Yeah, I caught the bug too. Ended up with a level 2 model rocket habit.
College chemistry led to the synthesis of real primary explosives - pinhead sized bits that sound off like a firecracker when you hit them. A couple of us made some silver fulminate and let it precipitate onto the chem building foyer floor overnight. We got nice patches of explosive floor - think snap n' pop sized pops with every step. We didn't get in trouble, we got semi-legendary status and a good laugh from the department chair on the departmental retreat. A member of the faculty even gave us a tip on where we could get larger quantities of silver nitrate. Times have changed.
(BTW - c2h2 + O2 is a combustion reaction, not a primary explosive - but we know what you were going for).
You can buy dry ice at the grocery store. "These are dangerous" in a very ordinary and pedestrian way. There is no public health risk from blowing up a 2 liter bottle with CO2. It is loud as hell, and if you were completely and utterly reckless you could conceivably get yourself a minor injury. Heck, if you stuck it up your bum you might get a major injury. But really, have you guys all lost your minds? This is in the class of jumping your bike over a ditch, not in the criminal class.
In the pantheon of "shit that makes a really, really loud noise", a CO2 bomb is just about as safe as you can get. And as long as you aren't harming anyone else, you should be left alone. The worst that should have come from this case is an order to cease disturbing the peace.
This is a pretty astute observation. It also points out the unrealistic ideals of the law - that you could possibly entirely disentangle the political from the high level government work. These people speak with lobbyists about specific legislative or regulatory actions as a part of their government job. They speak to the same lobbyist about political organizing activity as a part of their (entirely separate) political job. Maintaining the fiction of separate phone and email accounts for the (completely unrelated) conversations must be nigh impossible. I suppose everyone involved knows the rules and knows to keep their fund raising comments to Rahm off of the.gov email and vice-verse. Still, it's pretty silly. If they really want to maintain appearances, perhaps they should hand out actual hats that say "Political" and "Government" on them. That way they could literally change hats as they change job functions.
Good for CREW. Most of these partisan advocacy groups play team red / team blue and have to check the roster to decide where they stand on an issue. It is great to see one of them finally standing on principal and holding their own team to the same standard. It would be nice if every "issue advocacy" group would stick to its guns without regard to party affiliation.
I live in Florida - before the crash there were something like 8-10 real estate agents for every person in Florida. They caused traffic jams when herds of agents would cross the road. Airports installed propane cannons to scare real estate agents away from the runways. When we had hurricanes, real estate agents would pile up on the beaches in huge drifts. Now that the real estate bubble has crashed hard there's only about 3-4 real estate agents per person.
It is pretty easy for a working agent to get a listing, particularly a condo listing, since there are about 5,000 empty condos per resident. Getting a sale is an entirely different matter. He's pretty candid that he made more money not selling real estate for the last year - that should tell you something about his success as an agent.
I don't know about his link to protest activity. He had a john-boat tied to the roof of his car. I don't know for sure, but normally one doesn't bring a 14 foot aluminum boat to a protest rally on a downtown street.
It basically sounds like the author is attributing the "Flash Crash" to lag from an insufficient quoting computer.
And to an intentional use of this infrastructure deficiency to blind competing trading algorithms for short periods by issuing bursts of quote requests that will overwhelm competitors for a few milliseconds.
It can also show ordinary 2D video for up to four people simultaneously Stop the presses! Bob, Joe, Sally: gather 'round my ordinary computer monitor with me and read what Ars Technica is reporting about a display that can show TWO DIMENSIONAL content to up to FOUR PEOPLE!
Who modded this insightful? This is a report about showing 4 different two dimensional images to four different people at the same time on the same display - not all 4 seeing the same Ars Technica article on one monitor.
Seconded! Sitting through crappy reality shows about fat people losing weight is neigh torture. She feels the same way about Stargate. So we compromise and watch her shows.
1. Wealthier - they're traveling 2. Military - stationed outside the state 3. More politically motivated - they're outside their area; actually willing to go through the hassle of voting absentee 4. More likely to hit the websites up over the election?
Better possibility: Absentee ballots are often filed with the assistance of political operatives working on behalf of the candidate or party. Rawl had such assistance, Green did not.
Add that to the reports of widespread voter error in using the ballots perhaps resulting in mistaken votes cast for Green on election day and you've got a plausible explanation for the disparity. Actually, it is pretty shocking if the difference is only 11%, given the major advantage organization plays in casting absentee ballots. Given reports about Green, you would expect that anything north of 3% of the vote would be a surprising result.
The widespread ignorance of the race in the electorate at the time of the election (e.g. the party candidate having less than 5% name recognition) parallels a problem with down-card elections. We vote for our judges, but really now, who knows anything about these candidates. In most areas they are not allowed to campaign, other than putting their name on a poster. So that's all you have to go on... just a name. Yet someone wins the election every time...
data analysis in Excel 2010 is far superior to any prior spreadsheet. It rivals many business analytics tools. For business users, this is poised to be a true game changer - and for data security folks it is poised to be a true pain in the ass... because it allows you to do analytics on arbitrarily large data sets in excel -- which you can then take anywhere you please (rather than keeping this data in a warehouse where security can be centrally maintained).
But really, if manipulating data is your thing, the new Excel is amazing.
I actually agree with both methods. I don't want my files destructively altered by my photo cataloging software. I also don't want to lose my hours of work.
Having used Picasa extensively since it was purchased by Google, I have suffered the lost hard drive issue - losing all of my folders that had taken years to put together - with 50k+ photos, that's no joke. It was a royal pain in the ass. The picasa backup tool brought back all of the photos, and something of a database of folders and faces, but hopelessly corrupted so that I had thousands of "faces" in the wrong file or wrong location on the file, all labeled "unknown".
I want to have my cake and eat it too... a file format that holds all of the meta data, is completely portable, even across platforms and applications, never makes destructive changes to the original data and yet displays the rotated, cropped and edited photo, complete with faces and names. Oh, and let's keep the information about people's identities secure, unless I chose to release it, but make sure that it can tie out to any other face management system. Crap, I think I just specified my way out of any real product.
From a technical point of view MS SQL has nothing on Postgres or Mysql. It has less than nothing on Oracle. If you are in the position of getting MS SQL free as part of some other deal it still costs the same as better databases, and it still has the security risk that goes with MS software. ( You remember slammer right? )
From a technical point of view you are completely wrong. MS SQL server is every bit the enterprise database - just short of DB2 and Oracle in some very large applications, ahead in other areas. Postgres and MySQL are not in that league in any way. They are great and open, but don't pretend that they are in the same ballpark as the big 3. This is an article about Eclipse developers using -surprise, surprise- open source databases in preference to closed and especially Microsoft. You might as well trumpet the huge advantage that MS SQL server has in.NET development shops. The article is plain silly in that regard - and posts trumpeting MySQL or Postgres over SQL server or Oracle are just ridiculous. For certain environments these are superior choices, but claiming overall technical superiority is just plain ignorant. Microsoft has disadvantages, particularly with respect to cross-platform capability (none), but on the whole it is easier to manage than any of the others and offers features competitive with the largest enterprise databases.
Wrong.... we have strong evidence of trade going back well before the advent of written histories. Stone age societies were trading amongst each other. We know this not because of things that were written down, but because of the artifacts that they left behind. Stone implements that were manufactured hundreds of miles away, pottery that was manufactured in a different style from the local culture using materials not available locally, etc. Trade long predates government, laws, writing and recorded history.
A quick Google turned up a reference to trade routes in the east involving japan and Papua New Guinea trading in Obsidian tools and art over 20,000 years ago. This was established via radio-isotope dating and sourcing the quarry locations. They also cite references to trade on the Mediterranean and in the British isles in similar time frames. So maybe you don't know quite as much as you think you do about trade and human history.
Really, it doesn't take that much imagination or insight to understand that trade would pre-exist any organized political structure. Trade exists in non-human primate societies for crying out loud, so it definitely pre-exists anything of human creation.
If it is too big, nobody can watch it, and nobody can fix it. Does that help?
The US model for government is Federalism, which is supposed to keep power distributed for the most part to the local level, where those in power are presumably more directly accountable for their actions. This has of course been destroyed over the last 200+ years. Now the local governments are all running about begging for Federal largess, all wanting to become organs of the large federal bureaucracy. Federal controls that would have gotten you run out of town on a rail 30 years ago are now actively pursued by local governments. Really bizzarro-world.
Appellate case law is the law. At least in that court's jurisdiction. There is the actual law as passed and signed by the legislature and executive. And then there is the case law that determines how that law will be enforced.
I'm glad someone was able to help you pull the scales from your eyes. For a good look at why freedom is more important than security head on over to Radley Balko's blog.
He's an award winning reporter who focuses on exactly these issues. Most of his stuff deals with American justice system incompetence and abuses, but he'll frequently link to articles in your area.
Just this morning there was a link to a story from England about a couple of cops handcuffing a man in his own home and forcing him to remove a political poster because it called a candidate a wanker. The police said any reasonable person would find it alarming, harassing or distressful to call David Cameron a wanker. Probably half the population of England would disagree on a factual basis, but that didn't stop them from forcing him to remove the poster. I think the irony of actually harassing the guy with the poster in an alarming and distressful way was probably lost on the police....
Right. You should have to prove a legitimate use for anything you choose to carry on your person. Including that video camera. And that pen and paper. And that bottle of soda.
In fact, just report to police headquarters for arrest while we decide what to do with you....
No, this is Slashdot. Everyone here is smarter than everyone else in the world. Particularly anyone who runs a multi-billion dollar company. You should know that by now....
Similar story - I had the window on my 100k mile Ford Escort smashed in to get the dollar store sunglasses on the passenger seat. Great job guys... better still, the passenger side door was locked, but the driver side door was unlocked. So they didn't even need to smash the window. With brains like that, I'm sure they've managed to hit me (and you) up for about 20 years of room and board too....
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Yeah, I caught the bug too. Ended up with a level 2 model rocket habit.
College chemistry led to the synthesis of real primary explosives - pinhead sized bits that sound off like a firecracker when you hit them. A couple of us made some silver fulminate and let it precipitate onto the chem building foyer floor overnight. We got nice patches of explosive floor - think snap n' pop sized pops with every step. We didn't get in trouble, we got semi-legendary status and a good laugh from the department chair on the departmental retreat. A member of the faculty even gave us a tip on where we could get larger quantities of silver nitrate. Times have changed.
(BTW - c2h2 + O2 is a combustion reaction, not a primary explosive - but we know what you were going for).
You can buy dry ice at the grocery store. "These are dangerous" in a very ordinary and pedestrian way. There is no public health risk from blowing up a 2 liter bottle with CO2. It is loud as hell, and if you were completely and utterly reckless you could conceivably get yourself a minor injury. Heck, if you stuck it up your bum you might get a major injury. But really, have you guys all lost your minds? This is in the class of jumping your bike over a ditch, not in the criminal class.
In the pantheon of "shit that makes a really, really loud noise", a CO2 bomb is just about as safe as you can get. And as long as you aren't harming anyone else, you should be left alone. The worst that should have come from this case is an order to cease disturbing the peace.
Notre Dame - catholic university
Duke University - Methodist school
Wake Forest - Baptist school
Harvard - Puritan/unitarian
That's off the top of my head - among the top institutions of higher learning in the world. Christians and education are hardly strange bedfellows.
Tell what happend, not your analysis of what happened -
But, but.... how are we to know what to think!?
This is a pretty astute observation. It also points out the unrealistic ideals of the law - that you could possibly entirely disentangle the political from the high level government work. These people speak with lobbyists about specific legislative or regulatory actions as a part of their government job. They speak to the same lobbyist about political organizing activity as a part of their (entirely separate) political job. Maintaining the fiction of separate phone and email accounts for the (completely unrelated) conversations must be nigh impossible. I suppose everyone involved knows the rules and knows to keep their fund raising comments to Rahm off of the .gov email and vice-verse. Still, it's pretty silly. If they really want to maintain appearances, perhaps they should hand out actual hats that say "Political" and "Government" on them. That way they could literally change hats as they change job functions.
Good for CREW. Most of these partisan advocacy groups play team red / team blue and have to check the roster to decide where they stand on an issue. It is great to see one of them finally standing on principal and holding their own team to the same standard. It would be nice if every "issue advocacy" group would stick to its guns without regard to party affiliation.
I live in Florida - before the crash there were something like 8-10 real estate agents for every person in Florida. They caused traffic jams when herds of agents would cross the road. Airports installed propane cannons to scare real estate agents away from the runways. When we had hurricanes, real estate agents would pile up on the beaches in huge drifts. Now that the real estate bubble has crashed hard there's only about 3-4 real estate agents per person.
It is pretty easy for a working agent to get a listing, particularly a condo listing, since there are about 5,000 empty condos per resident. Getting a sale is an entirely different matter. He's pretty candid that he made more money not selling real estate for the last year - that should tell you something about his success as an agent.
Sucker - I'm not interested unless it only has one functional seat and zero doors.
Sounds like you need an Ariel Atom
I don't know about his link to protest activity. He had a john-boat tied to the roof of his car. I don't know for sure, but normally one doesn't bring a 14 foot aluminum boat to a protest rally on a downtown street.
But how can that be if last year is 1/3 less than this year?
It basically sounds like the author is attributing the "Flash Crash" to lag from an insufficient quoting computer.
And to an intentional use of this infrastructure deficiency to blind competing trading algorithms for short periods by issuing bursts of quote requests that will overwhelm competitors for a few milliseconds.
It can also show ordinary 2D video for up to four people simultaneously
Stop the presses! Bob, Joe, Sally: gather 'round my ordinary computer monitor with me and read what Ars Technica is reporting about a display that can show TWO DIMENSIONAL content to up to FOUR PEOPLE!
Who modded this insightful? This is a report about showing 4 different two dimensional images to four different people at the same time on the same display - not all 4 seeing the same Ars Technica article on one monitor.
Seconded! Sitting through crappy reality shows about fat people losing weight is neigh torture. She feels the same way about Stargate. So we compromise and watch her shows.
Possibilities off the top of my head:
1. Wealthier - they're traveling
2. Military - stationed outside the state
3. More politically motivated - they're outside their area; actually willing to go through the hassle of voting absentee
4. More likely to hit the websites up over the election?
Better possibility: Absentee ballots are often filed with the assistance of political operatives working on behalf of the candidate or party. Rawl had such assistance, Green did not.
Add that to the reports of widespread voter error in using the ballots perhaps resulting in mistaken votes cast for Green on election day and you've got a plausible explanation for the disparity. Actually, it is pretty shocking if the difference is only 11%, given the major advantage organization plays in casting absentee ballots. Given reports about Green, you would expect that anything north of 3% of the vote would be a surprising result.
The widespread ignorance of the race in the electorate at the time of the election (e.g. the party candidate having less than 5% name recognition) parallels a problem with down-card elections. We vote for our judges, but really now, who knows anything about these candidates. In most areas they are not allowed to campaign, other than putting their name on a poster. So that's all you have to go on... just a name. Yet someone wins the election every time...
data analysis in Excel 2010 is far superior to any prior spreadsheet. It rivals many business analytics tools. For business users, this is poised to be a true game changer - and for data security folks it is poised to be a true pain in the ass... because it allows you to do analytics on arbitrarily large data sets in excel -- which you can then take anywhere you please (rather than keeping this data in a warehouse where security can be centrally maintained).
But really, if manipulating data is your thing, the new Excel is amazing.
I actually agree with both methods. I don't want my files destructively altered by my photo cataloging software. I also don't want to lose my hours of work.
Having used Picasa extensively since it was purchased by Google, I have suffered the lost hard drive issue - losing all of my folders that had taken years to put together - with 50k+ photos, that's no joke. It was a royal pain in the ass. The picasa backup tool brought back all of the photos, and something of a database of folders and faces, but hopelessly corrupted so that I had thousands of "faces" in the wrong file or wrong location on the file, all labeled "unknown".
I want to have my cake and eat it too... a file format that holds all of the meta data, is completely portable, even across platforms and applications, never makes destructive changes to the original data and yet displays the rotated, cropped and edited photo, complete with faces and names. Oh, and let's keep the information about people's identities secure, unless I chose to release it, but make sure that it can tie out to any other face management system. Crap, I think I just specified my way out of any real product.
From a technical point of view MS SQL has nothing on Postgres or Mysql. It has less than nothing on Oracle. If you are in the position of getting MS SQL free as part of some other deal it still costs the same as better databases, and it still has the security risk that goes with MS software. ( You remember slammer right? )
From a technical point of view you are completely wrong. MS SQL server is every bit the enterprise database - just short of DB2 and Oracle in some very large applications, ahead in other areas. Postgres and MySQL are not in that league in any way. They are great and open, but don't pretend that they are in the same ballpark as the big 3. This is an article about Eclipse developers using -surprise, surprise- open source databases in preference to closed and especially Microsoft. You might as well trumpet the huge advantage that MS SQL server has in .NET development shops. The article is plain silly in that regard - and posts trumpeting MySQL or Postgres over SQL server or Oracle are just ridiculous. For certain environments these are superior choices, but claiming overall technical superiority is just plain ignorant. Microsoft has disadvantages, particularly with respect to cross-platform capability (none), but on the whole it is easier to manage than any of the others and offers features competitive with the largest enterprise databases.
Wrong.... we have strong evidence of trade going back well before the advent of written histories. Stone age societies were trading amongst each other. We know this not because of things that were written down, but because of the artifacts that they left behind. Stone implements that were manufactured hundreds of miles away, pottery that was manufactured in a different style from the local culture using materials not available locally, etc. Trade long predates government, laws, writing and recorded history.
A quick Google turned up a reference to trade routes in the east involving japan and Papua New Guinea trading in Obsidian tools and art over 20,000 years ago. This was established via radio-isotope dating and sourcing the quarry locations. They also cite references to trade on the Mediterranean and in the British isles in similar time frames. So maybe you don't know quite as much as you think you do about trade and human history.
Really, it doesn't take that much imagination or insight to understand that trade would pre-exist any organized political structure. Trade exists in non-human primate societies for crying out loud, so it definitely pre-exists anything of human creation.
If it is too big, nobody can watch it, and nobody can fix it. Does that help?
The US model for government is Federalism, which is supposed to keep power distributed for the most part to the local level, where those in power are presumably more directly accountable for their actions. This has of course been destroyed over the last 200+ years. Now the local governments are all running about begging for Federal largess, all wanting to become organs of the large federal bureaucracy. Federal controls that would have gotten you run out of town on a rail 30 years ago are now actively pursued by local governments. Really bizzarro-world.
IThat's like the difference between a road trip to Tijuana and a road trip to Tierra del Fuego.
I guess that all depends on your starting location. Those destinations are not that different when starting from Dublin.
Appellate case law is the law. At least in that court's jurisdiction. There is the actual law as passed and signed by the legislature and executive. And then there is the case law that determines how that law will be enforced.
I'm glad someone was able to help you pull the scales from your eyes. For a good look at why freedom is more important than security head on over to Radley Balko's blog.
He's an award winning reporter who focuses on exactly these issues. Most of his stuff deals with American justice system incompetence and abuses, but he'll frequently link to articles in your area.
Just this morning there was a link to a story from England about a couple of cops handcuffing a man in his own home and forcing him to remove a political poster because it called a candidate a wanker. The police said any reasonable person would find it alarming, harassing or distressful to call David Cameron a wanker. Probably half the population of England would disagree on a factual basis, but that didn't stop them from forcing him to remove the poster. I think the irony of actually harassing the guy with the poster in an alarming and distressful way was probably lost on the police....
Right. You should have to prove a legitimate use for anything you choose to carry on your person. Including that video camera. And that pen and paper. And that bottle of soda.
In fact, just report to police headquarters for arrest while we decide what to do with you....
No, this is Slashdot. Everyone here is smarter than everyone else in the world. Particularly anyone who runs a multi-billion dollar company. You should know that by now....
Similar story - I had the window on my 100k mile Ford Escort smashed in to get the dollar store sunglasses on the passenger seat. Great job guys... better still, the passenger side door was locked, but the driver side door was unlocked. So they didn't even need to smash the window. With brains like that, I'm sure they've managed to hit me (and you) up for about 20 years of room and board too....