You don't have to resort to some line about 'hearing' EM to explain this. The urban and suburban world are ridiculously full of noise pollution. Traffic noise, air conditioners, appliances, everything is making an actual noise. The cessation of all these low-level hums that you've learned to normally ignore is plenty of explanation for the phenomenon you've observed.
So are they a threat to society or not? If they are, then keep them in prison. We have a court and parole system dedicated to making this decision on a case-by-case basis.
When you tell someone they have to make a living for themselves but can't live anywhere and can't do this and can't do that, what are they going to do? Accept it and try to live a miserable life or run away and hide from the system?
Oppressive restrictions like this only make things worse.
This is all getting ridiculous. Here in South Florida, sex offenders are prevented from living within 2,500 feet of a school, parks, and other places where children gather. This puts all but tiny slivers of entire counties off-limits, and of course there's no housing available in those slivers.
So what have they done? Parole officers are telling their parolees to live under a bridge. As many as 20 sex offenders at a time live under this one bridge connecting Miami and Miami Beach, where they have no power or running water or even reliable shelter from the weather.
And they wonder why some of them disappear from the system entirely.
Either sex offenders are a threat to society and should be in prison or they're not and should be released. This crap about releasing them and making it impossible for them to live a normal life does nothing but encourage them to break the law.
It'll vary depending on the vehicle you're dealing with, but the number I was told for plug-in converted Priuses (available through certain programs in CA) was about $.02/mile considering about a $.10/kwh electricity price.
Compare this to the average passenger vehicle today that gets 20mpg. At $3/gal, that's $.15/mile.
That's only the federal application. Many states (I know Florida for certain, I don't know about Pennsylvania) have specific rights of privacy that apply to all citizens.
The Viking missions sampled soil on-site with the tools that were built into the landers. This mission is planning to bring samples to Earth, where we can perform much more detailed analysis with tools that cannot easily be sent to another planet and operated remotely.
Also, international cooperation is necessary since the US has already nixed bankrolling manned Mars missions.
This is a robotic mission, so would be perfectly fine under the NASA funding rules. If you're pissed about the rule, go complain in the thread we already had about it. Don't inject it into stories where it has no real bearing.
The actual article itself contains this completely different and more appropriate explanation for the need for international efforts:
International cooperation in the project is important because it is likely to carry a global-size price tag. NASA previously backed away from its own plans for a sample return mission due to budget overruns in the space shuttle programme.
"It's not an inexpensive proposition, and the ability to share the technical challenges and the costs across nations is very important for the success of this," says meeting attendee Lisa May, NASA's lead programme executive for Mars sample return missions.
Re:Understatement of new Millennium
on
Can Time Slow Down?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm glad you've taken a break out of your busy schedule of ending world hunger, finding a replacement for oil, and curing every disease to comment on Slashdot. It's good to have you here.
The question is this, which is poorly phrased in the summary:
When in a stressful event, does our perception of time actually slow down in such a way that we can experience more? The implication being that our brain would apparently be working at a faster speed.
They say no. We think we saw time slow down, but our mental faculties were not accelerated at all.
As others have pointed out, the vast majority of sexual crimes against children are committed by family members, in which cases a list like this makes no difference.
There are a very large number of cases where people convicted of statutory rape wind up on sex offender registries, effectively ruining their lives for having consensual sex with someone just a few years younger than them.
The worst situation is one that doesn't get a lot of press. So many municipalities are creating restrictive laws about where sex offenders can live that it's reached the point that these people can't live anywhere. The number of homeless sex offenders is huge, and many of these are no longer on normal paroles and accountable to nobody. Whether they're a risk or not is still highly arguable, but the system has forced them into a life where their risk of committing other crimes is much, much higher.
Society needs to make up its mind. Are these people reformed or not? If not, keep them in prison or in support programs.
This is more than an ad hominem attack. If the news story had uncovered that he was a sex offender or had been convicted for stealing a car, that would be a pure personal attack. This is proof that the individual has conducted fraud in the past, and the article also presents evidence by the OLPC people that this may be another case of fraud.
The US is facing a rise in political power of those who believe religion should inform and determine public policy.
We've been fortunate so far. We're not nearly as bass-ackwards as those parts of the world under Sharia law, but many of the evangelicals responsible for things like this wouldn't mind us going that far.
These guys aren't the first to "discover" this connection. The article does a piss-poor job of explaining it, but basically the global thermohaline circulation varies in speed. Sometimes it runs fast and sometimes slow. The fast periods tend to last about 15-20 years, with the slow ones a little shorter, and it's a self-correcting cycle. Our observed records of this pattern correspond very well with the last hundred years of Atlantic hurricanes.
Global warming is a major threat, and it's going to be responsible for a lot of weather problems, but Atlantic hurricanes aren't one of them. Once you increase Atlantic surface temperatures to a certain point, you actually tend to increase upper-level shear, which is extremely disruptive to hurricanes.
The 2005 season was so terrible because four of the storms that made landfall passed over the extremely warm loop current in the Gulf of Mexico shortly before making landfall. It was a busy season and we just had some really bad luck on top of it. Even considering this, they were all weakening when they actually hit, and the destruction of New Orleans is entirely due to shoddy construction of the levees. Katrina may have been a cat 5 at sea, but the levees failed in category 1 conditions.
It's perfectly reasonable to argue that violent video games allow people a safe outlet for their aggressive behavior, reducing the chance that they will be aggressive in actual interpersonal situations.
Both my proposal and yours have something in common: They're complete and utter speculation. I'm a geologist, not a psychologist, and the person that wrote this article is obviously a hack with a biased axe to grind. We're not going to know the truth until professional psychologists take a serious look at the situation.
It means that crime (or a civil infraction) pays. Now it's up to the copyright holders to enforce their rights and make crime (or a civil infraction) unprofitable.
Actually, there's an excellent plan in place that makes it a good idea for everyone to buy electric cars.
Right now, if you look at the chart of daily electricity use, there's a huge peak in the daytime and a huge dropoff at night. In many areas, electricity costs the same at whatever time, but many utilities are offering graded pricing depending on the hour, and peak electricity can cost as much as three times as off-peak.
Most people would plug their cars in at night, increasing the usage then. The neat prospect comes when those people then leave their partially-charged vehicles plugged in during the day. If electricity demand spikes, the utilities can pull energy back from those vehicles and pay the driver for it. It's inefficient compared to power generation by a primary plant, but the alternative is often going to secondary power plants that are cheap to build and expensive to operate, as they're only used to meet extreme demands.
I'd love to see some numbers for this miracle cheapness you're talking about.
Nuclear power plants cost ridiculous amounts to construct and operate. Lifetime cost per kwh, including amortized construction, fuel, maintenance, etc, for nuclear is approximately double that of a fossil fuel plant (coal or natural gas).
If you want to address non-polluting sources of power: Hydro is actually cheaper than anything else we're using, but it's already maxed out in much of the developed world. Wind has seen tremendous growth in the last fifteen years or so, and is actually cheaper than nuclear. Solar still has a ways to go, but right now it's only about double the prices of nuclear per kwh. Geothermal has great potential, but I don't know what the costs are right now.
This doesn't even begin to address the waste disposal problem. Every nuclear plant in the country has decades worth of waste piling up on site because we never figured out a place to put it.
Basically, a girl bought an iPod from Target which turned out to be a box of rocks. They then got another iPod from a different Target location, opened it in front of employees, and found it to be also full of rocks.
Is the game still going to be playable? Of course it is. As mentioned, all the various rules and restriction keep it from becoming too unbalanced.
But Sony's market for buyers of expansions has now gone into the toilet. If you'd hoped this would be a game with lots of new and interesting cards coming out in the future, that's gone. The market just won't be there when piracy is so much easier.
The only chance for long-term expansion of the game is if Sony patches it to include some sort of unique identifier on future cards, so that they can only be uploaded once.
You're saying that if the police see someone walk into an airport wearing something that may or may not be a bomb, they should wait until after it explodes to take action?
Slashdot Mirror
You hold your phone up to your head while you're sleeping?
You don't have to resort to some line about 'hearing' EM to explain this. The urban and suburban world are ridiculously full of noise pollution. Traffic noise, air conditioners, appliances, everything is making an actual noise. The cessation of all these low-level hums that you've learned to normally ignore is plenty of explanation for the phenomenon you've observed.
So are they a threat to society or not? If they are, then keep them in prison. We have a court and parole system dedicated to making this decision on a case-by-case basis.
When you tell someone they have to make a living for themselves but can't live anywhere and can't do this and can't do that, what are they going to do? Accept it and try to live a miserable life or run away and hide from the system?
Oppressive restrictions like this only make things worse.
This is all getting ridiculous. Here in South Florida, sex offenders are prevented from living within 2,500 feet of a school, parks, and other places where children gather. This puts all but tiny slivers of entire counties off-limits, and of course there's no housing available in those slivers.
So what have they done? Parole officers are telling their parolees to live under a bridge. As many as 20 sex offenders at a time live under this one bridge connecting Miami and Miami Beach, where they have no power or running water or even reliable shelter from the weather.
And they wonder why some of them disappear from the system entirely.
Either sex offenders are a threat to society and should be in prison or they're not and should be released. This crap about releasing them and making it impossible for them to live a normal life does nothing but encourage them to break the law.
Assuming they produce viable offspring, isn't that one of the primary definitions for a single species?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon has some more detailed information on the actual race. 22 miles, and it's been won by a human twice in its 27 year history.
It'll vary depending on the vehicle you're dealing with, but the number I was told for plug-in converted Priuses (available through certain programs in CA) was about $.02/mile considering about a $.10/kwh electricity price.
Compare this to the average passenger vehicle today that gets 20mpg. At $3/gal, that's $.15/mile.
That's only the federal application. Many states (I know Florida for certain, I don't know about Pennsylvania) have specific rights of privacy that apply to all citizens.
The Viking missions sampled soil on-site with the tools that were built into the landers. This mission is planning to bring samples to Earth, where we can perform much more detailed analysis with tools that cannot easily be sent to another planet and operated remotely.
This is a robotic mission, so would be perfectly fine under the NASA funding rules. If you're pissed about the rule, go complain in the thread we already had about it. Don't inject it into stories where it has no real bearing.
The actual article itself contains this completely different and more appropriate explanation for the need for international efforts:
I'm glad you've taken a break out of your busy schedule of ending world hunger, finding a replacement for oil, and curing every disease to comment on Slashdot. It's good to have you here.
The question is this, which is poorly phrased in the summary:
When in a stressful event, does our perception of time actually slow down in such a way that we can experience more? The implication being that our brain would apparently be working at a faster speed.
They say no. We think we saw time slow down, but our mental faculties were not accelerated at all.
As others have pointed out, the vast majority of sexual crimes against children are committed by family members, in which cases a list like this makes no difference.
There are a very large number of cases where people convicted of statutory rape wind up on sex offender registries, effectively ruining their lives for having consensual sex with someone just a few years younger than them.
The worst situation is one that doesn't get a lot of press. So many municipalities are creating restrictive laws about where sex offenders can live that it's reached the point that these people can't live anywhere. The number of homeless sex offenders is huge, and many of these are no longer on normal paroles and accountable to nobody. Whether they're a risk or not is still highly arguable, but the system has forced them into a life where their risk of committing other crimes is much, much higher.
Society needs to make up its mind. Are these people reformed or not? If not, keep them in prison or in support programs.
This is more than an ad hominem attack. If the news story had uncovered that he was a sex offender or had been convicted for stealing a car, that would be a pure personal attack. This is proof that the individual has conducted fraud in the past, and the article also presents evidence by the OLPC people that this may be another case of fraud.
The US is facing a rise in political power of those who believe religion should inform and determine public policy.
We've been fortunate so far. We're not nearly as bass-ackwards as those parts of the world under Sharia law, but many of the evangelicals responsible for things like this wouldn't mind us going that far.
These guys aren't the first to "discover" this connection. The article does a piss-poor job of explaining it, but basically the global thermohaline circulation varies in speed. Sometimes it runs fast and sometimes slow. The fast periods tend to last about 15-20 years, with the slow ones a little shorter, and it's a self-correcting cycle. Our observed records of this pattern correspond very well with the last hundred years of Atlantic hurricanes.
Global warming is a major threat, and it's going to be responsible for a lot of weather problems, but Atlantic hurricanes aren't one of them. Once you increase Atlantic surface temperatures to a certain point, you actually tend to increase upper-level shear, which is extremely disruptive to hurricanes.
The 2005 season was so terrible because four of the storms that made landfall passed over the extremely warm loop current in the Gulf of Mexico shortly before making landfall. It was a busy season and we just had some really bad luck on top of it. Even considering this, they were all weakening when they actually hit, and the destruction of New Orleans is entirely due to shoddy construction of the levees. Katrina may have been a cat 5 at sea, but the levees failed in category 1 conditions.
It's perfectly reasonable to argue that violent video games allow people a safe outlet for their aggressive behavior, reducing the chance that they will be aggressive in actual interpersonal situations.
Both my proposal and yours have something in common: They're complete and utter speculation. I'm a geologist, not a psychologist, and the person that wrote this article is obviously a hack with a biased axe to grind. We're not going to know the truth until professional psychologists take a serious look at the situation.
Actually, it matters greatly.
It means that crime (or a civil infraction) pays. Now it's up to the copyright holders to enforce their rights and make crime (or a civil infraction) unprofitable.
Actually, there's an excellent plan in place that makes it a good idea for everyone to buy electric cars.
Right now, if you look at the chart of daily electricity use, there's a huge peak in the daytime and a huge dropoff at night. In many areas, electricity costs the same at whatever time, but many utilities are offering graded pricing depending on the hour, and peak electricity can cost as much as three times as off-peak.
Most people would plug their cars in at night, increasing the usage then. The neat prospect comes when those people then leave their partially-charged vehicles plugged in during the day. If electricity demand spikes, the utilities can pull energy back from those vehicles and pay the driver for it. It's inefficient compared to power generation by a primary plant, but the alternative is often going to secondary power plants that are cheap to build and expensive to operate, as they're only used to meet extreme demands.
I'd love to see some numbers for this miracle cheapness you're talking about.
Nuclear power plants cost ridiculous amounts to construct and operate. Lifetime cost per kwh, including amortized construction, fuel, maintenance, etc, for nuclear is approximately double that of a fossil fuel plant (coal or natural gas).
If you want to address non-polluting sources of power: Hydro is actually cheaper than anything else we're using, but it's already maxed out in much of the developed world. Wind has seen tremendous growth in the last fifteen years or so, and is actually cheaper than nuclear. Solar still has a ways to go, but right now it's only about double the prices of nuclear per kwh. Geothermal has great potential, but I don't know what the costs are right now.
This doesn't even begin to address the waste disposal problem. Every nuclear plant in the country has decades worth of waste piling up on site because we never figured out a place to put it.
A similar story ran earlier in the month: http://www.star-telegram.com/news/columnists/dave_lieber//story/260075.html
Basically, a girl bought an iPod from Target which turned out to be a box of rocks. They then got another iPod from a different Target location, opened it in front of employees, and found it to be also full of rocks.
Is the game still going to be playable? Of course it is. As mentioned, all the various rules and restriction keep it from becoming too unbalanced.
But Sony's market for buyers of expansions has now gone into the toilet. If you'd hoped this would be a game with lots of new and interesting cards coming out in the future, that's gone. The market just won't be there when piracy is so much easier.
The only chance for long-term expansion of the game is if Sony patches it to include some sort of unique identifier on future cards, so that they can only be uploaded once.
I wonder how many school systems will drop evolution in favor of "intelligent design" once this is the policy.
Let me get this straight.
You're saying that if the police see someone walk into an airport wearing something that may or may not be a bomb, they should wait until after it explodes to take action?
The article says three songs. "Each ringle is expected to contain three songs -- one hit and maybe one remix and an older track -- and one ringtone."
Unless you're counting the remix as the same as the main song, which makes sense. They're still separate tracks, though.