Since the earth is spinning, the water tends to be forced to the equator by centrifugal force (although I think more correctly it's centripedal force, but whatever).
IMHO, high school physics teachers really dropped the ball in explaining this one. A whole generation of high school graduates is confused about centrifugal vs. centripedal.
A body that is spinning around an axis or orbiting around point must be under continual force. Otherwise, they would simply fly off in a straight line at a tangent to the curve. This is the centripedal force. The centrifugal force is a "pseudo force", which means that it only exists in a non-intertial frame of reference.
Basically, what happens is that when you accelerate (whether in a straight line or in a circle), your inertia feels like a force in your frame of reference. When you sit in a moving car, from your point of view you feel like you are sitting still and the car is moving. We know that when an object is at rest, the forces on it are balanced. Therefore, in your frame of reference you feel a pseudo force which balances out the force that is being applied on the car. The pseudo force is really just the effect of your inertia.
So how does this apply to the water? Well, everything on Earth has inertia, and this inertia wants to keep it going in a straight line, even though the Earth is rotating. Solid objects, such as humans are obviously kept in place by simple static friction and wind resistance. Water and air are more mobile and they are less subject to friction (although they are still very subject to air/water pressure). That is the main reason why wind and ocean currents are very obvious whereas continental drift takes centuries.
So in reality, it is the inertia of the water that makes it more buoyant at the equator. The water at the equator is spinning faster than the water at the poles, so it is slightly less subject to gravity. Therefore it bulges out, "making room" for some extra water from the poles to move towards the equator.
-a
Re:Where is one "located" when on the web?
on
Copyright as Cudgel
·
· Score: 2
I said "but geeks simply don't have the authority to override the laws of sovereign nations." You said that authority doesn't matter, the ability does.
I really don't understand what you mean. If you break the laws of China, that is fine as long as you don't live in China (or visit China). If you run a site that breaks the laws of China, they will undoubtedly block it at the firewall. If you locate the site in China they will shut it down. Where is your "ability"?
and what was the human lifespan 7000 years ago - they were lucky if they made 30.
I believe this kind of thinking has been widely debunked. Mean lifespan != median lifespan != typical lifespan. If you have a high infant mortality rate, that can really skew your average, even though most adults will live to a relatively old age (except in very warlike societies). It says in the Bible that man shall live for 3 score and 10 years, and that was written several years ago. Take a look at some modern "primitive" societies, such as the Inuit or historical accounts of isolated tribes. They all had plenty of tribal elders.
...and he is obviously ignoring the recent flap over the HP-Tru64 su vulnerability.
There's a good chance he has never heard of the HP-Tru64 su vulnerability. He said that he encourages those in the computer security field (but not anybody else) to run and attempt to crack industry software on their own computers (but not anybody else's) - ignoring the fact that this violates the DMCA
Who says this violates the DMCA? The DMCA only applies to hacking systems which protect copyright. HP has threatened to sue over the HP-Tru64 su vulnerability. It's not illegal until they actually follow through with the lawsuit and win.
Sadly, no. The penultimate kernel I built had would never work correctly on my machine. A coworker had the exact same computer, so I just used a copy of his kernel. It didn't have all the options I needed so I was forever trying to improve upon it. I tried to build the kernel using his.config file, but the modules wouldn't build. Getting tech support from him is like pulling teeth so I just gave up. A couple of months ago, I finally built a working kernel myself. I had to hand edit the makefiles and patch up some compile and link errors in the kernel source... I really wasn't expecting that. This one I do have the.config for.
-a
Re:Where is one "located" when on the web?
on
Copyright as Cudgel
·
· Score: 2
That's pretty circular reasoning, don't you think? Geeks complain when laws are enforced that they believe to be unfair. So why are the laws unfair? Too often, the answer is "because they are unenforceable."
At one point, I was trying to improve my chess game by studying the game archive that comes with ChessMaster. After only a few weeks of practice, I discovered that I could predict each move (in the midgame) with uncanny accuracy (80%). However, my chess game didn't actually improve. All I had done was train my brain to be a fuzzy logic analyzer for predicting Kasparov moves against high quality opponents. The basic strategy fails miserably against amateur players (who tend to be less subtle in their attack). One of the ways Kasparov came back to beat Deep Blue in their original match was to suddenly switch strategies to something the machine was not expecting.
Well, sure. I figured that out before I posted, and later confirmed it with a google search (I was still trying to figure out the puzzle without "cheating"). But here he goes asking me to generalize to an N card deck and the one data point he gives me is wrong. I spent quite a while looking for relations between Euler's phi function and the number 7 before I thought to confirm this result. Plus when I eventually looked the problem up, it doesn't look like there's a closed form solution anyway.
-a
Re:Where is one "located" when on the web?
on
Copyright as Cudgel
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, that was really flamebait. Stupid moderators.:-(
If your servers are physically located in Russia and they violate Russian law then don't be surprised if the Russians seize your servers. If your site violates US law then don't come to the US on vacation. If your users are located in China, they have no ability to seize the servers, but they may block them at the firewall, which is what they do.
It may seem unfair to you, but geeks simply don't have the authority to override the laws of sovereign nations.
1. If you publish copyrighted materials on the web, the owner should e-mail you with a cease and desist warning that unless you remove the material you will be sued. 2. If you are a search engine or portal, you should not be liable for linking to the potential copyright-violating site, so long as the case is still pending. 3. If you are a search engine/portal and you cache the material, you should be liable (and named as a co-defendant) should you choose to ignore a cease and desist warning. 4. Once a case has been settled, a search engine/portal must not link to a site or cache pages from the site that has lost the case. 5. If you are a search engine located in or serving pages to a particular country, you must obey the court rulings of that country in this regard.
I have actually seen TVs with built-in decoders, however set-top boxes are far more prevalent. Seriously, forget all that crap about digital being better. The digital receiver is worth $99 just for the browseable TV listings. The Scientific Atlanta box I got from the cable company is pretty crappy so I wouldn't dream of buying it. It has some really obvious flaws, such as the fact that the listings stop working from 12am to 2am every night (I think they skimped on memory and they don't have enough RAM to store a working copy of the listings while they do the update), but iron out those kinks and I'd gladly pay $200 extra for the feature.
A local radio station has been claiming that their broadcast repels mosquitos for several years now. I always thought it was just a publicity stunt, but maybe they have been using the same technology.
Sorry, but are a bunch of Indian programmers gonna buy a car from Yahoo! Autos? Or sign up for Yahoo! Personal?
If they offer a localized version of the site (which they already do for other countries, BTW), and they figure that the average Indian has enough disposable income to make it worthwhile, then I don't see why not. Fucking computer geeks think they're the center of the damn universe....
Everyone on Slashdot likes to call the DMCA a bought-and-paid for law which proves that congress is corrupt, but I am less cynical than that. These are the same people who believe that copyright is evil and ought to be abolished. That is a view that is rather unique to this crowd. Is it possible that congress simply wants to pass a law that will help to protect copyright.
"Cease and desist" letters are a standard part of copyright law. It is too much of a burden on the court system (and copyright holder) for them to go to court to get an injunction everytime they sense a violation. Therefore, the law requires them to attempt to resolve the dispute out of court first. You may consider that a chilling effect, but it is only a chilling effect when one party has the intimidation factor of a large war chest.
I don't know what you mean about "sanctions being effected simply as the result of an accusing party claiming harm". You can request that the offending material be removed, but you can't collect any monetary sanctions without going to court. All you can do is threaten to sue, and you can only do that effectively if the accused party thinks they might lose. If they are 100% confident of winning, they might as well go to court and collect the fine for the nuisance suit.
As I said, I don't believe the DMCA applies here. HP is trying to use an overly broad interpretation of the statute to twist it into something else, and if they go to court they will probably lose.
The chilling effect argument is fine and all, except that it's also an argument for never ever passing any new laws. New legislation is always a bit vague and it usually takes a few test cases to set the legal bounds. That's the risk you take when you do something that is borderline legal, as Elcomsoft did. This case is much different because it is HP that is pushing the boundaries and their claim seems pretty baseless. Big companies had the power of intimidation before the DMCA and they'll still have it tomorrow. It doesn't matter whether the claim has merit, only how much money the litigants have. Hell, I'd be freaked out if a big company threatened to sue me for $1,000,000 for not mowing my lawn.
Still, it's not a great advertisment for their Linux services division. Basically, they are saying that they can't make enough money selling software consulting so they've got to pad out their revenues by selling old-fashioned accounting advice.
Maybe we should wait to see if they win the case before concluding that the DMCA will allow companies to suppress security flaws. It doesn't sound like they have a legal leg to stand on. If SnoSoft doesn't pursue the case, no doubt the EFF will.
Also, releasing hacking tools without giving the company a chance to fix the problem still needs to be illegal under some other law or another. The details in this article were pretty vague. There was some vague allegation that they had known about the bug for a year, but there was nothing to suggest that they had a) informed HP about it or b) given HP a moratorium of "fix it by X date or we're going to release the exploit".
Also, the fact that the "researcher" is named "Phased" kind of makes you wonder about the legitimacy of this "research" group.
A dog barking gives you some random data, it's just not unbiased random data. That's no problem. Just keep XORing it into the transient seed of a PRNG to extract the randomness. It's virtually foolproof.
The Internet survived for 20 odd years in relative obscurity before people thought they could make money off it. Back in '86 I went to an exhibit at Expo '86 where you could send an "electronic mail". I typed a message into a computer and a printed copy arrived by snail mail a few weeks later. I wasn't overly impressed. Let's face it: the Internet sucked before you could get all this commercial content online.
Yes it's the evil empire, but I like the fact that I can go on the MSN zone and play games for free. I don't know how they pay for it with just a few ads (a few of which are popups and a few of which are click-throughs), but I like it. Sadly, I have no doubt that they will go into subscription-only mode some day.
Well, I don't particularly like popup ads, but I have to admit that they are effective at making me read them (except when I have popups disabled). The Slashdot ads are effective at making me read them too because they are large and animated. When I see those ads inline on online newspapers, I find them very distracting and I have a hard time reading the story, so in some senses I actually prefer popups (except for the popups that hover over top of the story).
Of course I would prefer not to read ads, but I'm not naive enough to believe that very many websites could survive without them. Many of those open source sites you mentioned will probably be out of business soon. I subscribe to a few sites, but the web would be a much different place if you couldn't read all sorts of content without an annual subscription fee. (I would like to see a widespread deployment of micropayments, though.)
Yeah, like that's such a leap of faith to assume that the people who bear enough of a grudge against the RIAA to DoS them are probably also stealing music. Sorry I just find the slant on that RIAA quote as half troll/closer to flamebait
I wish the moderators on Slashdot would stop moderating sarcastic (but relevant) comments as -1, troll.
I think you missed the point of the article and the OP's question. The question is "how can iVillage make money without popups", not "how can you advertise Linux without popups". That's fine that you wouldn't serve through them, but since you are not their customer they have no reason to respect your opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the earth is spinning, the water tends to be forced to the equator by centrifugal force (although I think more correctly it's centripedal force, but whatever).
IMHO, high school physics teachers really dropped the ball in explaining this one. A whole generation of high school graduates is confused about centrifugal vs. centripedal.
A body that is spinning around an axis or orbiting around point must be under continual force. Otherwise, they would simply fly off in a straight line at a tangent to the curve. This is the centripedal force. The centrifugal force is a "pseudo force", which means that it only exists in a non-intertial frame of reference.
Basically, what happens is that when you accelerate (whether in a straight line or in a circle), your inertia feels like a force in your frame of reference. When you sit in a moving car, from your point of view you feel like you are sitting still and the car is moving. We know that when an object is at rest, the forces on it are balanced. Therefore, in your frame of reference you feel a pseudo force which balances out the force that is being applied on the car. The pseudo force is really just the effect of your inertia.
So how does this apply to the water? Well, everything on Earth has inertia, and this inertia wants to keep it going in a straight line, even though the Earth is rotating. Solid objects, such as humans are obviously kept in place by simple static friction and wind resistance. Water and air are more mobile and they are less subject to friction (although they are still very subject to air/water pressure). That is the main reason why wind and ocean currents are very obvious whereas continental drift takes centuries.
So in reality, it is the inertia of the water that makes it more buoyant at the equator. The water at the equator is spinning faster than the water at the poles, so it is slightly less subject to gravity. Therefore it bulges out, "making room" for some extra water from the poles to move towards the equator.
-a
I said "but geeks simply don't have the authority to override the laws of sovereign nations." You said that authority doesn't matter, the ability does.
I really don't understand what you mean. If you break the laws of China, that is fine as long as you don't live in China (or visit China). If you run a site that breaks the laws of China, they will undoubtedly block it at the firewall. If you locate the site in China they will shut it down. Where is your "ability"?
-a
The real danger of a "well, corporations are multifaceted" philosophy is this
Your argument doesn't hold water. Just because an argument is "dangerous" doesn't make it untrue. From the "false arguments" FAQ:
ARGUMENT FROM ADVERSE CONSEQUENCES
Arguments are not valid based on bad things that would otherwise happen.
Example: If God didn't exist then I wouldn't want to live.
Example 2: God must exist or society would be much more lawless and dangerous.
Example 3: He must be found guilty, otherwise it will encourage others to rape women.
-a
and what was the human lifespan 7000 years ago - they were lucky if they made 30.
I believe this kind of thinking has been widely debunked. Mean lifespan != median lifespan != typical lifespan. If you have a high infant mortality rate, that can really skew your average, even though most adults will live to a relatively old age (except in very warlike societies). It says in the Bible that man shall live for 3 score and 10 years, and that was written several years ago. Take a look at some modern "primitive" societies, such as the Inuit or historical accounts of isolated tribes. They all had plenty of tribal elders.
-a
There's a good chance he has never heard of the HP-Tru64 su vulnerability.
He said that he encourages those in the computer security field (but not anybody else) to run and attempt to crack industry software on their own computers (but not anybody else's) - ignoring the fact that this violates the DMCA
Who says this violates the DMCA? The DMCA only applies to hacking systems which protect copyright. HP has threatened to sue over the HP-Tru64 su vulnerability. It's not illegal until they actually follow through with the lawsuit and win.
-a
Sadly, no. The penultimate kernel I built had would never work correctly on my machine. A coworker had the exact same computer, so I just used a copy of his kernel. It didn't have all the options I needed so I was forever trying to improve upon it. I tried to build the kernel using his .config file, but the modules wouldn't build. Getting tech support from him is like pulling teeth so I just gave up. A couple of months ago, I finally built a working kernel myself. I had to hand edit the makefiles and patch up some compile and link errors in the kernel source... I really wasn't expecting that. This one I do have the .config for.
-a
That's pretty circular reasoning, don't you think? Geeks complain when laws are enforced that they believe to be unfair. So why are the laws unfair? Too often, the answer is "because they are unenforceable."
-a
At one point, I was trying to improve my chess game by studying the game archive that comes with ChessMaster. After only a few weeks of practice, I discovered that I could predict each move (in the midgame) with uncanny accuracy (80%). However, my chess game didn't actually improve. All I had done was train my brain to be a fuzzy logic analyzer for predicting Kasparov moves against high quality opponents. The basic strategy fails miserably against amateur players (who tend to be less subtle in their attack). One of the ways Kasparov came back to beat Deep Blue in their original match was to suddenly switch strategies to something the machine was not expecting.
-a
is it just me or does any movie that has to do with number theory/ mathematics have Go in it somewhere.
I don't remember any references to Go in "Good Will Hunting" or "Cube".
-a
Clearly, what is called for here is semi-autonomous robotic spiders.
-a
Well, sure. I figured that out before I posted, and later confirmed it with a google search (I was still trying to figure out the puzzle without "cheating"). But here he goes asking me to generalize to an N card deck and the one data point he gives me is wrong. I spent quite a while looking for relations between Euler's phi function and the number 7 before I thought to confirm this result. Plus when I eventually looked the problem up, it doesn't look like there's a closed form solution anyway.
-a
Yeah, that was really flamebait. Stupid moderators. :-(
If your servers are physically located in Russia and they violate Russian law then don't be surprised if the Russians seize your servers. If your site violates US law then don't come to the US on vacation. If your users are located in China, they have no ability to seize the servers, but they may block them at the firewall, which is what they do.
It may seem unfair to you, but geeks simply don't have the authority to override the laws of sovereign nations.
-a
1. If you publish copyrighted materials on the web, the owner should e-mail you with a cease and desist warning that unless you remove the material you will be sued.
2. If you are a search engine or portal, you should not be liable for linking to the potential copyright-violating site, so long as the case is still pending.
3. If you are a search engine/portal and you cache the material, you should be liable (and named as a co-defendant) should you choose to ignore a cease and desist warning.
4. Once a case has been settled, a search engine/portal must not link to a site or cache pages from the site that has lost the case.
5. If you are a search engine located in or serving pages to a particular country, you must obey the court rulings of that country in this regard.
-a
I have actually seen TVs with built-in decoders, however set-top boxes are far more prevalent. Seriously, forget all that crap about digital being better. The digital receiver is worth $99 just for the browseable TV listings. The Scientific Atlanta box I got from the cable company is pretty crappy so I wouldn't dream of buying it. It has some really obvious flaws, such as the fact that the listings stop working from 12am to 2am every night (I think they skimped on memory and they don't have enough RAM to store a working copy of the listings while they do the update), but iron out those kinks and I'd gladly pay $200 extra for the feature.
-a
A local radio station has been claiming that their broadcast repels mosquitos for several years now. I always thought it was just a publicity stunt, but maybe they have been using the same technology.
-a
Sorry, but are a bunch of Indian programmers gonna buy a car from Yahoo! Autos? Or sign up for Yahoo! Personal?
If they offer a localized version of the site (which they already do for other countries, BTW), and they figure that the average Indian has enough disposable income to make it worthwhile, then I don't see why not.
Fucking computer geeks think they're the center of the damn universe....
There's no denying that.
-a
Everyone on Slashdot likes to call the DMCA a bought-and-paid for law which proves that congress is corrupt, but I am less cynical than that. These are the same people who believe that copyright is evil and ought to be abolished. That is a view that is rather unique to this crowd. Is it possible that congress simply wants to pass a law that will help to protect copyright.
"Cease and desist" letters are a standard part of copyright law. It is too much of a burden on the court system (and copyright holder) for them to go to court to get an injunction everytime they sense a violation. Therefore, the law requires them to attempt to resolve the dispute out of court first. You may consider that a chilling effect, but it is only a chilling effect when one party has the intimidation factor of a large war chest.
I don't know what you mean about "sanctions being effected simply as the result of an accusing party claiming harm". You can request that the offending material be removed, but you can't collect any monetary sanctions without going to court. All you can do is threaten to sue, and you can only do that effectively if the accused party thinks they might lose. If they are 100% confident of winning, they might as well go to court and collect the fine for the nuisance suit.
As I said, I don't believe the DMCA applies here. HP is trying to use an overly broad interpretation of the statute to twist it into something else, and if they go to court they will probably lose.
-a
The chilling effect argument is fine and all, except that it's also an argument for never ever passing any new laws. New legislation is always a bit vague and it usually takes a few test cases to set the legal bounds. That's the risk you take when you do something that is borderline legal, as Elcomsoft did. This case is much different because it is HP that is pushing the boundaries and their claim seems pretty baseless. Big companies had the power of intimidation before the DMCA and they'll still have it tomorrow. It doesn't matter whether the claim has merit, only how much money the litigants have. Hell, I'd be freaked out if a big company threatened to sue me for $1,000,000 for not mowing my lawn.
-a
Still, it's not a great advertisment for their Linux services division. Basically, they are saying that they can't make enough money selling software consulting so they've got to pad out their revenues by selling old-fashioned accounting advice.
-a
Maybe we should wait to see if they win the case before concluding that the DMCA will allow companies to suppress security flaws. It doesn't sound like they have a legal leg to stand on. If SnoSoft doesn't pursue the case, no doubt the EFF will.
Also, releasing hacking tools without giving the company a chance to fix the problem still needs to be illegal under some other law or another. The details in this article were pretty vague. There was some vague allegation that they had known about the bug for a year, but there was nothing to suggest that they had a) informed HP about it or b) given HP a moratorium of "fix it by X date or we're going to release the exploit".
Also, the fact that the "researcher" is named "Phased" kind of makes you wonder about the legitimacy of this "research" group.
-a
A dog barking gives you some random data, it's just not unbiased random data. That's no problem. Just keep XORing it into the transient seed of a PRNG to extract the randomness. It's virtually foolproof.
-a
The Internet survived for 20 odd years in relative obscurity before people thought they could make money off it. Back in '86 I went to an exhibit at Expo '86 where you could send an "electronic mail". I typed a message into a computer and a printed copy arrived by snail mail a few weeks later. I wasn't overly impressed. Let's face it: the Internet sucked before you could get all this commercial content online.
Yes it's the evil empire, but I like the fact that I can go on the MSN zone and play games for free. I don't know how they pay for it with just a few ads (a few of which are popups and a few of which are click-throughs), but I like it. Sadly, I have no doubt that they will go into subscription-only mode some day.
-a
Well, I don't particularly like popup ads, but I have to admit that they are effective at making me read them (except when I have popups disabled). The Slashdot ads are effective at making me read them too because they are large and animated. When I see those ads inline on online newspapers, I find them very distracting and I have a hard time reading the story, so in some senses I actually prefer popups (except for the popups that hover over top of the story).
Of course I would prefer not to read ads, but I'm not naive enough to believe that very many websites could survive without them. Many of those open source sites you mentioned will probably be out of business soon. I subscribe to a few sites, but the web would be a much different place if you couldn't read all sorts of content without an annual subscription fee. (I would like to see a widespread deployment of micropayments, though.)
-a
Yeah, like that's such a leap of faith to assume that the people who bear enough of a grudge against the RIAA to DoS them are probably also stealing music.
Sorry I just find the slant on that RIAA quote as half troll/closer to flamebait
I wish the moderators on Slashdot would stop moderating sarcastic (but relevant) comments as -1, troll.
-a
I think you missed the point of the article and the OP's question. The question is "how can iVillage make money without popups", not "how can you advertise Linux without popups". That's fine that you wouldn't serve through them, but since you are not their customer they have no reason to respect your opinion.
-a