I would love to see similar public pressure to bring back the "Fairness Doctrine" that Reagan eliminated in the 80's. Basically, it says that the companies are allowed to use a public resource - the broadcast spectrum, and as such they have a responsibility to the public to provide balanced and beneficial programming. This meant, for example, that if they provided airtime to a political candidate, they need to provide equal time for their competitor.
The problem with the Fairness Doctrine is that instead of the public hearing "both" sides of the debate, they end up essentially hearing neither. Broadcasters will go back to not airing anything that could be perceived as having a "side" so as to avoid having to fork over free airtime to anyone who shows up with a different opinion and demanding "equal time". The other problem is that it assumes political opinions to be two sided. Lefty people like the idea of the Fairness Doctrine because it'd mean that all those Clear Channel AM stations carrying Rush Limbaugh will be forced to take Al Franken. Ha-HAH! It's all fair then, right? Well what about the libertarians who think that both of them are fuckhead blowhards? Do they get their equal time? And how about the Anarchists or the Communists who think that Al Franken represents the smug big-city progressive armchair socialists who don't want to dismantle the corrupt fatcat capitalist system, but just want to tweak it a little to assuage their "white man's guilt"? Do they also get their equal time? Or the various contemporary Nazi parties out there who think Rush Limbaugh standing up for Clarence Thomas and Colin Powell is an outrage and that he's no better than those commie lib'ral nigra' lovers. Do they have to give those fucktards equal time?
Really, it's far too complicated in practice. The only way to guarantee every opinion is heard equally is to have none of them heard at all, which is the worst possible solution.
You mean you're admitting to be the only Slashdot user who hasn't stood outside their home with a GPS?!
When I got my first GPS unit (a crappy early Magellan), I went out back to the parking lot of my apartment building to test it. I only had a clear view to the north (4 story apt building to the south) so I was having trouble getting enough satellites in view for a fix. So I was wandering up and down the parking lot, looking up at the sky, waving a black box, and muttering under my breath "I just need four satellites!" I decided I should go inside after I looked up at the bulding and noticed two or three very concerned looking fellow tenants watching me.
That's definitely not true in the city of traffic lights, L.A. I get stuck at intersections all the way along Victory or Ventura Blvd in the dead of night.
As I recall, they put most of the major north-south streets in the SF Valley(at least all the 101 fwy exit streets, Topanga Cyn thru Van Nuys) on timers. If the traffic is light enough, you can usually drive from the 118 to the 101 at the speed limit and never hit a red. Of course the speed limit is generally an annoying 35mph. This works out OK for the traffic refugees trying to avoid the 405, but it pretty much leaves the east-west streets to just happen however they go.
I'd pick any liquid with good thermail properties but was a poor solvent, I'm sure there must be a lot about, maybe not in such huge quantities though.
The real problem isn't so much the nature of the liquid being pumped, but the nature of the crap it has to be pumped through. Even if you did find a truly inert liquid, the fact that it is a liquid is what causes the problem. Unless you install 15 miles of plumbing to keep it away from the walls of the hole, you're going to end up with mineral particulate matter in the liquid that, upon being sucked up to the surface and cooled, will start forming "clots" inside your heat transfer system. They did quite a bit of geothermal power research (using natural geothermal resources like hot springs)in the 70's and kept running into the same problem over and over: any setup to contain and control the the liquid source of heat became quickly sludged up.
Tivo Can do that!
Just not out of the box.
With TivoWebPlus you can set it to start Late or early (unlike the tivo UI), and end early or late (or even.. gasp on time).
That's not what he's talking about. What he wants is this: Show A is on from 8pm-9:05. Show B is on from 9pm to 10pm on another channel. He wants the option to tell tivo to record all of show A and then have it switch to show B at 9:05 and at least get the remaining 55 minutes of B. As it is now, tivo will refuse to record show B at all because of the 5 minute overlap (unless you set a timed record by hand for each airing of the show).
BTW, you can set "start/end late/early" from the regular UI, right out of the box.
Fahrenheit degrees are fairly near a reasonably perceptible change in temperature. Celsius ones are too big, so you either have to use half degrees (which most HVAC systems do) or round to a larger granularity.
Yeah, this is one of the problems with the centigrade scale. Fahrenheit is basically scaled such that most weather temperatures fall between 0 and 100. Centigrade is calibrated 0 to 100 on the liquid state of water at sea level. As common as water is, measuring its temperature on that scale just isn't something most people need to do very often. It may be more logical, but it's not actually more useful.
Maybe you shouldn't be in the IT industry then. When you have a passion for something you tend to enjoy doing it when ever the opportunity is available. I cannot imagine an artist saying I cannot wait to quit painting or drawing...
Liking working in IT doesn't mean you necessarily like scraping the crudware out of relatives' computers. That's equivalent to saying Bruegel or da Vinci should be overjoyed to paint their brother's house because they're painters.
Recently, during a seminar about Taiwan, I fought for the Tibetans by demanding that the speaker (who is an employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Taiwan) explain why Taiwan continues to insist that Tibet is part of "One China".
Wow, you sure fight the good fight, doncha'! I bet the PRC, who doesn't even acknowledge that Taiwan is a sovreign nation, is one step closer to leaving Tibet now that you've confronted the Taiwanese MFA!
The OP is claiming that Taiwan treats Tibet as part of China.
S/he was questioning the Taiwanese politician about this policy of Taiwan's.
Then he might as well have stood up during the Cartoon Council and demanded that the Mayor of Toon Town explain his fiefdom's assertion that Tibet is part of the PRC, for all the relevance it has. Who the fuck cares what Taiwan thinks of Tibet, since their position on the subject is unlikely to get the PRC troops out. Really, he seems rather smug for having accomplished something so pointless. But (as with so many activists) he seems to be more concerned with looking like he cares than actually doing anything useful.
Couldn't you pump something that didn't pick up quite so much shit and have a big head exchange at the top to heat the water.
That would solve one of the problems.
Yeah, sure, I suppose. Let me know when you come up with this as-yet-undiscovered substance!:)
He uses a pencil and paper for starters, and once he's scanned that in he does all the finishing work with Photoshop 6.1 and a massive 12x24 Wacom Intuos.
Those devices are really amazing. I wonder why he doesn't just get rid of the pencil and paper altogether.
Tactile feedback and better visual coordination. You can feel the paper under the moving pencil and the feel communicates the type of line you're getting. You can also see your hand as you move it, making it easier to follow a desired curve or what have you. Wacom pads are good for artists moving from traditional mediums to computerized, but few of the computer artists I know who started out doing computer art bother to use anything more complicated than a two button optical mouse. All of them do, however, start with a pencil sketch (sometimes inked) or the occasional watercolor painting and then scan it in.
About a year ago, I found a report posted on slashdot indicating that more birds die from glass than windmills.
There are a lot more windows than windmills, though. A more appropriate metric would be something that takes that into account, like "bird deaths per 1000 square meters of window vs. deaths per windmill". If you're going to compare windmills to window glass, you might as well compare the number of people who choke to death on Kobe beef compared to those that choke on flank steak.
Read the article on geothermal power. Once the water has been heated, it will return as high-pressure steam. In California, the temperature difference can be as much as 3632F per mile drilled downwards.
The big problem with geothermal is keeping the hole "clean".The water you dump down comes back full of various minerals which have a tendency to clog the plumbing. Nobody has yet found a good way of dealing with this.
I wonder if it's possible to live in a IP-free environment. Let's assume that you build your house from a public domain blueprint, you read only books written by authors who died before 1954, you use self-assembled PC running only free software, you use only generic drugs and own devices that either never were patented or whose patents have already expired. I think it's possible without resorting to Amish-style technophobia and living in such environment might even be quite comfortable and stylish (imagine all those 1960's refrigerators, air conditioning systems, eight-track stereo with nothing but folk and classic music etc.). Am I wrong? Any educated comment, please?
To be truly free from IP, you'd have to build everything that surrounds you from raw materials at least 14 years old, so as to avoid using (say) wood screws of a patented design, or paint made via a patented process. Also, you'd have to peel all the labels off everything, because they're covered with trademarks and most of the detailed text on them is automatically copyrighted. Even a home-assembled computer will be cock-full of things built containing copyrighted firmware and using patented manufacturing processes. Really, there's no way to get away from it without adopting a Luddite lifestyle and making everything for yourself.
Canada votes with plain paper and manual tabulation. They finish their counting in a single night.
1) Canada doesn't also vote for thirty-odd other things on the same ballot which vary from precinct to precinct
2) Most precincts finish their vote counting quickly and efficiently, just like precious Canada! You only hear about the exceptions, really.
That's not the situation I'm thinking of. The particular situation I'm thinking of is when the police shot a man who was walking away from them, not threatening them. Walking, facing away, didn't turn around or anything. How is that not murder?
I couldn't tell you. Without reading the IAD report I don't know the particular circumstances. I do know that police aren't required to let a dangerous felon wander away just because their back is turned and they're not running. They also don't have to wait until their own lives are in immediate danger before firing. What it comes down to is that it's only murder if the police officer firing can't come up with a plausible story as to why he thought non-deadly force would not be adequate. Third party video isn't a perfect witness. It frequently doesn't show the circumstances leading up to the incident and almost never shows the situation from the POV of any of the actual participants. The man walking away and shot in the back may have been murdered, but those two facts alone do not automatically make it so.
one for a software MMI (Man Machine Interface) technique. The software patent would seem very obvious to anyone and in fact I was surprised I had never seen it before
The fact that you haven't seen your patented MMI technique used anywhere doesn't mean no one has thought of it, and if the USPTO grants a patent on it doesn't mean it should have been patentable. I mean, you say so yourself: it seems very obvious. Would it seem very obvious to someone else skilled in the art of programming interfaces who was trying to solve the same problem? I guess we'll have to wait and see...
Why is it, then, that when a police officer murders someone, in the line of duty, and it turns out they shouldn't have (and perhaps shouldn't have even been raiding that building or whatever), they're not guilty of murder?
You don't quite seem to understand the definition of "murder". Murder is the unlawful taking of a human life. Police are authorized to use deadly force if the situation warrants, therefore it isn't automatically "murder" just because someone died. If they kill someone in a situation where they "shouldn't have", e.g. a drunk points a toy gun at him in a dark alley, the fact that it appeared to be a life-threatening situation is a mitigating circumstance that would generally cause it to be considered "not murder".
Now, if in a fit of rage a cop pulls his gun and shoots the guy behind the counter at Starbucks because his latte is cold, that'd probably be murder.
"The only good part was getting paid triple-time at union scale."
....So, we can safely guess that there were too few qualified tecnicians for the task at hand going into the final phase, and you were paid accordingly. I think that's the ONLY instance in which is reasonable for a PHB to ask.
Actually, there were dozens of qualified electricians available down at the union hall. The problem was, as usual, lack of intelligent planning by the PHB. He underestimated the time it would take to do all the work and didn't notice how far behind they were till the last month. Sure, he could've hired fifty more electricians the last week, but we were already getting in one another's way as it was-- we'd essentially reached maximum manpower capacity. The triple time was the one of the good effects of unionization. The dumbass friend-of-the-union-president PHB foreman was the bad.
I think there is a very important distinction to make in this case: code head written by a speed freak is quite different from a non-addict with a mild dose of amphetamine as a coding/study aid.
Well, there's not so much a distinction between those so much as they are two ends of a continuum. Speed isn't a replacement for sleep. A "non-addict" will code just as badly at hour 36 with no sleep as a "speed freak" will. A gak head who's had plenty of rest can code just as well as anyone other coder.
Even things that are not-quite-so mentally demanding such as electrical work become very difficult once a certain point is reached. For me, it's at about 65 hours/week.
Ok, which wire goes where now!
Heh. Been there too, man. I was an electrician working on the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas during the two weeks before it opened. We were still pulling wire the night before the grand opening, and we'd been working 16 to 20 hours a day all that last week, and many of us worked 36 hours straight the last two days. I tell 'ya, we were making really bad mistakes left and right. One thing about electrical errors, they're a lot easier to find than programming bugs. You just look for the smoke coming out of the fluorescent ballasts and then check which circuit got piped into the 277V panel instead of the 120V one. The only good part was getting paid triple-time at union scale.
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The problem with the Fairness Doctrine is that instead of the public hearing "both" sides of the debate, they end up essentially hearing neither. Broadcasters will go back to not airing anything that could be perceived as having a "side" so as to avoid having to fork over free airtime to anyone who shows up with a different opinion and demanding "equal time". The other problem is that it assumes political opinions to be two sided. Lefty people like the idea of the Fairness Doctrine because it'd mean that all those Clear Channel AM stations carrying Rush Limbaugh will be forced to take Al Franken. Ha-HAH! It's all fair then, right? Well what about the libertarians who think that both of them are fuckhead blowhards? Do they get their equal time? And how about the Anarchists or the Communists who think that Al Franken represents the smug big-city progressive armchair socialists who don't want to dismantle the corrupt fatcat capitalist system, but just want to tweak it a little to assuage their "white man's guilt"? Do they also get their equal time? Or the various contemporary Nazi parties out there who think Rush Limbaugh standing up for Clarence Thomas and Colin Powell is an outrage and that he's no better than those commie lib'ral nigra' lovers. Do they have to give those fucktards equal time?
Really, it's far too complicated in practice. The only way to guarantee every opinion is heard equally is to have none of them heard at all, which is the worst possible solution.
Good. Any business model that is built upon selling the public information it initially paid to collect (through taxes) deserves to fail.
When I got my first GPS unit (a crappy early Magellan), I went out back to the parking lot of my apartment building to test it. I only had a clear view to the north (4 story apt building to the south) so I was having trouble getting enough satellites in view for a fix. So I was wandering up and down the parking lot, looking up at the sky, waving a black box, and muttering under my breath "I just need four satellites!" I decided I should go inside after I looked up at the bulding and noticed two or three very concerned looking fellow tenants watching me.
As I recall, they put most of the major north-south streets in the SF Valley(at least all the 101 fwy exit streets, Topanga Cyn thru Van Nuys) on timers. If the traffic is light enough, you can usually drive from the 118 to the 101 at the speed limit and never hit a red. Of course the speed limit is generally an annoying 35mph. This works out OK for the traffic refugees trying to avoid the 405, but it pretty much leaves the east-west streets to just happen however they go.
The real problem isn't so much the nature of the liquid being pumped, but the nature of the crap it has to be pumped through. Even if you did find a truly inert liquid, the fact that it is a liquid is what causes the problem. Unless you install 15 miles of plumbing to keep it away from the walls of the hole, you're going to end up with mineral particulate matter in the liquid that, upon being sucked up to the surface and cooled, will start forming "clots" inside your heat transfer system. They did quite a bit of geothermal power research (using natural geothermal resources like hot springs)in the 70's and kept running into the same problem over and over: any setup to contain and control the the liquid source of heat became quickly sludged up.
My bad. You can't stop early or start late. Could've sworn I saw it as an option. I must be drunk again.
That's not what he's talking about. What he wants is this: Show A is on from 8pm-9:05. Show B is on from 9pm to 10pm on another channel. He wants the option to tell tivo to record all of show A and then have it switch to show B at 9:05 and at least get the remaining 55 minutes of B. As it is now, tivo will refuse to record show B at all because of the 5 minute overlap (unless you set a timed record by hand for each airing of the show).
BTW, you can set "start/end late/early" from the regular UI, right out of the box.
What do you mean, "to tell you the truth", all that other stuff you've been telling me is crap?
That's not actually a future tense, it's a qualifying phrase. A separate future tense would have an alternate way of conjugating the verb.
Yeah, this is one of the problems with the centigrade scale. Fahrenheit is basically scaled such that most weather temperatures fall between 0 and 100. Centigrade is calibrated 0 to 100 on the liquid state of water at sea level. As common as water is, measuring its temperature on that scale just isn't something most people need to do very often. It may be more logical, but it's not actually more useful.
Liking working in IT doesn't mean you necessarily like scraping the crudware out of relatives' computers. That's equivalent to saying Bruegel or da Vinci should be overjoyed to paint their brother's house because they're painters.
Wow, you sure fight the good fight, doncha'! I bet the PRC, who doesn't even acknowledge that Taiwan is a sovreign nation, is one step closer to leaving Tibet now that you've confronted the Taiwanese MFA!
S/he was questioning the Taiwanese politician about this policy of Taiwan's.
Then he might as well have stood up during the Cartoon Council and demanded that the Mayor of Toon Town explain his fiefdom's assertion that Tibet is part of the PRC, for all the relevance it has. Who the fuck cares what Taiwan thinks of Tibet, since their position on the subject is unlikely to get the PRC troops out. Really, he seems rather smug for having accomplished something so pointless. But (as with so many activists) he seems to be more concerned with looking like he cares than actually doing anything useful.
Yeah, sure, I suppose. Let me know when you come up with this as-yet-undiscovered substance! :)
Those devices are really amazing. I wonder why he doesn't just get rid of the pencil and paper altogether.
Tactile feedback and better visual coordination. You can feel the paper under the moving pencil and the feel communicates the type of line you're getting. You can also see your hand as you move it, making it easier to follow a desired curve or what have you. Wacom pads are good for artists moving from traditional mediums to computerized, but few of the computer artists I know who started out doing computer art bother to use anything more complicated than a two button optical mouse. All of them do, however, start with a pencil sketch (sometimes inked) or the occasional watercolor painting and then scan it in.
There are a lot more windows than windmills, though. A more appropriate metric would be something that takes that into account, like "bird deaths per 1000 square meters of window vs. deaths per windmill". If you're going to compare windmills to window glass, you might as well compare the number of people who choke to death on Kobe beef compared to those that choke on flank steak.
Problem there is that it's pretty hard to install plumbing to the bottom of a 15 mile deep hole...
The big problem with geothermal is keeping the hole "clean".The water you dump down comes back full of various minerals which have a tendency to clog the plumbing. Nobody has yet found a good way of dealing with this.
To be truly free from IP, you'd have to build everything that surrounds you from raw materials at least 14 years old, so as to avoid using (say) wood screws of a patented design, or paint made via a patented process. Also, you'd have to peel all the labels off everything, because they're covered with trademarks and most of the detailed text on them is automatically copyrighted. Even a home-assembled computer will be cock-full of things built containing copyrighted firmware and using patented manufacturing processes. Really, there's no way to get away from it without adopting a Luddite lifestyle and making everything for yourself.
1) Canada doesn't also vote for thirty-odd other things on the same ballot which vary from precinct to precinct
2) Most precincts finish their vote counting quickly and efficiently, just like precious Canada! You only hear about the exceptions, really.
I couldn't tell you. Without reading the IAD report I don't know the particular circumstances. I do know that police aren't required to let a dangerous felon wander away just because their back is turned and they're not running. They also don't have to wait until their own lives are in immediate danger before firing. What it comes down to is that it's only murder if the police officer firing can't come up with a plausible story as to why he thought non-deadly force would not be adequate. Third party video isn't a perfect witness. It frequently doesn't show the circumstances leading up to the incident and almost never shows the situation from the POV of any of the actual participants. The man walking away and shot in the back may have been murdered, but those two facts alone do not automatically make it so.
The fact that you haven't seen your patented MMI technique used anywhere doesn't mean no one has thought of it, and if the USPTO grants a patent on it doesn't mean it should have been patentable. I mean, you say so yourself: it seems very obvious. Would it seem very obvious to someone else skilled in the art of programming interfaces who was trying to solve the same problem? I guess we'll have to wait and see...
You don't quite seem to understand the definition of "murder". Murder is the unlawful taking of a human life. Police are authorized to use deadly force if the situation warrants, therefore it isn't automatically "murder" just because someone died. If they kill someone in a situation where they "shouldn't have", e.g. a drunk points a toy gun at him in a dark alley, the fact that it appeared to be a life-threatening situation is a mitigating circumstance that would generally cause it to be considered "not murder".
Now, if in a fit of rage a cop pulls his gun and shoots the guy behind the counter at Starbucks because his latte is cold, that'd probably be murder.
Actually, there were dozens of qualified electricians available down at the union hall. The problem was, as usual, lack of intelligent planning by the PHB. He underestimated the time it would take to do all the work and didn't notice how far behind they were till the last month. Sure, he could've hired fifty more electricians the last week, but we were already getting in one another's way as it was-- we'd essentially reached maximum manpower capacity. The triple time was the one of the good effects of unionization. The dumbass friend-of-the-union-president PHB foreman was the bad.
Well, there's not so much a distinction between those so much as they are two ends of a continuum. Speed isn't a replacement for sleep. A "non-addict" will code just as badly at hour 36 with no sleep as a "speed freak" will. A gak head who's had plenty of rest can code just as well as anyone other coder.
Heh. Been there too, man. I was an electrician working on the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas during the two weeks before it opened. We were still pulling wire the night before the grand opening, and we'd been working 16 to 20 hours a day all that last week, and many of us worked 36 hours straight the last two days. I tell 'ya, we were making really bad mistakes left and right. One thing about electrical errors, they're a lot easier to find than programming bugs. You just look for the smoke coming out of the fluorescent ballasts and then check which circuit got piped into the 277V panel instead of the 120V one. The only good part was getting paid triple-time at union scale.