Absentee votes take awhile to be counted and several of the states' races are very close, number wise. What happens if the same forces that would make a citizen cast an absentee vote (a strong political commitment but an inability to vote on election day due to some reason, etc) make that citizen also tend to vote for one candidate over another? Perhaps the absentee voter demographic might favor Gore, while the regular voter demographic will favor Bush, or vice versa. I'm specifically thinking of Florida with its 25 electoral votes that looks like it will decide the US elections this year. We might not know the true count for a few weeks.
Also, what happens if a member of the electoral college decides to vote contrary to his/her state? It has happened 9 times before, according to CNN. In that case, we wouldn't know the result until January.
Subject says it all. Why do we need to have two front page posts on the uncompleted US elections? Couldn't this have been an update to the first one?
Argh! I can see a front page snippet tomarrow morning declaring a winner of the US race, but why now? This is just added spam on the front page, and it makes the previous post obsolete only a few hours after it was posted!
Now this isn't my words, but someone who wants to remain anonymous.
With the election of a figurehead used by the American senate to attempt the facade of caring for the American people in both local and global affairs...
May take this time to say, our saintest candidate is FICTIONAL, I refer to the Duke2000 campaign...
If he had a body of a substance of any material, besides pen, paper, and creativity... he would be our safest bet to send into office, now, I'm not going to go into the cons and cons of the two main candidates this year, or the pros of any third party, because lets face it, our main candidates have both contributed to the least socialy apealing election in a long time if ever. And for those of you who say "what about a third party?" Well its time you face it America is a two pary system with a couple Media-whores along for the ride.
Back to the subject at hand though, I encourage all you poor souls to read the back strips of a comic strip known as Doonsbury, and tell me
with all honestey that Duke does not have a sane case... Anyone that can campaign through rural USA and completely pass up the small towns
because they just aren't noticable, anyone that can atempt to crash politcal conventions Mission Impossible style, anyone that can come up with that clever of media hooks and scandals to grab atention in the 11th hour, it takes a noticible candidate like that to grab the attention, of the average citizen... also, to encourage the younguns, by explaining taxes in a family sense, nothing grabs the future voters like explaining taxes as billions of dollars put away for little
billy...
Now the point has been made, any candidate of any genus able to formulate words, of any gender: male, female. 80/20*, anyone with ideals like this, can easily run and sway the masses, to become our next scandal-ridden figurehead to the entire free-world... With politics like this, why even stop at one large Super-Power, use it as
a springboard to launch a attempt at becoming the evil overlord, for a NWO that rules the entire world, exactly as every conspiracy theory
details.
and yes, this is just boredom, if anyone has been offended I humbly apologize.
[Name Removed]
Duke for Pres, them Evil Overlord of the world, and finaly CEO of the illuminati!!!
*A reference to a link on the Portal of Evil awhile back ago. After all, transgendered bunny girls have rights too!
g_mcbay writes "Why is it on Slashdot that many of the same people who think its okay to break copyright laws in cases of emulation, 'free' music and abadonware are the same people who would scream the loudest if a company were to run afoul of the GPL?"
Let me state this in another way: "Why is it on Slashdot that many people who want abandonware to be free to use would scream if someone ran afoul of the GPL and locked up the source so it wasn't free to use?"
Now doesn't that make a bit more sense? The people who support the idea of abandonware also support the idea of the GPL. Copywrite law used to support the GPL is a Good Thing(tm) since the copywrite law is used to benefit ourselves and others, but the way copywrite law is used to attack abandonware is a Bad Thing(tm) since it lets the "art" (old games) fade away, never to be enjoyed again.
In the local community library, I see students sit down and use the internet to do research that, IMHO, would be quicker and easier to conduct using non-internet sources. Want a brief overview of the civil war? Sure, the internet will give you plenty of material, but the wall of encyclopedias are better, IMHO, for the information, and for a detailed view, there are more then a few history books on the shelves, some dealing with only the civil war, or specialized aspects of it. I would use the internet to find civil war reinactments, or perhaps some specialized information, such as rare research papers done by scholars, but the internet should not be used as the sole source of information for many projects.
Which leads me to another point: The internet if full of misleading and often wrong information. Do schools educate students on authenticating sources? I just have the vision of a student turning in a report with "facts" cited from the Onion or Urbanlegends.com.
As someone that has been interested in emulation of older consoles, the only problem I've noticed is that the computer display is too clear, leading to a crispness in the image that they original designer didn't expect. Its playable, and it looks okay, just different from the image on television. I'm told some emulators such as bleem try to mimic the television look, and I'm not seeing a reason why this isn't possible, so with the right code, it should be possible to get an image very simular to television.
There are other reasons why this is probably a bad idea, and that is mentioned in other comments (such as GD-ROM), but resolution isn't one of them.
I remember one of my high school teachers explaining how occasionally he has met with the FBI to discuss a former student that was trying to join the organization. I might suspect that a simular inquiring would happen for a detailed background screening.
Checking over at pricewatch, I could build the following machine for $800:
600 mhz Duron, Mini Tower Case, God knows what Motherboard (barebones system, $200) + 128 megs PC133 SDRAM ($100) + CD Rom ($50) + Floppy, NIC or modem, sound ($70) + 10 gig hard drive ($100 easily) + Old voodoo vid card ($50).
Don't think I'm missing something, and I still get $200 to buy a cheap monitor and keyboard/mouse. Heck, I could even go cheaper, since I know there are barebones systems for under $200 with sound/nic/modem/video on the motherboard (*shudder* at the thought).
Not sure about the performance of a low end iMac, but I'm assuming that this machine would be faster for most applications.
Is there anyway that Slashdot could get an equivalent of a general user's account at the New York Times? There seems to be plenty of stories that are linked to the paper, and we must send plenty of traffic in their direction, has anyone at Slashdot/Andover tried to come to an agreement with the NYT over being able to copy the article cited or have a slashdot account all slashdot users could use?
I'm probably spitting into the wind here, but it can't hurt to ask now.
The higher the altitude, the less dense the air is. Now, if I wasn't sleeping in my physics class, I believe that less dense materials transmit sound more slowly and more dense materials transmit sounds at a higher speed. Therefore, the speed of sound through a material such as wood or water is higher and the speed of sound through a gas is lower. I'm suspecting that the lower pressure at high altitudes would mean that the speed of sound would go down.
Bringing this to a logical extreme, in a vacuum, the speed of sound should be zero, which it is, since there is no material to transmit the sound at all.
This is probably the junk science that the book was warning about, but who ever proved the dinosaurs were extinct? Is it possible that some species of large "lizard" out there is really a dinosaur that has been misclassified? It seems rather odd that dinosaurs were the most successful creatures of their time, and yet died off without a trace.
But look at what caffiene did! <voice tone="sarcastic">This means that LSD and other drugs are safe, but we should never, ever drink coffee.</voice>
For those of us geeky enough to care about what the cold fusion claim was about:
Fusion is what happens when two atoms' nuclei fuse, or join, into one nucleus. Its simular to fission, which involves one atom's nucleus splitting into two. Both fusion and fission turn a small amount of matter directly into energy, and even though the amount of matter involved is almost miniscule, its far more efficient then chemical reactions (such as burning coal), which only involved harvesting energy from breaking chemical bonds. Fusion is what powers the sun, which transforms 2 hydrogen atoms into one helium atom. It requires very high temperatures to strip the electrons away from the nuclei so that the nuclei can react. Although fusion is a form of nuclear power, no nuclear power plant that I'm aware of uses fusion as a source of commercial power generation. All fusion power generators that have been built (such as the tomahawk) have been experimental machines. Due to the heat involved, fusion is a tad difficult to harness. Quite literally, its like having a piece of the sun on the earth.
Now cold fusion is the dream of a fusion reaction that runs at around room temperature, making a simpler, more easily controlled reaction. Although its a nice dream, in reality, there is no theoretical framework for cold fusion.
People, being people, still tried. One group of researchers came forward and said that they finally discovered a method for cold fusion. However, their results were never reproduced in other experiments. (See the parent post for more information about this.)
If I understand the science behind it, they were claiming that something at the chemical level could affect something on the atomic level and generate "cold" fusion, by acting as sort of a catalyst. Now chemical reactions can change electron orbits, but they (AFAIK) cannot change anything in the nucleus, therefore, their cold fusion claim was rather remarkable, since nothing in chemistry ever indicated it was possible. Chemical reactions don't care about the nucleus, if they did, it would be possible to do stuff like seperate different isotopes of uranium chemically. (When the US government seperated U238 from U235 during the second world war, they *did* combine it with florine into a chemical gas (UF6), but only so that they could seperate the isotopes due to U238's slightly heavier mass. The florine did nothing but made it into a gas for easier seperation. I haven't doublechecked this fact, but I believe it was through diffusion, which was allowing the gas to escape into another chamber through a small hole, due to U238's weight, it didn't diffuse as fast, repeating this step many times led to higher concentrations of U238.)
Therefore, any cold fusion claim is like a claim of discovering little green men on Mars, or that the earth is actually flat. Its just bad science.
Slashdot Mirror
Absentee votes take awhile to be counted and several of the states' races are very close, number wise. What happens if the same forces that would make a citizen cast an absentee vote (a strong political commitment but an inability to vote on election day due to some reason, etc) make that citizen also tend to vote for one candidate over another? Perhaps the absentee voter demographic might favor Gore, while the regular voter demographic will favor Bush, or vice versa. I'm specifically thinking of Florida with its 25 electoral votes that looks like it will decide the US elections this year. We might not know the true count for a few weeks.
Also, what happens if a member of the electoral college decides to vote contrary to his/her state? It has happened 9 times before, according to CNN. In that case, we wouldn't know the result until January.
Subject says it all. Why do we need to have two front page posts on the uncompleted US elections? Couldn't this have been an update to the first one?
Argh! I can see a front page snippet tomarrow morning declaring a winner of the US race, but why now? This is just added spam on the front page, and it makes the previous post obsolete only a few hours after it was posted!
Now this isn't my words, but someone who wants to remain anonymous.
With the election of a figurehead used by the American senate to attempt the facade of caring for the American people in both local and global affairs...
May take this time to say, our saintest candidate is FICTIONAL, I refer to the Duke2000 campaign...
If he had a body of a substance of any material, besides pen, paper, and creativity... he would be our safest bet to send into office, now, I'm not going to go into the cons and cons of the two main candidates this year, or the pros of any third party, because lets face it, our main candidates have both contributed to the least socialy apealing election in a long time if ever. And for those of you who say "what about a third party?" Well its time you face it America is a two pary system with a couple Media-whores along for the ride.
Back to the subject at hand though, I encourage all you poor souls to read the back strips of a comic strip known as Doonsbury, and tell me with all honestey that Duke does not have a sane case... Anyone that can campaign through rural USA and completely pass up the small towns because they just aren't noticable, anyone that can atempt to crash politcal conventions Mission Impossible style, anyone that can come up with that clever of media hooks and scandals to grab atention in the 11th hour, it takes a noticible candidate like that to grab the attention, of the average citizen... also, to encourage the younguns, by explaining taxes in a family sense, nothing grabs the future voters like explaining taxes as billions of dollars put away for little billy...
Now the point has been made, any candidate of any genus able to formulate words, of any gender: male, female. 80/20*, anyone with ideals like this, can easily run and sway the masses, to become our next scandal-ridden figurehead to the entire free-world... With politics like this, why even stop at one large Super-Power, use it as a springboard to launch a attempt at becoming the evil overlord, for a NWO that rules the entire world, exactly as every conspiracy theory details.
and yes, this is just boredom, if anyone has been offended I humbly apologize.
[Name Removed]
Duke for Pres, them Evil Overlord of the world, and finaly CEO of the illuminati!!!
*A reference to a link on the Portal of Evil awhile back ago. After all, transgendered bunny girls have rights too!
g_mcbay writes "Why is it on Slashdot that many of the same people who think its okay to break copyright laws in cases of emulation, 'free' music and abadonware are the same people who would scream the loudest if a company were to run afoul of the GPL?"
Let me state this in another way: "Why is it on Slashdot that many people who want abandonware to be free to use would scream if someone ran afoul of the GPL and locked up the source so it wasn't free to use?"
Now doesn't that make a bit more sense? The people who support the idea of abandonware also support the idea of the GPL. Copywrite law used to support the GPL is a Good Thing(tm) since the copywrite law is used to benefit ourselves and others, but the way copywrite law is used to attack abandonware is a Bad Thing(tm) since it lets the "art" (old games) fade away, never to be enjoyed again.
In the local community library, I see students sit down and use the internet to do research that, IMHO, would be quicker and easier to conduct using non-internet sources. Want a brief overview of the civil war? Sure, the internet will give you plenty of material, but the wall of encyclopedias are better, IMHO, for the information, and for a detailed view, there are more then a few history books on the shelves, some dealing with only the civil war, or specialized aspects of it. I would use the internet to find civil war reinactments, or perhaps some specialized information, such as rare research papers done by scholars, but the internet should not be used as the sole source of information for many projects.
Which leads me to another point: The internet if full of misleading and often wrong information. Do schools educate students on authenticating sources? I just have the vision of a student turning in a report with "facts" cited from the Onion or Urbanlegends.com.
As someone that has been interested in emulation of older consoles, the only problem I've noticed is that the computer display is too clear, leading to a crispness in the image that they original designer didn't expect. Its playable, and it looks okay, just different from the image on television. I'm told some emulators such as bleem try to mimic the television look, and I'm not seeing a reason why this isn't possible, so with the right code, it should be possible to get an image very simular to television.
There are other reasons why this is probably a bad idea, and that is mentioned in other comments (such as GD-ROM), but resolution isn't one of them.
I remember one of my high school teachers explaining how occasionally he has met with the FBI to discuss a former student that was trying to join the organization. I might suspect that a simular inquiring would happen for a detailed background screening.
Checking over at pricewatch, I could build the following machine for $800:
600 mhz Duron, Mini Tower Case, God knows what Motherboard (barebones system, $200) + 128 megs PC133 SDRAM ($100) + CD Rom ($50) + Floppy, NIC or modem, sound ($70) + 10 gig hard drive ($100 easily) + Old voodoo vid card ($50).
Don't think I'm missing something, and I still get $200 to buy a cheap monitor and keyboard/mouse. Heck, I could even go cheaper, since I know there are barebones systems for under $200 with sound/nic/modem/video on the motherboard (*shudder* at the thought).
Not sure about the performance of a low end iMac, but I'm assuming that this machine would be faster for most applications.
Is there anyway that Slashdot could get an equivalent of a general user's account at the New York Times? There seems to be plenty of stories that are linked to the paper, and we must send plenty of traffic in their direction, has anyone at Slashdot/Andover tried to come to an agreement with the NYT over being able to copy the article cited or have a slashdot account all slashdot users could use?
I'm probably spitting into the wind here, but it can't hurt to ask now.
Well, lets think about this logically.
The higher the altitude, the less dense the air is. Now, if I wasn't sleeping in my physics class, I believe that less dense materials transmit sound more slowly and more dense materials transmit sounds at a higher speed. Therefore, the speed of sound through a material such as wood or water is higher and the speed of sound through a gas is lower. I'm suspecting that the lower pressure at high altitudes would mean that the speed of sound would go down.
Bringing this to a logical extreme, in a vacuum, the speed of sound should be zero, which it is, since there is no material to transmit the sound at all.
This is probably the junk science that the book was warning about, but who ever proved the dinosaurs were extinct? Is it possible that some species of large "lizard" out there is really a dinosaur that has been misclassified? It seems rather odd that dinosaurs were the most successful creatures of their time, and yet died off without a trace.
But look at what caffiene did! <voice tone="sarcastic">This means that LSD and other drugs are safe, but we should never, ever drink coffee.</voice>
For those of us geeky enough to care about what the cold fusion claim was about:
Fusion is what happens when two atoms' nuclei fuse, or join, into one nucleus. Its simular to fission, which involves one atom's nucleus splitting into two. Both fusion and fission turn a small amount of matter directly into energy, and even though the amount of matter involved is almost miniscule, its far more efficient then chemical reactions (such as burning coal), which only involved harvesting energy from breaking chemical bonds. Fusion is what powers the sun, which transforms 2 hydrogen atoms into one helium atom. It requires very high temperatures to strip the electrons away from the nuclei so that the nuclei can react. Although fusion is a form of nuclear power, no nuclear power plant that I'm aware of uses fusion as a source of commercial power generation. All fusion power generators that have been built (such as the tomahawk) have been experimental machines. Due to the heat involved, fusion is a tad difficult to harness. Quite literally, its like having a piece of the sun on the earth.
Now cold fusion is the dream of a fusion reaction that runs at around room temperature, making a simpler, more easily controlled reaction. Although its a nice dream, in reality, there is no theoretical framework for cold fusion.
People, being people, still tried. One group of researchers came forward and said that they finally discovered a method for cold fusion. However, their results were never reproduced in other experiments. (See the parent post for more information about this.)
If I understand the science behind it, they were claiming that something at the chemical level could affect something on the atomic level and generate "cold" fusion, by acting as sort of a catalyst. Now chemical reactions can change electron orbits, but they (AFAIK) cannot change anything in the nucleus, therefore, their cold fusion claim was rather remarkable, since nothing in chemistry ever indicated it was possible. Chemical reactions don't care about the nucleus, if they did, it would be possible to do stuff like seperate different isotopes of uranium chemically. (When the US government seperated U238 from U235 during the second world war, they *did* combine it with florine into a chemical gas (UF6), but only so that they could seperate the isotopes due to U238's slightly heavier mass. The florine did nothing but made it into a gas for easier seperation. I haven't doublechecked this fact, but I believe it was through diffusion, which was allowing the gas to escape into another chamber through a small hole, due to U238's weight, it didn't diffuse as fast, repeating this step many times led to higher concentrations of U238.)
Therefore, any cold fusion claim is like a claim of discovering little green men on Mars, or that the earth is actually flat. Its just bad science.