This doesn't make sense for a "meteor". The atmosphere is less than 200 miles thick, and the chance that a meteorite will skim across that relatively thin layer of atmosphere long enough to be sited along a 700-mile path over multiple states is infinitesimal....
You're wrong about much of what you said, but if I can pick on one point in particular:
... It's not even burning at Mach 3, as the SR71 doesn't do that,...
The heat that an SR-71 endures at that speed retempers the metal of its skin every time it flies, it's that hot. If it was made out of less heat-tolerant stuff, it most certainly would burst into flame. A piece of rock, not engineered to withstand high temperatures but simply made up of the random assortment elements it is, is almost certainly going to be flaming if it's going at Mach 3 for many minutes, unless you've wrapped it in some very good heat shielding first. Most meteors do not come so packaged.
... why do you have to base it from whats abundantly around you in your tiny micro speckle of the universe and project it on everything?
You don't. However, if you're going to theorize life without this chemical that plays a crucial role in so many chemical processes that are used by life as we know it, and expect to be taken seriously, you need to find replacements that are likely to exist instead of water in there alien environments and will be able to serve in its stead, or you need to come up with replacement life processes.
Presumably, you've done neither... which would make your speculation on life without water about as scientific as speculating life based on fairy-dust.
Get back to us when you've worked out this possible alien biochemistry, then we can start seeing how viable it would be given the alien environments we might fight the building blocks for it, and how well it operates compared to the processes we know.
...and a picture from a handful of pictures you're allowed to set as your "security image". Which anybody within 50 feet can see.
Most people setting up phishing sites aren't within 50 feet of you.
The point of the "security image" is so that if you go to a phishing site, their generic login page that's supposed to look like your normal online banking login page won't have the right picture, or the amusing caption you may have given it (e.g. the picture of a the man holding a gun with a dog in front of him, which I captioned "Support Dog Hunting").
Whether people within 50 feet of you can see it or not is irrelevant to the function it is supposed to serve. Heck, I've just told you which picture I picked... go to town with the info. XD
... There's no way in hell that a bank can know for sure, 100%, that you did or did not initiate a particular transaction. However, please know that most banks' core providers have heuristic/behavioral analysis that does in fact look for behaviors that don't match yours. Companies like Fidelity National Information Services (FNIS), for example, actively send out "fraud alerts" that monitor ACH and debit activity on their networks. For example, if your card is used to purchase a product from a country or a domestic location that doesn't match your activity history, your bank can be alerted and the card can be "hot carded"....
Had that happen to me. One day my debit card stopped working, and I immediately checked my activity on the online banking site and it had $800 worth of charges I hadn't made. The cool thing was, they detected the unusual activity even though it was all local -- whoever cloned the card used it locally, so all the transactions were to businesses within my area, in a couple cases to a liquor store that's within walking distance of my home. So geographically, it looked very much like my normal usage, but most of the stores were places I've never been to before, and in the case of the liquor store, buying products I've never purchased before (if a friend offers me a beer I don't turn it down, but I've never purchased alcohol myself). Looking at it myself, it was easy to see it didn't match my shopping patterns, but it surprised me that the bankers who don't know me personally also caught it that quick. I immediately filed a claim and listed all the transactions that I hadn't made myself, and within a couple weeks all the funds were restored. Had they succeeded in draining the account completely, there would have been a few tough days there with no money, but thanks to the bank's quick recognition of the suspicious charges, I was barely even inconvenienced.
Actual quote: "it's no problem to give you my password, you're leaving anyway". Yes thank you very much.
These people are very lucky they can actually trust me,...
Hehe, always makes me laugh. Of course, the fact of the matter is, this happens all the time, and the reason why is not unreasonable: it's almost always true. Indeed, as a consultant I'm probably more trustworthy -- I'm less likely to have an axe to grind than an employee. And if something bad does happen, they have both contracts and the law and your personal details to know where to send the cops. The rare chance that it isn't true, and that the consultant will be stupid enough to use the confidential info he or she has gained, isn't worth the bother to most employees of most companies.
Neither. They're saying it's the only brown dwarf to, well, let me just quote them:
Oddly, when looking at the spectrum from UGPSJ0722-05, there is an anomalous absorption line (i.e. a particular wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum that is missing) that cannot be explained by our current understanding of brown dwarfs. Perhaps the UKIRT has discovered a new breed of brown dwarf; a very cool object with some chemical in its atmosphere that absorbs infrared radiation at a wavelength of 1.25 micrometers.
Aside from the expected water vapor and methane, they've found this other absorption line pointing to something new and different from previous brown dwarves.
This was a case where someone who had an internet following, asked them all to send an email to the judge.
Right, harass the judge... good idea...
Is it spam if a local radio DJ gets all of his/her listeners to send email to the local Congressman about something being discussed in Congress?
No, because as an elected official in a democracy, the congressman is supposed to represent the people of his district. It's part of his job to listen to their opinions. Contrast this with a judge, who is supposed to rule based on the law and is supposed to not give a flying frak what people think about it. There's absolutely positively no valid reason at all whatsoever why you should be writing to a judge about an ongoing court case to voice your opinion. Flooding his mailbox with stuff he's obligated by oath and ethics to not take into account in his decision process is simply a form of harassment.
Then tell me again how the Chinese intelligence services aren't funding and running Ghostnet.
Now now, let's not be hasty, there's no evidence in this report of the involvement of the People's Republic of China. It could be anyone on the long list of organizations who happen to hate the Dalai Lama, Chinese dissidents, etc.;)
I can see now a lot of people claiming to be supertaskers.
Well yes, obviously all of us here are among the elite.;)
(I am so not... you would not believe the extent of injuries I've endured simply walking around the office or my home while thinking about something else... my pinky toe on my right foot is currently broken... again...)
I would say that software patents currently hinder innovation more than they promote it. But that shouldn't be an argument for abolishing software patents any more than Ralph Nader's campaign against unsafe cars was an argument for abolishing cars. Just as we made cars safer, couldn't we fix the patent system so it doesn't hinder innovation?
Well, it's an argument for abolishing unsafe cars. It's only not an argument for abolishing all cars because there exist safe cars (at least relatively speaking). If your argument is we shouldn't abolish all software patents, just bad software patents, I would argue there's no distinction between the two. You can't fix the patent system so that it simultaneously allows software patents and doesn't hinder innovation, because there's no such thing as a software patent that doesn't. The car analogy doesn't work here because not all cars are bad cars, but all software patents are bad patents.
Patenting an algorithm is not really like patenting an invention. It's more like patenting a mathematical law or a scientific discovery. If someone comes up with a new way to factor large numbers, they should get a Nobel Prize, not a market monopoly and a private island (unless you can buy a private island for cost of your Nobel Prize award).
Even the simple GIF format, which wasn't particularly clever at all, got a patent.
No. Terry Welch's improvement on Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv's LZ78 algorithm was patented, making the LZW algorithm used for compressing the data in a GIF file a patented process. The GIF file format was never patented (I don't think that's even possible, but IANAL).
I imagine you could still patent the concept as long as it was implemented as firmware but I assume the patent could not be used to stop others implementing the concept in software.
Standard disclaimers - IANAL. I haven't RTFA.
You also apparently either don't understand what firmware is, or what software is. (Your software doesn't cease to be software if it's burned into non-reprogrammable memory. Not all software is firmware, but all firmware is software. It's just software recorded on non-erasable chip media. Heck, often these days it's erasable too. Not as easily as when it's saved on disk, but still... software doesn't cease being software merely because you change the media you save it on.)
You completely missed the point. Software isn't patentable. But isn't a clever and non-obvious algorithm an invention that could deserve patent protection?
You're arguing that an algorithm should be patentable when written in English but not when written in Python? Why would what language you express an algorithm in determine its patentability? Or are you under the mistaken impression that a software program isn't an algorithm?
It's not a novel legal principle, rather, it's an archaic one, from back in the days when there was a lot of land on Earth not controlled by any nation. One could gain legal ownership rights over such land in a number of ways, with certain types of claims taking precedence over others, e.g. merely visiting land and claiming it was a weak claim, locating movable property on it was stronger, building permanent structures on it stronger yet. And there's no claim being made that this is superior to the Outer Space Treaty, not sure where you're getting that from. They're pointing out that the OST doesn't address the issue.
Not without violating international law, which prevents territorial claims on the moon.
Which law would that be? The only international law I'm aware of on the subject prevents the signatory countries from making territorial claims. No law that I'm aware of prevents anyone else from doing so. (For the record, Richard Garriot is not a signatory to the treaty in question.)
This, of course, is why you can displace indigenous people from "their" land, right? No government ever issued them a proper title, so it isn't really their land...
Um... since when did countries negotiate trade agreements with themselves? The fact that this article is about a proposed EU-Canada trade agreement kinda implies that Canada is not a part of the EU. Not sure where you'd get the opposite impression.
If you were part of the EU, they wouldn't make any demands, they'd just make the change themselves. Silently, behind closed-doors, with no democratic input, as I understand how the EU operates.
Naw, it'd work better the other way around -- our states should secede and become Canadian provinces. Ends up the same in the end (one united country), except with Ottawa instead of Washington DC, which sounds like a trade up to me...
I've personally felt like the whole thing was a scam from the beginning. But I tend to be skeptical of government in general. I just feel like it's easier to run a smear campaign on Toyota than to fix the reputations of General Motors and Ford....
I'm sorry, but you're misusing the word "skeptical". It is not a synonym for "paranoid kook".
If the car isn't already moving, sure, the engine won't overcome the brakes. OTOH, when a ton of metal is already moving at considerable speed, and the brakes are trying to slow it but the engine is applying an increasing amount of energy, I think you will find you are quite mistaken, I don't care how good condition your brakes are in.
Slashdot Mirror
Trial lawyers all but own the Democratic party, and they're the reason healthcare has becomes so expensive the last couple decades.
Ah yes, simple explanations for simple minds...
This doesn't make sense for a "meteor". The atmosphere is less than 200 miles thick, and the chance that a meteorite will skim across that relatively thin layer of atmosphere long enough to be sited along a 700-mile path over multiple states is infinitesimal....
Um, no, it's not.
You're wrong about much of what you said, but if I can pick on one point in particular:
... It's not even burning at Mach 3, as the SR71 doesn't do that, ...
The heat that an SR-71 endures at that speed retempers the metal of its skin every time it flies, it's that hot. If it was made out of less heat-tolerant stuff, it most certainly would burst into flame. A piece of rock, not engineered to withstand high temperatures but simply made up of the random assortment elements it is, is almost certainly going to be flaming if it's going at Mach 3 for many minutes, unless you've wrapped it in some very good heat shielding first. Most meteors do not come so packaged.
... why do you have to base it from whats abundantly around you in your tiny micro speckle of the universe and project it on everything?
You don't. However, if you're going to theorize life without this chemical that plays a crucial role in so many chemical processes that are used by life as we know it, and expect to be taken seriously, you need to find replacements that are likely to exist instead of water in there alien environments and will be able to serve in its stead, or you need to come up with replacement life processes.
Presumably, you've done neither... which would make your speculation on life without water about as scientific as speculating life based on fairy-dust.
Get back to us when you've worked out this possible alien biochemistry, then we can start seeing how viable it would be given the alien environments we might fight the building blocks for it, and how well it operates compared to the processes we know.
...and a picture from a handful of pictures you're allowed to set as your "security image". Which anybody within 50 feet can see.
Most people setting up phishing sites aren't within 50 feet of you.
The point of the "security image" is so that if you go to a phishing site, their generic login page that's supposed to look like your normal online banking login page won't have the right picture, or the amusing caption you may have given it (e.g. the picture of a the man holding a gun with a dog in front of him, which I captioned "Support Dog Hunting").
Whether people within 50 feet of you can see it or not is irrelevant to the function it is supposed to serve. Heck, I've just told you which picture I picked... go to town with the info. XD
... There's no way in hell that a bank can know for sure, 100%, that you did or did not initiate a particular transaction. However, please know that most banks' core providers have heuristic/behavioral analysis that does in fact look for behaviors that don't match yours. Companies like Fidelity National Information Services (FNIS), for example, actively send out "fraud alerts" that monitor ACH and debit activity on their networks. For example, if your card is used to purchase a product from a country or a domestic location that doesn't match your activity history, your bank can be alerted and the card can be "hot carded". ...
Had that happen to me. One day my debit card stopped working, and I immediately checked my activity on the online banking site and it had $800 worth of charges I hadn't made. The cool thing was, they detected the unusual activity even though it was all local -- whoever cloned the card used it locally, so all the transactions were to businesses within my area, in a couple cases to a liquor store that's within walking distance of my home. So geographically, it looked very much like my normal usage, but most of the stores were places I've never been to before, and in the case of the liquor store, buying products I've never purchased before (if a friend offers me a beer I don't turn it down, but I've never purchased alcohol myself). Looking at it myself, it was easy to see it didn't match my shopping patterns, but it surprised me that the bankers who don't know me personally also caught it that quick. I immediately filed a claim and listed all the transactions that I hadn't made myself, and within a couple weeks all the funds were restored. Had they succeeded in draining the account completely, there would have been a few tough days there with no money, but thanks to the bank's quick recognition of the suspicious charges, I was barely even inconvenienced.
Actual quote: "it's no problem to give you my password, you're leaving anyway". Yes thank you very much.
These people are very lucky they can actually trust me, ...
Hehe, always makes me laugh. Of course, the fact of the matter is, this happens all the time, and the reason why is not unreasonable: it's almost always true. Indeed, as a consultant I'm probably more trustworthy -- I'm less likely to have an axe to grind than an employee. And if something bad does happen, they have both contracts and the law and your personal details to know where to send the cops. The rare chance that it isn't true, and that the consultant will be stupid enough to use the confidential info he or she has gained, isn't worth the bother to most employees of most companies.
Neither. They're saying it's the only brown dwarf to, well, let me just quote them:
Oddly, when looking at the spectrum from UGPSJ0722-05, there is an anomalous absorption line (i.e. a particular wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum that is missing) that cannot be explained by our current understanding of brown dwarfs. Perhaps the UKIRT has discovered a new breed of brown dwarf; a very cool object with some chemical in its atmosphere that absorbs infrared radiation at a wavelength of 1.25 micrometers.
Aside from the expected water vapor and methane, they've found this other absorption line pointing to something new and different from previous brown dwarves.
This was a case where someone who had an internet following, asked them all to send an email to the judge.
Right, harass the judge... good idea...
Is it spam if a local radio DJ gets all of his/her listeners to send email to the local Congressman about something being discussed in Congress?
No, because as an elected official in a democracy, the congressman is supposed to represent the people of his district. It's part of his job to listen to their opinions. Contrast this with a judge, who is supposed to rule based on the law and is supposed to not give a flying frak what people think about it. There's absolutely positively no valid reason at all whatsoever why you should be writing to a judge about an ongoing court case to voice your opinion. Flooding his mailbox with stuff he's obligated by oath and ethics to not take into account in his decision process is simply a form of harassment.
Then tell me again how the Chinese intelligence services aren't funding and running Ghostnet.
Now now, let's not be hasty, there's no evidence in this report of the involvement of the People's Republic of China. It could be anyone on the long list of organizations who happen to hate the Dalai Lama, Chinese dissidents, etc. ;)
Robots should be kept barefoot and in the kitchen... ;)
I can see now a lot of people claiming to be supertaskers.
Well yes, obviously all of us here are among the elite. ;)
(I am so not... you would not believe the extent of injuries I've endured simply walking around the office or my home while thinking about something else... my pinky toe on my right foot is currently broken... again...)
I would say that software patents currently hinder innovation more than they promote it. But that shouldn't be an argument for abolishing software patents any more than Ralph Nader's campaign against unsafe cars was an argument for abolishing cars. Just as we made cars safer, couldn't we fix the patent system so it doesn't hinder innovation?
Well, it's an argument for abolishing unsafe cars. It's only not an argument for abolishing all cars because there exist safe cars (at least relatively speaking). If your argument is we shouldn't abolish all software patents, just bad software patents, I would argue there's no distinction between the two. You can't fix the patent system so that it simultaneously allows software patents and doesn't hinder innovation, because there's no such thing as a software patent that doesn't. The car analogy doesn't work here because not all cars are bad cars, but all software patents are bad patents.
Patenting an algorithm is not really like patenting an invention. It's more like patenting a mathematical law or a scientific discovery. If someone comes up with a new way to factor large numbers, they should get a Nobel Prize, not a market monopoly and a private island (unless you can buy a private island for cost of your Nobel Prize award).
Even the simple GIF format, which wasn't particularly clever at all, got a patent.
No. Terry Welch's improvement on Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv's LZ78 algorithm was patented, making the LZW algorithm used for compressing the data in a GIF file a patented process. The GIF file format was never patented (I don't think that's even possible, but IANAL).
I imagine you could still patent the concept as long as it was implemented as firmware but I assume the patent could not be used to stop others implementing the concept in software. Standard disclaimers - IANAL. I haven't RTFA.
You also apparently either don't understand what firmware is, or what software is. (Your software doesn't cease to be software if it's burned into non-reprogrammable memory. Not all software is firmware, but all firmware is software. It's just software recorded on non-erasable chip media. Heck, often these days it's erasable too. Not as easily as when it's saved on disk, but still... software doesn't cease being software merely because you change the media you save it on.)
You completely missed the point. Software isn't patentable. But isn't a clever and non-obvious algorithm an invention that could deserve patent protection?
You're arguing that an algorithm should be patentable when written in English but not when written in Python? Why would what language you express an algorithm in determine its patentability? Or are you under the mistaken impression that a software program isn't an algorithm?
NASA isn't in on it -- the robots we're using to explore are developing their own senses of humor.
The Google AI is laughing its posterior nodes off...
It's not a novel legal principle, rather, it's an archaic one, from back in the days when there was a lot of land on Earth not controlled by any nation. One could gain legal ownership rights over such land in a number of ways, with certain types of claims taking precedence over others, e.g. merely visiting land and claiming it was a weak claim, locating movable property on it was stronger, building permanent structures on it stronger yet. And there's no claim being made that this is superior to the Outer Space Treaty, not sure where you're getting that from. They're pointing out that the OST doesn't address the issue.
Not without violating international law, which prevents territorial claims on the moon.
Which law would that be? The only international law I'm aware of on the subject prevents the signatory countries from making territorial claims. No law that I'm aware of prevents anyone else from doing so. (For the record, Richard Garriot is not a signatory to the treaty in question.)
This, of course, is why you can displace indigenous people from "their" land, right? No government ever issued them a proper title, so it isn't really their land...
Um... since when did countries negotiate trade agreements with themselves? The fact that this article is about a proposed EU-Canada trade agreement kinda implies that Canada is not a part of the EU. Not sure where you'd get the opposite impression.
If you were part of the EU, they wouldn't make any demands, they'd just make the change themselves. Silently, behind closed-doors, with no democratic input, as I understand how the EU operates.
Naw, it'd work better the other way around -- our states should secede and become Canadian provinces. Ends up the same in the end (one united country), except with Ottawa instead of Washington DC, which sounds like a trade up to me...
I've personally felt like the whole thing was a scam from the beginning. But I tend to be skeptical of government in general. I just feel like it's easier to run a smear campaign on Toyota than to fix the reputations of General Motors and Ford. ...
I'm sorry, but you're misusing the word "skeptical". It is not a synonym for "paranoid kook".
If the car isn't already moving, sure, the engine won't overcome the brakes. OTOH, when a ton of metal is already moving at considerable speed, and the brakes are trying to slow it but the engine is applying an increasing amount of energy, I think you will find you are quite mistaken, I don't care how good condition your brakes are in.