My question is, how long until we have the capability to post pics on slashdot?
How long until we have the capability to post UTF-8 text to slashdot? I've had several comments recently where I've wanted to include a bit of Russian or Chinese or Japanese text, because it was relevant and would eliminate the need to talk around a direct quote that would help people who could read the other language (or feed it to babblefish;-). But we're still stuck back in the day of ASCII text, with maybe a few diacriticals used by Western European languages.
For that matter, earlier I wanted to use a <sup> tag to get proper exponential notation, and that didn't work, either. Some geek/nerd site this is...
Would you hire a great UI designer and make a brand new layout or skin that is easier to read and navigate?
That's not possible, of course, due to the wide range of human vision. If you want to make something easy for users to read, you should provide an easily-configured set of options that control everything, and let users configure it all until it's easy for their eyes to read on their display. Or for their readers to handle if they don't have functional eyes.
Anything your javascript or AJAX code draws that's out of the user's control is one more thing that will make it difficult to read for a portion of your readers.
Nah; I'll probably stick around on this planet until my assignment expires in a few centuries, or humans make contact with the Galactic Network, whichever comes first. So will most of the other field researchers.
Anyway, you're busy wiping out the living spaces of polar bears and penguins, which will provide more space for you and a few visitors. So don't complain about overcrowding; nobody will be sympathetic.
(Among other things, some of us are studying the weird, goofy user interfaces that humans are building into their computer systems. Why anyone would knowingly build such things is a mystery to all the electronic intelligences in the universe, so they're fully supporting our field research in an effort to comprehend the minds of people who would build such things.;-)
I just realized that the comment I'm replying to was my 5000th comment.
Hey, how did you "realize" this? I was a bit annoyed when/. stopped telling me my comment count, and I've never seen a clue that it's still available somewhere. Not that it's of any momentous importance, of course, but it's interesting to know. To use the canonical auto analogy, it's sorta like your car's odometer. If you're like most people, you hardly ever look at it, and couldn't tell people its current value. But if it stopped working, you'd miss it.
There is nothing wrong with AJAX/Web 2.0 stuff, but Slashdot seems to have completely missed the point in its implementation.
But the ability to do that is the main thing that's wrong with AJAX (and JavaScript and...). What's wrong is that these things allow the web page to override the browser's basic behavior, so the user get surprising (and usually incomprehensible) results when they hit keys. It's especially wrong to break things like the Back button or the space bar or the pg up/dn keys. This effectively destroys one of the main benefits of a browser, which is a consistent way of doing things regardless of what site you're looking at.
I find it especially annoying when a site takes away my ability to use CTRL-click to open a new page in a new tab. Gmail does this, for example, preventing me from seeing two email messages at the same time, making it a rather crippled email reader./. also did this to me when I tried the beta, and it was one of the things that quickly persuaded me to go back to basic.
as long as they keep the classic mode, there will be no problems.
Oh, I dunno about that. For example, the logo/etc bar at the top has text that's dark blue on a dark green background. This is pretty much illegible on this screen in most lighting conditions. Is there any way to fix this other than totally overriding the colors for all pages of all sites? It would be really handy if browsers had a per-site color override, but I don't know of one that does this. Even better would be if/. would send just the text, without any color attributes, so I can get whatever colors are most readable on whatever screen I'm looking at.
Another problem is that even with classic mode, the window is forced to have a minimum width of around 400 pixels, or you get a horizontal scroll bar and the text runs out of the window on the right, so you have to scroll left and right to read it. This is a hassle on small screens, and an annoyance on bigger screens. And even at the 400-pixel width, the main page only less than half the width for text, and the rest is blank except at the very top. This forces a huge waste of screen space. Some of us do use our computers for more than reading/., so this is all a bit of an annoying design.
It'd be much more reader-friendly if there were a mode in which the text used the full width of the window, without any width= attributes, and re-wrapped the text when the window is resized. This is, of course, the default behavior of most browsers, and it's annoying to see the/. "design" going out of its way to defeat it and waste screen space.
I'm considering getting a google phone, and I'm wondering if/. will be readable on its small screen.
I gave up on the beta pretty quickly, because on this screen (FF on a Mac Powerbook), there were just too many cases of text disappearing behind other stuff or overlapping to get things jumbled together. Tweaking my settings didn't fix anything, so I went back to classic. I also tried Safari and Opera, and they had the same problems.
You will have some problems trying to specify the solar system's center to within a few atomic diameters.;-)
A fun fact that I've run across a few places is that it turns out that Copernicus was actually wrong: The sun isn't actually at the center of the solar system. By "center" we obviously mean the barycenter, aka the center of mass, and that point turns out to be a few thousand km above the sun's surface. This is because Jupiter has about 1/1000 the mass of the sun, and the distance between them is greater than 1000 times the sun's radius. If you look up the distances and their masses (to 4 or 5 places) and do the standard calculation, you can quickly determine where the barycenter is along the line between their centers.
There's also the problem of just where the edge of the solar system is, but that's would probably produce an endless thread if we started it here, so we can hope that nobody else reads this. Especially since Pluto got demoted from full planet status.
By definition, in the US, a defendant is presumed innocent until proven otherwise.
By definition, and in theory, perhaps. But all too often, in actual practice defendants are considered guilty even when acquitted.
Chanting "innocent until proven guilty" often doesn't change the way that defendants are treated by the public. We can expect that whatever the outcome, it's highly likely that these girls will all leave the community in a few years and never move back. I personally know a number of people in this sort of situation. (In each case, I think they're better off where they live now.;-)
"Skumanick won't show the pictures to anyone, including the girls' lawyers"
This is called denial of exculpatory evidence, and is solid grounds for a complete case dismissal. So why would the DA do such a thing?
The most likely explanation is that he's doing it for the publicity, and never had any intention of allowing it to go to court. Prosecutors who are elected sometimes do this to get their name before the public. Losing in court would be bad publicity, so generally what you want to do is commit some minor act against the defense that will be good grounds for dismissal, and then use that "mistake" as the reason that you "regretfully" decide not to prosecute.
This is an old tactic. I saw a good example of it back in the 1970s, when I was in college. Some people organized a student demonstration against the latest Nixonian policies. The police showed up and arrested a lot of people. They were held in jail overnight, and not allowed any communication with the outside world. Not even the traditional "one phone call". The next morning they were all simply let go.
The numbers were large enough that the story couldn't be hidden, and some journalists did a bit of interviewing. The explanation that came out was that the people were held incommunicado as a way of preventing the top people in the (conservative) city administration to pressure the police or DA into filing charges against the demonstrators. It was obvious that a court case would be a political circus, and the city would get nothing but bad publicity. They had no evidence that any demonstrator had violated any law. So they took the approach of a minor violation of a "right". Then they could explain that they couldn't file charges because the arrestees rights had been violated and the courts would just dismiss all the cases.
The best part was when the journalists found that there were no official records to document that anyone had been arrested. "What do you mean? We've never seen you before. There's no evidence that we ever arrested you." This made it pretty obvious to anyone but the dumbest readers what was really going on. Some people thought it was a good lesson to the students about how the legal system really works. It's all to easy for the authorities to grab someone, hold them incommunicado for a while, maybe work them over a bit, release them, and deny all knowledge of it. Most of the college kids had never heard of such things happening, but they learned, and some of them still remember.
(Names of people and places left out intentionally so you might wonder if it was in the area that you live.;-)
Of course, as for publicity, the current story is likely the opposite. This prosecutor may be motivated to maximize the publicity, to enhance his own political image with conservative voters. But actually going to court could be a losing move for him. Much better to back off "reluctantly", and use the outcries as political evidence against the "pro-pornography liberals".
there are some bits [of the Bible] where current vs. older meanings of words and similar linguistic developments call into question specific meanings and interruptions occasionally.
One of the popular examples is in the Adam & Eve story, where people who know Hebrew will tell you that "adam" just means "mankind", and "eva" (or "evah") is a similar word for females. So Genesis really just says that God created mankind and womankind. There's no upper/lower-case distinction in Hebrew, so you can't usually tell common nouns from proper names. I've mentioned this to a few Jewish friends, who usually react with "Well, yeah; everyone knows that". But of course most Christian fundamentalists don't, because they can't be bothered to learn the Bible's original languages. They read it in their own language, because that's the way that God wanted it.
And there are always irreconcilable differences in word meanings when you're translating. In this case, the aleph-daleth-mem radical inside "adam" is also inside the Hebrew words for "dirt, soil" and "red". I had a (Jewish) friend once who liked to claim that the Adam/Eve story was really about a guy who was called "Red", because he had red hair, which was something unusual in that part of the world 6000 years ago. I don't know enough Hebrew to know if that's actually a valid reading of those passages, but it's a fun claim to toss out to the biblical literalists.
No one currently speaks Aramaic as a primary language, and modern Greek is not all that similar.
Actually, there are some Aramaic-speaking communities scattered around the Middle East, though many of them have been destroyed by the Iraq war. Of course, their Aramaic has evolved a bit from the biblical Aramaic of 2000 years ago. Similarly for Greek, which has a much larger population of native speakers. With both languages, the education systems have kept alive knowledge of the classical language, and there are at least a few thousand people who can read biblical Aramaic and Greek quite well.
But language problems remain. Thus, classical Hebrew (and probably Aramaic) had a word transliterated as "shoshan", which various bibles translate as "rose" or "lily". We don't have any classical Hebrew botanical reference texts, and we can't actually determine what species "shoshan" referred to. All we can say for sure is that it was a common flowering plant in the area. But this isn't really of any great theological import. If you replace "Consider the lilies of the field..." with "Consider the wild roses in the field...", it doesn't change the meaning of that passage at all. It's too bad that the writer didn't mention thorns or tubers, so we could narrow it down a bit. But unless we get a working time machine, we'll probably never know the correct translation of that word.
(And yes, I'm aware that there are lilies with thorns. We have two hanging pots of Asparagus plumosus, and their weak little thorns do nick us occasionally. This usually happens when we're picking one of their red berries for our conure, who loves them but can't pick them herself because she can't easily climb around in a plant with such thin stems. Her feet were designed for much thicker tree branches. Maybe God did this to prevent conures from devastating asparagus crops.;-)
Theology can be a great thing for people who like picky discussions of the detailed meanings of words in long-dead languages or dialects.
In 7th grade, I learned about Christianity and creationism, as well as Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hindu,.... This was, of course, done where it belonged -- in Social Studies class, not Science.
Actually, it's not all that uncommon for scientific degree programs to include a few History of Science courses, where you'd expect coverage of the important religious-vs-science disputes. Such courses wouldn't need to go into great detail about the religious belief systems, of course, but they should include enough information to appreciate the religious sides' viewpoints. Thus, you can't really understand the Church's persecution of people like Bruno or Galileo without some understanding of contemporary religious dogmas. And you can't make sense of the current American problems with teaching evolutionary theory without understanding American fundamentalist Christian doctrines.
But generally you're right; such courses are typically taught by historians, not scientists. This is a typical example of what is properly an inter-disciplinary topic. Good teaching would require a background in both topics, though the primary classification would be "history" and/or "sociology". After all, the scientific parts of such disputes is generally fairly simple. It's easy to teach historians or sociologists the basic concepts behind cosmology or evolutionary theory; it's only in the details where these topics become complex. But theologies generally can't be understood without extended study, which scientists (people like Isaac Newton or Charles Darwin excepted) generally don't have the patience for.
There is a rational number x such that if all engineering computations throughout history used x instead of pi there would be no loss of precision or accuracy in the result.
No, there isn't.
Sure there is. If you ask around, you'll find that it's fairly common for professional engineers to have pi memorized to 20 or more places. It's extremely unlikely that there has ever been an engineering task (as opposed to a mathematical task) that requires that amount of precision in the value of pi. It's certain that nobody has ever needed 100 places accuracy in the building of a physical object.
But the story is different if you consider just the values typically used in low-level schools: 3.14 and 22/7. It's easy to find objects for which you need more accuracy than that. The mechanism inside your computer's disk drive, for instance. Measurements to 4 or 5 places are fairly routine now when building a number of mechanical products.
It could be interesting to have a list of the highest-precision measurements possible for various quantities. But it's not too likely that we could actually get our hands on such numbers, since many of them would either be proprietary trade secrets hidden by corporations and/or classified secrets of various governments.
Anyone here know of measurements that have been made to more than 10 places accuracy? There are atomic clocks accurate to 10^-14, as a lot of readers here likely know. Is there anything with more precision than that?
(And why doesn't/. allow the <sup> tag? That sorta debunks our self-image, doesn't it?;-)
Does the Texas law include a legal definition of "scientific evidence"? If not, then the creationists can quite easily claim to be doing "science" under their definition of the term. And it's probably going to be hard to find a Texas judge whose legal training included techniques for deciding scientific issues.
I can almost hear the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Invisible Pink Unicorn supporters in Texas gearing up for the campaigns to pressure the school systems into teaching their alternative "scientific" explanations of evolution, cosmology, etc. It should be fun to watch.
And how about the people who think that the mathematicians have make pi far too difficult for kids, and want their favorite alternative value taught in the schools. Wouldn't it be fun to contemplate a world in which engineers could build things using the exact (and rational!) value of pi that was taught to them when they were young...
example: for a green card you must have land line to your home, period....
Huh? What? No, that's not true. My wife and I have only cell phones. I got my conditional permanent residency a couple of years ago, and... I was asked if I had a landline. "No, just cell". "Alright, not a problem".
This might be one of those cases where it depends on which bureaucrat you happen to talk to. You lucked out and got a younger bureaucrat who thinks that cell phones are the norm. Someone else might get a fuddy-duddy who doesn't believe in all this modern wireless phone nonsense, and thinks that the regulations require a "real" phone, i.e., one that's wired into the phone system. An ongoing problem with many government agencies is that if the regulations don't explicitly say what constitutes acceptable phone equipment, the workers are free to interpret them as they wish, perhaps depending on whether they like you or are in a good mood that day.
The point was that, without the Internet, the large scale collaberation typical of open-source projects would be mostly impossible.
And another point worth noting is that the Internet was mostly developed via a typical large-scale collaboration of open-source projects. Even in cases where the code wasn't legally open-source, it was fairly common for the code for the unix-based implementations being easily available to any developers who asked. And of course the Internet specs have always been online, downloadable instantly via FTP before we had browsers.
I remember working on several projects that used Sun machines. When we had questions about details of the inner workings, Sun's staff would often respond by simply emailing us the kernel code (once they'd determined that we were C programmers). They seemed happy to answer any questions we had about it, though usually we figured it out ourselves once we had the code. I also recall several cases where we had the kernel code from multiple manufacturers, so that we could compare the implementations and report on any incompatibilities we found.
The main practical difference with current systems is that we no longer need to ask for the code for linux or *BSD distros. It's all online, downloadable in a matter of seconds rather than the hours that asking via email could to take back then.
OTOH, one of my first unix systems was Amdahl's, which ran on VM on an IBM mainframe. We didn't need to ask for the source, because it "wasn't an option". All the source was included on the install tapes, whether we wanted it or not. We actually found a bug within a week or so, in its dealings with the clock in our version of VM. I fixed it in an hour or so, and emailed the patch back to Amdahl. I got a nice letter thanking me for the bug fix, and saying that several of their QA people had validated my code, and I was now on their list of contributors. This was in late 1981, before anyone but a few thousand geeks had ever heard of the Internet (or ARPAnet), and it was pretty much a textbook case of why a sensible vendor might want open source software. (It also contained the first IP/UDP/TCP implementation we could find that ran on an IBM mainframe, so it could talk easily to the little unix boxes in our development lab.;-)
In time, all ISP's will subscribe to this way of thinking, becuase it's the only path they can follow without introducing legal problems for themselves. At the moment, it's a non-issue because your internet doesn't go off without a court order, or legal proof of breach of contract, or customers agreeing to it. There's not a single confirmed case of that ever happening. Ask yourself why.... Internet access is *not* a right. Neither is telephone access. If you breach the contract or misuse either, you can and will be cut off if it can be proven, not slowed down because "it's a necessity". And the day that it becomes *impossible* to do something without a telephone or internet access is the day that it will be *impossible* to legally cut someone off from either. That day won't happen any time soon.
Well, I don't know what you mean by "confirmed", but I can say that some years back, when I was an internet subscriber with the company now called Comcast, they did shut off our service for no stated reason. That is, they flatly refused to tell me why the service had been terminated. They wouldn't even say whether it was some (unspecified) violation, or perhaps something like just not wanting to be bothered to supply service to our address for some (perhaps cost) reason. To my knowledge, nobody had fingered us for any illegal activity; if this was the reason, they wouldn't tell us.
I'd also note that in this state (Massachusetts), and some others, telephone access is a legal right. The phone monopolies are required by law to provide "911" emergency service to phone lines even if nobody has paid for the service. One of the background scandals going on now is that the telcos that are providing FIOS often disable the copper phone wire as part of the installation. FIOS isn't (yet) legally required to provide 911 emergency phone service, so if you agree to a switch to FIOS (which the local telco, Verizon, is pushing strongly), you are no longer guaranteed the ability to make a phone call in case of an emergency. Many people do consider this a loss of a "right". In emergency situations, it could lead to the loss of a life. Communication can be vital in the original meaning of the term.
Furthermore, note that people are confusing an important point: What Comcast did to us, and ISPs are doing to others, is shutting people down merely on the unsupported word of someone else. There is no legal procedure being invoked; people are terminated without any charges being filed, much less any court decision. This is very different from, say, a suspension of a drivers license, which only happens with a court order. State motor-vehicle departments don't and can't legally suspend your driver's license on the mere word from someone claiming to have been wronged by you; it requires a trial that determines that you are guilty of a legal violation.
What's going on with copyright law is very different from this. Suspensions and terminations are happening solely on the unsupported word of a random person, or more often, on the letterhead of a random company. There is no need to prove that I'm guilty of anything; my service can be terminated for no stated reason on the request of a person that I've had no dealings with. And, as others have stated, we are slowly reaching a situation where our communication options have all been converted to the internet, which is in turn controlled by companies that no longer have any legal requirement to supply the service that we've paid for if some unrelated stranger merely makes an accusation against us. And, as my experience with Comcast showed, the ISPs don't even need to present us with the charges or the evidence (if there is any) against us.
To be more specific, the Google Cloud is impossible to secure against google.
There are a number of precedents that encourage careful people to worry about this. Google may not (for now) be as evil as Microsoft or IBM, but you'd be a fool to trust the data about your company or organization to google's hands. And everything in their Cloud is accessible to them.
I liked the reference to "allegations of tampering" in some US elections. I mean, we're talking about elections in which people demoed their ability to train a chimp to alter the results of a voting machine and delete the log files that contained the evidence.
The use of the term "allegations" here could be viewed by the cynical as not quite what you'd call "fair and balanced" reporting. A better phrasing might probably be something like "brazen and shameless tampering". If you read the literature on the topic, you get a real feeling that the companies involved are all but thumbing their noses at the voting public.
The "hacked" machines weren't compromised due to obscure bugs that the companies quickly fixed. It's more like the hackability was based on a set of carefully designed-in features which the companies are probably bragging about during their sales pitches in the proverbial political back rooms. (Are they still smoke-filled?)
Scientists are constantly double-checking each other and making improvements.
At least that's the way it's supposed to work. In reality, scientists tend to be as human as everyone else, and it's common enough for the people running a project to, uh, discourage their underlings from doing such things.
Let's just say that the LHC project seems to be run by people who are "true scientists", since they seem to welcome challenges to their design. This is assuming, of course, they they really are encouraging Ms Quan to keep up the good work. The fact that her name has gotten out to the media is a good sign; all too often a project's leaders will react to a junior's important discovery by putting their own name on it when it can't be ignored.
Out of curiosity, I went to lenovo's web site, and found the details page for the Thinkpad W500. According to my browser, neither of the strings "1920" or "1200" occurs in that page. I can't find any other page that tells the resolutions, either.
As a somewhat wary customer, I take this to mean that if I order one, they can ship me one with any resolution they have on hand at the moment, and I have to accept it because it was what I ordered. Laptop vendors are somewhat notorious for doing this, with various components varying from day to day as different suppliers offer the best price each day. This is a serious problem if you're trying to determine whether a machine will run specific software. Mostly you read about it causing problems for things like wifi or bluetooth, where different hardware requires different drivers and often have different incompatibilities with other brands of "the same" hardware. But I've seen a few cases where two machines with the same model number have visibly different screens.
Slashdot Mirror
My question is, how long until we have the capability to post pics on slashdot?
How long until we have the capability to post UTF-8 text to slashdot? I've had several comments recently where I've wanted to include a bit of Russian or Chinese or Japanese text, because it was relevant and would eliminate the need to talk around a direct quote that would help people who could read the other language (or feed it to babblefish ;-). But we're still stuck back in the day of ASCII text, with maybe a few diacriticals used by Western European languages.
For that matter, earlier I wanted to use a <sup> tag to get proper exponential notation, and that didn't work, either. Some geek/nerd site this is ...
UTF-8 FTW!
Would you hire a great UI designer and make a brand new layout or skin that is easier to read and navigate?
That's not possible, of course, due to the wide range of human vision. If you want to make something easy for users to read, you should provide an easily-configured set of options that control everything, and let users configure it all until it's easy for their eyes to read on their display. Or for their readers to handle if they don't have functional eyes.
Anything your javascript or AJAX code draws that's out of the user's control is one more thing that will make it difficult to read for a portion of your readers.
[Sig] Earth is full. Go home.
Nah; I'll probably stick around on this planet until my assignment expires in a few centuries, or humans make contact with the Galactic Network, whichever comes first. So will most of the other field researchers.
Anyway, you're busy wiping out the living spaces of polar bears and penguins, which will provide more space for you and a few visitors. So don't complain about overcrowding; nobody will be sympathetic.
(Among other things, some of us are studying the weird, goofy user interfaces that humans are building into their computer systems. Why anyone would knowingly build such things is a mystery to all the electronic intelligences in the universe, so they're fully supporting our field research in an effort to comprehend the minds of people who would build such things. ;-)
I just realized that the comment I'm replying to was my 5000th comment.
Hey, how did you "realize" this? I was a bit annoyed when /. stopped telling me my comment count, and I've never seen a clue that it's still available somewhere. Not that it's of any momentous importance, of course, but it's interesting to know. To use the canonical auto analogy, it's sorta like your car's odometer. If you're like most people, you hardly ever look at it, and couldn't tell people its current value. But if it stopped working, you'd miss it.
There is nothing wrong with AJAX/Web 2.0 stuff, but Slashdot seems to have completely missed the point in its implementation.
But the ability to do that is the main thing that's wrong with AJAX (and JavaScript and ...). What's wrong is that these things allow the web page to override the browser's basic behavior, so the user get surprising (and usually incomprehensible) results when they hit keys. It's especially wrong to break things like the Back button or the space bar or the pg up/dn keys. This effectively destroys one of the main benefits of a browser, which is a consistent way of doing things regardless of what site you're looking at.
I find it especially annoying when a site takes away my ability to use CTRL-click to open a new page in a new tab. Gmail does this, for example, preventing me from seeing two email messages at the same time, making it a rather crippled email reader. /. also did this to me when I tried the beta, and it was one of the things that quickly persuaded me to go back to basic.
as long as they keep the classic mode, there will be no problems.
Oh, I dunno about that. For example, the logo/etc bar at the top has text that's dark blue on a dark green background. This is pretty much illegible on this screen in most lighting conditions. Is there any way to fix this other than totally overriding the colors for all pages of all sites? It would be really /. would send just the text, without any color attributes, so I can get whatever colors are most readable on whatever screen I'm looking at.
handy if browsers had a per-site color override, but I don't know of one that does this. Even better would be if
Another problem is that even with classic mode, the window is forced to have a minimum width of around 400 pixels, or you get a horizontal scroll bar and the text runs out of the window on the right, so you have to scroll left and right to read it. This is a hassle on small screens, and an annoyance on bigger screens. And even at the 400-pixel width, the main page only less than half the width for text, and the rest is blank except at the very top. This forces a huge waste of screen space. Some of us do use our computers for more than reading /., so this is all a bit of an annoying design.
It'd be much more reader-friendly if there were a mode in which the text used the full width of the window, without any width= attributes, and re-wrapped the text when the window is resized. This is, of course, the default behavior of most browsers, and it's annoying to see the /. "design" going out of its way to defeat it and waste screen space.
I'm considering getting a google phone, and I'm wondering if /. will be readable on its small screen.
I gave up on the beta pretty quickly, because on this screen (FF on a Mac Powerbook), there were just too many cases of text disappearing behind other stuff or overlapping to get things jumbled together. Tweaking my settings didn't fix anything, so I went back to classic. I also tried Safari and Opera, and they had the same problems.
You will have some problems trying to specify the solar system's center to within a few atomic diameters. ;-)
A fun fact that I've run across a few places is that it turns out that Copernicus was actually wrong: The sun isn't actually at the center of the solar system. By "center" we obviously mean the barycenter, aka the center of mass, and that point turns out to be a few thousand km above the sun's surface. This is because Jupiter has about 1/1000 the mass of the sun, and the distance between them is greater than 1000 times the sun's radius. If you look up the distances and their masses (to 4 or 5 places) and do the standard calculation, you can quickly determine where the barycenter is along the line between their centers.
There's also the problem of just where the edge of the solar system is, but that's would probably produce an endless thread if we started it here, so we can hope that nobody else reads this. Especially since Pluto got demoted from full planet status.
Oh, well, we should invoke Occam's Razor and declare that you're right. ;-)
By definition, in the US, a defendant is presumed innocent until proven otherwise.
By definition, and in theory, perhaps. But all too often, in actual practice defendants are considered guilty even when acquitted.
Chanting "innocent until proven guilty" often doesn't change the way that defendants are treated by the public. We can expect that whatever the outcome, it's highly likely that these girls will all leave the community in a few years and never move back. I personally know a number of people in this sort of situation. (In each case, I think they're better off where they live now. ;-)
The most likely explanation is that he's doing it for the publicity, and never had any intention of allowing it to go to court. Prosecutors who are elected sometimes do this to get their name before the public. Losing in court would be bad publicity, so generally what you want to do is commit some minor act against the defense that will be good grounds for dismissal, and then use that "mistake" as the reason that you "regretfully" decide not to prosecute.
This is an old tactic. I saw a good example of it back in the 1970s, when I was in college. Some people organized a student demonstration against the latest Nixonian policies. The police showed up and arrested a lot of people. They were held in jail overnight, and not allowed any communication with the outside world. Not even the traditional "one phone call". The next morning they were all simply let go.
The numbers were large enough that the story couldn't be hidden, and some journalists did a bit of interviewing. The explanation that came out was that the people were held incommunicado as a way of preventing the top people in the (conservative) city administration to pressure the police or DA into filing charges against the demonstrators. It was obvious that a court case would be a political circus, and the city would get nothing but bad publicity. They had no evidence that any demonstrator had violated any law. So they took the approach of a minor violation of a "right". Then they could explain that they couldn't file charges because the arrestees rights had been violated and the courts would just dismiss all the cases.
The best part was when the journalists found that there were no official records to document that anyone had been arrested. "What do you mean? We've never seen you before. There's no evidence that we ever arrested you." This made it pretty obvious to anyone but the dumbest readers what was really going on. Some people thought it was a good lesson to the students about how the legal system really works. It's all to easy for the authorities to grab someone, hold them incommunicado for a while, maybe work them over a bit, release them, and deny all knowledge of it. Most of the college kids had never heard of such things happening, but they learned, and some of them still remember.
(Names of people and places left out intentionally so you might wonder if it was in the area that you live. ;-)
Of course, as for publicity, the current story is likely the opposite. This prosecutor may be motivated to maximize the publicity, to enhance his own political image with conservative voters. But actually going to court could be a losing move for him. Much better to back off "reluctantly", and use the outcries as political evidence against the "pro-pornography liberals".
there are some bits [of the Bible] where current vs. older meanings of words and similar linguistic developments call into question specific meanings and interruptions occasionally.
One of the popular examples is in the Adam & Eve story, where people who know Hebrew will tell you that "adam" just means "mankind", and "eva" (or "evah") is a similar word for females. So Genesis really just says that God created mankind and womankind. There's no upper/lower-case distinction in Hebrew, so you can't usually tell common nouns from proper names. I've mentioned this to a few Jewish friends, who usually react with "Well, yeah; everyone knows that". But of course most Christian fundamentalists don't, because they can't be bothered to learn the Bible's original languages. They read it in their own language, because that's the way that God wanted it.
And there are always irreconcilable differences in word meanings when you're translating. In this case, the aleph-daleth-mem radical inside "adam" is also inside the Hebrew words for "dirt, soil" and "red". I had a (Jewish) friend once who liked to claim that the Adam/Eve story was really about a guy who was called "Red", because he had red hair, which was something unusual in that part of the world 6000 years ago. I don't know enough Hebrew to know if that's actually a valid reading of those passages, but it's a fun claim to toss out to the biblical literalists.
No one currently speaks Aramaic as a primary language, and modern Greek is not all that similar.
Actually, there are some Aramaic-speaking communities scattered around the Middle East, though many of them have been destroyed by the Iraq war. Of course, their Aramaic has evolved a bit from the biblical Aramaic of 2000 years ago. Similarly for Greek, which has a much larger population of native speakers. With both languages, the education systems have kept alive knowledge of the classical language, and there are at least a few thousand people who can read biblical Aramaic and Greek quite well.
But language problems remain. Thus, classical Hebrew (and probably Aramaic) had a word transliterated as "shoshan", which various bibles translate as "rose" or "lily". We don't have any classical Hebrew botanical reference texts, and we can't actually determine what species "shoshan" referred to. All we can say for sure is that it was a common flowering plant in the area. But this isn't really of any great theological import. If you replace "Consider the lilies of the field ..." with "Consider the wild roses in the field ...", it doesn't change the meaning of that passage at all. It's too bad that the writer didn't mention thorns or tubers, so we could narrow it down a bit. But unless we get a working time machine, we'll probably never know the correct translation of that word.
(And yes, I'm aware that there are lilies with thorns. We have two hanging pots of Asparagus plumosus, and their weak little thorns do nick us occasionally. This usually happens when we're picking one of their red berries for our conure, who loves them but can't pick them herself because she can't easily climb around in a plant with such thin stems. Her feet were designed for much thicker tree branches. Maybe God did this to prevent conures from devastating asparagus crops. ;-)
Theology can be a great thing for people who like picky discussions of the detailed meanings of words in long-dead languages or dialects.
In 7th grade, I learned about Christianity and creationism, as well as Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hindu, .... This was, of course, done where it belonged -- in Social Studies class, not Science.
Actually, it's not all that uncommon for scientific degree programs to include a few History of Science courses, where you'd expect coverage of the important religious-vs-science disputes. Such courses wouldn't need to go into great detail about the religious belief systems, of course, but they should include enough information to appreciate the religious sides' viewpoints. Thus, you can't really understand the Church's persecution of people like Bruno or Galileo without some understanding of contemporary religious dogmas. And you can't make sense of the current American problems with teaching evolutionary theory without understanding American fundamentalist Christian doctrines.
But generally you're right; such courses are typically taught by historians, not scientists. This is a typical example of what is properly an inter-disciplinary topic. Good teaching would require a background in both topics, though the primary classification would be "history" and/or "sociology". After all, the scientific parts of such disputes is generally fairly simple. It's easy to teach historians or sociologists the basic concepts behind cosmology or evolutionary theory; it's only in the details where these topics become complex. But theologies generally can't be understood without extended study, which scientists (people like Isaac Newton or Charles Darwin excepted) generally don't have the patience for.
Sure there is. If you ask around, you'll find that it's fairly common for professional engineers to have pi memorized to 20 or more places. It's extremely unlikely that there has ever been an engineering task (as opposed to a mathematical task) that requires that amount of precision in the value of pi. It's certain that nobody has ever needed 100 places accuracy in the building of a physical object.
But the story is different if you consider just the values typically used in low-level schools: 3.14 and 22/7. It's easy to find objects for which you need more accuracy than that. The mechanism inside your computer's disk drive, for instance. Measurements to 4 or 5 places are fairly routine now when building a number of mechanical products.
It could be interesting to have a list of the highest-precision measurements possible for various quantities. But it's not too likely that we could actually get our hands on such numbers, since many of them would either be proprietary trade secrets hidden by corporations and/or classified secrets of various governments.
Anyone here know of measurements that have been made to more than 10 places accuracy? There are atomic clocks accurate to 10^-14, as a lot of readers here likely know. Is there anything with more precision than that?
(And why doesn't /. allow the <sup> tag? That sorta debunks our self-image, doesn't it? ;-)
Does the Texas law include a legal definition of "scientific evidence"? If not, then the creationists can quite easily claim to be doing "science" under their definition of the term. And it's probably going to be hard to find a Texas judge whose legal training included techniques for deciding scientific issues.
I can almost hear the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Invisible Pink Unicorn supporters in Texas gearing up for the campaigns to pressure the school systems into teaching their alternative "scientific" explanations of evolution, cosmology, etc. It should be fun to watch.
And how about the people who think that the mathematicians have make pi far too difficult for kids, and want their favorite alternative value taught in the schools. Wouldn't it be fun to contemplate a world in which engineers could build things using the exact (and rational!) value of pi that was taught to them when they were young ...
This might be one of those cases where it depends on which bureaucrat you happen to talk to. You lucked out and got a younger bureaucrat who thinks that cell phones are the norm. Someone else might get a fuddy-duddy who doesn't believe in all this modern wireless phone nonsense, and thinks that the regulations require a "real" phone, i.e., one that's wired into the phone system. An ongoing problem with many government agencies is that if the regulations don't explicitly say what constitutes acceptable phone equipment, the workers are free to interpret them as they wish, perhaps depending on whether they like you or are in a good mood that day.
The point was that, without the Internet, the large scale collaberation typical of open-source projects would be mostly impossible.
And another point worth noting is that the Internet was mostly developed via a typical large-scale collaboration of open-source projects. Even in cases where the code wasn't legally open-source, it was fairly common for the code for the unix-based implementations being easily available to any developers who asked. And of course the Internet specs have always been online, downloadable instantly via FTP before we had browsers.
I remember working on several projects that used Sun machines. When we had questions about details of the inner workings, Sun's staff would often respond by simply emailing us the kernel code (once they'd determined that we were C programmers). They seemed happy to answer any questions we had about it, though usually we figured it out ourselves once we had the code. I also recall several cases where we had the kernel code from multiple manufacturers, so that we could compare the implementations and report on any incompatibilities we found.
The main practical difference with current systems is that we no longer need to ask for the code for linux or *BSD distros. It's all online, downloadable in a matter of seconds rather than the hours that asking via email could to take back then.
OTOH, one of my first unix systems was Amdahl's, which ran on VM on an IBM mainframe. We didn't need to ask for the source, because it "wasn't an option". All the source was included on the install tapes, whether we wanted it or not. We actually found a bug within a week or so, in its dealings with the clock in our version of VM. I fixed it in an hour or so, and emailed the patch back to Amdahl. I got a nice letter thanking me for the bug fix, and saying that several of their QA people had validated my code, and I was now on their list of contributors. This was in late 1981, before anyone but a few thousand geeks had ever heard of the Internet (or ARPAnet), and it was pretty much a textbook case of why a sensible vendor might want open source software. (It also contained the first IP/UDP/TCP implementation we could find that ran on an IBM mainframe, so it could talk easily to the little unix boxes in our development lab. ;-)
In time, all ISP's will subscribe to this way of thinking, becuase it's the only path they can follow without introducing legal problems for themselves. At the moment, it's a non-issue because your internet doesn't go off without a court order, or legal proof of breach of contract, or customers agreeing to it. There's not a single confirmed case of that ever happening. Ask yourself why. ...
Internet access is *not* a right. Neither is telephone access. If you breach the contract or misuse either, you can and will be cut off if it can be proven, not slowed down because "it's a necessity". And the day that it becomes *impossible* to do something without a telephone or internet access is the day that it will be *impossible* to legally cut someone off from either. That day won't happen any time soon.
Well, I don't know what you mean by "confirmed", but I can say that some years back, when I was an internet subscriber with the company now called Comcast, they did shut off our service for no stated reason. That is, they flatly refused to tell me why the service had been terminated. They wouldn't even say whether it was some (unspecified) violation, or perhaps something like just not wanting to be bothered to supply service to our address for some (perhaps cost) reason. To my knowledge, nobody had fingered us for any illegal activity; if this was the reason, they wouldn't tell us.
I'd also note that in this state (Massachusetts), and some others, telephone access is a legal right. The phone monopolies are required by law to provide "911" emergency service to phone lines even if nobody has paid for the service. One of the background scandals going on now is that the telcos that are providing FIOS often disable the copper phone wire as part of the installation. FIOS isn't (yet) legally required to provide 911 emergency phone service, so if you agree to a switch to FIOS (which the local telco, Verizon, is pushing strongly), you are no longer guaranteed the ability to make a phone call in case of an emergency. Many people do consider this a loss of a "right". In emergency situations, it could lead to the loss of a life. Communication can be vital in the original meaning of the term.
Furthermore, note that people are confusing an important point: What Comcast did to us, and ISPs are doing to others, is shutting people down merely on the unsupported word of someone else. There is no legal procedure being invoked; people are terminated without any charges being filed, much less any court decision. This is very different from, say, a suspension of a drivers license, which only happens with a court order. State motor-vehicle departments don't and can't legally suspend your driver's license on the mere word from someone claiming to have been wronged by you; it requires a trial that determines that you are guilty of a legal violation.
What's going on with copyright law is very different from this. Suspensions and terminations are happening solely on the unsupported word of a random person, or more often, on the letterhead of a random company. There is no need to prove that I'm guilty of anything; my service can be terminated for no stated reason on the request of a person that I've had no dealings with. And, as others have stated, we are slowly reaching a situation where our communication options have all been converted to the internet, which is in turn controlled by companies that no longer have any legal requirement to supply the service that we've paid for if some unrelated stranger merely makes an accusation against us. And, as my experience with Comcast showed, the ISPs don't even need to present us with the charges or the evidence (if there is any) against us.
Whatcha wanna bet they're yet another case of contamination by HeLa cells?
(Google for it. It's an interesting story, and a good cautionary tale.)
IMHO cloud computing is impossible to secure.
To be more specific, the Google Cloud is impossible to secure against google.
There are a number of precedents that encourage careful people to worry about this. Google may not (for now) be as evil as Microsoft or IBM, but you'd be a fool to trust the data about your company or organization to google's hands. And everything in their Cloud is accessible to them.
I liked the reference to "allegations of tampering" in some US elections. I mean, we're talking about elections in which people demoed their ability to train a chimp to alter the results of a voting machine and delete the log files that contained the evidence.
The use of the term "allegations" here could be viewed by the cynical as not quite what you'd call "fair and balanced" reporting. A better phrasing might probably be something like "brazen and shameless tampering". If you read the literature on the topic, you get a real feeling that the companies involved are all but thumbing their noses at the voting public.
The "hacked" machines weren't compromised due to obscure bugs that the companies quickly fixed. It's more like the hackability was based on a set of carefully designed-in features which the companies are probably bragging about during their sales pitches in the proverbial political back rooms. (Are they still smoke-filled?)
Scientists are constantly double-checking each other and making improvements.
At least that's the way it's supposed to work. In reality, scientists tend to be as human as everyone else, and it's common enough for the people running a project to, uh, discourage their underlings from doing such things.
Let's just say that the LHC project seems to be run by people who are "true scientists", since they seem to welcome challenges to their design. This is assuming, of course, they they really are encouraging Ms Quan to keep up the good work. The fact that her name has gotten out to the media is a good sign; all too often a project's leaders will react to a junior's important discovery by putting their own name on it when it can't be ignored.
Do school officials get to cherry pick which parts of the Constitution they can violate?
Of course. And they pick the cherries (;-) that allow them to strip-search the kids of their choice.
Because it's to protect the children!
Of course. But now it's time to paraphrase the old follow-on question: Who will protect our children from their protectors?
My 15" Thinkpad W500 has 1920x1200 resolution.
Out of curiosity, I went to lenovo's web site, and found the details page for the Thinkpad W500. According to my browser, neither of the strings "1920" or "1200" occurs in that page. I can't find any other page that tells the resolutions, either.
As a somewhat wary customer, I take this to mean that if I order one, they can ship me one with any resolution they have on hand at the moment, and I have to accept it because it was what I ordered. Laptop vendors are somewhat notorious for doing this, with various components varying from day to day as different suppliers offer the best price each day. This is a serious problem if you're trying to determine whether a machine will run specific software. Mostly you read about it causing problems for things like wifi or bluetooth, where different hardware requires different drivers and often have different incompatibilities with other brands of "the same" hardware. But I've seen a few cases where two machines with the same model number have visibly different screens.