According to the company, more than 70 percent of men from 18 to 34 visit a pornographic site in a typical month, and those men make up 25 percent of the visitors to such sites. They are 39 percent more likely than the rest of the Internet population to visit the sites, said Graham Mudd, an analyst for comScore.
I would have expected men 18-34 to be a much larger proportion of porn site users than 25%. Who are the other 75%? Men 0-18 and 35+? Women? It seems unlikely. According to the side panel on the NYT article men 18-34 make up 25.3% of the US population so ComScore are saying that 70% of 25.3% of the US population (i.e. 18%) make up 25% of the users. That wouldn't be very suprising except this is the male 18-34 demographic that should be the highest porn users.
The side panel shows how abused the statistics are in the article. Men 18-34 make up 25.3% of the US population and 36.4% of male internet users. Let's look at what that means. According to the CIA World Factbook men make up 49.1% of the US population in total so therefore men 18-24 represent 51.5% of US men, but only account for 36.4% of male internet use. The 23.8% of the US population that are men 0-18 or 35+ account for 63.6% of male internet use. Similarly time spent online and total pages are lower for men 18-34 than for men outside that age group (note that this result is supported by the porn statistics). Yet the article states that the 18-34 age group are the biggest internet users.
Google may choose to exhibit its search results in the form of a "URL redirecter." When Google uses a URL redirecter, if you click on a URL from a search result, information about the click is sent to Google, and Google in turn sends you to the site you clicked on. Google uses this URL information to understand and improve the quality of Google's search technology. For instance, Google uses this information to determine how often users are satisfied with the first result of a query and how often they proceed to later results.
A simple search on "Dupont Circle" named after got this page as the first hit. From the page:
Dupont Circle epitomizes Pierre L'Enfant's vision of a city of grandeur, greenness and grace. Here, three grand avenues named after original states -- Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire -- meet at a landscaped circle in the center of which is a large marble fountain. Designed in 1921 by Daniel Chester French and Henry Bacon, the designers of the Lincoln Memorial, the fountain replaced a statue of Rear Admiral Samuel Francis du Pont, a Civil War naval hero.
Note I didn't get any obvious DuPont Chemical hits by simply searching for "Dupont Circle" or including Washington in the query.
Perhaps you should question your own search skills rather than Google's engine?
I just think its odd that/. has Zero problem with posters constantly copying and pasting entire articles here but would refuse to cache because of "IP".
Think about who is responsible for the copyright violation in each case. Slashdot/OSDN will find it far easier to defend a lawsuit if a user posts an infringing comment than if they have systematically infringed themselves.
Every day with every article editors are selectively editing posts. They are very much aware of and encourge posters to copy and paste other site's IP.
I've been here four or five years and I've never heard of a comment being edited and I've never seen an editor encourage the "incase of Slashdotting" comments (I do remember the odd comment being deleted when a copyright owner requested it). You've been here a while longer, do you have any evidence to back up your claims?
I don't think is saying that this thing is the size of the Death Star. I think he saying when something that is the size of the Death Star comes our way and poses a serious threat that we'll be able to do something about it because it's apparent we'll be able to see it, as we've detected something much smaller.
According to this the Death Star from Star Wars was between 120 and 200km in diameter, and the Death Star from RotJ may have been as large as 1000km diameter. While it might be nice to be forewarned of our impending doom, there won't be anything we can do about it.
They're both private individuals spending their (ample) money to compete for the X-prize.
Please note that neither of these teams got into this for the X-prize. Carmack wanted to put someone in space for the hell of it, and Rutan is trying to develop a commercial space tourism platform. For Carmack the advent of the X-prize meant aiming for an X-prize sized vehicle earlier than otherwise. In Rutan's case the X-prize will nowhere near cover the cost of development (which I've heard is around $30M, IIRC), but will certainly reduce it.
I think this is how noise cancelling headphone do it - they just feed the external noise back into the earpieces after inverting it.
What's new here is that the microphone is very close to the speakers. Normally that would make the system ineffective because as the system cancels the noise, the microphone would detect less noise and stop the cancelling. In the case of headphones (and car noise reduction systems) the microphone is separated from the speakers by a relatively soundproof barrier and so is not itself affected by the output of the noise reduction system.
Probably what is happening here is that the system records the noise of the fan before cancellation, calculates the inverse and then plays that inverse constantly without ever recalibrating. This works because the noise of a fan is a pretty regular waveform. This would explain some of the things the article doesn't, like why air noise isn't cancelled, and why a microprocessor is necessary (rather than a simple inverter circuit).
Pluto is far, far larger than anything currently considered an "asteroid".
Pluto has a diameter of 2274kms. Ceres, the largest of the asteriods (if Sedna isn't classified an asteriod) has a diameter of approximately 950kms. That's hardly "far, far larger", especially when you consider that the next larger planet, Mercury, is more than twice Pluto's diameter at 4880kms. You may as well say that Pluto doesn't deserve to be a planet because it is "far, far" smaller than Mercury.
I frankly don't see what's wrong with (something like) a "planet" being a non-star that's orbiting (directly) around a star. Sure, that makes for some seriously small "planets" relative to what we're used to, but at least it's not an arbitrary and useless definition like (no offense) yours.
So you want to include comets and asteroids as planets as well? That definition is entirely too broad to be useful for anything and would result in people using other terms for more specific classes of object, as they do now.
The next due date for an eruption is, well, any century now...
No. People keep saying it's on a "clockwork" eruption cycle and we're "overdue". Yellowstone has erupted 3 times in the past approximately 2 million years ago, 1.3 million years ago and 600,000 years ago. Those three datapoints are what people are pulling this "clockwork 600,000 year cycle" from. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of statistics can tell you how foolish extrapolating any three datapoints is, let alone in the field of vulcanology where things are so variable and we know so little.
The fact is we don't know when Yellowstone will erupt, it could be tomorrow, it could be in a million years.
Someone else has already pointed out that 100,000 miles is not acceptable liftime mileage for a car.
Here is another problem with your example: the average speed a car attains is not going to be anywhere near 50 mph unless it is a racing car or only used on the open roads. I travel about 30 miles a day, most of it on highways and I still average around 30 mph. Admittedly those highways are often congested, but still for most people doing a lot of city driving the average will be lower than even 30 mph.
You do have a point though in that people tend to think in terms of the time they own something rather than the actual time it is used for.
We had sledge hammers located strategically throughout the building. In case of terrorist or Russian attack, we were supposed to smash our computers to bits on the way to the bomb shelter since we did not have time for proper disposal.
Aragorn was 10 when the events of The Hobbit took place. So there wouldn't be any point showing Aragorn if they stuck to Tolkein's timeline.
Some you missed, sort of:
- Gloin appeared at the council of Elrond in FotR.
- Gwaihir, the eagle who rescued Gandalf in FotR also appears in the hobbit.
Possibly, yes, although justifying very large payments would be a lot more difficult with compensatory damages (compared to punitive damages). Also, currently compensatory damages are decided before punitive damages so the pressure to inflate them is already there. I believe damages are generally set by the jury, with input from the judge, so there are balances there.
Then how does the victim of actual negligence or intent recover medical or material costs? You're right that there is a reward here for greedy behavior, but that reward (punitive damages) is intended to assist the victim through difficult consequences of the defendent's actions.
No, punitive damages are intended to punish the offender. It is the other component, compensatory damages, that are intended to compensate the victim. A victim should never end up worse off, as far as it possible to make up for their loss with money. The problem with awarding them the punitive damages is that the punitive damages often need to be ridiculously high in order to impact the company so they are therefore out of proportion to the victim's loss. Of course it is right and just that the victim receives compensatory damages, but I see little justification for awarding them the punitive damages beyond "what else do we do with the money?".
These are syndromes of a society with too many lawyers, coupled with distorted get rich quick ideas
No, these are the results of a system where the rewards of successfully suing someone outweigh the cost incurred by the victim (in terms of suffering or whatever the suit is about) to a large degree. The reason for that is that punitive damages are awarded to the plaintiff, along with the compensatory damages. But punitive damages are intended to punish the offender, not reward the victim. If punitive damages went into the general tax fund or were distributed to charities or some alternative other than giving them to the plantiff it would end the majority of frivolous lawsuits bought by individuals. IMO punitive damages should be distributed to the plaintiffs is in the case of class actions.
Don't be ridiculous. An RTG with twice the power output would have weighed far less than the batteries, solar panels, and mounting.
You are wrong. An RTG with twice the power output (ie. the model used on Cassini) weighs about 120 pounds. The
batteries (including support struts and heater) weigh about 20 pounds. There are two on the rovers so 40 pounds total. The solar panels will not weight more than one of the batteries, let alone the 80 pounds that would take the power supply weight up to the weight of an RTG.
I don't have any books on hand, but I think it was a volcanic eruption - the one that is now currently Yellowstone, I think. (Yes, Yellowstone is a super volcano - the largest in the world in fact.)
Yellowstone last erupted about 600,000 years ago. The eruption 75,000 years ago was Toba, Indonesia. It is believed that the human world population may have been reduced to as few as 2000 in the aftermath of that event.
Yellowstone and Toba's eruptions have been devastating, but they are not the most destructive. Flood basalt erruptions have that distinction:
Columbia River Flood Basalts cover about 165,000 km^3
Deccan Traps, India covers around 500,000 km^3. This occurred about 65 million years ago and is a more convincing second event to have finished off the dinosaurs than a second meteor strike.
The Siberian Traps cover 2.5 million km^3 and formed about 250 million years ago, corresponding with the Permian-Triassic Boundary, and the largest mass extinction we know about. There is a theory that there may have been a meteor strike around the same time. If true it's an interesting coincidence.
In contrast Yellowstone and Toba ejected about 3000 km^3 of material.
What he does not have is the legal right to film an adaptation of the book.
My understanding is that NewLine does indeed have the rights to film an adaptation of the Hobbit. What they don't have is the rights to distribute that movie. Those rights are owned by MGM/United Artists. I think that there is a very good chance that it will happen in the next five years. The Tolkein estate is not involved at all.
Even a human can't tell the difference. The only real difference is who they're from.
And that is all you need. I want website recommendations from friends, I don't want them from random spambots. That's enough for a human or a program to decide that one of those messages is spam and one is not.
Granted, you probably won't know how it handles most exceptions and boundary conditions, but who cares?
Boundary conditions such as buffer overflows are the cause of most vulnerabilities. If boundary conditions are hard to observe then they will be hard to exploit.
Slashdot Mirror
The side panel shows how abused the statistics are in the article. Men 18-34 make up 25.3% of the US population and 36.4% of male internet users. Let's look at what that means. According to the CIA World Factbook men make up 49.1% of the US population in total so therefore men 18-24 represent 51.5% of US men, but only account for 36.4% of male internet use. The 23.8% of the US population that are men 0-18 or 35+ account for 63.6% of male internet use. Similarly time spent online and total pages are lower for men 18-34 than for men outside that age group (note that this result is supported by the porn statistics). Yet the article states that the 18-34 age group are the biggest internet users.
Note I didn't get any obvious DuPont Chemical hits by simply searching for "Dupont Circle" or including Washington in the query.
Perhaps you should question your own search skills rather than Google's engine?
He is probably using a turbo timer.
Probably what is happening here is that the system records the noise of the fan before cancellation, calculates the inverse and then plays that inverse constantly without ever recalibrating. This works because the noise of a fan is a pretty regular waveform. This would explain some of the things the article doesn't, like why air noise isn't cancelled, and why a microprocessor is necessary (rather than a simple inverter circuit).
The fact is we don't know when Yellowstone will erupt, it could be tomorrow, it could be in a million years.
Here is another problem with your example: the average speed a car attains is not going to be anywhere near 50 mph unless it is a racing car or only used on the open roads. I travel about 30 miles a day, most of it on highways and I still average around 30 mph. Admittedly those highways are often congested, but still for most people doing a lot of city driving the average will be lower than even 30 mph.
You do have a point though in that people tend to think in terms of the time they own something rather than the actual time it is used for.
Some you missed, sort of:
- Gloin appeared at the council of Elrond in FotR.
- Gwaihir, the eagle who rescued Gandalf in FotR also appears in the hobbit.
Possibly, yes, although justifying very large payments would be a lot more difficult with compensatory damages (compared to punitive damages). Also, currently compensatory damages are decided before punitive damages so the pressure to inflate them is already there. I believe damages are generally set by the jury, with input from the judge, so there are balances there.
Yellowstone and Toba's eruptions have been devastating, but they are not the most destructive. Flood basalt erruptions have that distinction:
- Columbia River Flood Basalts cover about 165,000 km^3
- Deccan Traps, India covers around 500,000 km^3. This occurred about 65 million years ago and is a more convincing second event to have finished off the dinosaurs than a second meteor strike.
- The Siberian Traps cover 2.5 million km^3 and formed about 250 million years ago, corresponding with the Permian-Triassic Boundary, and the largest mass extinction we know about. There is a theory that there may have been a meteor strike around the same time. If true it's an interesting coincidence.
In contrast Yellowstone and Toba ejected about 3000 km^3 of material.paperback book ... 15-150 2-5 0.2 0.18-0.23 ... 350-500 6-10 0.05-0.2 ... priceless.
can of beer
numbers pulled out of my arse
Maybe I'll get mod'ed up as "informative", too!