The Chinese have finally admitted what was suspected all along
They've "admitted" to having a team trained to protect their networks from attacks. I would hope that most western countries could admit to that too. I can understand (and share) your belief that there's more to it than they've admitted but pretending that they have in fact admitted to something dire is silly.
Until the past few years, most pre-orders were either free or a $5.00 down payment toward the game.
But why would that change anything? Their choice would be between either refunding the down payment (if any) or selling these people the game. Why would they even consider not selling them the game?
Check the dates. DNF was opened for pre-orders back in 2001 (before being delayed, and delayed more, and delayed longer than any game in history). Some people kept those pre-orders.
Yes, I realise that. So you would think there would be two possibilities - (1) at some point Gamestop concluded that they couldn't deliver and therefore refunded the money or (2) Gamestop kept the money and the associated obligation to supply the product. In any situation where they kept the money it seems obvious that they're going to supply the product. Why wouldn't they?
I don't get it. Why would this be open to doubt? If I've understood correctly, Gamestop offered it for sale and these people paid for it... so now it's available Gamestop are going to honour the contract. Is that not what they would normally do?
How about stating the battery life in actual hours of continuous use instead of estimated days based on estimated usage? Is that really so hard?
Pretty hard. The Kindle (and presumably the Nook?) doesn't use battery power to just sit there showing a page while you read it; it only uses power when you turn the page (or connect to WIFI or 3G). The rate at which you need to turn pages (and thus use power) is going to depend on a combination of your reading speed, the nature of the material, and the font size you've set. You can make assumptions for all that but it still really comes down to "estimated usage".
And when you ride it, do you exhale additional CO2? What people need to do is to cycle less, drive less and eat more. The more carbon you can tie up in fat reserves, the better for the planet. Burning off that carbon through exercise can only make things worse.
Metric is a heck of a lot easier to explain than imperial.
Lets see, 2.5 cm per inch, 12 inches per foot, 5 foot per fathom, but its also 5280 feet per mile...and its 3 feet to a yard, which is kind of like a meter, but not quite...
I agree with your underlying point but that's a poor illustration because two of your examples are mixing imperial and metric together. "2.5 cm per inch" says no more about the imperial system than saying "0.4 inches per cm" says about metric. Same applies to a yard being "kind of like a meter but not quite" as compared to a meter being kind of like a yard but not quite.
I also cannot see any reason that FTL should imply time travel, any more than supersonic flight should interfere with.cause and effect.
Supersonic flight is nowhere near relativistic speeds so your Newtonian world won't noticably change.
I think the problem here is that there are two sets of answers as to why "causality wold be violated".
The first set babble about how an observer at point B would see you arrive before you leave. This seems to be irrelevant and does lead to the thought that the same explanation would mean that if the observer 'sees' via sonar instead of via radio waves then "causality would be violated" by something travelling faster than sound. I think that's the set the previous poster was referring to. Maybe these explanations have some sort of basis behind but they certainly don't sound convincing..
The second set are along the lines you've provided. These seem to be saying that the model we have (which is supported extensively by experimentation and real world application) basically stops working in any way we understand when you reach the speed of light, probably because you just can't get anything faster than that. But they don't appear to say that causality gets violated; for all the weirdness of "negative time" coming out of the equations I don't think you're saying that there is any identifiable effect that would occur before its cause - at the very most that would be only one explanation of the weirdness. They also don't seem to address why this should make it impossible for information to travel faster if there were some mechanism other than moving matter around - I'm not suggesting that quantum entanglement does allow transmission of information faster than light (or at all) but I'm not sure that your equations would necessarily be relevant if it did.
In this case, if you travel in a super luminal fashion from A -> B you (the cause) arrive at B before the effect (light) does. Because there is no universal frame of reference, if you now travel from B -> A you arrive before you left (because you're leaving B before you left A, relatively).
It's tricky enough concept for our monkey brains.
It might be tricky but you haven't explained it at all.
Say point A is 10 light years away from point B and that the two points are stationary relative to one another. Say that you travel at twice the speed of light from A to B and straight then back again. It seems obvious that you'll get back 10 years after you left. Now I realise that just because something seems obvious doesn't mean that it's true. But you haven't explained why you feel that you'd get back before you left instead of years later.
I am not a journalist, but I thought that "one source = no source"...
Dunno, I would have said that one source=one source (which might not be enough sources for a newspaper - I expect it would depend on what the story is) but then I'm not a journalist either. Not sure really whether you're criticising Vaughan-Nichols for writing that he'd met her purely on the basis of himself as a source or me for pointing out someone who claims to have met her.
I perfectly understand PJ's right to privacy, but I have always been puzzled by the fact that nobody seems to have ever met her physically.
I think at least a few people have met her (or at least have claimed to have doesn't and there doesn't seem to be any reason to doubt them).
But the only one a quick Google search brings up is Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and he does admit that he didn't check her passport, and those can be faked anyway, so I guess there's still room for mystery if you're into that sort of thing.
You risk giving the impression that the Allies suggested Palestine, to which the Jews responded "Wow, we never even considered that as a location!!!"
Hence this bit of my post:
(which admittedly they had historical ties to and substantial movement wanted back)
So yes, there was a substantial movement amongst the Jewish people that wanted the state of Israel there. But the blame for actually creating a country surrounded by enemies rests primarily with those that did it, not those that just wanted it.
The fact that at least some of those who wanted it felt they had some divine entitlement to the area should have only made it more clear what a terrible idea this was.
They aren't perfect but their enemies are perfect....perfectly murderous.
Complete crap. There are a whole bunch of people on both sides. Some of them are people who are really dedicated to their cause and don't care about loss of life of others (and sometimes not their own) to defend that cause. On both sides. Some of them are pretty decent people who nevertheless can't drop past conflicts, or past dreams. On both sides. Some of them genuinely want peace and a whole lot of them genuinely want not to be so close to the firing line. On both sides. Plenty of them are mothers and fathers who mostly just want a decent world for their kids to grow up in. On both sides. And, beyond that, every other sort of person too. If you genuinely honestly think that one side are "perfectly murderous" then I can only hope that you're very young and have time ahead of you to learn more about the world.
Yep, and more than that. The victorious Allies felt they had to do something about the attrocities commited in Germany against the jewish people. So they wanted to give them their own homeland. That's great. But they didn't of course offer a chunk of England, or France or the US or even of Germany. They used Britain's colonial power to give them a bit of someone else's land (which admitedly they had historical ties to and substantial moveement wanted back). And then the colonial power left. So a state was created that was surrounded by enemies. It was entirely understandable and predictable that they would be enemies. It was understanadable that the Israelis would be determined to survive. The results are everyone's fault but most of all the Allies who set it all up.
If you live in a country where there's sometimes tensions over immigration then imagine what it would be like if you'd been under the sway of a colonial power for a long time, and that power then decided to take a part of your land and give it as a new country to a group of people who had mostly left the area hundreds of years ago. And then the colonial power left. Obviously everything would be hunky dory - everyone liveing in peace and happiness.
Maybe the writer was in a bad car accident and is scarred and has lost an eye. Perhaps the real estate CEO has a severe stutter, or is a redhead. It doesn't diminish what their message.
Exacty. Now contrast that with the situation where it's actually an actor who's only pretending to be a writer or a CEO; that does diminish the message.
I believe the phrase is usually attributed as originating with Stewart Brand:
"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."
It's actually very relevant to aticles like this and rather a pity that only the first sentence tends to be quoted without the second.
That's the executive order, that they won't reduce the security (my speculation/interpretation).
That doesn't appear to make any sense.
Normally you'd expect it to be the exact same code running the embedded web apps as running the browser apps, just no chrome. i.e. you'd expect it to be Apple's code running, with whatever security Apple has written into it.
How does not displaying the chrome give rise to a security risk? If there's a security vulnerability from running your javascript using Apple's engine then that risk is identical with or without the chrome - isn't it?
As for the examples in the second FA of a flickr staff member posting things that aren't his own work - they're a huge stretch. It's FUD.
In what way? They looked pretty clear cut to me - most of them were screenshots of other people's websites. It's hard to think of anything that could be further from being "his own work". Would the Egypt photos have been valid if they'd been grabbed form someone else's website instead of uploaded direct?
The assignment of hour labels to particular times of the day is as arbitrary as assigning labels like "cat" and "dog" to particular animals. I'm not sure whether it means anything to ask whether a particular time is really 4pm or whether a particular animal is really a cat, but I'm sceptical of the advantages to be gained by moving the labels around.
They do this to eliminate the checks and balances provided by the constitutional court.
That being the case, what exactly is the point in having the constitution in the first place?
The constitution sets out the powers of the various units of government. Clearly there is a point to doing so, whether those powers ae vast or limited.
The US constitution doesn't explicitly say that the court system can rule on the constitutionality of laws. At one time it was very much up to debate as to whether it could or not. Would there be a point in explicitly saying that it could? Would there be a point in explicitly saying that it couldn't? Clearly there would be a point in doing so either way, as it would make the position definite instead of leaving it open for future debate. The fact that one path has fewer checks and balances doesn't make it pointless - making it clear that there are no checks on your power is often the intended point.
Slashdot Mirror
The Chinese have finally admitted what was suspected all along
They've "admitted" to having a team trained to protect their networks from attacks. I would hope that most western countries could admit to that too. I can understand (and share) your belief that there's more to it than they've admitted but pretending that they have in fact admitted to something dire is silly.
Until the past few years, most pre-orders were either free or a $5.00 down payment toward the game.
But why would that change anything? Their choice would be between either refunding the down payment (if any) or selling these people the game. Why would they even consider not selling them the game?
Check the dates. DNF was opened for pre-orders back in 2001 (before being delayed, and delayed more, and delayed longer than any game in history). Some people kept those pre-orders.
Yes, I realise that. So you would think there would be two possibilities - (1) at some point Gamestop concluded that they couldn't deliver and therefore refunded the money or (2) Gamestop kept the money and the associated obligation to supply the product. In any situation where they kept the money it seems obvious that they're going to supply the product. Why wouldn't they?
I don't get it. Why would this be open to doubt? If I've understood correctly, Gamestop offered it for sale and these people paid for it... so now it's available Gamestop are going to honour the contract. Is that not what they would normally do?
How about stating the battery life in actual hours of continuous use instead of estimated days based on estimated usage? Is that really so hard?
Pretty hard. The Kindle (and presumably the Nook?) doesn't use battery power to just sit there showing a page while you read it; it only uses power when you turn the page (or connect to WIFI or 3G). The rate at which you need to turn pages (and thus use power) is going to depend on a combination of your reading speed, the nature of the material, and the font size you've set. You can make assumptions for all that but it still really comes down to "estimated usage".
I am 7.7 miles from work and I ride a bicycle.
And when you ride it, do you exhale additional CO2? What people need to do is to cycle less, drive less and eat more. The more carbon you can tie up in fat reserves, the better for the planet. Burning off that carbon through exercise can only make things worse.
Metric is a heck of a lot easier to explain than imperial.
Lets see, 2.5 cm per inch, 12 inches per foot, 5 foot per fathom, but its also 5280 feet per mile...and its 3 feet to a yard, which is kind of like a meter, but not quite...
I agree with your underlying point but that's a poor illustration because two of your examples are mixing imperial and metric together. "2.5 cm per inch" says no more about the imperial system than saying "0.4 inches per cm" says about metric. Same applies to a yard being "kind of like a meter but not quite" as compared to a meter being kind of like a yard but not quite.
I also cannot see any reason that FTL should imply time travel, any more than supersonic flight should interfere with.cause and effect.
Supersonic flight is nowhere near relativistic speeds so your Newtonian world won't noticably change.
I think the problem here is that there are two sets of answers as to why "causality wold be violated".
The first set babble about how an observer at point B would see you arrive before you leave. This seems to be irrelevant and does lead to the thought that the same explanation would mean that if the observer 'sees' via sonar instead of via radio waves then "causality would be violated" by something travelling faster than sound. I think that's the set the previous poster was referring to. Maybe these explanations have some sort of basis behind but they certainly don't sound convincing..
The second set are along the lines you've provided. These seem to be saying that the model we have (which is supported extensively by experimentation and real world application) basically stops working in any way we understand when you reach the speed of light, probably because you just can't get anything faster than that. But they don't appear to say that causality gets violated; for all the weirdness of "negative time" coming out of the equations I don't think you're saying that there is any identifiable effect that would occur before its cause - at the very most that would be only one explanation of the weirdness. They also don't seem to address why this should make it impossible for information to travel faster if there were some mechanism other than moving matter around - I'm not suggesting that quantum entanglement does allow transmission of information faster than light (or at all) but I'm not sure that your equations would necessarily be relevant if it did.
Thanks for giving an answer that doesn't revolve around "well we use light to see with so it would look like...".
In this case, if you travel in a super luminal fashion from A -> B you (the cause) arrive at B before the effect (light) does. Because there is no universal frame of reference, if you now travel from B -> A you arrive before you left (because you're leaving B before you left A, relatively).
It's tricky enough concept for our monkey brains.
It might be tricky but you haven't explained it at all.
Say point A is 10 light years away from point B and that the two points are stationary relative to one another. Say that you travel at twice the speed of light from A to B and straight then back again. It seems obvious that you'll get back 10 years after you left. Now I realise that just because something seems obvious doesn't mean that it's true. But you haven't explained why you feel that you'd get back before you left instead of years later.
In fact, I was taught it's not a law; it's a falsified hypothesis.
Tell it to the judge.
I am not a journalist, but I thought that "one source = no source"...
Dunno, I would have said that one source=one source (which might not be enough sources for a newspaper - I expect it would depend on what the story is) but then I'm not a journalist either. Not sure really whether you're criticising Vaughan-Nichols for writing that he'd met her purely on the basis of himself as a source or me for pointing out someone who claims to have met her.
I perfectly understand PJ's right to privacy, but I have always been puzzled by the fact that nobody seems to have ever met her physically.
I think at least a few people have met her (or at least have claimed to have doesn't and there doesn't seem to be any reason to doubt them).
But the only one a quick Google search brings up is Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and he does admit that he didn't check her passport, and those can be faked anyway, so I guess there's still room for mystery if you're into that sort of thing.
You risk giving the impression that the Allies suggested Palestine, to which the Jews responded "Wow, we never even considered that as a location!!!"
Hence this bit of my post:
So yes, there was a substantial movement amongst the Jewish people that wanted the state of Israel there. But the blame for actually creating a country surrounded by enemies rests primarily with those that did it, not those that just wanted it.
The fact that at least some of those who wanted it felt they had some divine entitlement to the area should have only made it more clear what a terrible idea this was.
They aren't perfect but their enemies are perfect....perfectly murderous.
Complete crap. There are a whole bunch of people on both sides. Some of them are people who are really dedicated to their cause and don't care about loss of life of others (and sometimes not their own) to defend that cause. On both sides. Some of them are pretty decent people who nevertheless can't drop past conflicts, or past dreams. On both sides. Some of them genuinely want peace and a whole lot of them genuinely want not to be so close to the firing line. On both sides. Plenty of them are mothers and fathers who mostly just want a decent world for their kids to grow up in. On both sides. And, beyond that, every other sort of person too. If you genuinely honestly think that one side are "perfectly murderous" then I can only hope that you're very young and have time ahead of you to learn more about the world.
Yep, and more than that. The victorious Allies felt they had to do something about the attrocities commited in Germany against the jewish people. So they wanted to give them their own homeland. That's great. But they didn't of course offer a chunk of England, or France or the US or even of Germany. They used Britain's colonial power to give them a bit of someone else's land (which admitedly they had historical ties to and substantial moveement wanted back). And then the colonial power left. So a state was created that was surrounded by enemies. It was entirely understandable and predictable that they would be enemies. It was understanadable that the Israelis would be determined to survive. The results are everyone's fault but most of all the Allies who set it all up.
If you live in a country where there's sometimes tensions over immigration then imagine what it would be like if you'd been under the sway of a colonial power for a long time, and that power then decided to take a part of your land and give it as a new country to a group of people who had mostly left the area hundreds of years ago. And then the colonial power left. Obviously everything would be hunky dory - everyone liveing in peace and happiness.
Why would Google offer an underground tunnel to their impenetrable "castle" for free?
I think that's just a plot device so the hero can sneak into the castle to rescue the princess.
Maybe the writer was in a bad car accident and is scarred and has lost an eye. Perhaps the real estate CEO has a severe stutter, or is a redhead. It doesn't diminish what their message.
Exacty. Now contrast that with the situation where it's actually an actor who's only pretending to be a writer or a CEO; that does diminish the message.
I believe the phrase is usually attributed as originating with Stewart Brand:
"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."
It's actually very relevant to aticles like this and rather a pity that only the first sentence tends to be quoted without the second.
It's funny how that phrase - that EXACT phrase - is creeping into multiple comments on this discussion. You'd almost think it was coordinated.
Not at all, it's just head and shoulders above other phrases in almost any respect.
That's the executive order, that they won't reduce the security (my speculation/interpretation).
That doesn't appear to make any sense.
Normally you'd expect it to be the exact same code running the embedded web apps as running the browser apps, just no chrome. i.e. you'd expect it to be Apple's code running, with whatever security Apple has written into it.
How does not displaying the chrome give rise to a security risk? If there's a security vulnerability from running your javascript using Apple's engine then that risk is identical with or without the chrome - isn't it?
On top of that, pawn shops typically force people to sign that they are the owner of the item.
So what? They either suspected it was stolen or they didn't. Having the putative thief sign something is irrelevant.
"Well, it did look suspicious but then we thought, 'there's no way a thief would lie about something like that'"
As for the examples in the second FA of a flickr staff member posting things that aren't his own work - they're a huge stretch. It's FUD.
In what way? They looked pretty clear cut to me - most of them were screenshots of other people's websites. It's hard to think of anything that could be further from being "his own work". Would the Egypt photos have been valid if they'd been grabbed form someone else's website instead of uploaded direct?
The assignment of hour labels to particular times of the day is as arbitrary as assigning labels like "cat" and "dog" to particular animals. I'm not sure whether it means anything to ask whether a particular time is really 4pm or whether a particular animal is really a cat, but I'm sceptical of the advantages to be gained by moving the labels around.
They do this to eliminate the checks and balances provided by the constitutional court.
That being the case, what exactly is the point in having the constitution in the first place?
The constitution sets out the powers of the various units of government. Clearly there is a point to doing so, whether those powers ae vast or limited.
The US constitution doesn't explicitly say that the court system can rule on the constitutionality of laws. At one time it was very much up to debate as to whether it could or not. Would there be a point in explicitly saying that it could? Would there be a point in explicitly saying that it couldn't? Clearly there would be a point in doing so either way, as it would make the position definite instead of leaving it open for future debate. The fact that one path has fewer checks and balances doesn't make it pointless - making it clear that there are no checks on your power is often the intended point.