Here's a crazy theory to explain it: Russian-controlled botnets were the source of a huge amount of spam volume. These botnets are now hard at work DDOSing the government websites of Georgia and its friends.
In my home we refer to Stephen as "Loud Daddy" because my child would scream bloody murder when we paused him (and only him) on screen. Even at 8 months old the kid has strange taste.
Now that I think about it, this makes sense. Babies love faces, and Colbert's broad satire comes with some really broad facial expressions. Angry, hurt, sad, gleeful, and more angry. It's probably the only grown-up show on TV which spends most of its time showing a big full-screen shot of a man making goofy faces. Even the Daily Show doesn't compare: Stewart has to deliver most of his punch lines with a newsman's straight face.
It's going to be interesting to see what Colbert and Stewart do if and when the Democrats start calling the shots.
Stewart has the harder job, because his stated intention is to make fun of whoever's in power. Which I'm sure he'll do, but his audience is overwhelmingly Democratic, and might not be able to take a joke. He *has* thrown some jabs at Obama and Clinton lately, but audience reaction was not great. (After making fun of Obama for flip-flopping on public financing: "It's okay to laugh at him, y'know.") He may be forced by his audience to veer left.
Colbert (and most of Stewart's co-stars), on the other hand, aren't mocking the politicians: they're mocking the media. And the nice thing about the media is that they never lose the limelight, they're always there to be ridiculed. So long as Hannity and O'Reilly are on the air, Colbert has a show.
Assuming you're American, the key difference between your government and the UK's is that when the UK government does this kind of crap, the media and political opposition actually A) notice, and B) complain, so it makes the news.
If you don't set clear limits on technology in sports, the competition is no longer one of athletics, but of engineering. The skill and effort of the participant becomes less important than the biochemists and engineers who have "rebuilt him".
While such a competition among bioengineers would be quite interesting to see, it would be highly unethical to use humans like this, as building materials in a glorified Pinewood Derby contest.
In all sports that can be called sports, the emphasis is on the effort of the participant, not the technology. Even technological sports like auto racing set up strict limits to the kinds of technology that can be used. Otherwise, NASCAR racing, for example, would just be a contest to see who can stick the biggest engine on four wheels.
Sports already has plenty of controversy with possibly-unbalanced technological advantantages: consider the Speedo LZR racing swimsuit, Oscar Pistorius, and so on. Allow biotech into the mix, and it's a nightmare. And we lose focus on what's important: the athlete.
... what can most easily be explained by human greed and selfishness.
In other words, the smart money's always on the lone gunman.
This guy could have been the patsy of a vast government conspiracy to terrorize the public by release of anthrax, yes.
But how's this for an alternative? Expert in bioweapons realizes that bioweapons are a serious terrorist threat. Wants to make sure the U.S. takes the threat seriously. Oh and by the way, "taking the threat seriously" happens to provide him with some serious job security. So he slips a little anthrax out of the lab and mails it off to some high-profile folks.
As for suicide versus murder: it's kind of a pain in the butt to force someone to swallow a bottle of pills. Maybe you can do it, but there's gonna be signs of a struggle.
And it's worth noting that he became emotionally unstable and started contemplating suicide, not after the Feds started accusing him of things, but right after his colleague Hatfield was cleared. An innocent man might be a little worried by that news, but a guilty one would be terrified.
Going against the status quo is not trolling. Socrates and Galileo were asking provocative questions to encourage dialogue and discovery. An internet troll is hoping only to *destroy* the dialogue.
These two things are not just different, they're almost exact opposites.
To put it another way: flaming the mayor is not the same as yelling "FIRE!" in a town-hall meeting.
You pay me $16.2 million. I go down to the local RV salesman and buy a couple 30-foot travel trailers. I spend another couple thousand to paint UNITED STATES OF AMERICA on the side.
You roll 'em right into your planes and lash 'em down.
On an unrelated note, there is something very strange I find about the US election process. Your founding fathers went to so much trouble to create "cheques and balances", yet it never seemed to occur to them to make a completely seperate body for running elections.
You've got a good point, and we probably should have a separate division to handle that, but as always, who will watch the watchmen? Who hires the election overseers?
In any case, the American election system does have checks and balances of a sort. Almost every polling place has an observer from each of the major political parties. Their job is to watch out for shenanigans.
Of course, as a practical matter, these observers are typically 80-year-old retired schoolteachers who don't know a damned thing about computers, for all the good that would do them...
As a physics professor, I'm confronted with this problem every day. And in my opinion, trying to take action at the undergrad level is closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.
By the time they reach college, most young women have already been pushed away from a career in the sciences, and those that stick with it in their undergrad years find a depressing lack of female peers and mentors which leads to further attrition.
If you want to change the number of young women in science, you need to do it in K-12 teaching, and *especially* during junior high, when an interest in science turns a girl into a pariah.
Metcalfe's Law: the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.
Google's Law (which I just made up): the cost to run a network increases much less steeply than that.
Linden's servers cost money, but their value is much much greater than your brother Ted's private server which he lets you on for free. That's because there's the potential for hot cybersex on Linden's server, but Ted's server has nobody but Ted, and... ew.
If Ted's private server gets enough people on it that hot cyber becomes a possibility, he's going to have to pay for it somehow... and then it's no longer a free server.
Except for how they're launching WotLK without the actual Lich King. He'll be patched in before the NEXT expansion comes out.
Well, they released the Burning Crusade without its arch-villain either (Illidan, who was the focus of all the trailers and promo stuff), and it worked out great. Players took a few months to burn through the lower-level content, and when they started to hit the content ceiling, Black Temple opened up. Call it "just-in-time game development", if you like, it worked out very well.
Putting the torch to 2/3 of your starting areas and half your player classes is not quite the same thing.
Hold the innocent with standards longer than the guilty with nothing other than wanting to save their own ass.
No, the idea is that the innocent are acquitted at trial, and are not held at all. The moment the judge reads the guilty verdict, the system switches from a presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt. The penal system is concerned only with your punishment and correction. It has to be this way: if we treated every prisoner as a possible innocent, we'd have to let 'em all go free, or give them an endless series of new trials on demand. Unlike the *court* system, the *penal* system must proceed from a presumption of guilt, or it's useless. Useless as a deterrent, useless as rehabilitation, useless as incarceration.
Of course, there *are* innocent people in jail. But your problem is not with the penal system, it's with a trial system that occasionally imprisons innocents. No doubt that's a problem, but you're shooting at the wrong target.
"does it make any sense to pay that much for a phone that is still locked to AT&T's network even if you aren't bound to a contract?"
As Henry Ford once said of his Model T, "the customer can have any color he wants, so long as it's black." But only a cellphone company could call that a "custom color choice" and charge extra for it.
Re "why do we need a ball of silicon?": here's an allegory that might be useful.
You apply for a new job. Your boss says, "welcome aboard. Here's how you'll be paid. Every week, I'll give you a fat envelope with money in it."
"Uh, how much money is that?" you ask.
"One envelope's worth. It's somewhere around $600, I don't know exactly."
"Umm, how can I be sure you're paying me the same every week?"
The boss says, "Well, I make up a bunch of envelopes every week for all the employees, and I try to make sure they're equally fat. See look, here are some of them."
"Dude, those are obviously not all the same size. I don't want to be rude, but can't you pay me a fixed number of dollars?"
"Well, I pay all the other employees in envelopes, and I've got to have the same rules for everyone."
"Okay," you say, "tell you what. Get one of your envelopes, and we'll open it up and count all the money in it exactly. Then you pay me, and everyone else, that much money each week."
"If you insist", says your new boss. "But I'm still gonna hand it out in envelopes."
For "dollar", read "atomic mass". For "envelope", read "kilogram". For "the number of dollars in the envelope", read "Avogadro's Number".
The key part of this allegory is that to ensure consistency with past practice, the boss has to let you count the number of dollars in one particular envelope. It doesn't really matter which one, but there has to be a physical envelope.
The primate brain evolved in a situation where noticing hidden things was kind of important. Didn't see that shape in the grass? Oops, it was a skulking lion, you're dead, return genome to sender. We're the product of millions of years of life-or-death vision tests, and as a consequence, we're pretty good at it.
This device is based on the idea that some part of your brain might notice a hidden thing, but doesn't bother to tell the rest of you so you can react. This is evolutionary suicide. I'd have a hard time coming up with a trait that would be naturally selected out of the gene pool faster.
If this device worked, anyone who could use it would have gone extinct long ago.
Skip the kids' kits and get yourself a solderless breadboard and ordinary bare components. You're a big boy, you can be trusted not to eat the resistors.
Here's a good book: "Getting Started in Electronics", by Forrest M. Mims III.
Radio Shack used to be the place for this kind of thing: you could get assortments of resistors and capacitors, and lots of basic semiconductors. These days, not many RS's have this stuff, and it's overpriced, but it might still be your best bet. mouser.com and digikey.com are good sources for EVERYTHING, but it's all a la carte, and you want the buffet.
That's dumb. As dirty as coal plants are, they are far cleaner than the equivalent power output from internal combustion engines.
Wrong. Energy efficiency of a coal power plant is roughly 10,000 BTU of heat to produce 1 kWh of electricity, which works out to about 34% (1). Factor in about 93% efficiency for electrical transmission (2), 85% battery storage efficiency (3), and 90% electrical-to-mechanical energy conversion efficiency for electric motors, and the whole path from coal energy in to mechanical energy out works out to about 24% efficiency.
In comparison, an internal combustion engine is roughly 25% efficient from gasoline energy in to mechanical energy out (4). So it's really a wash.
In the end, the decision comes down to other factors, like weight of engine and energy storage systems, cost, and available infrastructure. By all means, make IC engines more efficient, but it's crazy to throw them out at the moment.
In a time of unlimited options, the world chose gasoline as the perfect transportation fuel, due to its power-to-weight ratio, efficiency, simplicity, portability, and storability. As energy becomes scarcer, let's reserve it for the job it's best suited for.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's a great "Little Engine that Could" story, but I'm going to wait until they actually *DO* it before I give my congratulations.
Low budget, jury-rigged parts, inexperienced designers, rush job = very high chance of total failure.
Good luck, Ames!
Here's a crazy theory to explain it: Russian-controlled botnets were the source of a huge amount of spam volume. These botnets are now hard at work DDOSing the government websites of Georgia and its friends.
In my home we refer to Stephen as "Loud Daddy" because my child would scream bloody murder when we paused him (and only him) on screen. Even at 8 months old the kid has strange taste.
Now that I think about it, this makes sense. Babies love faces, and Colbert's broad satire comes with some really broad facial expressions. Angry, hurt, sad, gleeful, and more angry. It's probably the only grown-up show on TV which spends most of its time showing a big full-screen shot of a man making goofy faces. Even the Daily Show doesn't compare: Stewart has to deliver most of his punch lines with a newsman's straight face.
It's going to be interesting to see what Colbert and Stewart do if and when the Democrats start calling the shots.
Stewart has the harder job, because his stated intention is to make fun of whoever's in power. Which I'm sure he'll do, but his audience is overwhelmingly Democratic, and might not be able to take a joke. He *has* thrown some jabs at Obama and Clinton lately, but audience reaction was not great. (After making fun of Obama for flip-flopping on public financing: "It's okay to laugh at him, y'know.") He may be forced by his audience to veer left.
Colbert (and most of Stewart's co-stars), on the other hand, aren't mocking the politicians: they're mocking the media. And the nice thing about the media is that they never lose the limelight, they're always there to be ridiculed. So long as Hannity and O'Reilly are on the air, Colbert has a show.
Assuming you're American, the key difference between your government and the UK's is that when the UK government does this kind of crap, the media and political opposition actually A) notice, and B) complain, so it makes the news.
If you don't set clear limits on technology in sports, the competition is no longer one of athletics, but of engineering. The skill and effort of the participant becomes less important than the biochemists and engineers who have "rebuilt him".
While such a competition among bioengineers would be quite interesting to see, it would be highly unethical to use humans like this, as building materials in a glorified Pinewood Derby contest.
In all sports that can be called sports, the emphasis is on the effort of the participant, not the technology. Even technological sports like auto racing set up strict limits to the kinds of technology that can be used. Otherwise, NASCAR racing, for example, would just be a contest to see who can stick the biggest engine on four wheels.
Sports already has plenty of controversy with possibly-unbalanced technological advantantages: consider the Speedo LZR racing swimsuit, Oscar Pistorius, and so on. Allow biotech into the mix, and it's a nightmare. And we lose focus on what's important: the athlete.
... what can most easily be explained by human greed and selfishness.
In other words, the smart money's always on the lone gunman.
This guy could have been the patsy of a vast government conspiracy to terrorize the public by release of anthrax, yes.
But how's this for an alternative? Expert in bioweapons realizes that bioweapons are a serious terrorist threat. Wants to make sure the U.S. takes the threat seriously. Oh and by the way, "taking the threat seriously" happens to provide him with some serious job security. So he slips a little anthrax out of the lab and mails it off to some high-profile folks.
As for suicide versus murder: it's kind of a pain in the butt to force someone to swallow a bottle of pills. Maybe you can do it, but there's gonna be signs of a struggle.
And it's worth noting that he became emotionally unstable and started contemplating suicide, not after the Feds started accusing him of things, but right after his colleague Hatfield was cleared. An innocent man might be a little worried by that news, but a guilty one would be terrified.
Going against the status quo is not trolling. Socrates and Galileo were asking provocative questions to encourage dialogue and discovery. An internet troll is hoping only to *destroy* the dialogue.
These two things are not just different, they're almost exact opposites.
To put it another way: flaming the mayor is not the same as yelling "FIRE!" in a town-hall meeting.
Oh, but it's bulletproof paint.
You pay me $16.2 million.
I go down to the local RV salesman and buy a couple 30-foot travel trailers.
I spend another couple thousand to paint UNITED STATES OF AMERICA on the side.
You roll 'em right into your planes and lash 'em down.
I pocket $16.0 million.
Fine, fine. How about "banana republic"? Quite honestly, I'm having trouble distinguishing America 2005 from Honduras 1935.
On an unrelated note, there is something very strange I find about the US election process. Your founding fathers went to so much trouble to create "cheques and balances", yet it never seemed to occur to them to make a completely seperate body for running elections.
You've got a good point, and we probably should have a separate division to handle that, but as always, who will watch the watchmen? Who hires the election overseers?
In any case, the American election system does have checks and balances of a sort. Almost every polling place has an observer from each of the major political parties. Their job is to watch out for shenanigans.
Of course, as a practical matter, these observers are typically 80-year-old retired schoolteachers who don't know a damned thing about computers, for all the good that would do them...
As a physics professor, I'm confronted with this problem every day. And in my opinion, trying to take action at the undergrad level is closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.
By the time they reach college, most young women have already been pushed away from a career in the sciences, and those that stick with it in their undergrad years find a depressing lack of female peers and mentors which leads to further attrition.
If you want to change the number of young women in science, you need to do it in K-12 teaching, and *especially* during junior high, when an interest in science turns a girl into a pariah.
Metcalfe's Law: the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.
Google's Law (which I just made up): the cost to run a network increases much less steeply than that.
Linden's servers cost money, but their value is much much greater than your brother Ted's private server which he lets you on for free. That's because there's the potential for hot cybersex on Linden's server, but Ted's server has nobody but Ted, and ... ew.
If Ted's private server gets enough people on it that hot cyber becomes a possibility, he's going to have to pay for it somehow... and then it's no longer a free server.
Except for how they're launching WotLK without the actual Lich King. He'll be patched in before the NEXT expansion comes out.
Well, they released the Burning Crusade without its arch-villain either (Illidan, who was the focus of all the trailers and promo stuff), and it worked out great. Players took a few months to burn through the lower-level content, and when they started to hit the content ceiling, Black Temple opened up. Call it "just-in-time game development", if you like, it worked out very well.
Putting the torch to 2/3 of your starting areas and half your player classes is not quite the same thing.
Hold the innocent with standards longer than the guilty with nothing other than wanting to save their own ass.
No, the idea is that the innocent are acquitted at trial, and are not held at all. The moment the judge reads the guilty verdict, the system switches from a presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt. The penal system is concerned only with your punishment and correction. It has to be this way: if we treated every prisoner as a possible innocent, we'd have to let 'em all go free, or give them an endless series of new trials on demand. Unlike the *court* system, the *penal* system must proceed from a presumption of guilt, or it's useless. Useless as a deterrent, useless as rehabilitation, useless as incarceration.
Of course, there *are* innocent people in jail. But your problem is not with the penal system, it's with a trial system that occasionally imprisons innocents. No doubt that's a problem, but you're shooting at the wrong target.
"does it make any sense to pay that much for a phone that is still locked to AT&T's network even if you aren't bound to a contract?"
As Henry Ford once said of his Model T, "the customer can have any color he wants, so long as it's black." But only a cellphone company could call that a "custom color choice" and charge extra for it.
Re "why do we need a ball of silicon?": here's an allegory that might be useful.
You apply for a new job. Your boss says, "welcome aboard. Here's how you'll be paid. Every week, I'll give you a fat envelope with money in it."
"Uh, how much money is that?" you ask.
"One envelope's worth. It's somewhere around $600, I don't know exactly."
"Umm, how can I be sure you're paying me the same every week?"
The boss says, "Well, I make up a bunch of envelopes every week for all the employees, and I try to make sure they're equally fat. See look, here are some of them."
"Dude, those are obviously not all the same size. I don't want to be rude, but can't you pay me a fixed number of dollars?"
"Well, I pay all the other employees in envelopes, and I've got to have the same rules for everyone."
"Okay," you say, "tell you what. Get one of your envelopes, and we'll open it up and count all the money in it exactly. Then you pay me, and everyone else, that much money each week."
"If you insist", says your new boss. "But I'm still gonna hand it out in envelopes."
For "dollar", read "atomic mass". For "envelope", read "kilogram". For "the number of dollars in the envelope", read "Avogadro's Number".
The key part of this allegory is that to ensure consistency with past practice, the boss has to let you count the number of dollars in one particular envelope. It doesn't really matter which one, but there has to be a physical envelope.
Since I don't have mod points:
-1, wrong. Melt the ice, and it exactly fills the "hole" it's displacing in the liquid.
Point taken. Let's go for a walk in the savanna, blindfolded. I'll let you go first.
The primate brain evolved in a situation where noticing hidden things was kind of important. Didn't see that shape in the grass? Oops, it was a skulking lion, you're dead, return genome to sender. We're the product of millions of years of life-or-death vision tests, and as a consequence, we're pretty good at it.
This device is based on the idea that some part of your brain might notice a hidden thing, but doesn't bother to tell the rest of you so you can react. This is evolutionary suicide. I'd have a hard time coming up with a trait that would be naturally selected out of the gene pool faster.
If this device worked, anyone who could use it would have gone extinct long ago.
Nice. Site is slashdotted in 20 minutes just from a rank-3 *comment*.
Skip the kids' kits and get yourself a solderless breadboard and ordinary bare components. You're a big boy, you can be trusted not to eat the resistors.
Here's a good book: "Getting Started in Electronics", by Forrest M. Mims III.
Radio Shack used to be the place for this kind of thing: you could get assortments of resistors and capacitors, and lots of basic semiconductors. These days, not many RS's have this stuff, and it's overpriced, but it might still be your best bet. mouser.com and digikey.com are good sources for EVERYTHING, but it's all a la carte, and you want the buffet.
Mod parent up, linked graphic is FRICKIN' AWESOME.
That's dumb. As dirty as coal plants are, they are far cleaner than the equivalent power output from internal combustion engines.
Wrong. Energy efficiency of a coal power plant is roughly 10,000 BTU of heat to produce 1 kWh of electricity, which works out to about 34% (1). Factor in about 93% efficiency for electrical transmission (2), 85% battery storage efficiency (3), and 90% electrical-to-mechanical energy conversion efficiency for electric motors, and the whole path from coal energy in to mechanical energy out works out to about 24% efficiency.
In comparison, an internal combustion engine is roughly 25% efficient from gasoline energy in to mechanical energy out (4). So it's really a wash.
In the end, the decision comes down to other factors, like weight of engine and energy storage systems, cost, and available infrastructure. By all means, make IC engines more efficient, but it's crazy to throw them out at the moment.
In a time of unlimited options, the world chose gasoline as the perfect transportation fuel, due to its power-to-weight ratio, efficiency, simplicity, portability, and storability. As energy becomes scarcer, let's reserve it for the job it's best suited for.
(1) http://www.doe.gov.ph/EE/HRIPP.htm
(2) http://www.canren.gc.ca/prod_serv/index.asp?CaId=101&PgId=550
(3) http://www.ceere.org/iac/assessment%20tool/ARC2410.html
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency