A very heavily government protected monopoly. Hardly a case of "lack of regulation" I guarantee you. In fact it's a prime example for the libertarians to use against regulation.
But "regulation" can't really be lumped together into one fuzzy concept that you're either "for" or "against" like teddy bears or terrorism- although it usually is nowadays. We end up with none of the regulations we would want, and all the regulation that the people who control the news media want- and these two types of regulation are diametrically opposed. Regulation can vary intensely in its intents and effects. It isn't just one big ON/OFF switch.
Giant communications monopolies like to present "regulation" as one big lump of badness. We've been exposed to this constant brainwashing all our lives. The argument usually reduces (upon examination) to protecting the rights and freedoms of all citizens to run their giant monopolistic telecommunications conglomerates as they see fit. Bolstered with silly talking points like "government can't even lay a sewer pipe on my street" or references to lines at the DMV.
We buy into this garbage because we've never experienced a broken sewer line spewing filth into our front yards because some bean counter somewhere denied our claims. We can't imagine how bad FedEx and UPS service would get with no competition from the USPS. We don't realize how expensive and ineffective private schools would become with no competition from the public schools. The inexpensive DMV fees escape our notice (since we don't realize what licensing or registration fees AllState or Geico would impose if these functions were "deregulated"). We don't realize how crappy the Internet would have been if the powers who currently control its infrastructure had been involved in its design.
We just know we don't like "regulation", because all the regulation we get is carefully designed to benefit corporate interests. I can understand why so many libertarians are so confused right now. I used to be one myself and I might revert to being a libertarian some day if it ever furthers libertarianism again. Right now, unless your entire focus is on gun rights, libertarianism is a sucker bet in the United States.
According to the specs on this car, it uses 3.6 kg of hydrogen per 100 km.
To liquefy 3.5 kg of gaseous hydrogen, one would need an additional 1.5 kg even with a 100% efficient isothermal compression process. If hydrogen takes off we'll have to build a network of steam pipes like the one that exploded in New York recently. Con Ed pumps its waste heat through those pipes to large customers who use it for cheaply heating large buildings like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 30% is too much overhead to ignore.
So basically you're not making a laser, you're just moving a laser from a drive into a flashlight case.
The Unabomber would have made a laser diode from scratch using items gathered from the forest in Montana, but I can't find his HOWTO on the web anywhere.
thanks for proving my point further. the ice in the past had much _longer_ times to melt at higher temperatures, a greater rate of change today would give the ice _less_ time to melt.
You're assuming that the temperature will rise quickly and then stop rising once it reaches the historic temperatures. What people are worried about is the present rate of change remaining constantly high like this for a long period of time. The fact that we've only been observing it for a short time doesn't mean it's almost over.
/* you typed all that in under 4 minutes. (story posted at 11:01, comment posted at 11:05) want to document my code for me? shouldn't take you long */ You're right- that was fast!
Wow... such a promising post... and then almost halfway through you suffered an ischemic stroke. Somebody give this guy mod points; he's having a lousy day.
I wasn't thinking so much that the actual expansion is causing the Casimir effect than the other way around- both are manifestations of the same type of particle-in-a-box pressure mechanism. The attractive force does decrease over time as the plates move together but I don't think that's what you meant.
And therein lies the corruption in a two party system. *Everybody* should have to pencil in their party on their voters registration.
Penciling in parties won't change anything; we don't have a parliamentary Constitution like these other countries with lots of little parties. Multiple-party systems have never been stable in this country for more than a few years at a time, because our Constitution's winner-take-all system guarantees minority rule in those situations. People in the other two parties get fed up and one drains into the other.
Also, how seriously messed up is it? A security bug can either be a detail, or it can throw the entire architecture behind a system into question by exposing flaws inherent in the fundamental way it works. Just look at all these AJAX problems we're having. A security hole might even force a company to shut everything down while they do a massive panicky conversion of tons of code. And bug fix code is usually the shittiest code of all; I bet half these patches tear open more holes than they close.
It's really strange. Mozilla wants to give our enemies a timetable. Never in the history of software patches has a browser company been asked to give a timetable. I'm for victory.
The field isn't jarred too much because the brain has low magnetic permeability and it doesn't dictate the field topology. But your skull moves enough for subpixel displacements to skew the later analysis. I used to hate these experiments. They all had to be done at 3 AM because the machine was constantly in use by paying customers. We were measuring pain, too, which really really sucked for a bunch of reasons:
- Nothing shows up on an fMRI (it seems a few neurons fire somewhere and you're in excruciating pain) - It's hard to inflict pain in a reproducible way; "rate this from 1 to 10" is how you calibrate it - The pain must be inflicted nonmagnetically - Inflicting pain will easily cause injury; everybody comes in with rectangular burn marks the next day - Afterwards nobody volunteers for the experiments so you end up doing them all on yourself
To inflict reproducible pain without using electric currents, the lab used a clumsy water bath heated to some point between 40-45 C. You get a two degree window of injury-free pain before protein denaturation occurs in tissue, so the water bath has to be heated just right. Then you pump it into the room via leaky rubber tubing that cools the water down a bit before it runs through an aluminum waterblock velcroed to the subject's arm. So you have this back and forth over the intercom as you fiddle with a thermostat and the guy either experiences no pain or is getting a first degree burn.
Meanwhile the vision people would come in and get to watch little movies in there, and they'd have this rich intense fMRI signal to work with the next day. They hardly had to do any alignment correction at all. We couldn't see anything without extensive processing of gigabytes of noise (this was a decade ago before CD burners became reliable) and it still ended up looking like faint noisy crap. I can't even remember if we got anything to light up. Pain sucks.
The universe has three sections: the part between the plates, the part to the left of the left plate, and the part to the right of the right plate. All three parts of the universe are undergoing adiabatic expansion and are thus applying pressure to their boundaries. Generally they have more success at the edges of the universe (near where the CMB appears) than at the surfaces of the plates since it isn't clear that they have anything to push against near the CMB, but the boundary conditions at the surface of a plate are different because of the universe on the other side. The universe in the middle of the plates doesn't do a good job of expanding because even virtual particles have trouble fitting in there (the plates form a high pass filter that attenuates any long wavelength standing waves), so the other two parts of the universe make it contract. Soon the virtual particles in the middle universe have very high energy and apply an imaginary pressure on the plates that counters the imaginary pressure being applied from the two external portions of the universe, and this affects the position of the plates relative to one another. The force can either be attractive or repulsive depending on the electromagnetic characteristics of the plates and their effects on the wave functions of the charged virtual particles inside.
If you're curious about the levitating top in the picture, that is a Levitron based on two permanent magnets. The magnet in the top hovers over another more powerful magnet in the base; the torque applied by the bottom magnet to flip over the top doesn't change its spin axis because the top is dynamically stabilized. (It cannot be statically stabilized.) But it has to be perfectly parallel to the field, and the field has to be absolutely vertical with respect to gravity. In practice this means you slide these goofy wedges under the base to stabilize it on a table (otherwise the top flies off in the direction of the field tilt), and you learn to spin the top and carefully raise it on a platform until it pops up into position, carefully weighted down by thin plastic disks. The correct choice of disk weights is sensitive to the temperature in the room or some other factor that seems to vary from day to day, so three or four attempts are usually necessary. It levitates for 2-3 minutes before the angular momentum is lost to air resistance, at which point the precession succeeds in flipping it over and it falls and sticks to the base. I guess it might last a few hours in a vacuum.
Getting offtopic from the Casimir effect, but oh well. Only a Republican could respond to an overload of bad laws and politicians by saying there's nowhere with perfect laws and politicians. From last nights 60 Minutes repeat:
When the prescription drug bill finally passed shortly before dawn, in the longest roll call in the history of the House of Representatives, much of the credit went to former Congressman Billy Tauzin, R-La., who steered it through the house. "It's just a messy process," Tauzin says. "I mean, the old adage about if you like sausage or laws, you should not watch either one of them being made is true. It's a messy process." Tauzin says that the voting machines were open for three hours "because the vote wasn't finished." As for arms being twisted? "People were being talked to," he says. And of Walter Jones' comment that it was the "ugliest night" he had "ever seen in politics in 22 years?" "Well, he's a young member," counters Tauzin with a laugh. "Had he been around for 25 years, he'd have seen some uglier nights."
Ha ha ha ha! I love this part:
If Tauzin sounds a lot like a lobbyist for the drug industry, that's because now he is. Just a few months after the prescription drug bill passed, Tauzin began discussions with the pharmaceutical industry to become its chief lobbyist in Washington. He says it was one of several lucrative offers he's received just before he got some very bad news. "I got a call from a doctor in Bethesda who said, 'You got cancer. And it's extremely rare. And it could kill ya.' And then everything changed," Tauzin says. Tauzin had a cancerous tumor removed from his intestines and was treated with a new medicine, called Avastin, that had never been used before on that form of cancer. The treatment was successful, and as a result Tauzin says he felt he owed his life to the drug industry. After serving out his congressional term, he accepted a $2 million-a-year job as president of PhRMA -- Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. "There was an extraordinary moment when my wife literally looked me in the eye and said, 'Look, you're gonna do well wherever you go, Billy... You got a lot a great offers... And maybe you oughta think about working for the people that struggle everyday to try to invent the medicines that save lives like yours.' And that was a pretty important moment in my life," Tauzin says. "And it was the moment I decided that this was the work I wanted to do -- headaches and all."
avoid having surgery while you are being treated with Avastin you may have problems with wound healing which could result in bleeding or infection if you need to have any type of surgery you will need to stop receiving Avastin for at least 4 weeks while your surgical incision heals before being treated with Avastin tell your doctor if you have liver disease kidney disease heart disease high blood pressure a conflict of interest a history of stroke or blood clots or an open wound some people receiving a Avastin injection have had a reaction to the infusion (when the medicine is injected into the vein) tell your caregiver right away if you feel dizzy nauseated light-headed sweaty itchy or have a fast heartbeat chills wheezing or chest pain during the injection call your doctor at once if you have serious side effects such as blood in your stools or vomit sudden numbness or weakness (especially on one side of the body) sudden headache or confusion problems with vision or speech chest pain spreading to the arm or shoulder shortness of breath swelling rapid weight gain or flu symptoms Avastin can cause a rare but serious neurologic disorder affecting the brain symptoms include headache confusion vision problems feeling light-headed fainting and seizure (blackout or convulsions) these rare symptoms may occur within hours of your first dose of Avastin or they may not appear for up to a year after your treatment started call your doctor at once i
Fortunately, most brains (unlike arms and legs) aren't in the habit of moving around a lot during an MRI scan, so they're relatively easy to match up!
You've obviously never spent an hour inside one of those machines. I used to do research in an fMRI lab and even something like post nasal drip eventually makes you swallow just to keep breathing and the slight movement pushes your head into a new pixel lattice so when you subtract the images you just see gray everywhere.
Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who choose the isotopes decide everything.
Also how will you stop someone from slipping in a beryllium ballot? It won't trip the Geiger counters on the way in and in the presence of alpha radiation it fissions releasing a neutron which could disenfranchise other voters.
Until voting is centralized, managed entirely by the government, with better security mechanisms in place, it's very easy for anyone to commit fraud. People just have not thought about it yet.
No, I thought of it when I stole an election last year. I only do a Diebold job if the client promises to quash any investigation into election fraud in the district once he gets elected. Anyone who can't figure out that much won't get far in the vote stealing business. Stealing elections is tricky- you can't just rely on encryption and technical methods for stealth- you have to cover your tracks politically too, so that nobody ever suspects anything is wrong. I mean it's easy but it does require a little tradesmanship. It's a good thing, too, since the work is seasonal at best.
Slashdot Mirror
Please, don't take my post as blanket anti-regulation.
:)
I merely saw it as an opportunity to shoot off my mouth.
A very heavily government protected monopoly. Hardly a case of "lack of regulation" I guarantee you. In fact it's a prime example for the libertarians to use against regulation.
But "regulation" can't really be lumped together into one fuzzy concept that you're either "for" or "against" like teddy bears or terrorism- although it usually is nowadays. We end up with none of the regulations we would want, and all the regulation that the people who control the news media want- and these two types of regulation are diametrically opposed. Regulation can vary intensely in its intents and effects. It isn't just one big ON/OFF switch.
Giant communications monopolies like to present "regulation" as one big lump of badness. We've been exposed to this constant brainwashing all our lives. The argument usually reduces (upon examination) to protecting the rights and freedoms of all citizens to run their giant monopolistic telecommunications conglomerates as they see fit. Bolstered with silly talking points like "government can't even lay a sewer pipe on my street" or references to lines at the DMV.
We buy into this garbage because we've never experienced a broken sewer line spewing filth into our front yards because some bean counter somewhere denied our claims. We can't imagine how bad FedEx and UPS service would get with no competition from the USPS. We don't realize how expensive and ineffective private schools would become with no competition from the public schools. The inexpensive DMV fees escape our notice (since we don't realize what licensing or registration fees AllState or Geico would impose if these functions were "deregulated"). We don't realize how crappy the Internet would have been if the powers who currently control its infrastructure had been involved in its design.
We just know we don't like "regulation", because all the regulation we get is carefully designed to benefit corporate interests. I can understand why so many libertarians are so confused right now. I used to be one myself and I might revert to being a libertarian some day if it ever furthers libertarianism again. Right now, unless your entire focus is on gun rights, libertarianism is a sucker bet in the United States.
According to the specs on this car, it uses 3.6 kg of hydrogen per 100 km.
To liquefy 3.5 kg of gaseous hydrogen, one would need an additional 1.5 kg even with a 100% efficient isothermal compression process. If hydrogen takes off we'll have to build a network of steam pipes like the one that exploded in New York recently. Con Ed pumps its waste heat through those pipes to large customers who use it for cheaply heating large buildings like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 30% is too much overhead to ignore.
>> On the bright side, my fiance is a huge fan or organics and natural products
> Myself and my fiance are both big fans of the Method products.
Are there any... women here today...?
So basically you're not making a laser, you're just moving a laser from a drive into a flashlight case.
The Unabomber would have made a laser diode from scratch using items gathered from the forest in Montana, but I can't find his HOWTO on the web anywhere.
Umm, "other two parties"? The USA only has two parties. Effectively.
And I just explained why 3+ is not a stable hypothetical configuration in the USA.
oh, yeah clever-trousers, but the thing is you commented his comment.
Well that's obviously required to make it run faster.
thanks for proving my point further. the ice in the past had much _longer_ times to melt at higher temperatures, a greater rate of change today would give the ice _less_ time to melt.
You're assuming that the temperature will rise quickly and then stop rising once it reaches the historic temperatures. What people are worried about is the present rate of change remaining constantly high like this for a long period of time. The fact that we've only been observing it for a short time doesn't mean it's almost over.
You must be incredibly naive. CmdrTaco is part of the massive Global Warming conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious vehicular fluids!
you typed all that in under 4 minutes. (story posted at 11:01, comment posted at 11:05)
want to document my code for me? shouldn't take you long
*/
You're right- that was fast!
Wow... such a promising post... and then almost halfway through you suffered an ischemic stroke. Somebody give this guy mod points; he's having a lousy day.
They don't point out that in the last 8 million years the earth has been much warmer than it is today, at many different times.
Probably because those changes typically occur over tens or hundreds of millenia, not just a couple decades of easy motoring.
I wasn't thinking so much that the actual expansion is causing the Casimir effect than the other way around- both are manifestations of the same type of particle-in-a-box pressure mechanism. The attractive force does decrease over time as the plates move together but I don't think that's what you meant.
And therein lies the corruption in a two party system. *Everybody* should have to pencil in their party on their voters registration.
Penciling in parties won't change anything; we don't have a parliamentary Constitution like these other countries with lots of little parties. Multiple-party systems have never been stable in this country for more than a few years at a time, because our Constitution's winner-take-all system guarantees minority rule in those situations. People in the other two parties get fed up and one drains into the other.
Also, how seriously messed up is it? A security bug can either be a detail, or it can throw the entire architecture behind a system into question by exposing flaws inherent in the fundamental way it works. Just look at all these AJAX problems we're having. A security hole might even force a company to shut everything down while they do a massive panicky conversion of tons of code. And bug fix code is usually the shittiest code of all; I bet half these patches tear open more holes than they close.
It's really strange. Mozilla wants to give our enemies a timetable. Never in the history of software patches has a browser company been asked to give a timetable. I'm for victory.
The field isn't jarred too much because the brain has low magnetic permeability and it doesn't dictate the field topology. But your skull moves enough for subpixel displacements to skew the later analysis. I used to hate these experiments. They all had to be done at 3 AM because the machine was constantly in use by paying customers. We were measuring pain, too, which really really sucked for a bunch of reasons:
- Nothing shows up on an fMRI (it seems a few neurons fire somewhere and you're in excruciating pain)
- It's hard to inflict pain in a reproducible way; "rate this from 1 to 10" is how you calibrate it
- The pain must be inflicted nonmagnetically
- Inflicting pain will easily cause injury; everybody comes in with rectangular burn marks the next day
- Afterwards nobody volunteers for the experiments so you end up doing them all on yourself
To inflict reproducible pain without using electric currents, the lab used a clumsy water bath heated to some point between 40-45 C. You get a two degree window of injury-free pain before protein denaturation occurs in tissue, so the water bath has to be heated just right. Then you pump it into the room via leaky rubber tubing that cools the water down a bit before it runs through an aluminum waterblock velcroed to the subject's arm. So you have this back and forth over the intercom as you fiddle with a thermostat and the guy either experiences no pain or is getting a first degree burn.
Meanwhile the vision people would come in and get to watch little movies in there, and they'd have this rich intense fMRI signal to work with the next day. They hardly had to do any alignment correction at all. We couldn't see anything without extensive processing of gigabytes of noise (this was a decade ago before CD burners became reliable) and it still ended up looking like faint noisy crap. I can't even remember if we got anything to light up. Pain sucks.
The universe has three sections: the part between the plates, the part to the left of the left plate, and the part to the right of the right plate. All three parts of the universe are undergoing adiabatic expansion and are thus applying pressure to their boundaries. Generally they have more success at the edges of the universe (near where the CMB appears) than at the surfaces of the plates since it isn't clear that they have anything to push against near the CMB, but the boundary conditions at the surface of a plate are different because of the universe on the other side. The universe in the middle of the plates doesn't do a good job of expanding because even virtual particles have trouble fitting in there (the plates form a high pass filter that attenuates any long wavelength standing waves), so the other two parts of the universe make it contract. Soon the virtual particles in the middle universe have very high energy and apply an imaginary pressure on the plates that counters the imaginary pressure being applied from the two external portions of the universe, and this affects the position of the plates relative to one another. The force can either be attractive or repulsive depending on the electromagnetic characteristics of the plates and their effects on the wave functions of the charged virtual particles inside.
If you're curious about the levitating top in the picture, that is a Levitron based on two permanent magnets. The magnet in the top hovers over another more powerful magnet in the base; the torque applied by the bottom magnet to flip over the top doesn't change its spin axis because the top is dynamically stabilized. (It cannot be statically stabilized.) But it has to be perfectly parallel to the field, and the field has to be absolutely vertical with respect to gravity. In practice this means you slide these goofy wedges under the base to stabilize it on a table (otherwise the top flies off in the direction of the field tilt), and you learn to spin the top and carefully raise it on a platform until it pops up into position, carefully weighted down by thin plastic disks. The correct choice of disk weights is sensitive to the temperature in the room or some other factor that seems to vary from day to day, so three or four attempts are usually necessary. It levitates for 2-3 minutes before the angular momentum is lost to air resistance, at which point the precession succeeds in flipping it over and it falls and sticks to the base. I guess it might last a few hours in a vacuum.
Only a Republican could respond to an overload of bad laws and politicians by saying there's nowhere with perfect laws and politicians.
From last nights 60 Minutes repeat:
Ha ha ha ha! I love this part:
avoid having surgery while you are being treated with Avastin you may have problems with wound healing which could result in bleeding or infection if you need to have any type of surgery you will need to stop receiving Avastin for at least 4 weeks while your surgical incision heals before being treated with Avastin tell your doctor if you have liver disease kidney disease heart disease high blood pressure a conflict of interest a history of stroke or blood clots or an open wound some people receiving a Avastin injection have had a reaction to the infusion (when the medicine is injected into the vein) tell your caregiver right away if you feel dizzy nauseated light-headed sweaty itchy or have a fast heartbeat chills wheezing or chest pain during the injection call your doctor at once if you have serious side effects such as blood in your stools or vomit sudden numbness or weakness (especially on one side of the body) sudden headache or confusion problems with vision or speech chest pain spreading to the arm or shoulder shortness of breath swelling rapid weight gain or flu symptoms Avastin can cause a rare but serious neurologic disorder affecting the brain symptoms include headache confusion vision problems feeling light-headed fainting and seizure (blackout or convulsions) these rare symptoms may occur within hours of your first dose of Avastin or they may not appear for up to a year after your treatment started call your doctor at once i
Fortunately, most brains (unlike arms and legs) aren't in the habit of moving around a lot during an MRI scan, so they're relatively easy to match up!
You've obviously never spent an hour inside one of those machines. I used to do research in an fMRI lab and even something like post nasal drip eventually makes you swallow just to keep breathing and the slight movement pushes your head into a new pixel lattice so when you subtract the images you just see gray everywhere.
Every day people are dying, and we're reading Slashdot.
Well, none of us have real Jobs.
Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who choose the isotopes decide everything.
Also how will you stop someone from slipping in a beryllium ballot? It won't trip the Geiger counters on the way in and in the presence of alpha radiation it fissions releasing a neutron which could disenfranchise other voters.
Until voting is centralized, managed entirely by the government, with better security mechanisms in place, it's very easy for anyone to commit fraud. People just have not thought about it yet.
No, I thought of it when I stole an election last year. I only do a Diebold job if the client promises to quash any investigation into election fraud in the district once he gets elected. Anyone who can't figure out that much won't get far in the vote stealing business. Stealing elections is tricky- you can't just rely on encryption and technical methods for stealth- you have to cover your tracks politically too, so that nobody ever suspects anything is wrong. I mean it's easy but it does require a little tradesmanship. It's a good thing, too, since the work is seasonal at best.
Which are they using, WPA or WEP?