Maybe Archie Bunker had the right idea: "I could end all hijackings tomorrow. Just arm all the passengers. Then the hijackers have no advantage. You could pass out guns to everyone and collect them after the flight. Problem solved."
Unfortunately, given the neurotic attitudes that society has toward firearms, most of which are the result of the media's flogging "assault weapon" at the public with every suitably-gory gun crime, or by the gun-control lobby painting guns with the same evil brush that Hearst's papers painted the "devil weed", capable of inflaming law-abiding citizens to crime by their mere existence, I would hesitate to pass out firearms to the passengers en masse. However, anyone who'd passed a firearms-safety course and had demonstrated basic skill with one should be able to carry -- openly, or concealed if so licensed. And if people would come to see firearms as tools, to be used responsibly, then I'd expect people to be able to choose to arm themselves on aircraft as well as on the ground. But the existence of things like the 'Twinkie defense' doesn't leave me sanguine about the prospect of people accepting responsibility for their actions any time soon, so I don't expect that things are going to change much for a long time.
What amount of g forces are we talking about? Shuttle structure is rated for 3g acceleration and it has throttable engines which provides exactly this. 3g is quite harsh but a reasonably healthy athlette will cope with it. Fighter pilots and early astronauts regularly cope with g forces around 7 to 12g.
I point out here that fighter aircraft are designed to reduce the amount of arm-waving the pilot needs to do, that the G forces on a fighter pilot when moving are more orthogonal to the pilot's body (those 12 gees are pushing him down toward his feet, not toward his back -- G tolerance is higher for a front-to-back acceleration), that fighter pilots wear G suits to help counteract the effects of G forces, and that the duration of sustained G forces before the pilot blacks out diminishes quickly after reaching 6 gees; maneuvers pulling six or more gees are generally reserved for when lower-G maneuvers aren't getting the pilot into a position of advantage against his opponent (high-G maneuvers waste smash, and Speed is Life). While the situations are similar, there are enough differences to make drawing direct analogies questionable.
a further benefit to hemp being that it grows really quickly. which means that the source of paper can be renewed over short time periods, unlike trees. I wonder if the logging lobby is doing anything in particular about these sorts of laws these days.
I believe the figure that drove Hearst to undertake his smear campaign after the hemp decorticator started to bring quantities of cheap hemp pulp onto the market was that an acre planted in hemp produced four times the paper pulp of an acre of pulp timber. Hearst's holdings in pulp timberland would rapidly have become close to worthless if hemp had become the primary paper pulp source.
Sometimes I wonder if it's the court that doesn't understand technology, or maybe its us technology guys that don't understand the courts. This ruling doesn't make any sense to me.
Well, given the two court cases wherein in one trial President Harding's Secretary of the Interior, a Mr. Fall, was convicted of receiving a bribe from a financier named Doheny, who was acquitted in the other trial of paying the bribe to Fall, I'm not sure that 'sense' has any meaning when it comes to court judgements.
Turns out it's a cool place to land - much easier than the surface as far less deceleration is needed, it should have plenty of Mars rocks spattered on the surface and it's just 9000km above the surface.
"Less deceleration" only in that Phobos' gravity well doesn't add much velocity to the probe's velocity as it approaches the moon; however, being airless, it will be impossible to use any aerobraking (unless the mission profile uses a 'skip' into Mars' atmosphere to bleed off excess velocity); having to carry fuel to perform all the deceleration by thrust makes the probe heavier, which increases the amount of fuel required (lather, rinse, and repeat).
Not at all. What they did was to establish that "public use" or "public benefit" shall be defined to include "tax revenue", because the income that a government receives from taxes is (theoretically) spent for the public good -- therefore, any seizure and transfer of property that increases the tax revenue of the government is justifiable under eminent domain.
Are they afraid you're going to dismantle the plane over Nova Scotia?
Actually, it was the blanket prohibition of nail clippers (the ones with nail files I can see being dangerous if you get a couple of forty-ton winches and stretch the definition out of all recognizability) that seemed most ridiculous to me -- what are you going to do with a pair of nail clippers? Threaten to manicure a flight attendant to death?
Microsoft always wants to rush everything and only ends up with a crappy product in the end. I hope whatever company decides to make the film takes their time and makes it worth seeing.
Thinking about this, it may be the movie that makes George Lucas' vision of electronic distribution of digital movies to theatres the industry standard, because that's the only way that Microsoft's going to be able to distribute a patch after "MS Halo 1.0" proves to be massively buggy and BSOD's in theatres nationwide...
If your future wife doesn't care about the diamond, get something else. Manufacturing diamonds isn't something that you can do.
Find a company like Jamming Gems, which sell synthetic gemstones, and you can get a much better cost than for natural stones. For example, you can get a 20mm x 15mm oval synthetic alexandrite for $14.99 -- a stone which, if natural, would be worth over $20,000. By spending less on the stone(s), you can have a more impressive ring made, and get a custom setting, so you're not just buying one of a thousand identical rings.
I envy early man and his wider variety of animals to eat
Darwin's theory, in his famous treatise Oregano on Species, that all food evolved from lower forms of food is a seminal work in this field. The principle of 'survival of the tastiest' is strongly supported by observational evidence -- the animals that people like to eat are husbanded, and are in no danger of dying out, while other species disappear. Mammoths are extinct; has anyone tried taking one of the remaining one of the remaining deep-frozen carcasses and tried barbecuing it? Admittedly, thousands of years of freezer burn is going to reduce the quality some, but if it can be shown that mammoth does not go well with barbecue sauce, that provides a reason for early Man to hunt them to extinction in order to replace them with animals that taste better -- horses, cattle, swine, etc.
I wonder what research they've done to prove that stopping piracy will increase their profits.
The RIAA and MPAA have always computed 'losses' from piracy under the premise that each person who makes a pirate copy of a song/CD/movie wants it so much that they would mindlessly walk into a store and pay full list price for it, if only they could be prevented from getting a pirated copy. And those losses are always figured on the full retail price of the theoretical purchase, not the equally-theoretical profit to the publisher (after all, when someone pirates a CD, the publisher isn't supplying the CD, case, liner notes, the pittance of a royalty (if any) that the performers actually get, etc.), so they're inflating the 'cost' to them from the lost sale.
It was all about combining the purchasing power of 5 of my friends allowances which enabled us to buy and listen to more music than any one of us could by ourselves. Taking away our ability to copy music would not have made us spend more.
Either because you can't afford to buy separate copies, or you don't want it bad enough to buy your own copy. And there have always been people for whom the collection of the song/CD/movie/software has been the goal, not actually using it -- getting 'street' cred from being the first one to post it, cracked of any copy protection, to the Net, whether or not they have any use for it in the first place. But that's another sale 'lost' to the publisher. And anyone who downloads a ripped CD, decides they like it, and buys their own copy is still a 'lost' sale, because they downloaded the rip, even if they actually bought the CD afterward.
If you look in the background of the picture, it looks like there are Zalman posters hanging up, like you'd have at a booth. Made much smaller, they might have an interesting idea for an effective CPU cooler (as Zalman has come up with some pretty neat ideas over the years, I'd almost expect something like this for them). The text is just for fun.
Even at a reduced size to fit inside a case, I'd be a little leery about that much weight cantilevered out from the brackets on the motherboard, and if that cooler were a) real and b) actual size, I'd expect it to be usable only on horizontal motherboards that were never moved, and that you would snap the motherboard from the torque on the mount if you mounted it on a vertical motherboard. The lack of any kind of bracing bracket mount is significant.
What a typical, moronic CS reply. Actually, don't you mean "hack", (as in done blindly with an axe) like a CS person trying to do math.
Depends on the CS people. When I was in college, I was one of two undergrad CS majors who spanked an entire class of EE majors in an upper-division/graduate EE class that was essentially 'programming for direct hardware control' (i.e., writing code to control SIO chips). The professor had to give the two of us 'A's and grade the rest of the class on a curve so he wouldn't have to fail 3/4 of the class. (Having the department undergoing accreditation probably affected his decision in that regard...)
Well, we have tried to use CS people, and I have seen the code, too.
And I saw the code of the EE majors in that class; I'd never seen someone screw up a bubble-sort function before... And these were upper-division and graduate EE students
People with "real degrees", like engineers, tend to pick-up very sophisticated programming concepts and can write very good code.
Whether a CS major has a 'real' degree depends more on the CS program than the person; where I went to college, the difference in course requirements between a BA in CS and a BS in Math with an emphasis in CS was nine units of upper-division math; three upper-division classes isn't going to make much of a difference in your ability to write good code.
Lots of CS people cannot multiply without firing up a copy of the Python IDE, and you wonder why I want someone with a "real degree" that can program.
Aside from the pitfalls associated with sweeping generalizations like this, I wonder how much of the semicompetent CS people you've seen have been people who went into CS because it looked like they could make a lot of money at it, not because it was something they wanted to do.
Also, I am not exaggerating. We wasted 1.5 years with a programmer writing code under the direction of some engineers. Out of desparation, I gave the project to some engineering grad students to work on. They were done in a month!
So either the programmer wasn't able to write code, or the engineers weren't able to communicate effectively with non-engineers. Either conclusion is viable, and your experiment didn't rule out the second option.
-- "Four years ago, I couldn't even spell engineer, and now I are one!"
The existing six films, patchy though they are, tell one overarching story - the fall from grace and subsequent redemption of Anakin Skywalker. Anything else tacked on at the end would ruin the 'shape' of the saga, if you will.
Unless what they do for subsequent movies is pick up the better novels that have been written in the Star Wars univers, such as Timothy Zahn's "Grand Admiral Thrawn" books. That would allow them to continue the franchise without being locked into the main characters or trying to drag the 'overthrow of the Empire' plotline out beyond its natural death.
I don't know why so many people here, quite a lot of which seem to be anti-patent in general, became pro-patent in this case (unless they are Australians, in which case I can understand). In my opinion, no single entity should be able to monopolize on an idea, whether it is a country or a company (the net effect is the same to us outsiders).
I'm not sure whether it's being 'pro-patent' in this case so much as it is "You've shown that you're willing and eager to sue whenever someone comes up with something that might by the most extremely distorted stretch of the facts impinge on one of your 'intellectual property' patents, now suck it up and show that you're willing to play by the same rules you want to force down everyone else's throat when it benefits you". Particularly when, as was pointed out by another poster, the CSIRO patent genuinely does cover what they're asking licensing fees for, instead of being some "using the right mouse button to replace double-clicking the left mouse button" patent...
Wow, that's news to me. I thought I had been watching the official boards pretty well, but I guess I was slack. This is exactly the kind of information that I was looking for, thanks for posting!
Just for reference, one of the references was in this thread in the forums, citing an article in the March 2005 issue of PC Gamer:
The "Issue #4" update will also introduce amazing "body scaling" technology to Paragon City's protectors, allowing them to tweak the size of waists, arms, and cheekbones... among other body parts. And direct from NCsoft's arists in Korea comes new costume-design elements inspired by anime and manga.
The weird thing I've noticed is that a lot of the new costume options are restricted to one gender or the other for no real reason. Quick background here, most costume options are unisex, but there are some obvious ones, like metal bikini-thing, that are restriced.
The developers have stated several times in the CoH Forums that the new costume elements were added for the official release of CoH in Japan and Korea, and that the American and European players got the new costume elements because it was relatively trivial to add them once they were already coded. The gender-specificity was due to the gender-specificity of those costume elements in anime and manga; I expect that, over time, we'll see more variations on these, and at least some of the gender-specificity removed, but I'd rather get what had already been created now than wait until all the variations were created. And there are still some things, like samurai armor, that were originally requested back near the release of the game that we have yet to see. New costume elements take time to make.
The one caveat is that in Northern Areas it was discovered that asphalt roadways were not holding up as long as their concrete breathern. Many asphalt roads were having to be torn up and replaced every other year due to extensive freeze damage. Many cities went back to using concrete for their roads, until better techniques of preparing the roadbeds were discovered. Which were to compress and smooth the roadbed as much as possible, then lay a barrier layer of aggregate *gravel* on top of that to help with drainage and settling, then to finally slope the finished road from the middle to the edges for increased water run-off.
"Discovered". Feh. Until the cities were willing to cough up the money to prepare the roadbed correctly, a practice which had been in use two millennia earlier, but which fell out of use because of the lack of civic incentive to build and maintain good roads.
Well, you're a little bit off there. HTTP was never Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. It's HyperText Transfer Protocol. Subtle, but it makes a big difference.
Well, yes, it was Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. That's why we had to put it on decaf; the letters were bouncing around on the page too fast to read.
No-one uploads. File sharers simply advertise their willingness to participate with anyone in manufacturing a new copy of a file on the requestor's machine. This act has never been tested in court as a copyright infringement. But, hey, who can afford to take things that far?
As I understand it, Canadians pay a surcharge on recordable media (DVD-R, CD-R, etc., and tapes, both audio and video), with this surcharge purportedly to be paid out to copyright holders. If this is correct, would it not be the case that the people making the copy would be protected against suit only if the copy was being made to media for which the surcharge was paid? So if you transferred the music file from someone else's computer to a CD-RW in your machine, it would be protected, but not if you transferred the file to the hard drive on your machine?
Of course, you could burn the file to CD-RW, being protected through having paid the surcharge, and then copy the file back to your hard drive, which would be protected under fair use. But you'd have to be able to produce a copy of the file on CD/DVD/tape if you were charged...
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, given the neurotic attitudes that society has toward firearms, most of which are the result of the media's flogging "assault weapon" at the public with every suitably-gory gun crime, or by the gun-control lobby painting guns with the same evil brush that Hearst's papers painted the "devil weed", capable of inflaming law-abiding citizens to crime by their mere existence, I would hesitate to pass out firearms to the passengers en masse. However, anyone who'd passed a firearms-safety course and had demonstrated basic skill with one should be able to carry -- openly, or concealed if so licensed. And if people would come to see firearms as tools, to be used responsibly, then I'd expect people to be able to choose to arm themselves on aircraft as well as on the ground. But the existence of things like the 'Twinkie defense' doesn't leave me sanguine about the prospect of people accepting responsibility for their actions any time soon, so I don't expect that things are going to change much for a long time.
I point out here that fighter aircraft are designed to reduce the amount of arm-waving the pilot needs to do, that the G forces on a fighter pilot when moving are more orthogonal to the pilot's body (those 12 gees are pushing him down toward his feet, not toward his back -- G tolerance is higher for a front-to-back acceleration), that fighter pilots wear G suits to help counteract the effects of G forces, and that the duration of sustained G forces before the pilot blacks out diminishes quickly after reaching 6 gees; maneuvers pulling six or more gees are generally reserved for when lower-G maneuvers aren't getting the pilot into a position of advantage against his opponent (high-G maneuvers waste smash, and Speed is Life). While the situations are similar, there are enough differences to make drawing direct analogies questionable.
I believe the figure that drove Hearst to undertake his smear campaign after the hemp decorticator started to bring quantities of cheap hemp pulp onto the market was that an acre planted in hemp produced four times the paper pulp of an acre of pulp timber. Hearst's holdings in pulp timberland would rapidly have become close to worthless if hemp had become the primary paper pulp source.
No, that was back in... Let's see... what time is it now?
An entire country Slashdotted...
Well, given the two court cases wherein in one trial President Harding's Secretary of the Interior, a Mr. Fall, was convicted of receiving a bribe from a financier named Doheny, who was acquitted in the other trial of paying the bribe to Fall, I'm not sure that 'sense' has any meaning when it comes to court judgements.
"Less deceleration" only in that Phobos' gravity well doesn't add much velocity to the probe's velocity as it approaches the moon; however, being airless, it will be impossible to use any aerobraking (unless the mission profile uses a 'skip' into Mars' atmosphere to bleed off excess velocity); having to carry fuel to perform all the deceleration by thrust makes the probe heavier, which increases the amount of fuel required (lather, rinse, and repeat).
Of course. Pie are round. Cornbread are square.
On this page are download links for four PDF files you can use as a printer test:
You should be able to get a decent picture of how well your printer renders colors with those files.
Not at all. What they did was to establish that "public use" or "public benefit" shall be defined to include "tax revenue", because the income that a government receives from taxes is (theoretically) spent for the public good -- therefore, any seizure and transfer of property that increases the tax revenue of the government is justifiable under eminent domain.
Actually, it was the blanket prohibition of nail clippers (the ones with nail files I can see being dangerous if you get a couple of forty-ton winches and stretch the definition out of all recognizability) that seemed most ridiculous to me -- what are you going to do with a pair of nail clippers? Threaten to manicure a flight attendant to death?
Thinking about this, it may be the movie that makes George Lucas' vision of electronic distribution of digital movies to theatres the industry standard, because that's the only way that Microsoft's going to be able to distribute a patch after "MS Halo 1.0" proves to be massively buggy and BSOD's in theatres nationwide...
Find a company like Jamming Gems, which sell synthetic gemstones, and you can get a much better cost than for natural stones. For example, you can get a 20mm x 15mm oval synthetic alexandrite for $14.99 -- a stone which, if natural, would be worth over $20,000. By spending less on the stone(s), you can have a more impressive ring made, and get a custom setting, so you're not just buying one of a thousand identical rings.
Darwin's theory, in his famous treatise Oregano on Species, that all food evolved from lower forms of food is a seminal work in this field. The principle of 'survival of the tastiest' is strongly supported by observational evidence -- the animals that people like to eat are husbanded, and are in no danger of dying out, while other species disappear. Mammoths are extinct; has anyone tried taking one of the remaining one of the remaining deep-frozen carcasses and tried barbecuing it? Admittedly, thousands of years of freezer burn is going to reduce the quality some, but if it can be shown that mammoth does not go well with barbecue sauce, that provides a reason for early Man to hunt them to extinction in order to replace them with animals that taste better -- horses, cattle, swine, etc.
The RIAA and MPAA have always computed 'losses' from piracy under the premise that each person who makes a pirate copy of a song/CD/movie wants it so much that they would mindlessly walk into a store and pay full list price for it, if only they could be prevented from getting a pirated copy. And those losses are always figured on the full retail price of the theoretical purchase, not the equally-theoretical profit to the publisher (after all, when someone pirates a CD, the publisher isn't supplying the CD, case, liner notes, the pittance of a royalty (if any) that the performers actually get, etc.), so they're inflating the 'cost' to them from the lost sale.
Either because you can't afford to buy separate copies, or you don't want it bad enough to buy your own copy. And there have always been people for whom the collection of the song/CD/movie/software has been the goal, not actually using it -- getting 'street' cred from being the first one to post it, cracked of any copy protection, to the Net, whether or not they have any use for it in the first place. But that's another sale 'lost' to the publisher. And anyone who downloads a ripped CD, decides they like it, and buys their own copy is still a 'lost' sale, because they downloaded the rip, even if they actually bought the CD afterward.
Even at a reduced size to fit inside a case, I'd be a little leery about that much weight cantilevered out from the brackets on the motherboard, and if that cooler were a) real and b) actual size, I'd expect it to be usable only on horizontal motherboards that were never moved, and that you would snap the motherboard from the torque on the mount if you mounted it on a vertical motherboard. The lack of any kind of bracing bracket mount is significant.
Depends on the CS people. When I was in college, I was one of two undergrad CS majors who spanked an entire class of EE majors in an upper-division/graduate EE class that was essentially 'programming for direct hardware control' (i.e., writing code to control SIO chips). The professor had to give the two of us 'A's and grade the rest of the class on a curve so he wouldn't have to fail 3/4 of the class. (Having the department undergoing accreditation probably affected his decision in that regard...)
And I saw the code of the EE majors in that class; I'd never seen someone screw up a bubble-sort function before... And these were upper-division and graduate EE students
Whether a CS major has a 'real' degree depends more on the CS program than the person; where I went to college, the difference in course requirements between a BA in CS and a BS in Math with an emphasis in CS was nine units of upper-division math; three upper-division classes isn't going to make much of a difference in your ability to write good code.
Aside from the pitfalls associated with sweeping generalizations like this, I wonder how much of the semicompetent CS people you've seen have been people who went into CS because it looked like they could make a lot of money at it, not because it was something they wanted to do.
So either the programmer wasn't able to write code, or the engineers weren't able to communicate effectively with non-engineers. Either conclusion is viable, and your experiment didn't rule out the second option.
--
"Four years ago, I couldn't even spell engineer, and now I are one!"
Unless what they do for subsequent movies is pick up the better novels that have been written in the Star Wars univers, such as Timothy Zahn's "Grand Admiral Thrawn" books. That would allow them to continue the franchise without being locked into the main characters or trying to drag the 'overthrow of the Empire' plotline out beyond its natural death.
I'm not sure whether it's being 'pro-patent' in this case so much as it is "You've shown that you're willing and eager to sue whenever someone comes up with something that might by the most extremely distorted stretch of the facts impinge on one of your 'intellectual property' patents, now suck it up and show that you're willing to play by the same rules you want to force down everyone else's throat when it benefits you". Particularly when, as was pointed out by another poster, the CSIRO patent genuinely does cover what they're asking licensing fees for, instead of being some "using the right mouse button to replace double-clicking the left mouse button" patent...
Just for reference, one of the references was in this thread in the forums, citing an article in the March 2005 issue of PC Gamer:
The developers have stated several times in the CoH Forums that the new costume elements were added for the official release of CoH in Japan and Korea, and that the American and European players got the new costume elements because it was relatively trivial to add them once they were already coded. The gender-specificity was due to the gender-specificity of those costume elements in anime and manga; I expect that, over time, we'll see more variations on these, and at least some of the gender-specificity removed, but I'd rather get what had already been created now than wait until all the variations were created. And there are still some things, like samurai armor, that were originally requested back near the release of the game that we have yet to see. New costume elements take time to make.
"Discovered". Feh. Until the cities were willing to cough up the money to prepare the roadbed correctly, a practice which had been in use two millennia earlier, but which fell out of use because of the lack of civic incentive to build and maintain good roads.
"You can have your BSOD in any color, as long as it's black."
Well, yes, it was Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. That's why we had to put it on decaf; the letters were bouncing around on the page too fast to read.
As I understand it, Canadians pay a surcharge on recordable media (DVD-R, CD-R, etc., and tapes, both audio and video), with this surcharge purportedly to be paid out to copyright holders. If this is correct, would it not be the case that the people making the copy would be protected against suit only if the copy was being made to media for which the surcharge was paid? So if you transferred the music file from someone else's computer to a CD-RW in your machine, it would be protected, but not if you transferred the file to the hard drive on your machine?
Of course, you could burn the file to CD-RW, being protected through having paid the surcharge, and then copy the file back to your hard drive, which would be protected under fair use. But you'd have to be able to produce a copy of the file on CD/DVD/tape if you were charged...