I don't think that's the problem.
The root of the problem is that corporations have been granted personhood and have enormous resources--more than any person--to defend their rights. No matter how you perfect the guidelines for granting patents, corporations can still abuse them at the expense of the general public, because they have the money to fight things out in court. Even though we all think this patent is absurd, how are the courts going to hear our opinion?
Here's how it works: You can buy a license to use your existing Windows XP disc to install the software on another PC for up to 10 percent less than the original cost of the program. So, for example, at Microsoft's own Web-based store, if you bought the Windows XP Home Upgrade version for $99, you can buy an additional license for that product for $89. If you bought a full version of the software for $199, a second license will run you about $189.
Nice math!
Thats an unbelievably inefficient solution you have proposed. The problem is that we are studying quantum mechanical effects so everything we do is extremely statistical. Most of the time when an event happens in our detector, it is some trivial well understood event. If we didn't somehow ignore some (not all!) of these events, we wouldn't have enough space left over for interesting events that involve rare processes.
But how is this Science? Because it is extremely reproducible. We take enough unbiased data to understand the effect of more biased triggers. Then the biased triggers give us lots of rare events to study.
Keep an mind that our analysis still happens offline, we just have to work very hard to extract a signal while we are taking data
Sadly, I don't think that the increcible growth of corporate power is restricted to the USA... think WTO.
Its amazing how ballsy these guys are getting! It reminds me of a quote from the Princess "The more you tighten you grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." These idiots will lose in the long run.
Domestic Terrorism as defined in section 803 of the USA Act (S.1510) and section 309 of the PATRIOT Act (H.R.2975) includes activities that are dangerous to human life, violate criminal law, and appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.
This definition goes far beyond the usual meaning of the word terrorist. For instance, it includes political protests in cases where the protests are dangerous and illegal, as in the WTO protests. These laws will be used to crack down on dissenters; Federal Racketeering laws (RICO) were used to prosecute anti-Abortion activists! So don't tell me that these laws will only effect terrorists. And despite the title, many of the changes are not even restricted to cases of domestic terrorism.
And you are completely wrong about the probable cause issue! The removal of judicial oversight is the main objection organizations like the ACLU have against this bill. For instance section 101 of the PATRIOT Act and Section 216 of the USA extend Pen Register or Trap Trace Orders to cover "dialing, routing and addressing". These orders, which formely were used to obtain a list of phone numbers called from a particular phone, have essentially no judicial oversight. They only require that an agent of law enforcement state that the information is likely to be useful in an investigation and the Judge must sign the order. There is no probable cause requirement for Pen Register or Trap Trace Orders, and now they are being extended to cover things like Web Sites visited, e-mails sent, and so on.
Current law gives the FBI the authority to conduct secret physical searches and wiretaps to obtain "foreign intelligence information." Section 218 of the USA Act and 153 of the PATRIOT Act replaces the requirement that intelligence gathering is the primary purpose with the requirement that it is a significant purpose. So the FBI can run around the probable cause requirement of a criminal investigation by tacking a foreign intelligence justification on the side. And there is no judicial review because this is a secret.
Amazing. You hit on all three of the major objections in your attempt to console us. Now do you see why those of us who read the legislation (or just visited the ACLU or similar home pages) are alarmed!!!
Doing away with the electoral college so that a vote from Rhode Island counts as much as a vote from California? Not on your life!
Alot of people get this backwards. The electoral college favors states like RI by giving them more representatives per citizen. The number of electoral college votes is the number of senators plus the number of representatives. Since the number of representatives are proportional to population but the number of senators is always two this favors smaller states in the electoral college. In other words, the two senate votes are shared by fewer people. Candidates may spend more time in big states but that wouldn't and shouldn't change if the electoral college was revoked...
Can Someone please explain how encryption alone can be used to hurt someone?
We regulate things like guns, explosives, automobiles and airplanes because these things, if used maliciously or even just incorrectly, can hurt people. When something can be used to hurt someone, most people don't mind giving up some freedom with respect to that thing.
But Encryption is NOT in the class of things like guns, explosives, automobiles and airplanes that can hurt people. I'm not saying that encryption can't be used by people who want to aquire the kinds of things that can hurt people, but only that encryption is not one of those things.
So if law enforcement wants to stop people from hurting people, they don't NEED to regulate encryption the way they regulate hand guns. They can stop people from hurting people when they do something BESIDES talk.
That is why I am willing to give up my right to a hand gun, but NOT to give up my right to a private conversation.
Ummmmm. Maybe you have forgotten that MIT is a giant corporation too?
Now I understand why they call it a "Free Market System". Its because once you've got a ton of money, you get more for free.
I can still hear the sound of hands rifling through a huge box of legos. Ahhhhhhhh.
Its hard for me to imagine a copy-prevention scheme that will work. Whatever reassurances the hardware needs that an operation is permissible have to be provided by the operating system. And while we may have to buy there hardware, we can write our own OSs. They can build whatever protections they want, but they have to trust the OS, and an OS can always lie.
By this logic a canned food drive is a commercial activity because food (which ordinarily one has to buy) is given to anonymous recipients. Man this upsets me. An ordinary person would think that charging money is what constitutes commercial use.
The music industry stole music from us. We are just taking it back!
No its not the same, because music isn't licensed . Try calling Sony the next time your Bob Dylan album starts skipping halfway through Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.
Just think how much more aware people are becoming! I had no idea about "Fair Use" until the Napster issue took off. I thought everytime you made a mix for a friend you were breaking a law! Now I am aware of a new right that I will vigorously defend.
If we have six minutes (or even six months)to work with, I'll trust statistics more than a patriot missile.
Evolution is the theory that species change and new species emerge through the combined actions of mutation and natural selection.
Cosmology is the branch of physics which attempts to explain the large scale dynamics of the universe. The standard model of cosmology begins with a big bang.
Although we cannot replicate the entire effect of either theory in the laboratory (I sure hope the Relativistic Heavy-ion Collider (RHC) doesn't accidently replicate the latter...) that does not place them outside the realm of scientific inquiry. A scientists makes predictions using a theory and checks those predictions. If they agree, she gains confidence in the theory. If they do not, she reconsiders the theory.
With respect to cosmology, we make predictions about observable phenomena in the current universe based on the standard model of cosmology. If our predictions are correct, as with the spectacular discovery of the Cosmic Background Radiation after its prediction, we begin to gain confidence in the theory. But we never claim to be right .
No one can prove anything to arbitrary philosophical confidence, but that doesn't stop a scientist from doing his job, or make science a meaningless pursuit. It does not make science and religion the same thing.
But this does not mean that a Creationist's beliefs are fundamentally the same as a scientist's beliefs. In particular, it doesn't mean that Creationism needs to be taught as an alternative to evolution, or that there even is a reasonable "God vs Darwin" debate.
See it isn't a problem for a scientist that This particle appeared out of NOWHERE as long as the resulting theory has predictive power (e.g. the Cosmic Background Radiation).
But lets not lump cosmology and evolution together. Evolution is a theory because it has predictive power. We expect to see the emergence of new species under certain laboratory conditions, and we do. We expect that species diversity varies proportionally to the stability of the climate, and sure enough, the bottom of the ocean is hostile yet diverse.
Scientific Creationism has no predictive power, and hence it is not scientific.
There's no need for a scientist to be offended by the idea of God or Creationism (I agree some do), but she is entitled to be upset if they are considered scientific.