The title is technically accurate (misleading as hell, but accurate): you can, indeed, get more energy from a system than predicted by the classical law of thermodynamics. You just have to extend the law to include the energy bound in the quantum entanglement, which classical thermodynamics does not.
As an experiment, yes. There were also a few reactors that simply used modifications on existing uranium designs, but those don't really have most of the proposed advantages of thorium. We won't really know if they work well in practice outside a limited-run experiment until they start getting deployed on a commercial scale, which they haven't yet, especially the "no-meltdown LFTR" design. It's unfortunate they weren't pursued earlier, and I do believe they serve as a useful stop-gap until we get to fusion (very useful), but I'm a bit wary about putting all our eggs into the thorium basket.
We have a perfectly fine tested method of doing nuclear power safely using a thorium reactor.
Actually, no. There are many thorium reactors in development, but there are no well-tested designs at all yet, so we don't really know how safe they will end up being (in theory, pebble-bed reactors are perfectly safe, non-contaminating too, but they turned out not to be quite so good in practice). And at best, they are no-where near as good as fusion could be.
I just can't wait for the legislation sponsered by the RIAA that simply allows the labels to send armed gaurds to anyone's home and hold them up for wallet cash and loose change at any time.
Won't happen, the government doesn't like anyone infringing on their monopoly.
Justin Beiber wouldn't be popular unless a lot of people actually liked his music, as hard as that is to believe. A result of marketing he may be, but they are marketing something people clearly want. The fundamental problem is most people have terrible taste in music. The labels are just pandering to that.
The court disagreed on both counts, noting that “the biological characteristics of the cells change during the process”, and that this, together with other factors, means the cells are more than “minimally manipulated”.
Leigh Turner, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, agrees. “It is much too simplistic to think that stem cells are removed from the body and then returned to the body without a ‘manufacturing process’ that includes risk of transmission of communicable diseases,” he says. “Maintaining the FDA’s role as watchdog and regulatory authority is imperative.”
They aren't just taking pieces from one part and injecting them into another. They are taking pieces, modifying them, and then re-injecting them. It's quite possible that a procedure that didn't modify the cells would be fine with the FDA: in fact, TFA mentions that the company in question offers 3 other processes that have much quicker turn-around which the FDA has not taken issue with (they have also not approved them, so we'll see if they decide to tackle them later as well or not).
Not necessarily. This is a court decision, not a new statutory law. A significant (very very very significant) part of the job of a court is to decide over specific cases and whether the law, in word and in spirit, is supposed to apply to that case. They ruled that in this case (stem cells) it does. In the case of dialysis, they might not (probably wouldn't, since it is a proven long-standing and genuinely routine medical procedure). It is a very fine line, but that is what the courts are for: so that they can walk that line, and the legislature doesn't have to (of course, the legislature often does, but that is a different problem).
You'd like Steam - a DRM system - to help you buy only DRMed games that don't use a competing DRM system?
People really have drunk the Steam kool-aid, haven't they?
Yes, because unlike every other DRM system I've ever seen, Steam actually helps to improve the experience, by making sure the game is up-to-date, storing saves and config files in the "cloud" (for developers who implement it), allowing me to re-download and re-install games on as many computers as I please, allowing me to easily play with friends (or not, as I see fit), and still allowing me to play games offline (unlike *ahem* Blizzard). And of course their famous sales. I know people who dislike Valve who still like Steam. Granted, the DRM isn't necessary for all that technically speaking, but it is to provide a decent selection (most developers wouldn't put their games on Steam if it didn't have copy-protection of some kind).
Honestly, Steam is almost always as easier, sometimes more, than pirating games.
Maybe Kickstarter.com can help fix this mess. The 24 game projects that have been funded with Kickstarter will all be delivered sometime in 2013. And then we will see if the "Crowdfunded Games" can serve as a replacement for buying games from the big Multi-Billion Dollar game publishers. ------
A replacement? If they could, indie games already would (to some people, they already are). That is essentially what all the Kickstarter games are: indie games which are crowdfunded rather than self-funded (allows developers with less financial security in, and helps give peace of mind to all of them). While I love indie games (some of them being superior to the AAA titles in many ways), they do not serve as a 100% replacement for me, and I'm guessing not to most people. A game like Skyrim is simply too big and costs too much to be crowdfunded, and I love games like that and will by no means give them up simply because of DRM like Steam (now, if it was like Origin or UPlay or "always-on connection", I might reconsider, but Bethesda has a history of fairly sane DRM. Oblivion used a simple CD check, and Fallout 3 didn't have any on the game proper, though the launcher used Securom for some insane reason).
Is there any reason we shouldn't recycle designs when it comes to rocket engines? Of course (maybe?) we could use modern tools to help improve efficiency but is there anything to gain by starting from scratch?
Unless you have some new form of rocket fuel or someone discovers a radical new design for an engine that improves efficiency, not really. Rockets are a pretty well established field: starting from scratch doesn't really happen. Not only would it add a ton of testing and design time (which costs quite a lot of money), but you aren't really even sure it would work any better. Rockets are, well, rockets. Ignite propellant, make sure it heads out the back. Thats a gross oversimplification, of course, but they aren't like jets that have a ton of thrust-creating parts you can redesign and recreate in different ways (turbojet, ramjet, scramjet, etc.)
Actually, depending on what the options were exactly, employees with stock options could have made out wonderfully if they sold them out early (same with early private investors). You're probably right about the rest, though.
Well, obviously, they did it to make money (that is rather the point of an IPO in the first place). In that, they succeeded, although I think it will be to the detriment of the company long term. Perhaps they realized Facebook didn't have a long-term future and going public was the only way for the people in charge to get out with all the money they could.
What an IPO is supposed to do is raise capital to operate and expand, and to help pay off initial private investors and early employees. They succeeded at the latter, but I don't think they even needed an IPO for the former, and in fact I do think it was counterproductive in the long term, and in that you make a very good point. But I'm not sure they even really intended the IPO for that anyways.
Not really, no. The problem with waiting was Facebook got so large no one really knew what it was worth, and more importantly they did the IPO right as Facebook was more or less peaking in size and revenue. That means investors bought into the company expecting vastly continued growth and expanding revenue (because Facebook had been growing so fast), and ended up with... well, some growth and and revenue increase, but not as much as expected.
If the IPO had been made earlier, when Facebook was much smaller and still expanding rapidly, the actual value would have been somewhat easier to determine, expectations would have been considerably easier to meet, and the hype would not have inflated the price quite so much. As it stands, Facebook has very little room for growth, which is expected based on their history (even though, of course, they really don't have many more users they even can add) and their attempts to revitalize (by changing the layout, for example) have not helped. Add to that that Facebook is pretty much a one-trick, super-hyped pony, and you have a recipe for disappointed investors.
It's run by Congress, technically (the whole Congress, House and Senate). So neither party controls it by themselves, since the Senate is controlled by one party and the House by the other.
So if I shoot and kill you, I didn't commit a crime because you would have died eventually anyways? Anon went in, stole the private data of innocent people who were completely uninvolved in what anon was protesting, and released it to the public, likely resulting in grave harm to those individuals, all so that Anon could make a point. Yes, maybe it would have happened eventually anyway, but that doesn't matter in the slightest. Anon did something that directly results in harm towards others. Simply put: the ends do not justify the means. You cannot harm innocent people simply because your intended result is good.
The original AC wasn't talking about taxes, he was talking about straight-up taking all of Bill Gates wealth. The two things are quite different.
And of course people accumulating money does drive capitalism (it is very difficult to have capitalism without capitalists). Many of those goods regular people buy wouldn't exist had it not been for the millions or billions of dollars corporations sank into research and development, courtesy of capitalism. Granted, people don't need to be multi-billionaires to do that, but they do need to have enough money that they can afford to sink a significant amount of it into business capital and not every-day needs.
I'm not arguing against high tax rates for the rich, just saying the OP is a bit of an idiot.
Of course, the DOJ decision was after this little tidbit:
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge Jackson's [original judge who issued the breakup order] rulings against Microsoft. This was partly because the Appellate court had adopted a "drastically altered scope of liability" under which the Remedies could be taken, and also partly due to the embargoed interviews Judge Jackson had given to the news media while he was still hearing the case, in violation of the Code of Conduct for US Judges.[17] Judge Jackson did not attend the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hearing, in which the appeals court judges accused him of unethical conduct and determined he should have recused himself from the case.
Unfortunately, take-off and landing are the times noise creates the worst impact. Also, I don't think you meant "1000" feet, as a commercial jet does not normally fly that low and certainly wouldn't at supersonic speeds (cruise altitude for the Concorde was closer to 60,000 feet, going supersonic at 1000 feet would be really really stupid: noise, safety, and structural concerns due to higher atmospheric pressure that low would forbid it).
They do. But a tornado bad enough to knock out the fiber will knock out the power long before (and the phone lines, since they are being run on the same poles). The power is, for residential customers, the bigger issue (not much point in gigabit Internet if your computer, modem, and WiFi are all down as well).
More importantly, hanging is a lot cheaper than burying.
If the new malware is able to bypass the quarantine dialog in 10.7 already (TFS says "silently", so a safe assumption I think), that means Gatekeeper won't do anything: it relies on the quarantine flag on downloaded files. That's basically what it does, AFAICT: checks for the flag, block execution if it is flagged and not signed validly. I'm not sure if it will stop this malware or not: I was pointing out that it doesn't simply stop unsigned apps from executing at all, because it doesn't (and the fact that users can bypass it, without altering settings, means that programs almost certainly can as well, which means a fault in Firefox or Safari, for that matter, can probably also bypass it).
Maybe, maybe not. Gatekeeper is supposed to prevent unsigned downloaded programs from running, but it will only work if the executable gets properly flagged as "downloaded." It doesn't stop other executables from running, nor does it stop people from running them directly, so whether it will stop all drive-bys or not is not 100% clear (it should stop some, of course).
Not true. Read the Ars Technica review: Gatekeeper only stops the execution of apps directly from downloading them (downloaded executables are flagged). Hell, you can right-click the app after downloading it, select "run", and it will work just fine.
In most countries, software itself is not illegal unless it is used illegally in that country (I believe Japan is one exception, there may be others was well). Monitoring your own computer using "malware" is perfectly legal. That means the government cannot legally do anything, and generally you wouldn't want them to either: or do you trust governments to have the restraint not to call Linux "hacking" software?
Do you have reading comprehension problems? The quoted text says "on record".
Who exactly has reading comprehension problems? The sentence says this year is the warmest on record for the US. It says the past 13 are the warmest period for the whole planet, no mention of recorded or time at all. What it may have meant... actually isn't clear (do they mean the warmest in the past 100 years? Because that is pretty meaningless, really.)
Slashdot Mirror
The title is technically accurate (misleading as hell, but accurate): you can, indeed, get more energy from a system than predicted by the classical law of thermodynamics. You just have to extend the law to include the energy bound in the quantum entanglement, which classical thermodynamics does not.
As an experiment, yes. There were also a few reactors that simply used modifications on existing uranium designs, but those don't really have most of the proposed advantages of thorium. We won't really know if they work well in practice outside a limited-run experiment until they start getting deployed on a commercial scale, which they haven't yet, especially the "no-meltdown LFTR" design. It's unfortunate they weren't pursued earlier, and I do believe they serve as a useful stop-gap until we get to fusion (very useful), but I'm a bit wary about putting all our eggs into the thorium basket.
We have a perfectly fine tested method of doing nuclear power safely using a thorium reactor.
Actually, no. There are many thorium reactors in development, but there are no well-tested designs at all yet, so we don't really know how safe they will end up being (in theory, pebble-bed reactors are perfectly safe, non-contaminating too, but they turned out not to be quite so good in practice). And at best, they are no-where near as good as fusion could be.
I just can't wait for the legislation sponsered by the RIAA that simply allows the labels to send armed gaurds to anyone's home and hold them up for wallet cash and loose change at any time.
Won't happen, the government doesn't like anyone infringing on their monopoly.
Justin Beiber wouldn't be popular unless a lot of people actually liked his music, as hard as that is to believe. A result of marketing he may be, but they are marketing something people clearly want. The fundamental problem is most people have terrible taste in music. The labels are just pandering to that.
From TFA:
The court disagreed on both counts, noting that “the biological characteristics of the cells change during the process”, and that this, together with other factors, means the cells are more than “minimally manipulated”.
Leigh Turner, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, agrees. “It is much too simplistic to think that stem cells are removed from the body and then returned to the body without a ‘manufacturing process’ that includes risk of transmission of communicable diseases,” he says. “Maintaining the FDA’s role as watchdog and regulatory authority is imperative.”
They aren't just taking pieces from one part and injecting them into another. They are taking pieces, modifying them, and then re-injecting them. It's quite possible that a procedure that didn't modify the cells would be fine with the FDA: in fact, TFA mentions that the company in question offers 3 other processes that have much quicker turn-around which the FDA has not taken issue with (they have also not approved them, so we'll see if they decide to tackle them later as well or not).
Not necessarily. This is a court decision, not a new statutory law. A significant (very very very significant) part of the job of a court is to decide over specific cases and whether the law, in word and in spirit, is supposed to apply to that case. They ruled that in this case (stem cells) it does. In the case of dialysis, they might not (probably wouldn't, since it is a proven long-standing and genuinely routine medical procedure). It is a very fine line, but that is what the courts are for: so that they can walk that line, and the legislature doesn't have to (of course, the legislature often does, but that is a different problem).
I think almost everyone is fine with government regulating dangerous unproven medical treatments with potentially horrific side-effects.
You'd like Steam - a DRM system - to help you buy only DRMed games that don't use a competing DRM system?
People really have drunk the Steam kool-aid, haven't they?
Yes, because unlike every other DRM system I've ever seen, Steam actually helps to improve the experience, by making sure the game is up-to-date, storing saves and config files in the "cloud" (for developers who implement it), allowing me to re-download and re-install games on as many computers as I please, allowing me to easily play with friends (or not, as I see fit), and still allowing me to play games offline (unlike *ahem* Blizzard). And of course their famous sales. I know people who dislike Valve who still like Steam. Granted, the DRM isn't necessary for all that technically speaking, but it is to provide a decent selection (most developers wouldn't put their games on Steam if it didn't have copy-protection of some kind).
Honestly, Steam is almost always as easier, sometimes more, than pirating games.
Maybe Kickstarter.com can help fix this mess. The 24 game projects that have been funded with Kickstarter will all be delivered sometime in 2013. And then we will see if the "Crowdfunded Games" can serve as a replacement for buying games from the big Multi-Billion Dollar game publishers. ------
A replacement? If they could, indie games already would (to some people, they already are). That is essentially what all the Kickstarter games are: indie games which are crowdfunded rather than self-funded (allows developers with less financial security in, and helps give peace of mind to all of them). While I love indie games (some of them being superior to the AAA titles in many ways), they do not serve as a 100% replacement for me, and I'm guessing not to most people. A game like Skyrim is simply too big and costs too much to be crowdfunded, and I love games like that and will by no means give them up simply because of DRM like Steam (now, if it was like Origin or UPlay or "always-on connection", I might reconsider, but Bethesda has a history of fairly sane DRM. Oblivion used a simple CD check, and Fallout 3 didn't have any on the game proper, though the launcher used Securom for some insane reason).
Is there any reason we shouldn't recycle designs when it comes to rocket engines? Of course (maybe?) we could use modern tools to help improve efficiency but is there anything to gain by starting from scratch?
Unless you have some new form of rocket fuel or someone discovers a radical new design for an engine that improves efficiency, not really. Rockets are a pretty well established field: starting from scratch doesn't really happen. Not only would it add a ton of testing and design time (which costs quite a lot of money), but you aren't really even sure it would work any better. Rockets are, well, rockets. Ignite propellant, make sure it heads out the back. Thats a gross oversimplification, of course, but they aren't like jets that have a ton of thrust-creating parts you can redesign and recreate in different ways (turbojet, ramjet, scramjet, etc.)
Actually, depending on what the options were exactly, employees with stock options could have made out wonderfully if they sold them out early (same with early private investors). You're probably right about the rest, though.
Well, obviously, they did it to make money (that is rather the point of an IPO in the first place). In that, they succeeded, although I think it will be to the detriment of the company long term. Perhaps they realized Facebook didn't have a long-term future and going public was the only way for the people in charge to get out with all the money they could.
What an IPO is supposed to do is raise capital to operate and expand, and to help pay off initial private investors and early employees. They succeeded at the latter, but I don't think they even needed an IPO for the former, and in fact I do think it was counterproductive in the long term, and in that you make a very good point. But I'm not sure they even really intended the IPO for that anyways.
Not really, no. The problem with waiting was Facebook got so large no one really knew what it was worth, and more importantly they did the IPO right as Facebook was more or less peaking in size and revenue. That means investors bought into the company expecting vastly continued growth and expanding revenue (because Facebook had been growing so fast), and ended up with... well, some growth and and revenue increase, but not as much as expected.
If the IPO had been made earlier, when Facebook was much smaller and still expanding rapidly, the actual value would have been somewhat easier to determine, expectations would have been considerably easier to meet, and the hype would not have inflated the price quite so much. As it stands, Facebook has very little room for growth, which is expected based on their history (even though, of course, they really don't have many more users they even can add) and their attempts to revitalize (by changing the layout, for example) have not helped. Add to that that Facebook is pretty much a one-trick, super-hyped pony, and you have a recipe for disappointed investors.
It's run by Congress, technically (the whole Congress, House and Senate). So neither party controls it by themselves, since the Senate is controlled by one party and the House by the other.
So if I shoot and kill you, I didn't commit a crime because you would have died eventually anyways? Anon went in, stole the private data of innocent people who were completely uninvolved in what anon was protesting, and released it to the public, likely resulting in grave harm to those individuals, all so that Anon could make a point. Yes, maybe it would have happened eventually anyway, but that doesn't matter in the slightest. Anon did something that directly results in harm towards others. Simply put: the ends do not justify the means. You cannot harm innocent people simply because your intended result is good.
The original AC wasn't talking about taxes, he was talking about straight-up taking all of Bill Gates wealth. The two things are quite different.
And of course people accumulating money does drive capitalism (it is very difficult to have capitalism without capitalists). Many of those goods regular people buy wouldn't exist had it not been for the millions or billions of dollars corporations sank into research and development, courtesy of capitalism. Granted, people don't need to be multi-billionaires to do that, but they do need to have enough money that they can afford to sink a significant amount of it into business capital and not every-day needs.
I'm not arguing against high tax rates for the rich, just saying the OP is a bit of an idiot.
Of course, the DOJ decision was after this little tidbit:
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge Jackson's [original judge who issued the breakup order] rulings against Microsoft. This was partly because the Appellate court had adopted a "drastically altered scope of liability" under which the Remedies could be taken, and also partly due to the embargoed interviews Judge Jackson had given to the news media while he was still hearing the case, in violation of the Code of Conduct for US Judges.[17] Judge Jackson did not attend the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hearing, in which the appeals court judges accused him of unethical conduct and determined he should have recused himself from the case.
(bracketed bit inserted by me)
Unfortunately, take-off and landing are the times noise creates the worst impact. Also, I don't think you meant "1000" feet, as a commercial jet does not normally fly that low and certainly wouldn't at supersonic speeds (cruise altitude for the Concorde was closer to 60,000 feet, going supersonic at 1000 feet would be really really stupid: noise, safety, and structural concerns due to higher atmospheric pressure that low would forbid it).
They do. But a tornado bad enough to knock out the fiber will knock out the power long before (and the phone lines, since they are being run on the same poles). The power is, for residential customers, the bigger issue (not much point in gigabit Internet if your computer, modem, and WiFi are all down as well).
More importantly, hanging is a lot cheaper than burying.
If the new malware is able to bypass the quarantine dialog in 10.7 already (TFS says "silently", so a safe assumption I think), that means Gatekeeper won't do anything: it relies on the quarantine flag on downloaded files. That's basically what it does, AFAICT: checks for the flag, block execution if it is flagged and not signed validly. I'm not sure if it will stop this malware or not: I was pointing out that it doesn't simply stop unsigned apps from executing at all, because it doesn't (and the fact that users can bypass it, without altering settings, means that programs almost certainly can as well, which means a fault in Firefox or Safari, for that matter, can probably also bypass it).
Maybe, maybe not. Gatekeeper is supposed to prevent unsigned downloaded programs from running, but it will only work if the executable gets properly flagged as "downloaded." It doesn't stop other executables from running, nor does it stop people from running them directly, so whether it will stop all drive-bys or not is not 100% clear (it should stop some, of course).
Not true. Read the Ars Technica review: Gatekeeper only stops the execution of apps directly from downloading them (downloaded executables are flagged). Hell, you can right-click the app after downloading it, select "run", and it will work just fine.
In most countries, software itself is not illegal unless it is used illegally in that country (I believe Japan is one exception, there may be others was well). Monitoring your own computer using "malware" is perfectly legal. That means the government cannot legally do anything, and generally you wouldn't want them to either: or do you trust governments to have the restraint not to call Linux "hacking" software?
Do you have reading comprehension problems? The quoted text says "on record".
Who exactly has reading comprehension problems? The sentence says this year is the warmest on record for the US. It says the past 13 are the warmest period for the whole planet, no mention of recorded or time at all. What it may have meant... actually isn't clear (do they mean the warmest in the past 100 years? Because that is pretty meaningless, really.)