I've always wondered why Americans (I assume you're American) are so anti-French, especially when they helped you get independence from Britain etc, right? (Correct my poor history knowledge) The "they" that helped during the revolutionary war was the French Monarchy, looking to make life difficult for England--- a monarchy which not all that long after found itself headless. It wasn't some altruistic effort of the french people to help.
Really, if you want to understand the antipathy you have to stop pointing to a single event 240-odd years ago and start looking at France's more recent behavior. A classic but little-known example is that of Vietnam. Prior to WW2, Vietnam was a French colony (French Indochina), full of French-run rubber plantations. When the Japanese invaded in WW2, the French colonial government officials either ran or declared themselves Vichy allies. The Vietnamese people fought a guerilla war against the Japanese, led mainly by Ho Chi Minh. While a communist, HCM was also a great admirer of th US founding fathers and the priciples of the right to self government. The US provided covert aid to HCM during the war. After the war ended, HCM petitioned Truman to support the independence of Vietnam. The fucking French, though, wanted their rubber colony back and threatened to pull out of NATO unless the US pledged support for the French colonialism. The US needed NATO to work, so they had no choice. That pretty much put the US on the wrong side, and culminated in a 12 year unwinable war.
It's pulling crap like that that makes people hate the french.
The Olympics are not about what can be done by machines, it's about achieving the limits of the human body. Which illustrates very nicely the problem with the Olympic Games in the first place. It's a childish, chest-pounding ritual that appeals to the biological drive to prove one's survival skills and increase the chances of successfully procreating. Sure, I'm all for getting laid, but devoting my life to being the best at using a stick to jump over a bar seems like an inefficient means to that end. It's really stupid how we've sliced the larger set of core natural survival skills into these tiny, irrelevant sub-skills, none of which are all that important for survival in the modern world. It largely looks to me like a bunch of circus freaks running around. I am mystified why anyone seems to care. Go, fellow countryman, you magnificent bastard! Run around a circle before the rest of those foreign guys do! Woo! Cripes, even soccer/football is more entertaining.
Carr draws interesting parallels to the rise of electricity suppliers during the Industrial Revolution. Interesting comparisons? More like spurious comparisons. I read the linked interview and, as someone who has read quite a bit about the rise of industry and its relationship to the availability of power (basically, the history of power generation), I can say he's a typical unrealistic abstractionist. He handwaves away the fact that the purpose and nature of electric power generation and electronic communication are similar solely in topography by claiming that they are both "general purpose technology" and are analogous economically. Of course, his entire line of reasoning is balanced upon a precarious point of assumption which is highly questionable: that people will find off-site centralization easier than in-house. Really, it's the same old crap we've heard for years. How long had we been hearing about how "real soon now" thin clients will be all people will need? It's ludicrous. Just think about how much lower latency and greater reliability would be required before people would be willing to offload any significant percentage of their storage and computational needs. We're not there yet. We're not anywhere near there. I'd say you'd be lucky to get 2 nines of reliability out of such a system, much less the 4 or 5 nines you'd need to make it what this nutter predicts. Really, the parallel between remote IT service and electric power is nil. All power requires for reliability is a good run of copper wire and generator.
But if you download a movie without paying for admission, or rental, aren't you profiting from it? No. "Profit" in the legal sense is about material gain. Avoiding costs is not a material gain. If it was, General Motors could claim billions in "profits" by avoiding regulatory fines by not selling cars that violate federal safety regulations. e.g. "We had profits of $27 billion this year by not building and selling 100,000 cardboard Chevy Suburbans!" Sounds ridiculous, right?
Actually, I read a few years back (back in the days of VHS!) that rental stores pay an exorbitant amount for their films, around the realms of $100 or so. This is correct. When movies were new releases, they were quite expensive.
That gives them the licence to rent the films out, something forbidden for regular licensees Not true. You could buy a movie and rent it out to whomever you wished, for whatever price you wished. You require no special license to lend your property, a legitimate copy of a movie, to someone else, profit being the motive or not.
(or so the FBI warning tells me). Where does the FBI warning say anything about loaning out individual legitimate copies of a movie? Read it again. Special licenses are required for things like public performance.
No citation, and things may well have changed. Anyone have new info? Nothing new, but I do have correct information. Nothing about video rental has changed since then, other than that squeezing the rental stores is no longer as profitable for the studios, as they've found they can make more money by just selling the dang things right off the bat. 20 people buying a new release movie for $10 each (because it's cheap and convenient) makes them more money than 20 people renting one copy the movie from Blockbuster, who paid $100.
and my fate was sealed. I work on computers to this day. Heh. I bet there are a hundreds of us with nearly the same story. For me it was my father, and it was on an NCSS PDP-11 via a 15" tractor-feed dot matrix printing serial terminal with a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem and a rotary dial phone in the living room. After that, it was all over.
snopes vs scientific american. I would believe scientific american. Then you're an idiot, because Scientific American is wrong and, faced with evidence showing this to be the case, you handwave it and make an Appeal to Authority. Both Fisher and NASA confirm what Snopes says. Are NASA, Fisher, and Snopes all in on a conspiracy to make both you and Scientific American look foolish? Did Scientific American even say/I. that? You provide no links, after all...
My examples were globalsecurity.org's entire list of active US military reconaissance spacecraft. If you don't believe me, then by all means do your own research, find the orbit data, find some of it that supports your assertions, and reply with references. From your link, in the article on the current state of the art KH-12:
"USA 6 [a KH-11 launched 4 December 1984] introduced the approx 270 km x 1000 km orbit that has been the standard (more or less) ever since. Earlier KH-11s had the same perigee, but their apogee was about 500 km. The higher apogee reduces drag, thus conserving propellant, one of the factors that affect a spacecraft's useful life."
If 270 x 100 kilometers isn't elliptical, I don't know what is.
Gaming has evolved significantly since the 70s & 80s when old D&D was made. Old D&D is like COBOL -- it gets the job done for the people who are still using it decades after it was last relevant, but there's no reason to design new products in emulation of it. We've moved on to better, more expressive, and more coherent tools. New gamers expect more of games than the byzantine rules (like the convoluted initiative system) and arbitrary restrictions (like racial level caps) of 2e. Play should be fast, fun, and should enable people to create the characters and stories they find most fascinating. 4e is moving in that direction and leaving 2e in the dust where it belongs, with all the rest of the gaming dinosaurs. Indeed. I, like the OP, have been gaming with the same group for a long time--- 28 years now, off and on. Our group, however, has changed systems easily a dozen times along the way, always looking for a system that more effectively gets the heck out of our way so we can have a good time role playing rather than rolling dice (GURPS I am looking in your direction). You name it, we tried it. Currently we're using 3.5e rules, and it's been the most unobtrusive so far while still providing a framework that makes it a game (see Everway for an example of a system that's too loose). Granted, it "suffers" from some degree of unrealistic abstractions (Hit Points?), but that's the trade off for simplicity. I'm looking forward to some of the 4e improvements.
As for those griping about all this having to re-buy books, all I can say is "get a job!" More seriously, it's a bit unfortunate that new books are required, but on the other hand, the books themselves are a lot cheaper (considering inflation) than the old 1e rules were. The old demon cover DM's guide was like 35 bucks--- in 1979!
If we spent 40 billion dollars on automatic self-driving cars, we could basically elliminate roadway accidents and save many thousands of lives. $40bil wouldn't even be enough to develop such a system, much less implement it.
Or make a high speed train network that doesn't have the dangers or air travel. Not enough. The Red Line subway line in Los Angeles is only 17 miles long and it cost $5.5bil to build. The proposed 300 mile high speed rail line from LA to Las Vegas has been conservatively estimated at $3bil.
Or, we could just save 40 billion dollars and call it a victory. I say we go with that one
It would be cheaper to just not give missiles to Arabs. Cheaper? How, at any price, do you stop the chinese from selling to the iranians, who then sell them to their brothers-in-islam? Are you under the ridiculous impression that the MANPADS units are coming from the United States?
I could only see that being hard to defeat if the laser-firing device is dropped from the plane. Otherwise - if the missile identifies the source of the laser and homes on it, why would it steer out of the sensor FOV? Look, if you don't know how IR guided missiles work, it's no use trying to make random guesses why this system wouldn't work, in your mind. The simple explanation is that the laser basically illuminates the edge of the IR sensor, making the missile think the target is way off to the side. The missile doesn't follow the laser, the laser feeds the sensor false information based on the fact that such IR systems are designed to follow radiant heat signatures.
Since laser light is directional, a simple pin-hole shadow mask in front of a CCD would be enough to compute a satisfactory approach vector to keep the target within re-capture range.
Who rated this insightful? The countermeasure works by making the missile go off course to follow a phantom heat signature induced by the laser. In order to "use.. the laser as a homing beacon", the missile would have to know there was a laser in the first place--- which, by the system's design, it wouldn't. The system doesn't blind the seeker, it misleads it.
If you're going to make engineering suggestions, at least research the JetEye system beyond what was in the lame AP story or the even lamer Slashdot summary.
My SIG doesn't actually state if i am for or against what he did. It merely states the fact that he was, by definition, a patriot. Its designed to make one think and seriously consider the issue. Apparently in your case, it failed. Cripes, is a little reading comprehension too much to ask? He's arguing that the second part of your sig is a stupid question, as to be "first" you'd need to be around 150 years old. No one here said anything about the patriotism issue brought up in the first part.
With Planck constant what it is, how many bits of precision are we? No way to tell. Planck's constant is in Joule-seconds, so we would need to know what the "simulation engineers" used for both measurement of force and distance, and measurement of time. If we could somehow reconcile all those basic things with each other in round numbers, that itself would be a strong indicator of "intelligent design". So far, such reconciliation has not been forthcoming.
Does a teacher in a classroom have an expectation of privacy? No. Public employee, on the job. Private school teachers, sure. Definitely not for a public school teacher.
Is it reasonable for students to tape the teacher with their cellphones? Yes. See above.
Do the students have the right to post said recording on youtube or other public arena? Yes. See above.
Who controls the rights to the recording? Rights? What rights? If you're trying to drag copyright into this, that's a separate issue, to be decided in civil court, should the need arise.
Conversely, is it reasonable for a teacher to tape students without them knowing? No, the children are there by force of law and are not public employees. Why is this so hard for you?
Do you Americans realize that you are heading towards a totalitarian regime? Oh please. Get over yourself. Security personnel engaging in behavior analysis is nothing new, and it's not limited to the US. Law enforcement officers everywhere have always watched for "suspicious behavior". In this case, the TSA is choosing to actually train their people in it, rather then letting them form unreasonable notion about what constitutes "suspicious behavior". This is totalitarian? Go back to throttling Belgians after the football match, or whatever you foreign thugs do for fun.
Better have a diesel engine in this case. Nothing electric to be hacked. Are you just repeating something someone once told you, or was the last diesel engine you looked at 20 years old? You ever seen the control system for a Volkswagen TDi Diesel? It's non trivial, and very electronic. Modern automotive diesel engines are a lot more complicated than they used to be.
This isn't quite a real "hack", but more of a "social hack" if you will.
In 1967 Abbie Hoffman and a group of protesters thew fake money onto the floor of the NYSE (it wasn't blocked by glass back then). Trading on the floor *actually stopped* while traders scrambled around trying to collect the money. Kinda ironic that they'd stop to do that, considering how much more they were actually making doing their real trading. Wikipedia has a little bit on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbie_Hoffman. I don't really know much about Hoffman, but I found the story very amusing myself.
Eh. I think AH was a really sharp and entertaining dude, but the irony everyone thinks they see there, isn't actually there. Hoffman was making a political statement, that stock trading was just a bunch of money grubbing. Really, those schulbs working the floor trading all those stocks were trading for other people. They weren't all millionaire stock holders. There's no irony behind a $8K/yr floor trader who lives in a fifth floor walk-up studio apartment grabbing at dollar bills in 1967. Five bucks in 1967 was a month of lunches at the hot dog cart outside.
For the most part, I'd say we ignore them more than anything, except for the extracting Africa's natural resources. One just has to glance at the diamond industry to see mass exploitation in action. It's worth noting that DeBeers, the de facto controlling force in the diamond industry, is a Luxembourg corporation with extensive ongoing anti-trust and price fixing actions by state and federal agencies of the US. For many years, the principals of DeBeers could only enter the US secretly, lest they be served subpoenas (and by extension, later arrested for failure to appear) for their trade practices. DeBeers, the owner of 70% of Africa's diamond mines, has no US holdings, because they'd be subject to seizure. "We" are a big market for diamonds, but it can honestly be said that we, the US are definitely not the ones pillaging Africa for diamonds.
gee that's funny, I always thought scammers didn't need to be living in Nigeria or connected to Nigeria in any way to send those kind of emails, silly me. Nobody said they did. The fact that the Nigerian 419 Scam originated and from and is still largely dominated by well-organized Nigerian gangs with the complicity of Nigerian government officials, however, makes the point perfectly valid.
Really, you ought to at least cursorily research subjects before commenting on them.
Just trying to be honest. I've almost completely cut sugar out of my diet, and I feel better to show for it. Intriguing. I've done the opposite. I've replaced much of my candy intake and all of my starchy snack food intake with maltodextrin (available freakin' cheap as "Carbo Gain"). 50g added to a quart of Gatorade a day and I no longer desire all that nasty candy and snack food. I'm a firm believer in long-chain polysaccharides now. Then again, I don't work at a desk, I actually do things all day.
No, it's not. I'm not saying that the authors are right, I'm saying that they have done what they are required to do for scientific publishing. And we're not talking about whether they met the standards for publishing. We're talking about whether the points the poster four levels up have been adressed.
That's a very real possibility, but you aren't going to find it by analyzing "an enumeration of the steps taken to make the study double blind", Really? And if the steps consisted of "everyone wore blindfolds" is the entirety of their "double blind" procedure? Granted, that's highly unlikely...
you are going to find it by reproducing the experiment, and they have given you a sufficient level of detail for that. Again, the discussion isn't about whether they're right, but about whether they controlled for the specific points of the poster four levels up. A flat statement of "double blind" is inadequate. Reproducing their experiment independently doesn't answer the question either.
Yes, and this paper appears in a peer reviewed publication, which tells you that the reviewers were satisfied with the level of detail in the paper. That's true, but also still an appeal to authority. Without the details that satisfied those peers, we are trusting their judgement. Granted it's PIERS and not the Time Cube Monthly, so their word is probably worth something. Not as much as (say) IEEE, given that PIERS is a series of events put on by the EM Academy and its whopping 1,000 or so members specifically for the purpose of trumpeting research projects, but sure, why not, MIT seems to be willing to lend their name to it.
But still, without the same level of detail the reviewers were (hompefully) privy to, your assertion that their claims of "double blind" are valid and infallible because both they said so and PIERS said so is the definition of an appeal to authority.
Who are you to second-guess them? Some random fucktard on slashdot. Is there any greater authority than that?
Slashdot Mirror
Really, if you want to understand the antipathy you have to stop pointing to a single event 240-odd years ago and start looking at France's more recent behavior. A classic but little-known example is that of Vietnam. Prior to WW2, Vietnam was a French colony (French Indochina), full of French-run rubber plantations. When the Japanese invaded in WW2, the French colonial government officials either ran or declared themselves Vichy allies. The Vietnamese people fought a guerilla war against the Japanese, led mainly by Ho Chi Minh. While a communist, HCM was also a great admirer of th US founding fathers and the priciples of the right to self government. The US provided covert aid to HCM during the war. After the war ended, HCM petitioned Truman to support the independence of Vietnam. The fucking French, though, wanted their rubber colony back and threatened to pull out of NATO unless the US pledged support for the French colonialism. The US needed NATO to work, so they had no choice. That pretty much put the US on the wrong side, and culminated in a 12 year unwinable war.
It's pulling crap like that that makes people hate the french.
ADVENT
and my fate was sealed. I work on computers to this day. Heh. I bet there are a hundreds of us with nearly the same story. For me it was my father, and it was on an NCSS PDP-11 via a 15" tractor-feed dot matrix printing serial terminal with a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem and a rotary dial phone in the living room. After that, it was all over.
"USA 6 [a KH-11 launched 4 December 1984] introduced the approx 270 km x 1000 km orbit that has been the standard (more or less) ever since. Earlier KH-11s had the same perigee, but their apogee was about 500 km. The higher apogee reduces drag, thus conserving propellant, one of the factors that affect a spacecraft's useful life."
If 270 x 100 kilometers isn't elliptical, I don't know what is.
As for those griping about all this having to re-buy books, all I can say is "get a job!" More seriously, it's a bit unfortunate that new books are required, but on the other hand, the books themselves are a lot cheaper (considering inflation) than the old 1e rules were. The old demon cover DM's guide was like 35 bucks--- in 1979!
If you're going to make engineering suggestions, at least research the JetEye system beyond what was in the lame AP story or the even lamer Slashdot summary.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118883/
Whoosh!
Does a teacher in a classroom have an expectation of privacy? No. Public employee, on the job. Private school teachers, sure. Definitely not for a public school teacher. Is it reasonable for students to tape the teacher with their cellphones? Yes. See above. Do the students have the right to post said recording on youtube or other public arena? Yes. See above. Who controls the rights to the recording? Rights? What rights? If you're trying to drag copyright into this, that's a separate issue, to be decided in civil court, should the need arise. Conversely, is it reasonable for a teacher to tape students without them knowing? No, the children are there by force of law and are not public employees. Why is this so hard for you?
Are you just repeating something someone once told you, or was the last diesel engine you looked at 20 years old? You ever seen the control system for a Volkswagen TDi Diesel? It's non trivial, and very electronic. Modern automotive diesel engines are a lot more complicated than they used to be.
This isn't quite a real "hack", but more of a "social hack" if you will.
In 1967 Abbie Hoffman and a group of protesters thew fake money onto the floor of the NYSE (it wasn't blocked by glass back then). Trading on the floor *actually stopped* while traders scrambled around trying to collect the money. Kinda ironic that they'd stop to do that, considering how much more they were actually making doing their real trading. Wikipedia has a little bit on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbie_Hoffman. I don't really know much about Hoffman, but I found the story very amusing myself.
Eh. I think AH was a really sharp and entertaining dude, but the irony everyone thinks they see there, isn't actually there. Hoffman was making a political statement, that stock trading was just a bunch of money grubbing. Really, those schulbs working the floor trading all those stocks were trading for other people. They weren't all millionaire stock holders. There's no irony behind a $8K/yr floor trader who lives in a fifth floor walk-up studio apartment grabbing at dollar bills in 1967. Five bucks in 1967 was a month of lunches at the hot dog cart outside.Really, you ought to at least cursorily research subjects before commenting on them.
you are going to find it by reproducing the experiment, and they have given you a sufficient level of detail for that. Again, the discussion isn't about whether they're right, but about whether they controlled for the specific points of the poster four levels up. A flat statement of "double blind" is inadequate. Reproducing their experiment independently doesn't answer the question either. Yes, and this paper appears in a peer reviewed publication, which tells you that the reviewers were satisfied with the level of detail in the paper. That's true, but also still an appeal to authority. Without the details that satisfied those peers, we are trusting their judgement. Granted it's PIERS and not the Time Cube Monthly, so their word is probably worth something. Not as much as (say) IEEE, given that PIERS is a series of events put on by the EM Academy and its whopping 1,000 or so members specifically for the purpose of trumpeting research projects, but sure, why not, MIT seems to be willing to lend their name to it. But still, without the same level of detail the reviewers were (hompefully) privy to, your assertion that their claims of "double blind" are valid and infallible because both they said so and PIERS said so is the definition of an appeal to authority.
Who are you to second-guess them? Some random fucktard on slashdot. Is there any greater authority than that?