I'm not saying the Civic hybrid is a bad car, it may suit your needs just fine. But the Prius is significantly bigger, both in terms of interior volume and weight, it has significantly more power (0-60 times for the 2007 Prius are 2 seconds faster than your Civic), and yet it gets a bit better mileage (I average 45 mpg and I drive way too fast; my wife averages about 48.)
There's all kinds of reasons to pick a car, and your reasons are good ones. But if you're interested in maximizing fuel economy without sacrificing comfort or power (which is what the article is about), the size of the electric motor system is the #1 factor to consider.
The problem is all people are asking is, "is it a hybrid?" The question they should be asking is, "How hybrid is it?"
Honda Civic Hybrid '06 Gas engine: 85 hp Electric motor: 13 hp
Saturn Vue Hybrid '07 Gas engine: 170 hp Electric motor: 15 hp
Toyota Prius '07 Gas engine: 76 hp Electric motor: 67 hp
There are plenty of cars that were technically hybrids, but when I bought a hybrid in 2009, the Prius was the *only* one which got a significant amount of power from its electric system. The rest were basically just gasoline engines with a little toy electric motor duct taped to them. The '09 Civic Hybrid I tested was particularly bad: larger gas engine than a Prius, 1/4 as much electric power, so it gets worse mileage, and with so little horsepower you feel like you're putting your life on the line every time you take an on-ramp.
Look beyond the hybrid label, and check out the size of the electric power system. It matters.
Yes, MA does have a seatbelt law. No, the lt gov is not exempt: he received a fine for not wearing a seat belt, as well as for speeding and a "lane violation". (Apparently driving out of your lane and into a big rock without signaling your intentions is a ticketable offense.)
That's what I thought. Then I read the decision: the plaintiffs have about seventy billion objections to the FISA amendment, but they never once mention this clause.
Most of the plaintiffs' stated objections are weak -- because centuries of national security case law and legislation have led to a situation where trampling on rights in the name of national security is perfectly legal -- and they didn't bother to play their only strong card, the "ex post facto" clause.
I'm no lawyer, so I don't know if the judge is allowed to make decisions based on arguments the plaintiff did not make, but I know it's not the judge's job to make the plaintiff's case for 'em.
Let's get a list from NASA of All the Things That Have Broken on the ISS (they like lists, I'm sure they have one), and ask, "How many of these things could we have made with a 3d printer?" I'm betting the answer is "not many".
When the plastic blade of a ventilator fan breaks, a 3d printer has got you covered. When a SDRAM chip gets fried or a tungsten heater filament inside a sealed vacuum tube melts, you're screwed.
If all you need to copy something is to get ahold of one, the Iranians would be better off stopping by the Dubai Apple Store and picking up an iPhone. Copy one of those and you can make endless billions.
You can learn a hell of a lot by looking at an example of a technology, but beyond a certain level of expertise, looking at it won't let you copy it. (And I'm not slighting the Iranians' brainpower here. Same goes for everyone.)
Hypercard's brilliant idea was, I agree, blurring the line between using and programming, between creating static and dynamic content. This blurry line was my personal gateway into computing as a kid: I learned to program on the Commodore 64 (another "blurry programming line" system) and then in Hypercard.
But that spirit isn't dead. Examples: * Macro languages in computer games (WoW for example) * Spreadsheet formulas * Visual Basic in Microsoft Office * Javascript in web pages
None of these are as awesome or elegant as Hypercard, but the idea lives on.
PS: my best Hypercards from high school: an orbital mechanics simulator, and a 3D perspective maze game. (The walls of the maze were just trapezoids of various sizes that I turned on and off. There was a big smilie face that chased you through the maze.)
In addition to the usual arguments about wave and particle energy density of light in the radio spectrum, there's another reason this result is extremely unlikely to be true: sperm are not built out of custom parts. Other parts of the body, for example the inside of the lungs, contain beating filaments which are almost identical (except for length and pattern of motion) to the tails of sperm.
If wifi caused serious problems with sperm motility, it would also cause very obvious respiratory problems or other issues throughout the body.
And TFA is the response to that problem. When it comes to the wrong fish, we go from problem to solution in two months. When it comes to the wrong suspect, 20 years and counting.
Good news, folks! If you live in Massachusetts, it'll soon be easier to find out if you got the right fish from Legal Seafood than it will be to find out whether the right man was convicted by the state legal system!
His point (which should be modded up) is that God or no God, the essential difference between religion and science is that religion puts articles of faith before observed data. Which is exactly what the post he was responding to was doing.
Don't get me wrong: I think the OPERA experiment will turn out to be wrong. But neutrinos are so poorly-understood and poorly-observed that any blanket dismissal of OPERA's results counts as an act of faith.
Oh, come on, seriously? You're going to insist that we watch 5000 supernovas before you'll accept this as a valid point? A single carefully measured *truly independent* data point is more valuable than a thousand repetitions of the same experiment.
Or to put it another way: say you measure the voltage of a battery 100 times with a voltmeter, and measure 0 volts every time. I hook it to a light bulb and the bulb lights up. Are you going to insist that my single observation is useless, or is it possible your voltmeter is broken?
do these "roads" match up with the roadways of any real city anywhere? Like target practice with a poster of your favorite enemy. That would be disconcerting.
Lots more good information available via Google Earth than via Google Maps. In particular, check out "historical imagery".
2003: Bare patch of desert April 14, 2005: Lines are being constructed May 30, 2005: Construction complete No change since then, most recent images Nov 2010.
So while TFA says China is "building" these, really they built them 6 years ago. And they can't be "structures" either: there's no way a dozen trucks (see below) can construct 2 square km of anything substantial in two months.
The "under construction" image in April 2005 is most interesting. There's a depot on the west side with a dozen or so trucks, and what looks like a stockpile of messy white powder. If you look at the leading edges of the lines under construction, you can see what looks like dumped piles of white powder, and in some places white stuff has washed into a gully and been carried downstream.
One poster here said that "Those structures occupy some pretty treacherous hilly terrain, yet look perfectly straight from above", so it must be meant to be viewed from orbit. This is not the case: the land is a flat desert plain, with bumps a few meters high, sloping gradually 50 m downhill over 2 km.
My interpretation: bombing target, made of lime or some other white powder, spread over the ground to make complicated road patterns. Designed for practicing aerial bombing or artillery in an urban street map.
I picked the most extreme example to make my point, the practical problems are obvious. But seriously to my point: Jan Mayen island, the Labrador Sea... there are lots of places in the North Atlantic which get almost zero ship traffic, are ice-free, and very near NATO stomping grounds.
Christ. To get to the original source article, you have to click links through two different intermediate sites, one of which is the Volokh Conspiracy, which while always interesting is not exactly an unbiased source.
Remember kids, when you get your news from Slashdot, you're getting it fourth-hand. It's good to read the news, it protects your rights as a citizen. Kinda like a condom. But do you really want to protect yourself with a fourth-hand condom?
Anyway, on to the meat of the matter: the original article doesn't clearly come down on the side of the scare-quote that's being passed around. It says, IN ALL CAPS FOR GOD'S SAKE, that some people think free speech rights should never be limited, while others think a less extreme approach, with exceptions for grievous harm to others, is needed. Its tone does seem to suggest it favors the latter, which is disturbing, but as an "oh my God these guys want to burn the Constitution" freakout document, it lacks a little punch.
Many of us have been arguing for a while now that computer crimes shouldn't be treated any differently from other crimes. Stealing credit card numbers is theft, whether you do it by breaking and entering a storefront or by SQL injection on a website. Vandalism is vandalism, whether you've defaced the front entrance to the New York Times building or the front page of their website.
Too many concerned public officials are trying to put computer crimes in their own category, as if they're somehow more terrifying and dangerous because a computer was involved. And contrariwise, many geeks seem to feel that crimes are not crimes if you use a computer to do them. Both of these positions are wrong. Prosecute the crime, not the tool used to commit it.
So this article is about government doing the right thing. They're treating people who organize for the purposes of committing computer crime as organized criminals, and prosecuting them accordingly, rather than trying to invent some new crime for the situation.
And for those of you who are posting "oh, so uploading a torrent is being a mobster now?", you're not paying attention. To prosecute under RICO, you must establish both that crimes were committed, and that a group was organized for the purpose of committing them. A prosecutor would be hard-pressed to convince a judge that a dude in his dorm room is an organized group.
If a group of people formed an organization with the goal of stealing credit cards, then yes, they can be prosecuted under organized crime law. Doesn't matter if their method for doing so is beating up pedestrians and taking their wallets, breaking and entering, or SQL injection.
If just one guy decides to steal some credit cards, he can be prosecuted for one of the several varieties of theft, but not under RICO. Doesn't matter what his method is.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying the Civic hybrid is a bad car, it may suit your needs just fine. But the Prius is significantly bigger, both in terms of interior volume and weight, it has significantly more power (0-60 times for the 2007 Prius are 2 seconds faster than your Civic), and yet it gets a bit better mileage (I average 45 mpg and I drive way too fast; my wife averages about 48.)
There's all kinds of reasons to pick a car, and your reasons are good ones. But if you're interested in maximizing fuel economy without sacrificing comfort or power (which is what the article is about), the size of the electric motor system is the #1 factor to consider.
The problem is all people are asking is, "is it a hybrid?" The question they should be asking is, "How hybrid is it?"
Honda Civic Hybrid '06
Gas engine: 85 hp
Electric motor: 13 hp
Saturn Vue Hybrid '07
Gas engine: 170 hp
Electric motor: 15 hp
Toyota Prius '07
Gas engine: 76 hp
Electric motor: 67 hp
There are plenty of cars that were technically hybrids, but when I bought a hybrid in 2009, the Prius was the *only* one which got a significant amount of power from its electric system. The rest were basically just gasoline engines with a little toy electric motor duct taped to them. The '09 Civic Hybrid I tested was particularly bad: larger gas engine than a Prius, 1/4 as much electric power, so it gets worse mileage, and with so little horsepower you feel like you're putting your life on the line every time you take an on-ramp.
Look beyond the hybrid label, and check out the size of the electric power system. It matters.
Massholes. Trust me, I live in MA, it's a plague.
Yes, MA does have a seatbelt law. No, the lt gov is not exempt: he received a fine for not wearing a seat belt, as well as for speeding and a "lane violation". (Apparently driving out of your lane and into a big rock without signaling your intentions is a ticketable offense.)
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wamc/news.newsmain/article/0/0/1891053/WAMC.New.England.News/MA.Lieutenant.Governor.Will.Not.Contest.Ticket
That's what I thought. Then I read the decision: the plaintiffs have about seventy billion objections to the FISA amendment, but they never once mention this clause.
Most of the plaintiffs' stated objections are weak -- because centuries of national security case law and legislation have led to a situation where trampling on rights in the name of national security is perfectly legal -- and they didn't bother to play their only strong card, the "ex post facto" clause.
I'm no lawyer, so I don't know if the judge is allowed to make decisions based on arguments the plaintiff did not make, but I know it's not the judge's job to make the plaintiff's case for 'em.
In short, the EFF blew this one.
As Darwin himself said: "Well, *duh*. What did you expect?"
Let's get a list from NASA of All the Things That Have Broken on the ISS (they like lists, I'm sure they have one), and ask, "How many of these things could we have made with a 3d printer?" I'm betting the answer is "not many".
When the plastic blade of a ventilator fan breaks, a 3d printer has got you covered. When a SDRAM chip gets fried or a tungsten heater filament inside a sealed vacuum tube melts, you're screwed.
If all you need to copy something is to get ahold of one, the Iranians would be better off stopping by the Dubai Apple Store and picking up an iPhone. Copy one of those and you can make endless billions.
You can learn a hell of a lot by looking at an example of a technology, but beyond a certain level of expertise, looking at it won't let you copy it. (And I'm not slighting the Iranians' brainpower here. Same goes for everyone.)
Hypercard's brilliant idea was, I agree, blurring the line between using and programming, between creating static and dynamic content. This blurry line was my personal gateway into computing as a kid: I learned to program on the Commodore 64 (another "blurry programming line" system) and then in Hypercard.
But that spirit isn't dead. Examples:
* Macro languages in computer games (WoW for example)
* Spreadsheet formulas
* Visual Basic in Microsoft Office
* Javascript in web pages
None of these are as awesome or elegant as Hypercard, but the idea lives on.
PS: my best Hypercards from high school: an orbital mechanics simulator, and a 3D perspective maze game. (The walls of the maze were just trapezoids of various sizes that I turned on and off. There was a big smilie face that chased you through the maze.)
In addition to the usual arguments about wave and particle energy density of light in the radio spectrum, there's another reason this result is extremely unlikely to be true: sperm are not built out of custom parts. Other parts of the body, for example the inside of the lungs, contain beating filaments which are almost identical (except for length and pattern of motion) to the tails of sperm.
If wifi caused serious problems with sperm motility, it would also cause very obvious respiratory problems or other issues throughout the body.
You see what I did there.
And TFA is the response to that problem. When it comes to the wrong fish, we go from problem to solution in two months. When it comes to the wrong suspect, 20 years and counting.
Good news, folks! If you live in Massachusetts, it'll soon be easier to find out if you got the right fish from Legal Seafood than it will be to find out whether the right man was convicted by the state legal system!
http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Access_To_PostConviction_DNA_Testing.php
Um, I think Roast Beef and Ray Smuckles have prior art on this.
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=05082002
http://achewood.com/eggsmilk.php
To continue the analogy, OPERA is one of those extremely complicated digital multimeters, and they've never "used it as a voltmeter" before.
His point (which should be modded up) is that God or no God, the essential difference between religion and science is that religion puts articles of faith before observed data. Which is exactly what the post he was responding to was doing.
Don't get me wrong: I think the OPERA experiment will turn out to be wrong. But neutrinos are so poorly-understood and poorly-observed that any blanket dismissal of OPERA's results counts as an act of faith.
Oh, come on, seriously? You're going to insist that we watch 5000 supernovas before you'll accept this as a valid point? A single carefully measured *truly independent* data point is more valuable than a thousand repetitions of the same experiment.
Or to put it another way: say you measure the voltage of a battery 100 times with a voltmeter, and measure 0 volts every time. I hook it to a light bulb and the bulb lights up. Are you going to insist that my single observation is useless, or is it possible your voltmeter is broken?
do these "roads" match up with the roadways of any real city anywhere? Like target practice with a poster of your favorite enemy. That would be disconcerting.
Hard to match the roads, but there are a couple of cratered mock airfields nearby which look alarmingly like the Taipei Airport in Taiwan.
Could just be an innocent coincidence, I just checked the obvious target.
Lots more good information available via Google Earth than via Google Maps. In particular, check out "historical imagery".
2003: Bare patch of desert
April 14, 2005: Lines are being constructed
May 30, 2005: Construction complete
No change since then, most recent images Nov 2010.
So while TFA says China is "building" these, really they built them 6 years ago. And they can't be "structures" either: there's no way a dozen trucks (see below) can construct 2 square km of anything substantial in two months.
The "under construction" image in April 2005 is most interesting. There's a depot on the west side with a dozen or so trucks, and what looks like a stockpile of messy white powder. If you look at the leading edges of the lines under construction, you can see what looks like dumped piles of white powder, and in some places white stuff has washed into a gully and been carried downstream.
One poster here said that "Those structures occupy some pretty treacherous hilly terrain, yet look perfectly straight from above", so it must be meant to be viewed from orbit. This is not the case: the land is a flat desert plain, with bumps a few meters high, sloping gradually 50 m downhill over 2 km.
My interpretation: bombing target, made of lime or some other white powder, spread over the ground to make complicated road patterns. Designed for practicing aerial bombing or artillery in an urban street map.
I picked the most extreme example to make my point, the practical problems are obvious. But seriously to my point: Jan Mayen island, the Labrador Sea... there are lots of places in the North Atlantic which get almost zero ship traffic, are ice-free, and very near NATO stomping grounds.
Seriously, guys. Off the coast of Scotland? Why not, say, here?
Christ. To get to the original source article, you have to click links through two different intermediate sites, one of which is the Volokh Conspiracy, which while always interesting is not exactly an unbiased source.
Remember kids, when you get your news from Slashdot, you're getting it fourth-hand. It's good to read the news, it protects your rights as a citizen. Kinda like a condom. But do you really want to protect yourself with a fourth-hand condom?
Anyway, on to the meat of the matter: the original article doesn't clearly come down on the side of the scare-quote that's being passed around. It says, IN ALL CAPS FOR GOD'S SAKE, that some people think free speech rights should never be limited, while others think a less extreme approach, with exceptions for grievous harm to others, is needed. Its tone does seem to suggest it favors the latter, which is disturbing, but as an "oh my God these guys want to burn the Constitution" freakout document, it lacks a little punch.
Hear, hear. I came here to post *exactly* this thought, but I wasn't clever enough to come up with "Kirchoff's Laws apply to container ships".
Many of us have been arguing for a while now that computer crimes shouldn't be treated any differently from other crimes. Stealing credit card numbers is theft, whether you do it by breaking and entering a storefront or by SQL injection on a website. Vandalism is vandalism, whether you've defaced the front entrance to the New York Times building or the front page of their website.
Too many concerned public officials are trying to put computer crimes in their own category, as if they're somehow more terrifying and dangerous because a computer was involved. And contrariwise, many geeks seem to feel that crimes are not crimes if you use a computer to do them. Both of these positions are wrong. Prosecute the crime, not the tool used to commit it.
So this article is about government doing the right thing. They're treating people who organize for the purposes of committing computer crime as organized criminals, and prosecuting them accordingly, rather than trying to invent some new crime for the situation.
And for those of you who are posting "oh, so uploading a torrent is being a mobster now?", you're not paying attention. To prosecute under RICO, you must establish both that crimes were committed, and that a group was organized for the purpose of committing them. A prosecutor would be hard-pressed to convince a judge that a dude in his dorm room is an organized group.
If a group of people formed an organization with the goal of stealing credit cards, then yes, they can be prosecuted under organized crime law. Doesn't matter if their method for doing so is beating up pedestrians and taking their wallets, breaking and entering, or SQL injection.
If just one guy decides to steal some credit cards, he can be prosecuted for one of the several varieties of theft, but not under RICO. Doesn't matter what his method is.