It's replacing the physical flight controls with directly brain-controlled flight controls. As to why: a large part of learning to fly (not the biggest part, certainly, but a significant piece) is learning how to use the fairly complicated controls. If you can simplify or even remove that interface, it makes the process of flying easier to learn.
Since this is Slashdot, someone is undoubtedly going to say that that learning difficulty is a good thing, since it sets a higher bar for pilots. There may be a bit of truth to that, but it's an artificial boundary that doesn't actually pertain to flying ability. It's like having to learn to use a Dvorak layout before you let anyone code: learning Dvorak probably won't make you a better coder, it'll simply make learning to code a more difficult process. Likewise, the complex controls that planes have doesn't make pilots better at flying, it simply makes learning to fly more difficult. So, while complicated controls might keep out lazy pilots, it won't keep out bad pilots (that's what the licensing requirements are for).
if it can execute the operation needed for the research then it is acceptable...if not, then no
You could probably write this computational code in a shell script, too. But it would still be a terrible idea. Why? Because it's the wrong tool for the job. Simple as that. It doesn't matter what you can and cannot do, it matters what you should do, and you shouldn't use spreadsheets for anything complicated. It's simply too easy to make stupid mistakes that are difficult to trace and correct (or even notice).
you can't blame a spreadsheet for a poorly devised experiment...you *can* blame a researcher for using an inappropriate statistical model...you *cannot* criticize the method of analysis as long as it is physically capable of the computation
TFA isn't blaming the spreadsheets, he's blaming the people who use them for using them. It's not acceptable to use a tool that works poorly and is highly susceptible to mistakes, and no one should listen to anyone who does so unless that person is damned good at that tool: yes, it is possible that someone is so fantastically good with spreadsheets they can use them for massive data analysis with no problems. They are, however, the exception, and I would generally be inclined to disbelieve the results from anyone who does large work with spreadsheets (simply because of the possibility for errors and the lack of concern for accuracy that using spreadsheets demonstrates). So, the conclusion is that you shouldn't use spreadsheets for important work. You absolutely can criticize an analysis if it uses a tool that is highly likely to introduce errors, and that's fundamentally the point (and it's underscored by the fact that that is precisely what happened in Piketty’s case).
Per the Constitution, the acceptable error rate is 0% false positives and any amount of false negatives.
No it isn't. In fact, it's easy to see that any justice system that accepts only a 0% false positive rate would convict absolutely no one of crimes whatsoever: it's simple Gaussian statistics. No matter how confident you are that someone committed a crime, it's impossible to be 100% positive, even if you saw them do it with your own eyes, which means that any standard of evidence no matter how high will yield a non-zero false conviction rate, so you couldn't convict anyone under such a high standard.
No, what the US follows for convictions is "reasonable doubt", which will inevitably lead to some false convictions. The alternative is to leave all crime unpunished, which is even more unacceptable than to have some innocent people end up in prison. It may sound "barbaric", but letting the guilty get away with their crimes is vastly more barbaric, and a society that did so would quickly collapse.
Pounds are both a measure of weight and mass, and the USA Today article uses pounds (not tons, Slashdot did that conversion) because, for better or worse, the US population is more familiar with US customary units than metric units, and USA Today is marketed at a US audience (the name is a bit of a clue). NASA also uses US units for some mind-baffling reason (maybe it likes destroying Mars Orbiter missions?) so the US units make sense in this story.
There's absolutely nothing weird on PowerPC being used on videogames.
No one is saying using a PowerPC-based chip was stupid. Virtually everyone is saying using a Cell-based chip was stupid. You automatically lose performance relative to your competitors on games that don't take full advantage of the Cell architecture, which is precisely those multi-platform games where people can directly compare performance on the PS3 with performance on the Xbox. This article is a testament to the code specialization required to take full advantage of the architecture, and game developers simply weren't willing to put in that kind of effort (especially for a console that sold more for it's ability to play Blu-ray discs than it did for it's gaming capabilities). Often, even PS3 exclusives didn't utilize the Cell properly: it simply took too much work on an architecture few developers were familiar with (while PowerPC based, the SPE co-processor design means you have to use radically different techniques than you would for a normal PowerPC system).
Car analogy time: it's like giving a bunch of drivers who don't know how to use manual transmissions a manual car. Yes, manual transmission is faster than automatic, but if your drivers don't know how to use it properly, it's always going to end up being slower in practice.
How difficult would it be to re-run the same procedure with fully dehydrated particles? Is this a 'just bake them under a modest vacuum for a bit' situation, or are these values of 'small' and 'adsorbed' the sort of thing where getting the water out would be a moderately heroic endeavor?
Difficult, you'd need to run the entire process under an ultra-high vacuum. For reference, you to get water monolayer formation times greater than a second, you'd need pressures of roughly less than 10^-7 torr, or 10^-10 atmospheres. For reference (if WolframAlpha is to believed), the ISS is exposed to a pressure of about 10^-11 atmospheres. Molecular/ion pumps can get that low a pressure, so it's not impossible, just difficult.
That requires the robbers to take time to inspect the bottles, or develop some quick method of identifying them (which is probably very difficult). Either way, it makes committing a robbery more difficult, which is the real point. You can't stop crime, not without truly draconian measures. You can, however, make it difficult enough for it to not be an enticing prospect for criminals or potential criminals.
When the laws were created is irrelevant to the reality that protecting your privacy is made impossible in many places by government thugs.
Wearing masks in public is not a protection of your privacy: you're in *public*: everyone can see you, and what you are doing. That's part of the whole concept of a public place. No, wearing masks preserves *anonymity*, which is different from privacy. As is, you have and should have limited rights to privacy in public (can't force people not to look at you, for example). You have no right whatsoever to anonymity in public.
But even then, you'd still have the expense of the Delta-V to get it to fall into the Sun. It almost certainly would be cheaper to send the stuff to Alpha Centuari than to the Sun.
I've done the math. It would (IIRC, it's actually more fuel efficient to almost escape from the Solar System, then fall back into the Sun, than it is to try directly falling into the Sun from Earth). However, you wouldn't have to send the waste into the sun, merely "not Earth" would be enough (still very expensive, though). It's not going to hurt much floating in orbit between here and Mars, for instance.
I hate to break it to you, but the ancient term "America" refers to the whole continent, Canada included.
Nope - that would be "North America."
Hey, if you're going to be a pedant...
Ok, since we're being pedantic: technically, "America" refers to the entire landmass (made up of the continents of North and South America and associated islands). Still includes Canada, though.
It's a fundamentally flawed hypothesis, because by definition we don't know what we haven't discovered yet. I might even go so far as to say the knowledge we haven't acquired is greater than the knowledge we have. This has been true historically, it is probably true now, and it might well remain true for... well, actually, forever, though it's impossible to know.
Sure, except that in every reported case of battery fires in a Tesla, the user has walked away from the crash (even when the crash took place at 100 mph or so). The cars already have the highest safety rating possible in tests. Expecting a safety margin is one thing, and Tesla has shown they more than fulfill that. Expecting to be invincible is quite another, and that's what a lot of people (or, at least the media) seem to be expecting, and that's incredibly stupid.
This battery shield is a PR move, quite simply. Not a bad one, and it might marginally improve safety, but I suspect only extremely marginally so, and it's certainly not worth it as a safety measure alone.
There's also a complete inequality in girls graduating high school, enrolling in college, and graduating college.
Yes there is. There are considerably more women in college than men. Has been for decades, now. Higher graduation rates, too (roughly 5% higher for women). I suspect that is the exact opposite inequality from what you meant, but there definitely is an inequality there.
It should be noted I'm not complaining about that inequality. I don't know for sure why it exists, but I suspect it has to do with boys being encouraged during high school (and to some extent college as well) to pursue sports and "manly" activities rather than their studies, which leaves them less prepared for higher education. I could be wrong, though.
Don't you think modern medicine should have just as much of a chance of tapping into the placebo effect as anything else?
Yes, but it also has a greater chance than homeopathy of tapping into side effects (not that I'm defending homeopathy in any way). It also has a greater chance of tapping into real effects than the placebo effect: that is, in fact, most of the point of double-blind studies (you give half the group the placebo, half the group the proposed treatment, don't tell them or the doctors who observe the results which is which, and see if the medicine is more effective than the placebo).
Only to still replace it with air cooling further down the line.
Honest question: how would you build a consumer system that doesn't rely on air cooling eventually? Even if you use phase change, you still need to dump that heat somewhere, so unless you use evaporative cooling or have access to a practically infinite heat sink such as a river or geothermal exchange system (both of which are completely impractical for consumer level equipment), air cooling is literally the only option. Hell, even most (and by most I mean practically all) air conditioning systems use air cooling, ultimately. Probably 99% of all cooling systems everywhere end up using air.
I am not a physicist, but since light is a particle and a wave it would seem that light being matter would break down anti matter over time?
Like I said it's just what I would think and I could be insanely stupid and wrong lol
Nah, light isn't matter at all (a particle, yes, but not matter). More precisely: every particle has an equivalent antiparticle with exactly opposite charge (or other properties). For example, electrons are charged leptons with lepton number +1 and electric charge -1 (in units of electron-charge). The antielectron (positron) has lepton number -1, and electric charge +1. Conservation laws require that lepton number and charge be conserved, so the positron and electron can annihilate each other. The proton and the positron, however, cannot (as the proton is a baryon, not a lepton, and both have charge +1, so such an annihilation would violate 3 conservation laws). However, photons have no charge or lepton number, and thus conservation dictates that they cannot annihilate with electrons. Interestingly enough, they can annihilate with each other (photons are their own antiparticle).
This conservation is the entire reason matter-antimatter asymmetry is a problem in physics: every process we know of that produces electrons should also produce antielectrons. It's worth noting that the universe as a whole is not conservative (the expansion of space violates energy conservation, for example), so it isn't necessarily surprising to find an asymmetry, we'd just like to know by what process this comes about (of course, this is hard to do, as every process we can initiate does obey conservation laws: asymmetry may well only happen in some universe-level process, so we may not be able to study it directly).
According to TFA, neither (well, not that they're announcing, anyways). They're supposedly looking into advanced prosthetics, biological manufacturing techniques, disease tracking, stopping harmful genetic engineering, stuff like that. I'd imagine a defense against bio/chemical weapons would also be of interest. Although, given it's DARPA, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did look into bioengineered super-soldiers, just to see if it's possible.
Really? Because I'm pretty fucking sure they did, in fact, do exactly that. Samsung vs Apple involved patent USD504899, which claims "the ornamental design for an electronic device, substantially as shown and described", to wit a rectangular cuboid with rounded corners. So, yes, Apple did sue Samsung over rounded corners (although the jury did find Samsung did not infringe, that does not change the fact that Apple did in fact sue Samsung over a thin rectangular design with rounded corners.)
But the meaning of the word "toilet" does not (generally) depend on the whole sentence nor on the context of the sentence. "You're such a Samantha", however, does, especially since Samantha doesn't literally mean anything besides the name itself. Samantha does not mean "bitch/slut/etc., except in this context (toilet, on the other hand, retains its meaning even entirely outside any other context). As another example, one could easily translate the phrase "a New York minute" to another language, but conveying what it actually means would require using completely different words (in fact, the literal translation would be entirely different from the idiomatic meaning). A computer which tried to translate the phrase would have zero concept that it's an idiom (unless explicitly told so), and would simply translate the sentence as it was, which would create an intelligible translation, but would not convey the desired concept at all.
You could argue that single-word (such as "Samantha") could intelligently be translated by the universal translator successfully, even when used in such an idiomatic construct. But a sentence which depends entirely on the context ("Darmok at Blahblah" might well refer to an entirely different Darmok, or not even to a person at all) is vastly harder, if not impossible, to translate.
Wait, you think whiny slashdotters are an economic force?
Notch has already canceled his plans to bring Minecraft to the Rift. Given that the entire success of the Rift so far has been from the community (literally: the Rift was crowd-funded and would not exist today if it wasn't for the community), and I have yet to see a single person in the community comments on a number of sites who doesn't dislike this move, I'm guessing the blowback is going to be pretty massive.
I myself have already gone from debating whether I should pick up the dev kit version 2 to play around with or wait for the consumer version, to not planning on buying it ever, and I'm not the only one.
Over the last... long while now scientists have developed a bad habit of getting really excited and presenting findings as concrete, only to get shot down. Besides, doesn't an experiment have to be repeated for the results to be confirmed? Regardless, if the alternate interpretation proves true, I find it no less significant.
It's customary in science to present your findings exactly as they are, with the statistical certainty associated with the findings. They never said their results were confirmed or "concrete", they said their findings confirmed several other theories and that they were highly certain of the results given the known sources of error and the model they were using. You can always come up with other theories that would also fit the observational data: heck, half the point of publishing your data is so the scientific community can look at it and see if you did something wrong, or if there are other interpretations that fit the data better.
Decidedly not relevant. The NCIS (which is what actually collects said data, not the Navy proper) is a civilian organization (according to their website, 98% of their agents are civilians, and 90% of the agency overall is civilian) which is specifically authorized by Congress to engage in law enforcement. Law enforcement is, in fact, it's whole reason for existence. Posse Commitus does not apply.
I'm neither a lawyer nor intimately familiar with the details of this particular case, but I'm a bit confused how EU law would apply to a US based company running a US-based service (such as an outlook.com email address), regardless of the nationality of the person who signed up for said service.
But they don't believe in evolution, they believe in theistic evolution, that is, evolution guided by god, which is not really evolution. One of the fundamental aspects of evolution is that it does not require a guider, just chemistry, statistics, and time.
No, they don't (well, some of them do, I can't really speak for all of them). God doesn't have to guide evolution: why would he? He's an omnipotent omniscient being in Catholic theology: he is completely capable of creating the universe with a set of physical laws that will result in evolution following the path he wants it to without intervening directly in it later.
It sounds like you are describing a god whose existence is indistinguishable from it's non-existense. How would you ever tell if that god exists? Why should anyone believe in it if you can't tell?
Scientifically, yes: the universe with a god is indistinguishable from one without one (well, aside from the fact that the universe does actually exist, but that's a long argument I won't engage in here). That makes sense: science deals with the natural, not the supernatural. In fact, even if God did regularly directly intervene in the physical world, there still would be no scientific proof he exists: science would attribute it either as a natural process if it happened regularly (even if it didn't fully understand why) just as it does with all regular processes we see in the world, or a statistical anomaly also caused by natural processes (albeit unknown ones) if it happened irregularly. That's because that is all science can do: to ask it to talk about supernatural beings is like asking your eyes what noise tastes like. That is simply not how it works. Science looks for natural processes governing nature. It literally cannot see supernatural events. All it would say is "some effect we cannot yet fully explain."
Slashdot Mirror
What is brain controlled?
It's replacing the physical flight controls with directly brain-controlled flight controls. As to why: a large part of learning to fly (not the biggest part, certainly, but a significant piece) is learning how to use the fairly complicated controls. If you can simplify or even remove that interface, it makes the process of flying easier to learn.
Since this is Slashdot, someone is undoubtedly going to say that that learning difficulty is a good thing, since it sets a higher bar for pilots. There may be a bit of truth to that, but it's an artificial boundary that doesn't actually pertain to flying ability. It's like having to learn to use a Dvorak layout before you let anyone code: learning Dvorak probably won't make you a better coder, it'll simply make learning to code a more difficult process. Likewise, the complex controls that planes have doesn't make pilots better at flying, it simply makes learning to fly more difficult. So, while complicated controls might keep out lazy pilots, it won't keep out bad pilots (that's what the licensing requirements are for).
if it can execute the operation needed for the research then it is acceptable...if not, then no
You could probably write this computational code in a shell script, too. But it would still be a terrible idea. Why? Because it's the wrong tool for the job. Simple as that. It doesn't matter what you can and cannot do, it matters what you should do, and you shouldn't use spreadsheets for anything complicated. It's simply too easy to make stupid mistakes that are difficult to trace and correct (or even notice).
you can't blame a spreadsheet for a poorly devised experiment...you *can* blame a researcher for using an inappropriate statistical model...you *cannot* criticize the method of analysis as long as it is physically capable of the computation
TFA isn't blaming the spreadsheets, he's blaming the people who use them for using them. It's not acceptable to use a tool that works poorly and is highly susceptible to mistakes, and no one should listen to anyone who does so unless that person is damned good at that tool: yes, it is possible that someone is so fantastically good with spreadsheets they can use them for massive data analysis with no problems. They are, however, the exception, and I would generally be inclined to disbelieve the results from anyone who does large work with spreadsheets (simply because of the possibility for errors and the lack of concern for accuracy that using spreadsheets demonstrates). So, the conclusion is that you shouldn't use spreadsheets for important work. You absolutely can criticize an analysis if it uses a tool that is highly likely to introduce errors, and that's fundamentally the point (and it's underscored by the fact that that is precisely what happened in Piketty’s case).
Per the Constitution, the acceptable error rate is 0% false positives and any amount of false negatives.
No it isn't. In fact, it's easy to see that any justice system that accepts only a 0% false positive rate would convict absolutely no one of crimes whatsoever: it's simple Gaussian statistics. No matter how confident you are that someone committed a crime, it's impossible to be 100% positive, even if you saw them do it with your own eyes, which means that any standard of evidence no matter how high will yield a non-zero false conviction rate, so you couldn't convict anyone under such a high standard.
No, what the US follows for convictions is "reasonable doubt", which will inevitably lead to some false convictions. The alternative is to leave all crime unpunished, which is even more unacceptable than to have some innocent people end up in prison. It may sound "barbaric", but letting the guilty get away with their crimes is vastly more barbaric, and a society that did so would quickly collapse.
Pounds are both a measure of weight and mass, and the USA Today article uses pounds (not tons, Slashdot did that conversion) because, for better or worse, the US population is more familiar with US customary units than metric units, and USA Today is marketed at a US audience (the name is a bit of a clue). NASA also uses US units for some mind-baffling reason (maybe it likes destroying Mars Orbiter missions?) so the US units make sense in this story.
There's absolutely nothing weird on PowerPC being used on videogames.
No one is saying using a PowerPC-based chip was stupid. Virtually everyone is saying using a Cell-based chip was stupid. You automatically lose performance relative to your competitors on games that don't take full advantage of the Cell architecture, which is precisely those multi-platform games where people can directly compare performance on the PS3 with performance on the Xbox. This article is a testament to the code specialization required to take full advantage of the architecture, and game developers simply weren't willing to put in that kind of effort (especially for a console that sold more for it's ability to play Blu-ray discs than it did for it's gaming capabilities). Often, even PS3 exclusives didn't utilize the Cell properly: it simply took too much work on an architecture few developers were familiar with (while PowerPC based, the SPE co-processor design means you have to use radically different techniques than you would for a normal PowerPC system).
Car analogy time: it's like giving a bunch of drivers who don't know how to use manual transmissions a manual car. Yes, manual transmission is faster than automatic, but if your drivers don't know how to use it properly, it's always going to end up being slower in practice.
How difficult would it be to re-run the same procedure with fully dehydrated particles? Is this a 'just bake them under a modest vacuum for a bit' situation, or are these values of 'small' and 'adsorbed' the sort of thing where getting the water out would be a moderately heroic endeavor?
Difficult, you'd need to run the entire process under an ultra-high vacuum. For reference, you to get water monolayer formation times greater than a second, you'd need pressures of roughly less than 10^-7 torr, or 10^-10 atmospheres. For reference (if WolframAlpha is to believed), the ISS is exposed to a pressure of about 10^-11 atmospheres. Molecular/ion pumps can get that low a pressure, so it's not impossible, just difficult.
That requires the robbers to take time to inspect the bottles, or develop some quick method of identifying them (which is probably very difficult). Either way, it makes committing a robbery more difficult, which is the real point. You can't stop crime, not without truly draconian measures. You can, however, make it difficult enough for it to not be an enticing prospect for criminals or potential criminals.
When the laws were created is irrelevant to the reality that protecting your privacy is made impossible in many places by government thugs.
Wearing masks in public is not a protection of your privacy: you're in *public*: everyone can see you, and what you are doing. That's part of the whole concept of a public place. No, wearing masks preserves *anonymity*, which is different from privacy. As is, you have and should have limited rights to privacy in public (can't force people not to look at you, for example). You have no right whatsoever to anonymity in public.
But even then, you'd still have the expense of the Delta-V to get it to fall into the Sun. It almost certainly would be cheaper to send the stuff to Alpha Centuari than to the Sun.
I've done the math. It would (IIRC, it's actually more fuel efficient to almost escape from the Solar System, then fall back into the Sun, than it is to try directly falling into the Sun from Earth). However, you wouldn't have to send the waste into the sun, merely "not Earth" would be enough (still very expensive, though). It's not going to hurt much floating in orbit between here and Mars, for instance.
I hate to break it to you, but the ancient term "America" refers to the whole continent, Canada included.
Nope - that would be "North America."
Hey, if you're going to be a pedant...
Ok, since we're being pedantic: technically, "America" refers to the entire landmass (made up of the continents of North and South America and associated islands). Still includes Canada, though.
Relevant SMBC.
It's a fundamentally flawed hypothesis, because by definition we don't know what we haven't discovered yet. I might even go so far as to say the knowledge we haven't acquired is greater than the knowledge we have. This has been true historically, it is probably true now, and it might well remain true for... well, actually, forever, though it's impossible to know.
Sure, except that in every reported case of battery fires in a Tesla, the user has walked away from the crash (even when the crash took place at 100 mph or so). The cars already have the highest safety rating possible in tests. Expecting a safety margin is one thing, and Tesla has shown they more than fulfill that. Expecting to be invincible is quite another, and that's what a lot of people (or, at least the media) seem to be expecting, and that's incredibly stupid.
This battery shield is a PR move, quite simply. Not a bad one, and it might marginally improve safety, but I suspect only extremely marginally so, and it's certainly not worth it as a safety measure alone.
There's also a complete inequality in girls graduating high school, enrolling in college, and graduating college.
Yes there is. There are considerably more women in college than men. Has been for decades, now. Higher graduation rates, too (roughly 5% higher for women). I suspect that is the exact opposite inequality from what you meant, but there definitely is an inequality there.
It should be noted I'm not complaining about that inequality. I don't know for sure why it exists, but I suspect it has to do with boys being encouraged during high school (and to some extent college as well) to pursue sports and "manly" activities rather than their studies, which leaves them less prepared for higher education. I could be wrong, though.
Don't you think modern medicine should have just as much of a chance of tapping into the placebo effect as anything else?
Yes, but it also has a greater chance than homeopathy of tapping into side effects (not that I'm defending homeopathy in any way). It also has a greater chance of tapping into real effects than the placebo effect: that is, in fact, most of the point of double-blind studies (you give half the group the placebo, half the group the proposed treatment, don't tell them or the doctors who observe the results which is which, and see if the medicine is more effective than the placebo).
Only to still replace it with air cooling further down the line.
Honest question: how would you build a consumer system that doesn't rely on air cooling eventually? Even if you use phase change, you still need to dump that heat somewhere, so unless you use evaporative cooling or have access to a practically infinite heat sink such as a river or geothermal exchange system (both of which are completely impractical for consumer level equipment), air cooling is literally the only option. Hell, even most (and by most I mean practically all) air conditioning systems use air cooling, ultimately. Probably 99% of all cooling systems everywhere end up using air.
I am not a physicist, but since light is a particle and a wave it would seem that light being matter would break down anti matter over time?
Like I said it's just what I would think and I could be insanely stupid and wrong lol
Nah, light isn't matter at all (a particle, yes, but not matter). More precisely: every particle has an equivalent antiparticle with exactly opposite charge (or other properties). For example, electrons are charged leptons with lepton number +1 and electric charge -1 (in units of electron-charge). The antielectron (positron) has lepton number -1, and electric charge +1. Conservation laws require that lepton number and charge be conserved, so the positron and electron can annihilate each other. The proton and the positron, however, cannot (as the proton is a baryon, not a lepton, and both have charge +1, so such an annihilation would violate 3 conservation laws). However, photons have no charge or lepton number, and thus conservation dictates that they cannot annihilate with electrons. Interestingly enough, they can annihilate with each other (photons are their own antiparticle).
This conservation is the entire reason matter-antimatter asymmetry is a problem in physics: every process we know of that produces electrons should also produce antielectrons. It's worth noting that the universe as a whole is not conservative (the expansion of space violates energy conservation, for example), so it isn't necessarily surprising to find an asymmetry, we'd just like to know by what process this comes about (of course, this is hard to do, as every process we can initiate does obey conservation laws: asymmetry may well only happen in some universe-level process, so we may not be able to study it directly).
According to TFA, neither (well, not that they're announcing, anyways). They're supposedly looking into advanced prosthetics, biological manufacturing techniques, disease tracking, stopping harmful genetic engineering, stuff like that. I'd imagine a defense against bio/chemical weapons would also be of interest. Although, given it's DARPA, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did look into bioengineered super-soldiers, just to see if it's possible.
Really? Because I'm pretty fucking sure they did, in fact, do exactly that. Samsung vs Apple involved patent USD504899, which claims "the ornamental design for an electronic device, substantially as shown and described", to wit a rectangular cuboid with rounded corners. So, yes, Apple did sue Samsung over rounded corners (although the jury did find Samsung did not infringe, that does not change the fact that Apple did in fact sue Samsung over a thin rectangular design with rounded corners.)
But the meaning of the word "toilet" does not (generally) depend on the whole sentence nor on the context of the sentence. "You're such a Samantha", however, does, especially since Samantha doesn't literally mean anything besides the name itself. Samantha does not mean "bitch/slut/etc., except in this context (toilet, on the other hand, retains its meaning even entirely outside any other context). As another example, one could easily translate the phrase "a New York minute" to another language, but conveying what it actually means would require using completely different words (in fact, the literal translation would be entirely different from the idiomatic meaning). A computer which tried to translate the phrase would have zero concept that it's an idiom (unless explicitly told so), and would simply translate the sentence as it was, which would create an intelligible translation, but would not convey the desired concept at all.
You could argue that single-word (such as "Samantha") could intelligently be translated by the universal translator successfully, even when used in such an idiomatic construct. But a sentence which depends entirely on the context ("Darmok at Blahblah" might well refer to an entirely different Darmok, or not even to a person at all) is vastly harder, if not impossible, to translate.
Wait, you think whiny slashdotters are an economic force?
Notch has already canceled his plans to bring Minecraft to the Rift. Given that the entire success of the Rift so far has been from the community (literally: the Rift was crowd-funded and would not exist today if it wasn't for the community), and I have yet to see a single person in the community comments on a number of sites who doesn't dislike this move, I'm guessing the blowback is going to be pretty massive.
I myself have already gone from debating whether I should pick up the dev kit version 2 to play around with or wait for the consumer version, to not planning on buying it ever, and I'm not the only one.
Over the last... long while now scientists have developed a bad habit of getting really excited and presenting findings as concrete, only to get shot down. Besides, doesn't an experiment have to be repeated for the results to be confirmed? Regardless, if the alternate interpretation proves true, I find it no less significant.
It's customary in science to present your findings exactly as they are, with the statistical certainty associated with the findings. They never said their results were confirmed or "concrete", they said their findings confirmed several other theories and that they were highly certain of the results given the known sources of error and the model they were using. You can always come up with other theories that would also fit the observational data: heck, half the point of publishing your data is so the scientific community can look at it and see if you did something wrong, or if there are other interpretations that fit the data better.
Decidedly not relevant. The NCIS (which is what actually collects said data, not the Navy proper) is a civilian organization (according to their website, 98% of their agents are civilians, and 90% of the agency overall is civilian) which is specifically authorized by Congress to engage in law enforcement. Law enforcement is, in fact, it's whole reason for existence. Posse Commitus does not apply.
I'm neither a lawyer nor intimately familiar with the details of this particular case, but I'm a bit confused how EU law would apply to a US based company running a US-based service (such as an outlook.com email address), regardless of the nationality of the person who signed up for said service.
But they don't believe in evolution, they believe in theistic evolution, that is, evolution guided by god, which is not really evolution. One of the fundamental aspects of evolution is that it does not require a guider, just chemistry, statistics, and time.
No, they don't (well, some of them do, I can't really speak for all of them). God doesn't have to guide evolution: why would he? He's an omnipotent omniscient being in Catholic theology: he is completely capable of creating the universe with a set of physical laws that will result in evolution following the path he wants it to without intervening directly in it later.
It sounds like you are describing a god whose existence is indistinguishable from it's non-existense. How would you ever tell if that god exists? Why should anyone believe in it if you can't tell?
Scientifically, yes: the universe with a god is indistinguishable from one without one (well, aside from the fact that the universe does actually exist, but that's a long argument I won't engage in here). That makes sense: science deals with the natural, not the supernatural. In fact, even if God did regularly directly intervene in the physical world, there still would be no scientific proof he exists: science would attribute it either as a natural process if it happened regularly (even if it didn't fully understand why) just as it does with all regular processes we see in the world, or a statistical anomaly also caused by natural processes (albeit unknown ones) if it happened irregularly. That's because that is all science can do: to ask it to talk about supernatural beings is like asking your eyes what noise tastes like. That is simply not how it works. Science looks for natural processes governing nature. It literally cannot see supernatural events. All it would say is "some effect we cannot yet fully explain."