Well, if this legislation is going to tax online businesses that also have "brick and mortar" stores in California, then won't most of the superstores still be exempt? I mean, there's neither brick nor mortar in the ugly big-box sub-urban stores from which they do their retailing.
Interesting semi-neutral language by directmag.com in describing an "e-mail append service." What sort of low-life thought of this? Its nearly the same things as randomly trying to guess passwords, except that they randomly try to guess email addresses (first_initial+last_name@host.com) and compile the ones that don't bounce back. Good thing MAPS shut them down. I hadn't heard of this sort of spammer trick but I'm not surprised by it.
When someone gets an email from an e-mail append "service," is there an easy way to generate a semi-bogus returned mail so that the appender thinks your address is invalid?
So Judge Jackson basically agrees with the DOJ's findings of fact. He probably then thinks that MS has been acting bad and needs to change. Suppose, however, that he can't agree at all with the DOJ's findings of law; that although evil, Microsoft has done nothing illegal. Then maybe he's strongly urging a settlement in order that something be done about Microsoft, before he's forced to let them off the hook.
(I don't actually believe this myself; its just a thought that occured to me.)
Also, somebody imported a dozen european swallows (or swifts, I always get them confused) into Central Park because they were mentioned in Shakespeare (I Am Not Making This Up) and they have literally exploded all over the continent.
Actually, they are European Starlings; and it happened in the 1890's. Eugene Schieffelin brought to New York each type of bird mentioned in any of Shakespeare's plays. In Henry IV Part 1, Act 1, Scene 3, Shakespeare wrote:
Nay, I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but 'Mortimer'
and so did Schieffelin bring several dozen starlings to New York. (Sources vary as to the exact number--some say 60, some 100, some 120, some 60 followed by 40 a year later.) There are also scattered reports that other Starlings made it to North America prior to Scheiffelin's introduction, but it was most likely his that have spawned the millions of starlings that now inhabit the continent.
There are some who think that the Starling largely took the ecological niche that had been occupied by the passenger pigeon, which was very quickly disappearing at the time the starlings were introduced. Numbering about 5,000,000,000 in 1800, there would be hundreds of millions of passenger pigeons in a flock, but overzealous hunting (e.g. contests where participants would need to kill at least 30,000 to be a contender but especially commercial hunting) caused the numbers to dwindle which in turn caused the flocks to collapse. Passenger pigeons were extirpated from the wild in about 1900 and became completely extinct in 1914.
Starlings, as a alien species, have absolutely no Federal protection, so hunters can kill as many as they like as often as they like any time they like.
I'm veering offtopic here, but the buying of forests and grazing land (and also buying easements, or restrictions on use and development) by environmentalists is something that The Nature Conservancy already does. There are some in the Sierra Club who actually don't think this pragmatic approach is a good one, but most envvironmentally-minded people think the two organizations complement each other. There are a bunch of similar land-purchase groups as well, like Ducks Unlimited, that buys land for duck hunting and for ducks to breed upon, and numerous local land trusts.
Would a hard-core fan really want to play Anakin?
on
Dear Mr. Lucas
·
· Score: 1
I could imagine that actually being in the film could be a bit of a letdown. Everything about making the film would be a giant spoiler. The film isn't necessarily shot sequentially, and the acting is done without special effects or a soundtrack. Most of the coolest stuff (e.g. pod racers) is the product of a heck of a lot of sleight-of-hand and fancy editing--it'd be like when you find out how magic tricks are really done. Even the romantic scenes wouldn't be; an actual studio, with the boom operators and gaffers and best boys looking on, and with studio lights shining in your face, would hardly be as romantic as the scene you're trying to create. There is a lot of tedium before the finished product is ready, and only then does the movie get its 'magic'. If you knew how fake it really was, could you ever pretend again?
There's been a lot of talk here about scientists using the metric system--that's only sort of true. At least in physics, there are those who insist on SI units (Systeme International, e.g. meter,kilogram,Kelvin), some who hang on to CGS (centimeter,gram) units, and a bunch of other unrelated units that are incredibly useful.
What is called the metric system seems to mash together the SI and CGS units, plus the celsius temperature scale and the use of liters for volume. In order to get the easy conversions to work right, you have to stick to either CGS or SI else powers of ten end up missing. The celsius scale (my least favorite of the metric units), by the way, doesn't give any of the easy conversion advantages that the rest of the metric units has; its thermodynamically irrelevant. The celsius scale doesn't work for equations (e.g. PV=nRT) involving temperature. The SI unit of temperature, of course, is the Kelvin.
I'm not aware of any weather forecasts, anywhere, that use Kelvin. I also think kilowatt-hour is in widespread use worldwide for electric power, even though Joule would be the strict SI unit. Likewise kilometers per hour instead of meters per second.
Units really get hairy in electrodynamics. Experimental physicists work with SI units almost exclusively, as that's what lab equipment is made in. Except that magnetic fields are sometimes measured in gauss instead of Tesla. Theorists, on the other hand, often use CGS because the calculations are more elegant. But everyone uses liter, even though its not really SI.
Torr, the unit of pressure, is still in widespread use (1 torr = 1 mm of mercury), although bar and millibar are creeping in. Angstroms are in widespread use and likely always will be.
Physicists would be lost without the electron volt (1eV=1.602e-19 Joule). Atomic mass units (amu), astronomical units (au=Earth-sun distance), light-years, and parsecs are similarly very useful and in widespread use. Furthermore, if you look at graphs in physics articles, you'll often find the raw quantities multiplied or divided by constants such as the Bohr magneton, Planck's constant, or the Boltzmann constant.
By far the most useful way to state the speed of light is one foot per nanosecond. Likewise, the speed of sound in air is roughly one foot per millisecond.
The choice between Kelvin and Celsius is mostly a matter of convenience. Chemists use Celsius almost exclusively, physicists--especially those working at low temperatures or with thermodynamics--use Kelvin.
The point of all this is that practicing scientists use units that are appropriate to the problem. I think we should be comfortable in a variety of units and be able to convert when necessary. I'm perfectly happy with camera lenses in millimeters, monitors in inches, the weather in Farenheit, my experiment in Kelvin, cars in horsepower, light bulbs in watts, and everything else in units that makes the quantity measured easier to think about.
There are no 1/10 mm pocket scales available. The finest divisions Starrett (or anyone else AFAIK) makes are 1/100 inch and 1/2 mm. So the English units are finer by about a factor of two.
If you want to spend $500+ and get a glass ruler that comes with a magnifying glass, there are microrules that have 1/1000 inch and 0.025 mm graduations, in which case the metric graduations are a hair finer. But I wouldn't carry one of these in my pocket! (See page 1788 of the McMaster-Carr catalog.
I'm surprised I haven't seen this suggested yet: What about giving moderators separate +1 and -1 moderation points? So moderators could moderate down without feeling they're wasting moderation points.
Heck, with all the fancy suggestions for fractional and longer-lived moderation points, Slashdot could be turned into a real-life role-playing game, with hit points, magic points, strength, dexterity, and the whole lot. Hey, didn't Ultima III have some spell to magically kill Trolls?
I used to think CMYK was irrelevant for most people, especially those who weren't preparing images for four-color offset printing.
Then I read Dan Margulis's fantastic book, Professional Photoshop 5: The Classic Guide to Color Correction. Although it uses "Photoshop" in the title, it's hardly Photoshop-specific, and is mostly about how to apply Curves and blend channels to color correct and repair photographs. (A few chapters are available on his website). In any case, one certainly gets an understanding of what image editing tools are important for professional graphic artists.
The point is this: there are many color corrections and photograph repairs which are difficult, if not impossible, to correct without the ability to switch to CMYK (and CIELab also).
The difficulty with CMYK and CIELab is that the channel definitions change, but the image itself must still be displayed in RGB (unless someone invents a CIELab/CMYK monitor). So its a bit more difficult than writing a snazzy special effects filter, but on the other hand I can imagine that someday Gimp could even go beyond Photoshop with fully configurable and user-specified color models (e.g. Margulis's theoretical Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Tangerine).
I used to think CMYK was irrelevant for most people, especially those who weren't preparing images for four-color offset printing.
Then I read Dan Margulis's fantastic book, Professional Photoshop 5: The Classic Guide to Color Correction. Although it uses "Photoshop" in the title, it's hardly Photoshop-specific, and is mostly about how to apply Curves and blend channels to color correct and repair photographs. (A few chapters are available on his website). In any case, one certainly gets an understanding of what image editing tools are important for professional graphic artists.
The point is this: there are many color corrections and photograph repairs which are difficult, if not impossible, to correct without the ability to switch to CMYK (and CIELab also).
The difficulty with CMYK and CIELab is that the channel definitions change, but the image itself must still be displayed in RGB (unless someone invents a CIELab/CMYK monitor). So its a bit more difficult than writing a snazzy special effects filter, but on the other hand I can imagine that someday Gimp could even go beyond Photoshop with fully configurable and user-specified color models (e.g. Margulis's theoretical Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Tangerine).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if this legislation is going to tax online businesses that also have "brick and mortar" stores in California, then won't most of the superstores still be exempt? I mean, there's neither brick nor mortar in the ugly big-box sub-urban stores from which they do their retailing.
Interesting semi-neutral language by directmag.com in describing an "e-mail append service." What sort of low-life thought of this? Its nearly the same things as randomly trying to guess passwords, except that they randomly try to guess email addresses (first_initial+last_name@host.com) and compile the ones that don't bounce back. Good thing MAPS shut them down. I hadn't heard of this sort of spammer trick but I'm not surprised by it.
When someone gets an email from an e-mail append "service," is there an easy way to generate a semi-bogus returned mail so that the appender thinks your address is invalid?
(I don't actually believe this myself; its just a thought that occured to me.)
Actually, they are European Starlings; and it happened in the 1890's. Eugene Schieffelin brought to New York each type of bird mentioned in any of Shakespeare's plays. In Henry IV Part 1, Act 1, Scene 3, Shakespeare wrote:
and so did Schieffelin bring several dozen starlings to New York. (Sources vary as to the exact number--some say 60, some 100, some 120, some 60 followed by 40 a year later.)
There are also scattered reports that other Starlings made it to North America prior to Scheiffelin's introduction, but it was most likely his that have spawned the millions of starlings that now inhabit the continent.
There are some who think that the Starling largely took the ecological niche that had been occupied by the passenger pigeon, which was very quickly disappearing at the time the starlings were introduced. Numbering about 5,000,000,000 in 1800, there would be hundreds of millions of passenger pigeons in a flock, but overzealous hunting (e.g. contests where participants would need to kill at least 30,000 to be a contender but especially commercial hunting) caused the numbers to dwindle which in turn caused the flocks to collapse. Passenger pigeons were extirpated from the wild in about 1900 and became completely extinct in 1914.
Starlings, as a alien species, have absolutely no Federal protection, so hunters can kill as many as they like as often as they like any time they like.
There's been a lot of talk here about scientists using the metric system--that's only sort of true. At least in physics, there are those who insist on SI units (Systeme International, e.g. meter,kilogram,Kelvin), some who hang on to CGS (centimeter,gram) units, and a bunch of other unrelated units that are incredibly useful.
What is called the metric system seems to mash together the SI and CGS units, plus the celsius temperature scale and the use of liters for volume. In order to get the easy conversions to work right, you have to stick to either CGS or SI else powers of ten end up missing. The celsius scale (my least favorite of the metric units), by the way, doesn't give any of the easy conversion advantages that the rest of the metric units has; its thermodynamically irrelevant. The celsius scale doesn't work for equations (e.g. PV=nRT) involving temperature. The SI unit of temperature, of course, is the Kelvin.
I'm not aware of any weather forecasts, anywhere, that use Kelvin. I also think kilowatt-hour is in widespread use worldwide for electric power, even though Joule would be the strict SI unit. Likewise kilometers per hour instead of meters per second.
Units really get hairy in electrodynamics. Experimental physicists work with SI units almost exclusively, as that's what lab equipment is made in. Except that magnetic fields are sometimes measured in gauss instead of Tesla. Theorists, on the other hand, often use CGS because the calculations are more elegant. But everyone uses liter, even though its not really SI.
Torr, the unit of pressure, is still in widespread use (1 torr = 1 mm of mercury), although bar and millibar are creeping in. Angstroms are in widespread use and likely always will be.
Physicists would be lost without the electron volt (1eV=1.602e-19 Joule). Atomic mass units (amu), astronomical units (au=Earth-sun distance), light-years, and parsecs are similarly very useful and in widespread use. Furthermore, if you look at graphs in physics articles, you'll often find the raw quantities multiplied or divided by constants such as the Bohr magneton, Planck's constant, or the Boltzmann constant.
By far the most useful way to state the speed of light is one foot per nanosecond. Likewise, the speed of sound in air is roughly one foot per millisecond.
The choice between Kelvin and Celsius is mostly a matter of convenience. Chemists use Celsius almost exclusively, physicists--especially those working at low temperatures or with thermodynamics--use Kelvin.
The point of all this is that practicing scientists use units that are appropriate to the problem. I think we should be comfortable in a variety of units and be able to convert when necessary. I'm perfectly happy with camera lenses in millimeters, monitors in inches, the weather in Farenheit, my experiment in Kelvin, cars in horsepower, light bulbs in watts, and everything else in units that makes the quantity measured easier to think about.
If you want to spend $500+ and get a glass ruler that comes with a magnifying glass, there are microrules that have 1/1000 inch and 0.025 mm graduations, in which case the metric graduations are a hair finer. But I wouldn't carry one of these in my pocket! (See page 1788 of the McMaster-Carr catalog.
I'm surprised I haven't seen this suggested yet: What about giving moderators separate +1 and -1 moderation points? So moderators could moderate down without feeling they're wasting moderation points.
Heck, with all the fancy suggestions for fractional and longer-lived moderation points, Slashdot could be turned into a real-life role-playing game, with hit points, magic points, strength, dexterity, and the whole lot. Hey, didn't Ultima III have some spell to magically kill Trolls?
I used to think CMYK was irrelevant for most people, especially those who weren't preparing images for four-color offset printing.
Then I read Dan Margulis's fantastic book, Professional Photoshop 5: The Classic Guide to Color Correction. Although it uses "Photoshop" in the title, it's hardly Photoshop-specific, and is mostly about how to apply Curves and blend channels to color correct and repair photographs. (A few chapters are available on his website). In any case, one certainly gets an understanding of what image editing tools are important for professional graphic artists.
The point is this: there are many color corrections and photograph repairs which are difficult, if not impossible, to correct without the ability to switch to CMYK (and CIELab also).
The difficulty with CMYK and CIELab is that the channel definitions change, but the image itself must still be displayed in RGB (unless someone invents a CIELab/CMYK monitor). So its a bit more difficult than writing a snazzy special effects filter, but on the other hand I can imagine that someday Gimp could even go beyond Photoshop with fully configurable and user-specified color models (e.g. Margulis's theoretical Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Tangerine).
I used to think CMYK was irrelevant for most people, especially those who weren't preparing images for four-color offset printing.
Then I read Dan Margulis's fantastic book, Professional Photoshop 5: The Classic Guide to Color Correction. Although it uses "Photoshop" in the title, it's hardly Photoshop-specific, and is mostly about how to apply Curves and blend channels to color correct and repair photographs. (A few chapters are available on his website). In any case, one certainly gets an understanding of what image editing tools are important for professional graphic artists.
The point is this: there are many color corrections and photograph repairs which are difficult, if not impossible, to correct without the ability to switch to CMYK (and CIELab also).
The difficulty with CMYK and CIELab is that the channel definitions change, but the image itself must still be displayed in RGB (unless someone invents a CIELab/CMYK monitor). So its a bit more difficult than writing a snazzy special effects filter, but on the other hand I can imagine that someday Gimp could even go beyond Photoshop with fully configurable and user-specified color models (e.g. Margulis's theoretical Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Tangerine).