The issue in the US is that taking up cropland here means plowing up marginal land elsewhere.
No, it doesn't.
Pseudo-scientific "analyses" such as TFA can point out all the shortcomings of biofuels only
because we, as a society, have this obsession with corn - More specifically, with the kernels themselves,
which make up only a small fraction of the mass of the plant.
Cellulose, however, contains quite a lot of energy. It just takes a bit more effort to get at it. Once
we start looking at processing that (in the form of stalks, husks, straw from wheat, any form of
grass clippings, etc), literally made up of material currently considered waste, we go from "wasting
cropland to grow corn to make barely more energy than we put in", to an effectively free alternative
to petroleum.
Can our existing biowaste production satisfy 100% of our demand for oil? I honestly have no idea. But
why turn down a free partial-solution???
It sickens me that we have solutions to our energy problems all around us - The sun shines down on me daily
(oh, but only for a few hours, boo hoo), the wind blows by (but think of the hundreds of birds caught in turbines - vs
the millions dying from NOx, SOx, and particulate emissions from cars and coal power plants), the tides ebb and
flow twice every 24 hours (oh, but you'll ruin the rich weirdo's scenic vista!), people pay to have their
yard waste hauled away. Until we perfect fusion, we will never have a 100% solution to our energy needs; Let's
stop ignoring the abundant partial soltutions nature has provided in the meantime.
A lot of the types of games that people played at an arcade can now be done at home
So basically, you have yet anothing industry built upon an obsolete business model
(scarcity of high-quality video games), and choose to blame the concept that made your
product worthless, rather than adapting to provide a better service (cheaper would
help - When an hour in the arcade costs me as much as buying a new game, why would I
ever pick the former?).
Don't worry, the buggy-whip manufacturers and the RIAA feel for you. The rest of look forward to you
porting your greatest hits to the Wii.
In the very first paragraph, TFA states "he'll demonstrate an invention that appears - though he doesn't dare say it - to
operate as a perpetual motion machine."
As for why "nobody's calling it" that, TFA answers that as well, with:
It's for this reason the 46-year-old inventor
has learned to walk on thin ice when dealing with academics and engineers, who he must win over to be taken seriously.
Credibility, after all, can't be invented. It must be earned. "I have to be humble. If you say the wrong thing at the
wrong time, you can lose support."
Seems straightforward enough. The guy believes (or wants others to believe) that he has made a perpetual motion
machine, but calling it as much would result in his instant damning to the land of crackpots. So instead of
claiming something widely considered impossible, he describes it as simply some sort of "very efficient" electric
motor, a perfectly reasonable (if unlikely, given his background) idea.
but also protects identifying data like parcel ownership.
Umm, that counts as a matter of public record as well. You can go to any county office in
the country and, theoretically, pull the deeds for every parcel in that county (though in
many places, they consider that their little fiefdom and make it as hard as possible, without
paying the outrageous fees mention in TFA, for a cheap photocopy).
They shouldn't "protect" that information, they should just make it a removeable
overlay (since most uses probably don't care).
Re:Too many 'this stuff sucks' moments
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 1
I searched around for freely available software libraries that would take care of parsing the XML documents for me.
Not "free", but believe it or not,.NET actually has pretty decent XML support... Except as you point out:
Then I got bitten by numerous bugs that occurred because XML has such weak syntax
Based on the exhibited behavior, I suspect virtually all programs that parse XML use SelectSingleNode()
(or comparable). And there we have a problem, in that XML itself doesn't require node uniqueness,
but most programs will break otherwise.
Thanks for the support, but I could have answered that question
before I ever posted (fortunately my karma can take the occasional
hit): Because I mentioned Israel.
If I had left that word out as the in-all-seriousness second most
likely source of (or partner in) this sabotage, I probably would have
made a +5. Most people, however, just can't grasp the idea that you
can hold the political state of Israel in utter contempt for
its actions, without expressing antisemitism.
read a Sherlock Homes novel, or about the scientific method? Nevermind....
Well, as regards Sherlock, "sabotage" doesn't count as "impossible", thus
"improbably" doesn't particularly matter, now does it? As for Scientific
Method, by all means propose a simple objective way to test the two
available hypotheses... On which point, have you ever heard
of Occam's razor?
Hypothesis 1: the same number of cables get cut in the past two weeks as in the entire 50 years previous to that.
Hypothesis 2: An organization hostile to certain groups in the Middle East "accidentally"
cut key cables to take those groups offline.
I'd call the latter so much more likely that it would take fairly strong evidence
to the contrary to eliminate it a near-certainty.
If people are concerned about Real ID posing massive privacy
issues, why haven't people like me using our passports faced this yet?
Because you fall into an EXTREME minority of people using a passport for
such purposes - All the passport-tracking infrastructure currently in
place exists to track entry and exit from the country at its borders (and
various major points-of-entry, ie, airports).
If you want an example of the sort of abuses RealID will lead
to, you need look no further than EZPass (or TransPass or whatever
they call it) in New Jersey (and several other states). "No, no, we'll
never give out your travel details!" - Then bam, ten years later,
the states want to use those record to retroactively impose speeding
fines, divorce cases regularly subpoena their records, and in at least
one case, police used an EZPass dump to "justify" randomly harassing
hundreds of innocent people who happened to use the wrong highway
at the wrong time.
We tinfoil-types don't (only) fear what could happen, we fear what
already happens when you hand similar tools to those in power.
No one ever said that one ship damaged all the cables.
True - Why limit it to one ship, when we have the whole US fleet to
choose from?
Look, I don't normally believe in conspiracy theories (they take too much
work to implement, and usually you can explain the same outcome by a lot
of people all acting out of simple greedy self-interest). But we've gone
how many decades with undersea cables only rarely taking damage,
and now we have five, which just happen to affect a region of the
world in which we have a strategic interest, all cut within two weeks???
Take the blinders off, friend. Even if the US didn't do it, someone
(cough cough Israel cough) did, and deliberately at that.
To me the answer to question 2 very much conflicts
with the answer to question 1.
The answer to #1 may appear confusing if you don't quite
"get" how Libertarians (whether running as Republican or
not) think.
To translate it into plain English, he thinks we should have
nothing to do with a government-sponsored space-race. We should
instead have a regulatory climate friendly to the numerous private
ventures trying to do the same damned thing without using
our tax dollars in the process.
Questions 4 and 5, however, somewhat surprise me. A proper libertarian
would have ranted about "corporate protectionism" and flatly stated he
would do away with all but the bare minimum of IP-related laws. Then again,
part of RP's appeal comes from his sanity rather than his strict
adherence to unrealistic Libertarian ideals, so he (as with the vast majority
of people) might just not have considered those issues to nearly the same
extent we Slashdotters do on an almost daily basis.
The study found that 30% of children between the ages of 9 and 18
delete the search history from their browsers in an attempt to protect
their privacy from their parents, that 73% of the children reported
giving out personal information online
Okay, so 30% of kids understand the implications of their online presence
enough to clear the cache to protect their privacy - But then (at least)
10% (((73+30)-100)/30) of those same kids give out personal info online?
Does not compute - Unless this "survey" had extremely biased
questions in a sad attempt to prove how dangerous we should all consider
the spooooooooky intarweb. For example, what constitutes "personal info"?
Using a real name to register for a website? Buying something through
Amazon? Clicking "I am not over 18" to get redirected to disney.com?
36% of the children admitted to meeting with a stranger they had met online
Same problem - What constitutes "meeting with a stranger"? At the younger end of
the surveyed age range, they have no ability to really go anywhere without
parental assistance; this suggests "stranger" means "classmate I don't really
know very well". And at the higher end of the age range, we have people who
don't really draw a line between "online" and "real" friends, and who quite likely
have attended at least one online-community-specific gathering (such as a Fark Party
or the like).
real innovation takes lots of time and hard work to come to fruition
Tell that to Watson and Crick, who for decades could never really explain how
they "stumbled" upon the secret of the DNA double helix - Until it recently
came out that the thought it up while tripping their balls off.
Or Einstein? He went from a hack dabbling in the works of Planck to the
greatest physicist of all time in a matter of 18 months; and while some
have accused him of "borrowing" his ideas from patent applications (or his
wife - Which would make this no less of a leap rather than slow progress),
no one can deny that he (or she) took a mess of conflicting ideas and unified
them, practically overnight, into the single most functional theory of how
the universe works we have available today - And he did so as a hobby, not
as his day-job.
Freud? He got really, really high while bored at university, and
noticed the influence the subconscious has on our overt behavior. That
didn't "evolve" from Brücke and Helmholtz' work, it appeared as a whole
new ballpark almost overnight (and in fact, when he personally went on
to do the "hard part" of fleshing out his ideas, he created his modern
tarnished image as a dirty old man).
Making that flash of LSD-inspired insight into the modern biotech
industry took 50 years of hard work. Turning a short paper on physics
into the LHC took a century. And turning "the subconscious" into modern
psychoanalysis still has some way to go, 125 years later.
The "little" leaps come about as a result of work. The jumps happen in a flash.
If anyone here knows of a colourless, odourless explosive you can safely drink, I'd like to be apprised of it.
Not to actually support the TSA's absurd policies, but "safely drink" doesn't really matter if you
plan to use it to blow up a plane. Only "not extremely caustic" matters for that particular test.
Which goes back to my biggest problem with all searches - A human can live for a good number of hours
with the entire contents of their abdoment REMOVED. All the digestive and reproductive tackle, absolutely
useless in the short-term. With only parts of 3 organs (the small lobe of the liver, half of one kidney,
and the tip of the pancreas) left below the diaphragm, you could theoretically survive for years (albeit on
TPN). Of those, you can further remove the entire liver and kidneys and still live for hours or even days.
Now - Why would someone do all that? Because they plan to die anyway! What does a suicide bomber
care if you replace their organs with 20lbs of C4? If anything, it would just make them more determined,
since failure really wouldn't exist as an option.
Of course, why do we seem so focused on preventing people from doing such things from the planes
themselves? A SAM fired from the middle of nowhere would do just as well as (if not better than)
a suicide bomber, and all the security in the world won't do anything to stop it (at least not before
the fact - And "a good chance of getting caught" after the fact certainly beats "certain death resulting
directly from success").
Meaningless policies and security theater only waste tax dollars for no increased safety. If
someone really wants to find a way to take down a plane, they will, and the TSA can't do a
goddamned thing about it.
Here in France someone is not guilty until it has been proven.
Theoretically true in the US - And I expect in france, as here in the US, it
holds true only for those able to afford the best legal defense team.
What gives its employer the right to judge him?
Well, he lost their money. A lot of it. Perhaps they
can't "judge" him in the legal sense, but they sure as hell have
a pretty good standing to call him a dozen varieties of scoundrel.
Is it really a fraud or is it a professional mistake?
Cooking a proto-board during testing counts as a mistake. Wasting
$10k in postage because you marked it as flats rather than presorted
bulk counts as a mistake. Losing seven BILLION dollars trying to cover
each successive loss by doubling-down, that doesn't count as a mistake.
It might not count as intentional or malicious, but it goes so
far beyond "mistake" as to make even "fraud" seem an inadequate term for it.
I am giving up my karma on this one;)
Pish - You make good points and ask valid questions, but I don't
think we can call this just a case of a bank losing a fortune and
trying to blame a bit player in it.
Y'know, at first I thought the same thing - Where the hell does this guy
get off telling people not to use the net so oh-so-special "business" users
can have priority access to bandwidth?
Then on thinking about it a bit deeper - That really does make
sense, and not just for the "screw you, I pay for it too and will damned
well use it" reason.
Without Aziz Sixpack using the net, these businesses have no use for it.
"The Internet" doesn't magically equal profit (or so I thought we all learned from
the dot com bubble bursting). It can help your paying customers
get to your products and services easier, but without those customers, the
net by itself does nothing at all for you.
God talking heads piss me off some times. Get a clue.
Ditto. "Utterance of official stupidity" should count as a crime punishable
by death.
The culture in question has a complicated set of rules about who can
and cannot see certain images, rituals, etc.
Yawn.
So how long do you suppose it would take them to make separate profiles
as each gender, as a member of every major "community"?
the restrictions also allows you the visitor to better understand the culture
Concealing information never leads to better information. It leads to tunnel-vision.
The sooner we get over our societally-imposed hangups, whether that mean sex or drugs or
national security or "women's rituals", the better for us all.
Use it to reflect on the assumptions you make about who is entitled to what information.
I make no assumptions about what I have access to, but strive for access to
everything. And once I have that access, I make sure everyone else has
access to it as well. Artificially imposed restrictions on access to information
harm everyone. We need to end such restrictions ASAP, to the best of our ability.
"Entitled"? Look up the root of that word, and you'll understand my point.
How did you gain the common sense in the first place about something that is listed on a warning label?
With most common dangers around the house, I learned them "experimentally" long before I could read.
Don't play with knives or broken glass, they make you bleed. Don't touch the stove, it hurts. Don't stick keys in
an outlet, they makes you feel all painfully tingly and get hot. Don't stare at the sun, it makes dots in your field
of vision that take a few day (if ever) to go away. Don't put food in the radiators, it will smell bad.
I don't see how anyone can reasonably argue against the inclusion of warning labels.
Because as I illustrate above, the people that might actually benefit from them, can't.
I suppose another target group exists, people who do know better, but they won't obey
the label either - Quite the opposite, you'll see people like them on shows like Jackass, seeing
how long they can stare into the beam.
It's even more foolish to believe that just because you know something that it will follow that you will
automatically apply it to every situation where it arises.
And there, this goes from "ignorance", as you point out, to stupidity.
We can't "learn" that cutting our own hearts out with a rusty spoon will hurt. We have to
apply the lesser knowledge that cutting yourself on a paring knife hurts, and extend it to a
much bigger hurt.
Similarly, we know that very bright lights can hurt us. While most flashlights can't, some can.
Even a good maglite would cause discomfort if you stare right into the beam; Anyone who shines this
right into their eyes before testing it out on a nearby wall, I will unrepentantly call "stupid", not
"ignorant of the danger".
The blogger could write them a letter disclosing his own identity, cash in the
$10k himself, and when they publish the letter sue them for infringing upon his
copyright on the letter.
Not a bad idea, actually... I'd skip the last half of that, but the blogger should
turn himself in for the bounty. The patent-troll lawyer has nothing. He would not
only have to (incorrectly) prove the claim false, but also demonstrate that the phrase
"patent troll" itself has some specific legal or technical meaning that would distinguish
it from clearly expressing a matter of opinion.
If you call someone an asshole, it doesn't count as slander or libel because no listener or reader
(respectively) could possibly mistake it for a factual statement.
People like the child/wife/friend/visitor who picks up
this neat little flashlight and, while remarking "I hate these
maglite knock-offs" proceeds to permanently blind themselves?
one would hope it has a warning not for the buyer but for
the safety of others where it is kept.
Quiz time - You just bought a cool black anodized aluminum high-powered
flashlight, with a huge ugly orange sticker on the handle warning you not
to look at the beam. Do you:
A) Have the warning professionally engraved directly onto the barrel of
the flashlight, so it can never wear off, B) Remove that sucker before you even put in the batteries,
C) Leave the sticker alone, ruining the look of your new toy, or
D) Take it back to the store and ask for one with a more permanantly-affixed
label?
A legitimate risk does not make for a legitimate warning label.
Anything that falls into the "mind-numbingly obvious" category should not
need a warning label.
Why shouldn't it warn you against plugging in too many high-power devices
Because each of those annoying little tags wastes the end-user's money, as well
as the time it takes to cut them all off.
I mean, you can't expect people to intuit how many things they can or
can't plug in
Why not? I'll admit I consider most people abysmally stupid, but they
should have a pretty good grasp of the idea that you can't safely run
a 20ga 100ft cord from your basement to your garage "beer fridge".
Why shouldn't it have a shit load of warning labels?
Well, because anyone paying $300 for the world's brightest flashlight
didn't buy it just so they can find their way to the electric panel
after a breaker blows. They bought it because it can melt
plastic. Thus, telling them as much merely insults us all, rather
than providing any potential safety to the end user.
Warning labels don't protect those of us with two neurons to rub together;
They keep people in the gene pool who Darwin-the-Lifeguard needs
to toss out ASAP.
As the Democrats currently control congress, I find your interpretation
of my statement somewhat peculiar.
My bias against Bush results from his nearly unbelievable mismanagement of
the US over the past seven years, not from any party loyalty (of which
I have none). ALL the idiots in Washington need to find themselves on
the unemployment line ASAP - And not just to replace them with the
new crop of idiots in November, either.
I honestly believe that we've gone too far at this point (which I wouldn't
have said prior to Bush) - We don't need the sort of change that comes from
an election, we need the sort of change that comes only from revolution
(preferably bloodless, but such things rarely work that way).
I think one of the most amazing things about Slashdot is how people can always find a way to somehow
start ranting about Bush and Iraq, no matter what the subject is.
Follow the money. DHS research funds come from the executive budget, which means...
Anyone?
Right! Bush.
We can blame Bush for so much because he oversees so much. The
War on Drugs? Bush -> FDA -> DEA -> multi-year sentences for simple posession. Air travel dying due to the nuissance
factor? Bush -> DHS -> TSA -> grandma gets tazed for her knitting needles. Media consolidation? Murdoch -> Bush -> FCC ->
ignoring overwhelmingly negative public response in favor of three comments by the CEOs of the biggest media companies on the
planet.
When you complain that it all goes back to Bush, well, it does all go back to Bush. Or congress. Or the USSC. But
usually Bush.
The sensors don't really perform the detection task individually
Riiiiiiight - So how long until we hear about a wave of people erroneously
"rendered" for "interrogation" in a "friendly", human-rights-respecting
country like Jordan, because their own cell phones turned them in following
medical tests involving the use of radioisotopes?
Hey congress, grow a pair. We the People do not want this bullshit.
Bush won't sign a budget that includes criteria for troop withdrawal - Fine,
cut off funding for the war. Bush won't sign a FISA extension that doesn't
include immunity for the telecomms - Fine, don't extend the damned thing!
Stop with the security theater, please - The actors suck and the popcorn went
stale four years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue in the US is that taking up cropland here means plowing up marginal land elsewhere.
No, it doesn't.
Pseudo-scientific "analyses" such as TFA can point out all the shortcomings of biofuels only because we, as a society, have this obsession with corn - More specifically, with the kernels themselves, which make up only a small fraction of the mass of the plant.
Cellulose, however, contains quite a lot of energy. It just takes a bit more effort to get at it. Once we start looking at processing that (in the form of stalks, husks, straw from wheat, any form of grass clippings, etc), literally made up of material currently considered waste, we go from "wasting cropland to grow corn to make barely more energy than we put in", to an effectively free alternative to petroleum.
Can our existing biowaste production satisfy 100% of our demand for oil? I honestly have no idea. But why turn down a free partial-solution???
It sickens me that we have solutions to our energy problems all around us - The sun shines down on me daily (oh, but only for a few hours, boo hoo), the wind blows by (but think of the hundreds of birds caught in turbines - vs the millions dying from NOx, SOx, and particulate emissions from cars and coal power plants), the tides ebb and flow twice every 24 hours (oh, but you'll ruin the rich weirdo's scenic vista!), people pay to have their yard waste hauled away. Until we perfect fusion, we will never have a 100% solution to our energy needs; Let's stop ignoring the abundant partial soltutions nature has provided in the meantime.
A lot of the types of games that people played at an arcade can now be done at home
So basically, you have yet anothing industry built upon an obsolete business model (scarcity of high-quality video games), and choose to blame the concept that made your product worthless, rather than adapting to provide a better service (cheaper would help - When an hour in the arcade costs me as much as buying a new game, why would I ever pick the former?).
Don't worry, the buggy-whip manufacturers and the RIAA feel for you. The rest of look forward to you porting your greatest hits to the Wii.
In the very first paragraph, TFA states "he'll demonstrate an invention that appears - though he doesn't dare say it - to operate as a perpetual motion machine."
As for why "nobody's calling it" that, TFA answers that as well, with:
Seems straightforward enough. The guy believes (or wants others to believe) that he has made a perpetual motion machine, but calling it as much would result in his instant damning to the land of crackpots. So instead of claiming something widely considered impossible, he describes it as simply some sort of "very efficient" electric motor, a perfectly reasonable (if unlikely, given his background) idea.
but also protects identifying data like parcel ownership.
Umm, that counts as a matter of public record as well. You can go to any county office in the country and, theoretically, pull the deeds for every parcel in that county (though in many places, they consider that their little fiefdom and make it as hard as possible, without paying the outrageous fees mention in TFA, for a cheap photocopy).
They shouldn't "protect" that information, they should just make it a removeable overlay (since most uses probably don't care).
I searched around for freely available software libraries that would take care of parsing the XML documents for me.
.NET actually has pretty decent XML support... Except as you point out:
Not "free", but believe it or not,
Then I got bitten by numerous bugs that occurred because XML has such weak syntax
Based on the exhibited behavior, I suspect virtually all programs that parse XML use SelectSingleNode() (or comparable). And there we have a problem, in that XML itself doesn't require node uniqueness, but most programs will break otherwise.
Why is this rated as a "Troll".
Thanks for the support, but I could have answered that question before I ever posted (fortunately my karma can take the occasional hit): Because I mentioned Israel.
If I had left that word out as the in-all-seriousness second most likely source of (or partner in) this sabotage, I probably would have made a +5. Most people, however, just can't grasp the idea that you can hold the political state of Israel in utter contempt for its actions, without expressing antisemitism.
read a Sherlock Homes novel, or about the scientific method? Nevermind....
Well, as regards Sherlock, "sabotage" doesn't count as "impossible", thus "improbably" doesn't particularly matter, now does it? As for Scientific Method, by all means propose a simple objective way to test the two available hypotheses... On which point, have you ever heard of Occam's razor?
Hypothesis 1: the same number of cables get cut in the past two weeks as in the entire 50 years previous to that.
Hypothesis 2: An organization hostile to certain groups in the Middle East "accidentally" cut key cables to take those groups offline.
I'd call the latter so much more likely that it would take fairly strong evidence to the contrary to eliminate it a near-certainty.
If people are concerned about Real ID posing massive privacy issues, why haven't people like me using our passports faced this yet?
Because you fall into an EXTREME minority of people using a passport for such purposes - All the passport-tracking infrastructure currently in place exists to track entry and exit from the country at its borders (and various major points-of-entry, ie, airports).
If you want an example of the sort of abuses RealID will lead to, you need look no further than EZPass (or TransPass or whatever they call it) in New Jersey (and several other states). "No, no, we'll never give out your travel details!" - Then bam, ten years later, the states want to use those record to retroactively impose speeding fines, divorce cases regularly subpoena their records, and in at least one case, police used an EZPass dump to "justify" randomly harassing hundreds of innocent people who happened to use the wrong highway at the wrong time.
We tinfoil-types don't (only) fear what could happen, we fear what already happens when you hand similar tools to those in power.
No one ever said that one ship damaged all the cables.
True - Why limit it to one ship, when we have the whole US fleet to choose from?
Look, I don't normally believe in conspiracy theories (they take too much work to implement, and usually you can explain the same outcome by a lot of people all acting out of simple greedy self-interest). But we've gone how many decades with undersea cables only rarely taking damage, and now we have five, which just happen to affect a region of the world in which we have a strategic interest, all cut within two weeks???
Take the blinders off, friend. Even if the US didn't do it, someone (cough cough Israel cough) did, and deliberately at that.
To me the answer to question 2 very much conflicts with the answer to question 1.
The answer to #1 may appear confusing if you don't quite "get" how Libertarians (whether running as Republican or not) think.
To translate it into plain English, he thinks we should have nothing to do with a government-sponsored space-race. We should instead have a regulatory climate friendly to the numerous private ventures trying to do the same damned thing without using our tax dollars in the process.
Questions 4 and 5, however, somewhat surprise me. A proper libertarian would have ranted about "corporate protectionism" and flatly stated he would do away with all but the bare minimum of IP-related laws. Then again, part of RP's appeal comes from his sanity rather than his strict adherence to unrealistic Libertarian ideals, so he (as with the vast majority of people) might just not have considered those issues to nearly the same extent we Slashdotters do on an almost daily basis.
The study found that 30% of children between the ages of 9 and 18 delete the search history from their browsers in an attempt to protect their privacy from their parents, that 73% of the children reported giving out personal information online
Okay, so 30% of kids understand the implications of their online presence enough to clear the cache to protect their privacy - But then (at least) 10% (((73+30)-100)/30) of those same kids give out personal info online?
Does not compute - Unless this "survey" had extremely biased questions in a sad attempt to prove how dangerous we should all consider the spooooooooky intarweb. For example, what constitutes "personal info"? Using a real name to register for a website? Buying something through Amazon? Clicking "I am not over 18" to get redirected to disney.com?
36% of the children admitted to meeting with a stranger they had met online
Same problem - What constitutes "meeting with a stranger"? At the younger end of the surveyed age range, they have no ability to really go anywhere without parental assistance; this suggests "stranger" means "classmate I don't really know very well". And at the higher end of the age range, we have people who don't really draw a line between "online" and "real" friends, and who quite likely have attended at least one online-community-specific gathering (such as a Fark Party or the like).
Nothing but FUD for parents.
real innovation takes lots of time and hard work to come to fruition
Tell that to Watson and Crick, who for decades could never really explain how they "stumbled" upon the secret of the DNA double helix - Until it recently came out that the thought it up while tripping their balls off.
Or Einstein? He went from a hack dabbling in the works of Planck to the greatest physicist of all time in a matter of 18 months; and while some have accused him of "borrowing" his ideas from patent applications (or his wife - Which would make this no less of a leap rather than slow progress), no one can deny that he (or she) took a mess of conflicting ideas and unified them, practically overnight, into the single most functional theory of how the universe works we have available today - And he did so as a hobby, not as his day-job.
Freud? He got really, really high while bored at university, and noticed the influence the subconscious has on our overt behavior. That didn't "evolve" from Brücke and Helmholtz' work, it appeared as a whole new ballpark almost overnight (and in fact, when he personally went on to do the "hard part" of fleshing out his ideas, he created his modern tarnished image as a dirty old man).
Making that flash of LSD-inspired insight into the modern biotech industry took 50 years of hard work. Turning a short paper on physics into the LHC took a century. And turning "the subconscious" into modern psychoanalysis still has some way to go, 125 years later.
The "little" leaps come about as a result of work. The jumps happen in a flash.
If anyone here knows of a colourless, odourless explosive you can safely drink, I'd like to be apprised of it.
Not to actually support the TSA's absurd policies, but "safely drink" doesn't really matter if you plan to use it to blow up a plane. Only "not extremely caustic" matters for that particular test.
Which goes back to my biggest problem with all searches - A human can live for a good number of hours with the entire contents of their abdoment REMOVED. All the digestive and reproductive tackle, absolutely useless in the short-term. With only parts of 3 organs (the small lobe of the liver, half of one kidney, and the tip of the pancreas) left below the diaphragm, you could theoretically survive for years (albeit on TPN). Of those, you can further remove the entire liver and kidneys and still live for hours or even days.
Now - Why would someone do all that? Because they plan to die anyway! What does a suicide bomber care if you replace their organs with 20lbs of C4? If anything, it would just make them more determined, since failure really wouldn't exist as an option.
Of course, why do we seem so focused on preventing people from doing such things from the planes themselves? A SAM fired from the middle of nowhere would do just as well as (if not better than) a suicide bomber, and all the security in the world won't do anything to stop it (at least not before the fact - And "a good chance of getting caught" after the fact certainly beats "certain death resulting directly from success").
Meaningless policies and security theater only waste tax dollars for no increased safety. If someone really wants to find a way to take down a plane, they will, and the TSA can't do a goddamned thing about it.
Here in France someone is not guilty until it has been proven.
;)
Theoretically true in the US - And I expect in france, as here in the US, it holds true only for those able to afford the best legal defense team.
What gives its employer the right to judge him?
Well, he lost their money. A lot of it. Perhaps they can't "judge" him in the legal sense, but they sure as hell have a pretty good standing to call him a dozen varieties of scoundrel.
Is it really a fraud or is it a professional mistake?
Cooking a proto-board during testing counts as a mistake. Wasting $10k in postage because you marked it as flats rather than presorted bulk counts as a mistake. Losing seven BILLION dollars trying to cover each successive loss by doubling-down, that doesn't count as a mistake. It might not count as intentional or malicious, but it goes so far beyond "mistake" as to make even "fraud" seem an inadequate term for it.
I am giving up my karma on this one
Pish - You make good points and ask valid questions, but I don't think we can call this just a case of a bank losing a fortune and trying to blame a bit player in it.
Business more important than my porn? NO!
Y'know, at first I thought the same thing - Where the hell does this guy get off telling people not to use the net so oh-so-special "business" users can have priority access to bandwidth?
Then on thinking about it a bit deeper - That really does make sense, and not just for the "screw you, I pay for it too and will damned well use it" reason.
Without Aziz Sixpack using the net, these businesses have no use for it. "The Internet" doesn't magically equal profit (or so I thought we all learned from the dot com bubble bursting). It can help your paying customers get to your products and services easier, but without those customers, the net by itself does nothing at all for you.
God talking heads piss me off some times. Get a clue.
Ditto. "Utterance of official stupidity" should count as a crime punishable by death.
The culture in question has a complicated set of rules about who can and cannot see certain images, rituals, etc.
Yawn.
So how long do you suppose it would take them to make separate profiles as each gender, as a member of every major "community"?
the restrictions also allows you the visitor to better understand the culture
Concealing information never leads to better information. It leads to tunnel-vision.
The sooner we get over our societally-imposed hangups, whether that mean sex or drugs or national security or "women's rituals", the better for us all.
Use it to reflect on the assumptions you make about who is entitled to what information.
I make no assumptions about what I have access to, but strive for access to everything. And once I have that access, I make sure everyone else has access to it as well. Artificially imposed restrictions on access to information harm everyone. We need to end such restrictions ASAP, to the best of our ability.
"Entitled"? Look up the root of that word, and you'll understand my point.
How did you gain the common sense in the first place about something that is listed on a warning label?
With most common dangers around the house, I learned them "experimentally" long before I could read.
Don't play with knives or broken glass, they make you bleed. Don't touch the stove, it hurts. Don't stick keys in an outlet, they makes you feel all painfully tingly and get hot. Don't stare at the sun, it makes dots in your field of vision that take a few day (if ever) to go away. Don't put food in the radiators, it will smell bad.
I don't see how anyone can reasonably argue against the inclusion of warning labels.
Because as I illustrate above, the people that might actually benefit from them, can't. I suppose another target group exists, people who do know better, but they won't obey the label either - Quite the opposite, you'll see people like them on shows like Jackass, seeing how long they can stare into the beam.
It's even more foolish to believe that just because you know something that it will follow that you will automatically apply it to every situation where it arises.
And there, this goes from "ignorance", as you point out, to stupidity.
We can't "learn" that cutting our own hearts out with a rusty spoon will hurt. We have to apply the lesser knowledge that cutting yourself on a paring knife hurts, and extend it to a much bigger hurt.
Similarly, we know that very bright lights can hurt us. While most flashlights can't, some can. Even a good maglite would cause discomfort if you stare right into the beam; Anyone who shines this right into their eyes before testing it out on a nearby wall, I will unrepentantly call "stupid", not "ignorant of the danger".
The blogger could write them a letter disclosing his own identity, cash in the $10k himself, and when they publish the letter sue them for infringing upon his copyright on the letter.
Not a bad idea, actually... I'd skip the last half of that, but the blogger should turn himself in for the bounty. The patent-troll lawyer has nothing. He would not only have to (incorrectly) prove the claim false, but also demonstrate that the phrase "patent troll" itself has some specific legal or technical meaning that would distinguish it from clearly expressing a matter of opinion.
If you call someone an asshole, it doesn't count as slander or libel because no listener or reader (respectively) could possibly mistake it for a factual statement.
People like the child/wife/friend/visitor who picks up this neat little flashlight and, while remarking "I hate these maglite knock-offs" proceeds to permanently blind themselves?
See my previous response to that question.
Seriously, you people had better never visit my house. I doubt any of you could make it past the foyer without cutting your own heads off.
one would hope it has a warning not for the buyer but for the safety of others where it is kept.
Quiz time - You just bought a cool black anodized aluminum high-powered flashlight, with a huge ugly orange sticker on the handle warning you not to look at the beam. Do you:
A) Have the warning professionally engraved directly onto the barrel of the flashlight, so it can never wear off,
B) Remove that sucker before you even put in the batteries,
C) Leave the sticker alone, ruining the look of your new toy, or
D) Take it back to the store and ask for one with a more permanantly-affixed label?
Er, that's a legitimate warning label to have
A legitimate risk does not make for a legitimate warning label. Anything that falls into the "mind-numbingly obvious" category should not need a warning label.
Why shouldn't it warn you against plugging in too many high-power devices
Because each of those annoying little tags wastes the end-user's money, as well as the time it takes to cut them all off.
I mean, you can't expect people to intuit how many things they can or can't plug in
Why not? I'll admit I consider most people abysmally stupid, but they should have a pretty good grasp of the idea that you can't safely run a 20ga 100ft cord from your basement to your garage "beer fridge".
Why shouldn't it have a shit load of warning labels?
Well, because anyone paying $300 for the world's brightest flashlight didn't buy it just so they can find their way to the electric panel after a breaker blows. They bought it because it can melt plastic. Thus, telling them as much merely insults us all, rather than providing any potential safety to the end user.
Warning labels don't protect those of us with two neurons to rub together; They keep people in the gene pool who Darwin-the-Lifeguard needs to toss out ASAP.
You are presuming that the Democrats have a pair
As the Democrats currently control congress, I find your interpretation of my statement somewhat peculiar.
My bias against Bush results from his nearly unbelievable mismanagement of the US over the past seven years, not from any party loyalty (of which I have none). ALL the idiots in Washington need to find themselves on the unemployment line ASAP - And not just to replace them with the new crop of idiots in November, either.
I honestly believe that we've gone too far at this point (which I wouldn't have said prior to Bush) - We don't need the sort of change that comes from an election, we need the sort of change that comes only from revolution (preferably bloodless, but such things rarely work that way).
I think one of the most amazing things about Slashdot is how people can always find a way to somehow start ranting about Bush and Iraq, no matter what the subject is.
Follow the money. DHS research funds come from the executive budget, which means...
Anyone?
Right! Bush.
We can blame Bush for so much because he oversees so much. The War on Drugs? Bush -> FDA -> DEA -> multi-year sentences for simple posession. Air travel dying due to the nuissance factor? Bush -> DHS -> TSA -> grandma gets tazed for her knitting needles. Media consolidation? Murdoch -> Bush -> FCC -> ignoring overwhelmingly negative public response in favor of three comments by the CEOs of the biggest media companies on the planet.
When you complain that it all goes back to Bush, well, it does all go back to Bush. Or congress. Or the USSC. But usually Bush.
The sensors don't really perform the detection task individually
Riiiiiiight - So how long until we hear about a wave of people erroneously "rendered" for "interrogation" in a "friendly", human-rights-respecting country like Jordan, because their own cell phones turned them in following medical tests involving the use of radioisotopes?
Hey congress, grow a pair. We the People do not want this bullshit. Bush won't sign a budget that includes criteria for troop withdrawal - Fine, cut off funding for the war. Bush won't sign a FISA extension that doesn't include immunity for the telecomms - Fine, don't extend the damned thing! Stop with the security theater, please - The actors suck and the popcorn went stale four years ago.