In fact, one of the conditions of his release from prison at the end of 10 years should be castration, to help weed the "nincompoop" gene out of the gene pool.
You are from the so-called "land of the free" I presume? You do realize how fascistic the above remark is, don't you?
So if you leave the front door of your house open (by mistake or on purpose), it is okay for anyone to come in, check out what you have in the fridge, use your bathroom, etc.?
As a possible intruder is not actually physically touching any of your stuff, I think it is more correct to compare this person to someone peeking through your window to see what kind of books you have on your bookshelve.
I think you don't understand the political process in Europe. When the European "government" makes a rule, this means all European countries have to implement laws that take this rule into account. This is why governments can change their opinions, when the national governments decide that this rule is not consistent with the rest of the laws.
I agree that this is a lengthy process, but since Europe is trying the harmonize the legislation of a lot of countries, hickups like these are to be expected, and it is in fact frightening that it does not happen more often. There is, for instance, a sort of European arrest warant, as a consequence of which any european country is required to arrest and handover a citizen if this person is to appear in a court of a different country. Given Amnesty Int.'s recent negative report on criminal prosecution in many European countries, this might not have been such a good idea.
You have to remember that stranger things have happened with unmanned space probes. Remember that contact with SOHO was actually lost. And they had a similar problem. The solar panel were rotating towards the sun (they could see that with radar echoes), so the probe was getting more and more power. However, since the probe wasn't answering, they had no way of knowing if it would actually fire it's engines to stop the rotation. So they had to establish contact with it, while it was in the phase of the rotation that it had enough power to thaw out the fuel.
When they had sent the probe it's wake up call, they would also have to remotely fix the software bug that had caused the loss of contact!
This all worked and SOHO went on to become a very valuable resource.
This guys argument is based on the fact that after a certain time, the light is no longer absorbed because the mirror is at it's equilibrium temperature. This proves that he does not grasp simple physics. The equilibrium means that the material emits as much light as it absorbs. The reason the sail works is that the light is emitted equally in the forward and backward direction, but is only absorbed from the back. This means there is a net momentum transfer. Now, one obvious remark would be that there is no energy transfer, because as many photons are emitted as there are photons absorbed. This means that the energy of the mirror cannot change and therefore we have a contradiction (mirror gains more momentum, but not more energy). However, this all works out if you take into account the Doppler shifts of the emitted radiation with respect to the absorbed radiation. This stuff is all understood, I cannot understand where this guy gets his ideas. His arguments can equally well be applied to laser cooling and we know that that works!
It may take altering entire cultures Strictly speaking, it will take only the altering of one culture....
A tangentially related comment on international law: it's not international law, it's international agreement. There is a thing called international law that has been agreed upon by all the nations represented in the united nations. If you wish to call this an agreement, that's okay with me. However, the consequence is that all law is in fact just an agreement between a ruling body and the people that are being ruled. This is ofcourse formally true, but there is no difference between national and international law. That being said, it is important to stress the fact that international law only works as long as the international community can apply some kind of pressure to uphold this international agreement. However, when the one nation still capable of enforcing this international law decides to not obey the law itself, the whole system collapses. That's why it was so wrong to invade Iraq. The US are saying that is is alright to invade a country if you don't agree with their way of running things. That also gives Islamic states the full right of invading democratic countries, because who's to say that one is better then the other.
The author of the essay seems to forget that using the metric system for calculations doesn't mean you cannot use an old name for something. His example of a pintje is a very bad one as that word is just used as a name for a beer, not as a measure of volume. You can have a pintje which is 250ml, 330ml or maybe even 500ml. It's all called a pintje.
Furthermore, the example of cooking amounts is also horseshit. Who cares what the exact amounts are! You're not a machine, you have a mind of your own. You can use a "generous pinch of salt" without worrying about how much it is, this has got nothing to do with which system.
His example of cutting a board of wood is also completely ridiculous ofcourse. If you want to buy a piece of wood, you by a 2 by 3, which refers to closest size measured in thumbs, but which is actually 48 by 67 millimeters.
My point is, wee don't calculate with thumbs, we calculate with millimeters, because anyone can add them up and divide them in their head. The fact that we use names that are a pre-metric relic does alter that fact, although it may seem strange in the limited perception of the author.
Since when does the US give a fuck about what other countries think? If they can bomb cities without the support of the UN, they can sure as hell nukes you pc.
I am sure that 10 years down the road, we may very well find out what exactly is responsible for it.
We know exactly what is responsible for it, in the same way we know why tube amplifiers generally sound nicer then solid state amplifiers. I was explained a couple of time already in this discussion. It has to do with filtering and the production of harmonics. Ofcourse we don't know exactly why some harmonics sound "nice", but we do know which. Now don't let it be claimed that I am pissing on analog stuff here. I myself have invested a shitload of money on a tube guitar amp, so I acknowledge that they sound good. However, they sound good because their imperfections happens to overlap with what we like. 44KHz is not enough to go up to even 22KHz Nyquist dissagrees with you, i believe. (and humans can hear that rather well) Most humans don't go beyond 18kHz once they are over 30 years old. You do have a point however that a lot of research is being done on higher dynamic ranges and higher sampling frequenties, but as I understand it, this is mostly because higher sampling rates seem to work better with more then stereo sound (5.1 and stuff).
Finally, please listen to a truly good-quality audio system (no, I don't mean a trashy Bose or Infinity 5.1) at least once in your lifetime before posting such idiotic comments. You would be surprised. I think this is a pretty cheap remark. I someone claims you spend to much money on audio equipment you just claim that someone with cheaper equipment would never understand. This is a load of bs. I have listened to quite a few pretty damn good audio systems. I noticed that if the record player is expensive enough (an order of magnitude more expensive then the cd player) I won't hear the difference.
It is in principle possible to figure out a way to make a 2 stroke engine that does have lubricant in the mixture. You could make a seperate chamber with an overpressure that takes that function of the crankcase. However, this will dramatically decrease the power to weight ratio and height of this ratio is really the only reason 2 strokes are built.
Your average Bose Einstein condensate, made in a lab of your choice, is somewhere between one billionth and one millionth kelvin above absolute zero. So the coldest place in the universe is probably in those labs.
If approved as is, the patent would cover application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow actions related to accessing the network, handling Extensible Markup Language (XML), and managing data from multiple sources.
I wonder what a company like SAP would think of this patent. They have been the world biggest player in portal software for years.
Binary-level compatability is a strange term in this context, as.NET and Java work with a VM. IMHO a VM is basically a new word for an old thing, namely interpreters. The fact that there is some pseudo machine code in between doesn't change the fact that the compiled code does actually run on the processor, but runs on a virtual machine. That's no more binary compatible then Basic was in it's interpreter days.
Furthermore, the claim that using non-OOP for anything but simple utilities and command-line tools strikes me ass odd. C and C++ are suitable for OOP, OOP is a programming discipline, not a programming language.
I am actually still using for things like that. When I was on holiday in the USA I picked up a couple for some friends and all of us are still happily using them.
Did any one check out their anti image "technology" It is supposed to stop us from "leeching" pictures from websites. If you try right mousing on the image to save an image, it doesn't work. However, right mousing to "view image" and then saving does work! This is almost to easy. Any think this anti-blocking thing is as easy to break?
Please take some time to study the subject before you call people stupid. It has been mentioned in other replies that size is very important in radio astronomy. The larger the base line, the better the resolution. Furthermore, the SKA is only the begin. The next project is already planned. It's called LOFAR and it will have a baseline of 100 km. This will give an extremely high resolution and will be impossible to lift into space.
Furthermore, the success of the Hubble space telescope you mention is not all the it's cracked up to be. With modern adaptive optics techniques that compensate for seeing errors, land based telescopes are (in certain areas) superior to Hubble.
Last but not least, research done in the developement of the Dutch Open Telescope has shown that much of the seeing errors are actually caused by temperature difference close to the ground, so by using a dome-less telescope on a special high platform can reduce seeing tremedously, without even having to resort to adaptive optics techniques. All these techniques can be employed for a fraction of the cost of a space based telescope.
I'm from Holland and maybe television is still slightly better there than in the US, but I think there are some pretty good shows on TV. You have this stereotype in your head about people oosing in front of the television, where you assume that television does this to people. This is not doing the medium justice. Ofcourse the majority of what is shown on TV is crap, but so is the majority of what's on the web and even the fast majority of books. I read a lot of books, read a lot on the web and I watch a lot of TV. From each I pick what I like.
All depends on what you watch. I generally only watch stuff that makes me think. That can be the news, a good movie, a good documentary or a show (read Buffy or Charmed). The last two are great to watch with the wife and discuss with friends in a social enviroment.
I admit that reading stuff on the Web is extremely interesting and can be very difficult. I learn a lot from the web. That doesn't mean that I cannot find a good movie intelectually teasing. I know that watching a movie like Vanilla Sky is not exactly nuclear physics, but I do enough physics during working hours.
In a while sting operations will not even be necesary. The Feds just claim you're a terrorist and they will come lift you from you bed in your own country. And if local cops try to stop it and arrest your arresters, the army will come rescue them.
After that, if you happen to have a beard they will dress you up in red prison clothes, stick you out in the sun in Guantanamo Bay and wait for you to die.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact,
one of the conditions of his release from prison
at the end of 10 years should be castration, to
help weed the "nincompoop" gene out of the gene
pool.
You are from the so-called "land of the free" I presume? You do realize how fascistic the above remark is, don't you?
So if you leave the front door of your house open (by mistake or on purpose), it is okay for anyone to come in, check out what you have in the fridge, use your bathroom, etc.?
As a possible intruder is not actually physically touching any of your stuff, I think it is more correct to compare this person to someone peeking through your window to see what kind of books you have on your bookshelve.
I think you don't understand the political process in Europe. When the European "government" makes a rule, this means all European countries have to implement laws that take this rule into account. This is why governments can change their opinions, when the national governments decide that this rule is not consistent with the rest of the laws.
I agree that this is a lengthy process, but since Europe is trying the harmonize the legislation of a lot of countries, hickups like these are to be expected, and it is in fact frightening that it does not happen more often. There is, for instance, a sort of European arrest warant, as a consequence of which any european country is required to arrest and handover a citizen if this person is to appear in a court of a different country. Given Amnesty Int.'s recent negative report on criminal prosecution in many European countries, this might not have been such a good idea.
You have to remember that stranger things have happened with unmanned space probes. Remember that contact with SOHO was actually lost. And they had a similar problem. The solar panel were rotating towards the sun (they could see that with radar echoes), so the probe was getting more and more power. However, since the probe wasn't answering, they had no way of knowing if it would actually fire it's engines to stop the rotation. So they had to establish contact with it, while it was in the phase of the rotation that it had enough power to thaw out the fuel.
When they had sent the probe it's wake up call, they would also have to remotely fix the software bug that had caused the loss of contact!
This all worked and SOHO went on to become a very valuable resource.
I think the burning skeleton was not in the original but in part two and was therefore prolly rendering with CG.
You are completely right. There is also a pressure exerted by laser light on atoms.
This guys argument is based on the fact that after a certain time, the light is no longer absorbed because the mirror is at it's equilibrium temperature. This proves that he does not grasp simple physics. The equilibrium means that the material emits as much light as it absorbs. The reason the sail works is that the light is emitted equally in the forward and backward direction, but is only absorbed from the back. This means there is a net momentum transfer.
Now, one obvious remark would be that there is no energy transfer, because as many photons are emitted as there are photons absorbed. This means that the energy of the mirror cannot change and therefore we have a contradiction (mirror gains more momentum, but not more energy). However, this all works out if you take into account the Doppler shifts of the emitted radiation with respect to the absorbed radiation.
This stuff is all understood, I cannot understand where this guy gets his ideas. His arguments can equally well be applied to laser cooling and we know that that works!
It may take altering entire cultures
Strictly speaking, it will take only the altering of one culture....
A tangentially related comment on international law: it's not international law, it's international agreement.
There is a thing called international law that has been agreed upon by all the nations represented in the united nations. If you wish to call this an agreement, that's okay with me. However, the consequence is that all law is in fact just an agreement between a ruling body and the people that are being ruled. This is ofcourse formally true, but there is no difference between national and international law.
That being said, it is important to stress the fact that international law only works as long as the international community can apply some kind of pressure to uphold this international agreement. However, when the one nation still capable of enforcing this international law decides to not obey the law itself, the whole system collapses. That's why it was so wrong to invade Iraq.
The US are saying that is is alright to invade a country if you don't agree with their way of running things. That also gives Islamic states the full right of invading democratic countries, because who's to say that one is better then the other.
The author of the essay seems to forget that using the metric system for calculations doesn't mean you cannot use an old name for something. His example of a pintje is a very bad one as that word is just used as a name for a beer, not as a measure of volume. You can have a pintje which is 250ml, 330ml or maybe even 500ml. It's all called a pintje.
Furthermore, the example of cooking amounts is also horseshit. Who cares what the exact amounts are! You're not a machine, you have a mind of your own. You can use a "generous pinch of salt" without worrying about how much it is, this has got nothing to do with which system.
His example of cutting a board of wood is also completely ridiculous ofcourse. If you want to buy a piece of wood, you by a 2 by 3, which refers to closest size measured in thumbs, but which is actually 48 by 67 millimeters.
My point is, wee don't calculate with thumbs, we calculate with millimeters, because anyone can add them up and divide them in their head. The fact that we use names that are a pre-metric relic does alter that fact, although it may seem strange in the limited perception of the author.
I equate the endorsement of this act to endorsing cutting off the hand of one who shoplifts
Don't give him any ideas...
Since when does the US give a fuck about what other countries think? If they can bomb cities without the support of the UN, they can sure as hell nukes you pc.
When your employer takes such a contract, you end up making a lot of mistakes
I am sure that 10 years down the road, we may very well find out what exactly is responsible for it.
We know exactly what is responsible for it, in the same way we know why tube amplifiers generally sound nicer then solid state amplifiers. I was explained a couple of time already in this discussion. It has to do with filtering and the production of harmonics. Ofcourse we don't know exactly why some harmonics sound "nice", but we do know which.
Now don't let it be claimed that I am pissing on analog stuff here. I myself have invested a shitload of money on a tube guitar amp, so I acknowledge that they sound good. However, they sound good because their imperfections happens to overlap with what we like.
44KHz is not enough to go up to even 22KHz
Nyquist dissagrees with you, i believe.
(and humans can hear that rather well)
Most humans don't go beyond 18kHz once they are over 30 years old.
You do have a point however that a lot of research is being done on higher dynamic ranges and higher sampling frequenties, but as I understand it, this is mostly because higher sampling rates seem to work better with more then stereo sound (5.1 and stuff).
Finally, please listen to a truly good-quality audio system (no, I don't mean a trashy Bose or Infinity 5.1) at least once in your lifetime before posting such idiotic comments. You would be surprised.
I think this is a pretty cheap remark. I someone claims you spend to much money on audio equipment you just claim that someone with cheaper equipment would never understand. This is a load of bs. I have listened to quite a few pretty damn good audio systems. I noticed that if the record player is expensive enough (an order of magnitude more expensive then the cd player) I won't hear the difference.
It is in principle possible to figure out a way to make a 2 stroke engine that does have lubricant in the mixture. You could make a seperate chamber with an overpressure that takes that function of the crankcase. However, this will dramatically decrease the power to weight ratio and height of this ratio is really the only reason 2 strokes are built.
Your average Bose Einstein condensate, made in a lab of your choice, is somewhere between one billionth and one millionth kelvin above absolute zero. So the coldest place in the universe is probably in those labs.
If approved as is, the patent would cover application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow actions related to accessing the network, handling Extensible Markup Language (XML), and managing data from multiple sources.
I wonder what a company like SAP would think of this patent. They have been the world biggest player in portal software for years.
Binary-level compatability is a strange term in this context, as .NET and Java work with a VM. IMHO a VM is basically a new word for an old thing, namely interpreters. The fact that there is some pseudo machine code in between doesn't change the fact that the compiled code does actually run on the processor, but runs on a virtual machine. That's no more binary compatible then Basic was in it's interpreter days.
Furthermore, the claim that using non-OOP for anything but simple utilities and command-line tools strikes me ass odd. C and C++ are suitable for OOP, OOP is a programming discipline, not a programming language.
I am actually still using for things like that.
When I was on holiday in the USA I picked up a couple for some friends and all of us are still happily using them.
Did any one check out their anti image "technology"
It is supposed to stop us from "leeching" pictures from websites. If you try right mousing on the image to save an image, it doesn't work. However, right mousing to "view image" and then saving does work!
This is almost to easy. Any think this anti-blocking thing is as easy to break?
If your PDA hash this feature, Outlook would be one more reason to practice safe sex.
Please take some time to study the subject before you call people stupid. It has been mentioned in other replies that size is very important in radio astronomy. The larger the base line, the better the resolution. Furthermore, the SKA is only the begin. The next project is already planned. It's called LOFAR and it will have a baseline of 100 km. This will give an extremely high resolution and will be impossible to lift into space.
Furthermore, the success of the Hubble space telescope you mention is not all the it's cracked up to be. With modern adaptive optics techniques that compensate for seeing errors, land based telescopes are (in certain areas) superior to Hubble.
Last but not least, research done in the developement of the Dutch Open Telescope has shown that much of the seeing errors are actually caused by temperature difference close to the ground, so by using a dome-less telescope on a special high platform can reduce seeing tremedously, without even having to resort to adaptive optics techniques. All these techniques can be employed for a fraction of the cost of a space based telescope.
I'm from Holland and maybe television is still slightly better there than in the US, but I think there are some pretty good shows on TV. You have this stereotype in your head about people oosing in front of the television, where you assume that television does this to people. This is not doing the medium justice. Ofcourse the majority of what is shown on TV is crap, but so is the majority of what's on the web and even the fast majority of books. I read a lot of books, read a lot on the web and I watch a lot of TV. From each I pick what I like.
All depends on what you watch. I generally only watch stuff that makes me think. That can be the news, a good movie, a good documentary or a show (read Buffy or Charmed). The last two are great to watch with the wife and discuss with friends in a social enviroment.
I admit that reading stuff on the Web is extremely interesting and can be very difficult. I learn a lot from the web. That doesn't mean that I cannot find a good movie intelectually teasing. I know that watching a movie like Vanilla Sky is not exactly nuclear physics, but I do enough physics during working hours.
Says the guy who takes time out to read slashdot each day...
In a while sting operations will not even be necesary. The Feds just claim you're a terrorist and they will come lift you from you bed in your own country. And if local cops try to stop it and arrest your arresters, the army will come rescue them.
After that, if you happen to have a beard they will dress you up in red prison clothes, stick you out in the sun in Guantanamo Bay and wait for you to die.