Imagine the following small addition: If my kid has such a chip, we can always check where it is, or if it gets kidnapped by the previous sexoffender, the first critical hours can be used much more efficient to find the kid
OK Einstein, tell me how you'd "check where [your kid] is"? Magic satellites? You're confusing RFID tags with tracking devices. An RFID tag is no more useful at finding a lost or kidnapped kid than a barcode stapled to the kid's forehead. If there's no one there to read it, it's useless.
This will never make it out of a commitee. The religious fundis would immediately seize upon this as "the mark of the beast". It's dead even before being submitted.
I must say that it is indeed fortunate that the book of Revelation happened to have that little bit about the mark of the beast. For all the absurdity of its source, it's done a respectable amount of work fending off the government's desire to "mark" people with some sort of permanent ID. Some things truly deserve to be "demonized"...
No, the isotope Strontium-90 is radioactive. "Regular" Strontium is not.
(and used in french toothpastes for sensitive teeth, for some reason. French sensodyne brand toothpaste works much better than English sensodyne brand toothpaste, but the English sensodyne brand toothpaste isn't slowly killing you...)
Strontium chloride is about as dangerous as table salt. You really ought to research things rather than drawing half-baked conclusions from inaccurate data.
After reading the tedious patent, apparently they are using strontium aluminate, not zinc sulfide. The toxicology on strontium aluminate is "This product is non-toxic". It's also reactive only with acids, and doesn't burn. Basically, about as hazardous as dirt.
I wonder how deadly the chemicals in these are compared to normal tubes as well.
Since radium and tritium aren't allowed to be sold in something as fragile as a fluorescent tube, they probably use zinc sulfide as their phosphorescent material. Zinc sulfide MSDS says "Irritant. Harmful if swallowed due to the generation of hydrogen sulfide." You'd have to eat quite a lot of broken tube debris to ingest enough to develop a harmful concentration of H2S gas. Obviously, the glass shards from the broken tube pose a far greater risk than the phosphorescent materials inside.
And if we let writers with proven "talent" approach the idea, we just end up with more movies like Armageddon.
Ah yes, the travesty co-written by JJ Abrams, the same brilliant mind that has brought us so much plausible science in "Alias" and "Lost". Let's hear it for the mediocrity mill, powered by nepotism.
I'm talking off the shelf current tech "limited." Show me a fully commercial and non-experimental breeder reactor (and Phenix is still experimental).
Development of commercial FBRs has slowed only because uranium is cheap. There's nothing technical preventing commercial exploitation of FBRs, unlike fusion. It's pure economics.
"...this product will likely make the technology more accessible to the masses and might hopefully show that hydrogen is a more attractive fuel than petroleum-based fuels."
Typical crackhead article submitter's comment that tries to be insightful, but fails. A product like this doesn't show squat about hydrogen's suitability as a fuel. It's just a stupid science trick that shows you can waste a LOT of energy sending it up the flue or into an electroysis system. Better off with an electric space heater.
Hollywood (in general) does cheap ascientific things because it makes better movies than the real stuff.
No, they do it because they think their audience is stupid.
Having worked with a few hollywood script writers, I think the real problem is that they are stupid. They honestly can't tell the difference between excusable simplification and outright, bald-faced irrational impossibility*. Scripts aren't picked up for their believability, or even their quality. They're picked up because they're similar to something that has worked before and/or (most often "and") the writer is someone the producer knows. Seriously, most hollywood writers are effin' tards. Just turn on the TV and it's downright obvious.
* take, for example, the TV series "Lost" or "Alias". The technical ignorance (and the general quality, for that matter) of the writing is staggeringly bad. Could it be that the talentless hack writer/creator for both, JJ Abrams, has gotten as far as he has on his wits alone? Or do you suppose the fact that his father, Gerald Abrams, has been a producer in the business since the early 70's has more to do with it?
What I like to do is to look for the 1 or 2 star reviews and read what they have to say. If they're along the lines of "This sucks!", then I ignore them, but if the review goes on to itemize the things they had a problem with, then I find the review to be helpful.
Some of the 1-star reviews are hilarious, though. Some of the stupidest reviews I've ever seen were (paraphrasing):
"This novel didn't have enough pages for what I paid for it. It should have been longer. -- 1 star"
"this raclette dish is not like the one I had in switzerland, which came with tongs. -- 1 star."
"i am not sure what raclette is but I am pretty sure it is not whnat I ordered. -- 1 star"
I personally have no problem with them going through and removing "reviews" that say "Nvidia is teh sux0rz. this video card is not as good as teh ATI - 1 star".As for tending to remove negative reviews more often, I reckon they seldom run into spurious positive reviews.
That's not really true; if the capture for 'right-click' was a simple mapping exercise (for control) then 3rd party mice would not right click/scroll with no drivers installed. This is the case since OS 9.
Yes, there is a "right click" event. My point was an explaination to the GP poster that the GUI functionality will remain the same, regardless of how many buttons the mouse comes with. His grandmother is safe. She does not need to learn a new trick. The "right click" functionality is totally optional.
That was true up to OS 9, but OS X has always supported multibutton clicks natively, straight from the events queue on up.
Yes, but the presence of a "right-click" event is not what I'm getting at. The GUI will remain one-button-centric, if you will, so as not to break functionality with older hardware. My point is, this isn't Apple "jumping ship" to the left and right click paradigm windows uses, this is just additional optional mouse functionality for those that want it, and grandma can safely buy a new Mac without having to re-learn anything.
I cannot even imagine try to to explain to my grandmother how to "right-click" without her being able to SEE the right button.
Fortunately, they've only made the mouse two button. You won't ever have to explain "right click" to anyone because OS X does not intrinsically support a specific right-click functionality the way windows does. Context menus are still "ctrl-(left)click" at their root. Essentially, it's too late to add true right-click functionality, and instead they've added user-definable extra buttons to the mouse.
Also, I forgot to mention that the mouse very much does have a speaker built into it, but the only sound I've heard it make is a clicking as you spin the scroll ball. It's almost like the iPod scrolling sound, but a lot quieter. It's impossible to hear in a normal, noisy office, and in a quiet room it's easy to mistake it for the standard ratcheting sound made by the wheel in almost all other scrolling-type mice. The ARS Technica article seems to have overlooked or simply not noticed this.
If you actually RTFA, page 2 specifically, you find this:
"The scroll ball has a subtle clicking sound as you roll it, which sounds extremely natural while using the mouse, but if you test it without the mouse being plugged in, you find that the sound is in fact not coming from the mouse's movements itself."
After that follows more detail on the "artificial" mouse sounds. So no, they didn't overlook it.
Another realistic plan might be something like the Free State Project except with guns to defend against the inevitable US military
FWIW, as a fromer member of the armed forces I can say if it comes down to large scale civil insurrection where sending the [FBI|BATF|DEA] isn't enough, you'll likely find yourself standing next to a lot of the US military rather than in front of it.
From what I can tell, the music industry is doing it all by themselves. I turn on the radio these days just to make sure it still sucks (and it does) and ClearChannel is still playing the same damn songs they were 2 years ago.
Man, you said it. In 1998 I drove cross country in a car with only a radio and man, did the music suck. Recently my car CD player crapped out and I've been forced to listen to the radio. They're playing the same fucking shit songs they were 7 years ago! OK, about half of what they play is NEW shit nearly indistinguishable from the OLD shit, but come ON! Where's the NEW stuff?
"The UK has bigger problems right now than worrying about a bunch of Spice Girl piratez."
Oh for fuck's sake, if I read or hear the Threat of Terror!!11! being used as an excuse for doing (or not doing) something one more time I'm going to throttle someone.
Bigger problems my arse. We survived 20+ years of IRA bombing campaigns, we'll survive these Johnny-come-latelys perfectly well thank you very much. We don't feel the need to fall to pieces and invade a couple of countries just because someone thinks they can intimidate us; they're not the first to try and fail, and I dare say they won't be the last.
While I wholeheartedly agree that these latest clowns are rank amateurs compared to the IRA and aren't worth worrying about, I'd still maintain that the UK does have more important things to worry about than "Spice Girls piratez". The list of such things would include jailing Welsh parents who let their kids go truant, policing mistreatment of Scottish sheep, and forming contingency plans to keep Man Utd fans from busting the heads of too many Arsenal fans in the event they win the FA cup. Really, I challenge anyone to show how society's interests are better served spending public money going after MP3 traders than by engaging in even the three ludicrous examples above.
So between my blackberry "naturally radiating me" since it is possibly at a level equal to or lower than earth, my additional cell phone "naturally radiating me", and now my 802.11 card on my laptop sitting on my lap "naturally radiating me", all of this must be safe and "haven't been shown to cause problems" even when you factor in the exposure to all of these technologies in a typical persons work day?
I'm not busting your balls, just recognizing the fact that anything in moderation "probably" will not hurt, as the body is amazingly resiliant, but lets also apply a bit if common sense instead of blind trust to technology that still is not mature.
Indeed, let's apply some common sense. Microwaves are non-ionizing radiation. Damage from ionizing radiation (far UV, X-rays, gamma rays) is cumulative because when it hits cells, it causes damage. The more ionizing radiation, the more damage. Microwaves are too large to cause direct cellular damage. They can only cause damage indirectly, by heating water molecules. The more microwave radiation, the more heat. Your cells can handle quite a bit of heating before suffering damage, and in fact you will undoubtedly feel the heating long before it has a chance to burn you.
Well, probably the best place to start is with the FCC RF Safety FAQ. The FCC bases their safety limits on recommendations from the IEEE and National Council on Radiation Protection & Measurements. The thing is, even if you have decided upon a specific power level beyond which it's "unsafe", figuring your exposure is complicated without carrying around and constantly monitoring an RF meter (might as well wear a tinfoil hat if you're gonna do that). If you want to check a specific antenna and have all the appropriate stats, you can calculate your actual exposure.
If you're looking for the short answer without having to do excessive research and wade through the crackpot stuff:
-Ionizing radiation: far ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays (wavelength 280nm or less )
Wavelength is small enough to cause cellular damage from free radicals. Definitely proven to cause cancer.
-microwave radiation: wavelength 30cm(1GHZ) to 1mm(300GHZ)
Not small enough to cause direct cellular damage (i.e. not ionizing). Exposure at high levels can cause burns. Microwaves pose a particular danger to the eyes, parts of which are much more sensitive to "cooking effects" than the skin and have no surface nerves to warn of overexposure. Cell phones and WAPs do not put out enough power to qualify as dangerous in this regard.
No conclusive link has been demonstrated between non-ionizing radiation and cancer.
The FSF isn't exactly a paragon of democracy, either. Even though Stallman claims to be supporting freedom, the way he does it is more akin to a dictatorship
True, but you can't really compare the two. The FSF isn't a governing body. If you live in (say) Belgium you will be forced-- eventually at gunpoint-- to obey the government's rules. No one anywhere is forced to "do things the FSF way". All are free to eschew GNU software and write their own work-alikes.
Churches don't become tax exempt because they're churches... they're exempt because they're nonprofit organizations. Same as the Red Cross, the American Cancer Society, my college debate league, and lots of other groups.
Tax exemption isn't conditional solely upon the condition of showing a no net profit. The federal government puts all sorts of restrictions, stipulations, and regulations on what's required to remain tax exempt. You may recall, for example, Bob Jones University v. United States, which ended with BJU losing its tax exempt status for racial discrimination. The court ruled that the tax exemption was partly based on the "beneficial and stabilizing influences in community life" of the organization, not just its finances. There's plenty of room in the tax code for something as simple as mandatory copyright licensing of works for a nominal set fee. I'm mostly approaching this as a means to specifically thwart Scientology, a highly money-oriented "non-profit" religion, that misuses copyright law as a tool to stifle dissent. It's all moot, though, as it simply ain't never gonna happen.
Now, this would in many ways solve the whole Scientology problem. If they are a religious group, then all these texts they're trying to protect would be public-domain, and so they couldn't suppress public dissemination and discussion of them using copyright law. If they insist on protecting these texts under copyright, then they're no longer a religious entity, but a business, and that opens them up to government legislation.
I think this is a great idea. The best way would be to make it a condition of their tax exempt status. Want your copyrights? Pay taxes! It'll never happen, what with "mainstream" religion having a pretty good grip on congress, but it's a great idea.
That would make it harder to fund new translation efforts.
Would it? How many people who buy liturgical texts would ignore a request from the spiritual leadership of said religion to only buy the version published by them? I daresay there'd only be a handful of dabblers who'd buy a cheaper knockoff.
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OK Einstein, tell me how you'd "check where [your kid] is"? Magic satellites? You're confusing RFID tags with tracking devices. An RFID tag is no more useful at finding a lost or kidnapped kid than a barcode stapled to the kid's forehead. If there's no one there to read it, it's useless.
I must say that it is indeed fortunate that the book of Revelation happened to have that little bit about the mark of the beast. For all the absurdity of its source, it's done a respectable amount of work fending off the government's desire to "mark" people with some sort of permanent ID. Some things truly deserve to be "demonized"...
No, the isotope Strontium-90 is radioactive. "Regular" Strontium is not.
(and used in french toothpastes for sensitive teeth, for some reason. French sensodyne brand toothpaste works much better than English sensodyne brand toothpaste, but the English sensodyne brand toothpaste isn't slowly killing you...)
Strontium chloride is about as dangerous as table salt. You really ought to research things rather than drawing half-baked conclusions from inaccurate data.
After reading the tedious patent, apparently they are using strontium aluminate, not zinc sulfide. The toxicology on strontium aluminate is "This product is non-toxic". It's also reactive only with acids, and doesn't burn. Basically, about as hazardous as dirt.
Since radium and tritium aren't allowed to be sold in something as fragile as a fluorescent tube, they probably use zinc sulfide as their phosphorescent material. Zinc sulfide MSDS says "Irritant. Harmful if swallowed due to the generation of hydrogen sulfide." You'd have to eat quite a lot of broken tube debris to ingest enough to develop a harmful concentration of H2S gas. Obviously, the glass shards from the broken tube pose a far greater risk than the phosphorescent materials inside.
Ah yes, the travesty co-written by JJ Abrams, the same brilliant mind that has brought us so much plausible science in "Alias" and "Lost". Let's hear it for the mediocrity mill, powered by nepotism.
Development of commercial FBRs has slowed only because uranium is cheap. There's nothing technical preventing commercial exploitation of FBRs, unlike fusion. It's pure economics.
"...this product will likely make the technology more accessible to the masses and might hopefully show that hydrogen is a more attractive fuel than petroleum-based fuels."
Typical crackhead article submitter's comment that tries to be insightful, but fails. A product like this doesn't show squat about hydrogen's suitability as a fuel. It's just a stupid science trick that shows you can waste a LOT of energy sending it up the flue or into an electroysis system. Better off with an electric space heater.
No, they do it because they think their audience is stupid.
Having worked with a few hollywood script writers, I think the real problem is that they are stupid. They honestly can't tell the difference between excusable simplification and outright, bald-faced irrational impossibility*. Scripts aren't picked up for their believability, or even their quality. They're picked up because they're similar to something that has worked before and/or (most often "and") the writer is someone the producer knows. Seriously, most hollywood writers are effin' tards. Just turn on the TV and it's downright obvious.
* take, for example, the TV series "Lost" or "Alias". The technical ignorance (and the general quality, for that matter) of the writing is staggeringly bad. Could it be that the talentless hack writer/creator for both, JJ Abrams, has gotten as far as he has on his wits alone? Or do you suppose the fact that his father, Gerald Abrams, has been a producer in the business since the early 70's has more to do with it?
Some of the 1-star reviews are hilarious, though. Some of the stupidest reviews I've ever seen were (paraphrasing):
"This novel didn't have enough pages for what I paid for it. It should have been longer. -- 1 star"
"this raclette dish is not like the one I had in switzerland, which came with tongs. -- 1 star."
"i am not sure what raclette is but I am pretty sure it is not whnat I ordered. -- 1 star"
S'ok. Partly my fault. I said "support" when the word "utilize" would have been more accurate.
I personally have no problem with them going through and removing "reviews" that say "Nvidia is teh sux0rz. this video card is not as good as teh ATI - 1 star".As for tending to remove negative reviews more often, I reckon they seldom run into spurious positive reviews.
Yes, there is a "right click" event. My point was an explaination to the GP poster that the GUI functionality will remain the same, regardless of how many buttons the mouse comes with. His grandmother is safe. She does not need to learn a new trick. The "right click" functionality is totally optional.
Yes, but the presence of a "right-click" event is not what I'm getting at. The GUI will remain one-button-centric, if you will, so as not to break functionality with older hardware. My point is, this isn't Apple "jumping ship" to the left and right click paradigm windows uses, this is just additional optional mouse functionality for those that want it, and grandma can safely buy a new Mac without having to re-learn anything.
Fortunately, they've only made the mouse two button. You won't ever have to explain "right click" to anyone because OS X does not intrinsically support a specific right-click functionality the way windows does. Context menus are still "ctrl-(left)click" at their root. Essentially, it's too late to add true right-click functionality, and instead they've added user-definable extra buttons to the mouse.
If you actually RTFA, page 2 specifically, you find this:
After that follows more detail on the "artificial" mouse sounds. So no, they didn't overlook it.FWIW, as a fromer member of the armed forces I can say if it comes down to large scale civil insurrection where sending the [FBI|BATF|DEA] isn't enough, you'll likely find yourself standing next to a lot of the US military rather than in front of it.
Man, you said it. In 1998 I drove cross country in a car with only a radio and man, did the music suck. Recently my car CD player crapped out and I've been forced to listen to the radio. They're playing the same fucking shit songs they were 7 years ago! OK, about half of what they play is NEW shit nearly indistinguishable from the OLD shit, but come ON! Where's the NEW stuff?
Oh for fuck's sake, if I read or hear the Threat of Terror!!11! being used as an excuse for doing (or not doing) something one more time I'm going to throttle someone. Bigger problems my arse. We survived 20+ years of IRA bombing campaigns, we'll survive these Johnny-come-latelys perfectly well thank you very much. We don't feel the need to fall to pieces and invade a couple of countries just because someone thinks they can intimidate us; they're not the first to try and fail, and I dare say they won't be the last.
While I wholeheartedly agree that these latest clowns are rank amateurs compared to the IRA and aren't worth worrying about, I'd still maintain that the UK does have more important things to worry about than "Spice Girls piratez". The list of such things would include jailing Welsh parents who let their kids go truant, policing mistreatment of Scottish sheep, and forming contingency plans to keep Man Utd fans from busting the heads of too many Arsenal fans in the event they win the FA cup. Really, I challenge anyone to show how society's interests are better served spending public money going after MP3 traders than by engaging in even the three ludicrous examples above.
Indeed, let's apply some common sense. Microwaves are non-ionizing radiation. Damage from ionizing radiation (far UV, X-rays, gamma rays) is cumulative because when it hits cells, it causes damage. The more ionizing radiation, the more damage. Microwaves are too large to cause direct cellular damage. They can only cause damage indirectly, by heating water molecules. The more microwave radiation, the more heat. Your cells can handle quite a bit of heating before suffering damage, and in fact you will undoubtedly feel the heating long before it has a chance to burn you.
If you're looking for the short answer without having to do excessive research and wade through the crackpot stuff:
-Ionizing radiation: far ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays (wavelength 280nm or less )
Wavelength is small enough to cause cellular damage from free radicals. Definitely proven to cause cancer.
-microwave radiation: wavelength 30cm(1GHZ) to 1mm(300GHZ)
Not small enough to cause direct cellular damage (i.e. not ionizing). Exposure at high levels can cause burns. Microwaves pose a particular danger to the eyes, parts of which are much more sensitive to "cooking effects" than the skin and have no surface nerves to warn of overexposure. Cell phones and WAPs do not put out enough power to qualify as dangerous in this regard.
No conclusive link has been demonstrated between non-ionizing radiation and cancer.
True, but you can't really compare the two. The FSF isn't a governing body. If you live in (say) Belgium you will be forced-- eventually at gunpoint-- to obey the government's rules. No one anywhere is forced to "do things the FSF way". All are free to eschew GNU software and write their own work-alikes.
Tax exemption isn't conditional solely upon the condition of showing a no net profit. The federal government puts all sorts of restrictions, stipulations, and regulations on what's required to remain tax exempt. You may recall, for example, Bob Jones University v. United States, which ended with BJU losing its tax exempt status for racial discrimination. The court ruled that the tax exemption was partly based on the "beneficial and stabilizing influences in community life" of the organization, not just its finances. There's plenty of room in the tax code for something as simple as mandatory copyright licensing of works for a nominal set fee. I'm mostly approaching this as a means to specifically thwart Scientology, a highly money-oriented "non-profit" religion, that misuses copyright law as a tool to stifle dissent. It's all moot, though, as it simply ain't never gonna happen.
I think this is a great idea. The best way would be to make it a condition of their tax exempt status. Want your copyrights? Pay taxes! It'll never happen, what with "mainstream" religion having a pretty good grip on congress, but it's a great idea.
Would it? How many people who buy liturgical texts would ignore a request from the spiritual leadership of said religion to only buy the version published by them? I daresay there'd only be a handful of dabblers who'd buy a cheaper knockoff.