2,750 nm = 2.75 microns. Transistors on your PIV chip - around 200 nm. So it's about 10x bigger than that - about 1/40 the width of a human hair, given the comparisons I've heard. Kind of hard to put up a reference object that's going to be recognizable.
Not to mention that apparently normal wineglasses are > 1/2 meter tall.
researchers built the glass from carbon with an external diameter of only 2,750 nanometers (nm),approximately 200,000 times smaller than a normal sized glass.
Now, admittedly I'm doing this on my cell phone's calculator, but:
2,750 * 200,000 = 5.5 x 10^8 nm (for a standard wineglass)
I like brainbench's exams as a way of assessing for myself where I am on a given topic. I don't think they're terribly useful for a resume or for evaluating potential employees, though - there's just too much room for cheating.
okay, I know this is offtopic, but I didn't see a single post about the wonderful ASCII pr0n on the gopher site, and I just thought it needed to be mentioned:P
It seems like we ought to have some sort of new designation for satellites like this. I mean, we're talking *very* small chunks of rock, about an AU out from saturn. They're about as much "moons" as Halley's Comet is a planet.
Don't assume that the people working at nonprofits can manage their own computers. My mother is a director of a family of nonprofit women's clinics, and I just spent half an hour last night explaining to her (again) that when you're typing in an exact URL, you type it in the address bar, and not Yahoo!'s search box. She's considered one of the *more* technically-savvy people in her organization.
All of this means that when something goes wrong with their 4-computer network, they have to hire in an MCSE at $200/hr to fix it (which he usually can't; I think he knows less about networking than your average gerbil) because there's *no* way they're going to afford (or justify to their BOD) a full-time network technician. Their accountant is studying for her MCSE, but she appears to be learning even less than their current computer rodent knows.
As for buying new computers, forget it! My mother has finally convinced her boss to replace her 486, after she made him sit down and watch how long it took to open Word, *and* got a quote proving it would be cheaper/easier to buy new than to upgrade the 486 into something useful. They barely make payroll most months, they certainly can't increase the size of their network.
oh, and by the way - their board of directors are such technophobes that one of them adds up the financial report every month on his pocket calculator, because he doesn't believe Excel will add numbers right. Good luck convincing them to free up funds for a shiny new network (or even a slightly dinged one), even if there were such funds. I'm donating my old Celeron 266 to them in a few months, just so I don't have to look at the pieces of crap they're using now.
Has anybody considered that most ISP's (including things like AOL etc...) require the person signing up for the account to be 18...a cc is needed.
Is this an easy simple solution to minors on the NET or have I just been working to hard?
You've been working too hard. I've been living on my own/arranging for my own internet access since I was 16; I've had multiple dial-up accounts and once a cable account. Not once have I been asked for ID or been told I must be 18 to sign up. Only AOL has required me to have a CC (which I've had, at any rate; there are banks which issue them to minors, with parental permission) - most ISPs are more than happy to send you a bill and be mailed a check. Or given cold hard cash in their office, as the case may be.
Companies like AOL like to require that you give them a CC# and be billed no other way because it makes it more work for you to 1) see what they're billing you and 2) cancel the service when their Accounts phone line is only open between 1 and 3 AM Tuesdays. Everyone else takes cash and checks.
<SARCASM>Plus, you're obviously missing the point that we're trying to protect THE CHILDREN from the HORRIBLE PORN PUSHERS out there. THE PORN DEALER on your street corner is redirecting YOUR CHILD'S browser to goatse.cx without your precious little darling doing more than sitting in front of the computer.</SARCASM>
We all took a couple of personality tests in one of my SW Eng classes last year, including the myers-briggs...after the results were tabulated, the prof showed us a slide consisting of our results (in a pie-chart, by personality type), the results of the students in the same class the year before, and the general population. It was a sort of informal survey on whether there was a "geek" personality type. The results were sort of interesting, though - the 2 SW Eng classes were within 1% of each other, and a good 20-30% away from the general population...
What's interesting here is just how far behind the Networks are in their reporting.
Florida's Elections Department has a website (Running IIS/MSSQL - Evidently being constantly rebooted by the number of SQL Server Unavailable Messages I'm getting) reporting up-to-date statistics. The Networks are at times 30-45 minutes behind these statistics. As I was watching CNN, and they were declaring George W. the winner, I was dumbfounded as I looked at the statistics showing George W. only 580 votes ahead. My girlfriend and I were screaming at the TV in vain as CNN reported George W. was preparing his concession speech. The Internet has finally surpassed the cable news networks in speed to deliver breaking news.
Same thing with cigs. If they are more expensive, people will smoke less beause they have an economic incentive.
...and if we make heroin more expensive, those damn junkies will *deal* with the withdrawal when they get their fixes a couple of days late!
I would like to respectfully submit that you, sir, are not, and have never been, an habitual smoker. Perhaps you have never in fact had an addiction. The fact of the matter is, smokers are one of the most captive markets there is. I smoke a pack or more a day, every day, and it's not because I enjoy smoking so much. I really only enjoy two or three of those cigarettes. The rest of them I smoke because I *need* them. Or, ok, I won't die without them, but I will sure as hell feel like shit. There's a good reason why so few people ever manage to quit smoking, despite the fact that we *all* know just how bad it is for us.
And no matter how high the prices go, we will keep paying, until you raise the prices so high that we don't have the money. And I don't mean until we have to give something else up, like food (I can't tell you how many meals I've skipped because I needed a pack of smokes), but until we can literally not come up with the cash. And then we will beg, and we will steal (I've stopped complete strangers on the street to ask for cigarettes).
Smokers aren't going to smoke less because cigarettes cost more - you'll just end up spreading the costs around bty what else we can't afford.
...only if I was getting some kind of guarantee as to the quality/availability of the music I was d/ling. EMusic gives me that sort of guarantee, so I do pay them, and more than $5 a month, for a subscription. But Napster isn't a content provider (or mostly not), and I'm not going to pay them to take the chance that other people aren't going to dick around with file names, bitrates, etc, etc...
Any sort of subscription model for Napster will fail, both because of the lack of a quality guarantee, and because, if they aren't kicking some of that subscription back to people sharing their files online, people won't put their music up to trade. You can either sell music or trade music - you can't sell trading music.
...and this is going to sound like a blatant plug, but I, for one, am very fond of EMusic. You can either buy single songs or whole albums pay-as-you-go, or you can sign up for a subscription ($20 for one month, $15/mo for 3, or $10/mo for a year) for unlimited downloads. Unlike MP3.com, they actually have quite a few bands you've heard of before, as well...TMBG and Bush are always in their top 10 list of downloads, and several smaller labels have their entire catalog (as far as I can tell) up for download.
I signed up for a 3-month subscription, and got my money's worth the same night.
"Legal" MP3 sites have some distinct benefits over pirated MP3s, too:
Guaranteed quality: If any file you d/l from EMusic is corrupted or encoded at less than 128Kpbs, they'll replace it
Guaranteed speed: It takes me about 3-5 mins to d/l a full album from EMusic with my cable modem. While I can sometimes get that speed off Napster, it's not consistent (duh)
No trolls claiming to have the new U2 album when all they have is a bunch of Barry Manilow songs renamed to the track titles of the U2 album
The songs I buy are always there to re-download. If I accidentally rm -rf * my MP3 directory, I don't have to go roaming thru Napster again, hoping that someone is online who has those songs
The newssite is taking the correct action -- getting their own lawyer. It's just a shame they have to spend the money to defend themselves from this sort of baseless intimidation tactic.
I agree totally. I only wish ISONews had stood their ground and refused to remove the Dreamcast info. All too often, companies will send out nasty, threatening letters in the hopes that their recipients will say "oh, dear! a letter from a lawyer! I must be doing something wrong. I'd better stop right now" when in reality there are no grounds for any sort of lawsuit. Most of the time, it won't even be taken as far as filing a suit - they know they can't possibly win. The weasely language in the letters says to me that they have no proof that will stand up to the light of day. "We have plenty of evidence"...it is to laugh.
Maybe it's just browsing at 1 that did it, but I was expecting at least 90% of the replies to this post to be jokes based around "probing the inside of a black hole". Instead, people actually gave semi-thought-out answers to the original post! Not a probing joke in sight. Consider this to be in lieu of every bad joke you can think of...
...or alternatively, just imagine a beowulf cluster of those...
It is illegal for the city of Lewisville to order my church to not hold services just because we spell church
with a lowercase 'c.' However, its not illegal, and is in fact expressly allowed, for my minister to run for (and possibly be elected to) a city council position.
That's not what 'separation of church and state' means. It doesn't mean that people who go to, work at or lead a church can't run for office, or be a part of the government - it means that the government can't endorse or discourage any church as the state religion. In other words (and better than mine), 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...'
So your minister could run for office, but he/she couldn't use that office to make everyone in Lewisville go to your church, or any church.
Admittedly, this is nothing new, it's just been moved into a new medium, but I have to cheer (well, quietly, at least while I'm at work) whenever student papers stand up in some way to administrative censorship.
My highschool paper had the good fortune to be headed up by an advisor who also was a professional journalist, so whenever the question of "prior review" came up, he told administration where they could stick it. Not many school papers have the benefit of an advisor who realizes that his students have first amendment rights, though - in fact, right after I graduated, he went on sabbatical and was replaced by a nice, compliant, tenured teacher who knew which side her bread was buttered on - she practically fell over herself agreeing that of course the principal should be able to read the paper before it came out, just to make sure there wasn't anything "inappropriate" in there...
I'd love to see the schools try to force removal of an online "underground" paper - the ACLU would be all over it in a second.
The core issue is that the ACLU and ALA (American Library Association) believe that a 5 year old boy has a constitutional right to access, view, and distribute pornography, extremism, et al,
Any 5 year old boy who's actually out there looking for porn, I say, go for it, kiddo! (This is not a troll - just pointing out that no 5-yo is out there searching for the latest issue of Lesbian Goat Ejaculation.) IMHO, if you're old enough to actually *want* to see porn, you're old enough to handle what you see. Filtering software is not about keeping people from "accidentally" seeing "naughty" things - it's about keeping people from being able to see them. And usually, it turns into keeping people from seeing "dangerous" ideas and opinions as well.
and thereby sabotaging and subjugating the manner in which we choose to raise our children
Or, in other words, some of us aren't willing to sacrifice our own freedoms and those of our children so that you won't have to watch yours.
Personally, I'm in favor of setting up booths for computers in libraries - I don't want people reading over my shoulder when I'm doing anything, even if it's not objectionable.
I applaud this manner in which it is sold, as this allows me to maintain the restrictions I impose upon my children in order to raise them in the manner I deem necessary
But what if the restrictions you place on your children aren't the same as the ones I place on mine? I want my kids to be able to have access to unfiltered information in a library. And I don't want them to lose that access because you want other people to enforce your rules for you.
It's also rather fatuous to claim that the sole purpose of filtering software is to block access to pr0n. If we let you tell us that we have to keep your kids from looking at nasty beaver shots in the library, then what do we say to the next parent who doesn't want their kids viewing gay-positive websites, or websites on birth control, or libertarian websites?
The entire reason for having no restrictions on free speech and access to said speech is that any time we agree to limit it, we have to decide who gets to determine what is reasonable and what isn't. I'm terrified of letting anyone but myself make that decision for me and my kids.
How can an entity that maintains seperation of Church and State also be the arbiter of morality?
I'm not touching this one, since it's so obviously one of the main arguments against filtering.
Basically, they had a list of doctors and "accessories", ie, nurses & assistants, with indications of whether any given person had been wounded or killed.
Also included in the site was any information they could get people to send them about the listed people - up to and including home address,license plate #'s, children's names, schools & pictures, social security #s...etc. They encouraged people to essentially stalk doctors by following them around, taking pictures of them, their homes & cars, and digging up any info they could to send to the Nuremburg Files...
I'm pretty rabidly in favor of free speech, but I think this amounts to invasion of privacy and an implicit threat to the doctors' & nurses' lives & families.
Then again, I used to check that list worriedly fairly often for names I knew...
Slashdot Mirror
-Cyclopatra
researchers built the glass from carbon with an external diameter of only 2,750 nanometers (nm),approximately 200,000 times smaller than a normal sized glass.
Now, admittedly I'm doing this on my cell phone's calculator, but:
2,750 * 200,000 = 5.5 x 10^8 nm (for a standard wineglass)
5.5 x 10^8 nm / 1 x 10^9 nm/meter = .55 meters
That's a lot of wine...
-Cyclopatra
-Cyclopatra
All of this means that when something goes wrong with their 4-computer network, they have to hire in an MCSE at $200/hr to fix it (which he usually can't; I think he knows less about networking than your average gerbil) because there's *no* way they're going to afford (or justify to their BOD) a full-time network technician. Their accountant is studying for her MCSE, but she appears to be learning even less than their current computer rodent knows.
As for buying new computers, forget it! My mother has finally convinced her boss to replace her 486, after she made him sit down and watch how long it took to open Word, *and* got a quote proving it would be cheaper/easier to buy new than to upgrade the 486 into something useful. They barely make payroll most months, they certainly can't increase the size of their network.
oh, and by the way - their board of directors are such technophobes that one of them adds up the financial report every month on his pocket calculator, because he doesn't believe Excel will add numbers right. Good luck convincing them to free up funds for a shiny new network (or even a slightly dinged one), even if there were such funds. I'm donating my old Celeron 266 to them in a few months, just so I don't have to look at the pieces of crap they're using now.
Is this an easy simple solution to minors on the NET or have I just been working to hard?
You've been working too hard. I've been living on my own/arranging for my own internet access since I was 16; I've had multiple dial-up accounts and once a cable account. Not once have I been asked for ID or been told I must be 18 to sign up. Only AOL has required me to have a CC (which I've had, at any rate; there are banks which issue them to minors, with parental permission) - most ISPs are more than happy to send you a bill and be mailed a check. Or given cold hard cash in their office, as the case may be.
Companies like AOL like to require that you give them a CC# and be billed no other way because it makes it more work for you to 1) see what they're billing you and 2) cancel the service when their Accounts phone line is only open between 1 and 3 AM Tuesdays. Everyone else takes cash and checks.
<SARCASM>Plus, you're obviously missing the point that we're trying to protect THE CHILDREN from the HORRIBLE PORN PUSHERS out there. THE PORN DEALER on your street corner is redirecting YOUR CHILD'S browser to goatse.cx without your precious little darling doing more than sitting in front of the computer.</SARCASM>
-Cyclopatra
What's interesting here is just how far behind the Networks are in their reporting.
Florida's Elections Department has a website (Running IIS/MSSQL - Evidently being constantly rebooted by the number of SQL Server Unavailable Messages I'm getting) reporting up-to-date statistics. The Networks are at times 30-45 minutes behind these statistics. As I was watching CNN, and they were declaring George W. the winner, I was dumbfounded as I looked at the statistics showing George W. only 580 votes ahead. My girlfriend and I were screaming at the TV in vain as CNN reported George W. was preparing his concession speech. The Internet has finally surpassed the cable news networks in speed to deliver breaking news.
I would like to respectfully submit that you, sir, are not, and have never been, an habitual smoker. Perhaps you have never in fact had an addiction. The fact of the matter is, smokers are one of the most captive markets there is. I smoke a pack or more a day, every day, and it's not because I enjoy smoking so much. I really only enjoy two or three of those cigarettes. The rest of them I smoke because I *need* them. Or, ok, I won't die without them, but I will sure as hell feel like shit. There's a good reason why so few people ever manage to quit smoking, despite the fact that we *all* know just how bad it is for us.
And no matter how high the prices go, we will keep paying, until you raise the prices so high that we don't have the money. And I don't mean until we have to give something else up, like food (I can't tell you how many meals I've skipped because I needed a pack of smokes), but until we can literally not come up with the cash. And then we will beg, and we will steal (I've stopped complete strangers on the street to ask for cigarettes).
Smokers aren't going to smoke less because cigarettes cost more - you'll just end up spreading the costs around bty what else we can't afford.
Any sort of subscription model for Napster will fail, both because of the lack of a quality guarantee, and because, if they aren't kicking some of that subscription back to people sharing their files online, people won't put their music up to trade. You can either sell music or trade music - you can't sell trading music.
-Cyclopatra-
"Legal" MP3 sites have some distinct benefits over pirated MP3s, too:
I agree totally. I only wish ISONews had stood their ground and refused to remove the Dreamcast info. All too often, companies will send out nasty, threatening letters in the hopes that their recipients will say "oh, dear! a letter from a lawyer! I must be doing something wrong. I'd better stop right now" when in reality there are no grounds for any sort of lawsuit. Most of the time, it won't even be taken as far as filing a suit - they know they can't possibly win. The weasely language in the letters says to me that they have no proof that will stand up to the light of day. "We have plenty of evidence"...it is to laugh.
That's not what 'separation of church and state' means. It doesn't mean that people who go to, work at or lead a church can't run for office, or be a part of the government - it means that the government can't endorse or discourage any church as the state religion. In other words (and better than mine), 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...'
So your minister could run for office, but he/she couldn't use that office to make everyone in Lewisville go to your church, or any church.
My highschool paper had the good fortune to be headed up by an advisor who also was a professional journalist, so whenever the question of "prior review" came up, he told administration where they could stick it. Not many school papers have the benefit of an advisor who realizes that his students have first amendment rights, though - in fact, right after I graduated, he went on sabbatical and was replaced by a nice, compliant, tenured teacher who knew which side her bread was buttered on - she practically fell over herself agreeing that of course the principal should be able to read the paper before it came out, just to make sure there wasn't anything "inappropriate" in there...
I'd love to see the schools try to force removal of an online "underground" paper - the ACLU would be all over it in a second.
Any 5 year old boy who's actually out there looking for porn, I say, go for it, kiddo! (This is not a troll - just pointing out that no 5-yo is out there searching for the latest issue of Lesbian Goat Ejaculation.) IMHO, if you're old enough to actually *want* to see porn, you're old enough to handle what you see. Filtering software is not about keeping people from "accidentally" seeing "naughty" things - it's about keeping people from being able to see them. And usually, it turns into keeping people from seeing "dangerous" ideas and opinions as well.
and thereby sabotaging and subjugating the manner in which we choose to raise our children
Or, in other words, some of us aren't willing to sacrifice our own freedoms and those of our children so that you won't have to watch yours.
Personally, I'm in favor of setting up booths for computers in libraries - I don't want people reading over my shoulder when I'm doing anything, even if it's not objectionable.
I applaud this manner in which it is sold, as this allows me to maintain the restrictions I impose upon my children in order to raise them in the manner I deem necessary
But what if the restrictions you place on your children aren't the same as the ones I place on mine? I want my kids to be able to have access to unfiltered information in a library. And I don't want them to lose that access because you want other people to enforce your rules for you.
It's also rather fatuous to claim that the sole purpose of filtering software is to block access to pr0n. If we let you tell us that we have to keep your kids from looking at nasty beaver shots in the library, then what do we say to the next parent who doesn't want their kids viewing gay-positive websites, or websites on birth control, or libertarian websites?
The entire reason for having no restrictions on free speech and access to said speech is that any time we agree to limit it, we have to decide who gets to determine what is reasonable and what isn't. I'm terrified of letting anyone but myself make that decision for me and my kids. How can an entity that maintains seperation of Church and State also be the arbiter of morality? I'm not touching this one, since it's so obviously one of the main arguments against filtering.
Also included in the site was any information they could get people to send them about the listed people - up to and including home address,license plate #'s, children's names, schools & pictures, social security #s...etc. They encouraged people to essentially stalk doctors by following them around, taking pictures of them, their homes & cars, and digging up any info they could to send to the Nuremburg Files...
I'm pretty rabidly in favor of free speech, but I think this amounts to invasion of privacy and an implicit threat to the doctors' & nurses' lives & families.
Then again, I used to check that list worriedly fairly often for names I knew...