I defy you to find any reputable medical researcher who would encourage people to take up drinking for health benefits.
Read the article in Scientific American from a year or so ago. It says just that.
Alcohol, not any other ingredients in the drink, significantly lowers the risk of heart disease. People who drink in moderation live longer on average; this has been confirmed in many studies.
The key is the correct dose. No more than 2 drinks per day for men, 1 for women. Beyond that, the detriments outweigh the benefits.
Like any medication, it has possible side effects. One is that the user becomes a lush. That's why many researchers are hesitant to recommend that someone who has never had a drink take up this regime; they may be a lush and just not know it yet. OTOH, the dosage guidelines from the studies may help convince others who drink too much cut back to the proper dosage.
Back when I was in college (mid 1980's), we could get a six-pack of Schaefer for under $2.
There were even better deals to be had in those days. Carling's Black Label returnable longnecks were usually available on sale for $4.99 for a case of 24. And it tasted marginally better than Schaefer, IMHO. (Rhinelander was often available for $3.99/24pk, but it was undrinkable by any standards.)
It's kind of odd how almost every single one of the dozens of cheap brands I remember from my school days have been absorbed into the Pabst Brewing Company borg.
When you do a circuit design, you take into account both maximum and minimum delay paths. These are usually spec'd over a recommended operating temperature range, which most likely doesn't get quite that cold.
While colder can often mean faster, sometimes a signal requires some minimum delay to work correctly. This is especially true of the minimum hold times required on inputs after a clock transition. So it's possible that some signal might go out of spec if you drop the temperature too far. It only takes a single bad signal to hose the whole system.
Unlike just dropping the temperature of the CPU chip which will have relatively uniform characteristics, getting the whole system cold might cause a wider range of timing variations. Moreover, even dropping the external heat sink of a CPU to extreme cold doesn't mean the chip itself is in the cryogenic range. They usually run at temps well above the bulk of the heatsink.
That "method of" and "system comprising" junk is just a semantic game that patent lawyers like to play. Patents are all about owning ideas, no matter how they try to spin it.
Yes, but the US military expenditure is just the subsidy part. That's on top of whatever capital Saddam/Halliburton/Shell/whoever has already spent to discover, drill and pipe the oil out of Iraq.
(And the $85B, which I assume is your estimate for the Iraq war costs, isn't really the issue. The big factor is how much larger the US military needs to be to stabilize oil supplies worldwide, year in and year out. Over the decades, this has added up to hundreds of $Billions.)
Remember, the original poster was all upset because he suspected that wind power might be getting some kind of subsidy, therefore concluding that wind power is a total sham.
Oil is about the most inelastic market on this planet. If any oil producing country's output was stopped, the price of oil would skyrocket. If Saudi Arabia's production were interrupted, prices would probably go well past $100/barrel worldwide. Who uses which oil on any given day is irrelevant; all of the oil is interchangeable. If Japan and Asia's oil supplies were cut off by Middle East conflict, they would instantly bid up the price of other oil sources by trying to import from Canada, Russia, etc.
The US dedicates so much of its military budget to that region (ignoring for now the additional costs of Iraq) because that region is the most likely to become unstable and it has a big fraction of global oil output.
Of course the price of oil is heavily subsidized as well. In order to keep the oil flowing, much of the US military is currently stationed in the Middle East to enforce relative stability in the region. The huge costs of this effort are charged to the taxpayers rather than being added directly to the price of oil.
Then how is this different than multiple user profiles in XP, OSX, or Linux?
It's different because the users are supposed to use the machine simultaneously. It comes with a book explaining the arts of Pair Data Entry and of Extreme Clericing.
And in a civilised society, the law would punish those who did and award appropriate compensation to the damaged party.
Orrin Hatch and his colleagues are working hard every day to realize your vision of a civilized society. Until then, that still doesn't mean that an app should wipe a hard drive if it is under the impression that someone might be using it without authorization.
Much like the US atomic program, it was mearly the fact that it worked at all that caused mearly FEAR of the weapon to be enough to achive their goals.
Except that it didn't work. I've never seen anybody suggest that Great Britain considered surrendering due to fear of the V2.
The Germans were WAY ahead of their time in weapons development
Yes, and they dedicated so many resources into this not-yet-effective weapons system that it hastened their defeat. With the guidance systems of the 40s-60s, missiles weren't really worthwhile without nuclear warheads. Conventional warhead missiles didn't become worthwhile until precision terminal guidance was introduced in the 1970s with cruise missiles.
I can't find in the several article where it mentions improved accuracy. However, von Braun's next project, the US Redstone missile, had an accuracy of 300m at a similar range as the V2. Although measured in "meters", this accuracy is just about totally useless for conventional weapons targeting.
High altitude bombers had similar accuracy, and it usually took countless thousands of bombs per raid to effectively destroy major targets. Each large bomber raid carried more explosive power than the all V2s combined delivered over the entire life of the program.
Moreover, submarine-based launches would have lacked the frame-of-reference required to accurately aim the missiles even if they had perfect guidance.
Do you seriously think that a lack of US moles would have delayed Stalin for more than a few short years? He was obsessed with getting nuclear weapons, and he was going to get them one way or another. He had plenty of smart scientists that would have eventually figured it out.
If you think that there is any way that the US could have kept a monopoly on the secret of how nuclear weapons work for 50 years, you're smoking some good stuff.
That probably would have been a good development. It took so much of Germany's limited resources to produce V2s that each one probably set them back more than any destruction it caused. Moreover, given its failure rate, fueling and launching a V2 from a submarine would have been extremely dangerous. It probably would have wiped out a good chunk of their submarine fleet.
Even if used at short range, the V2 was never "accurate". It had extremely primitive guidance, and was no better than throwing a dart at a map of an entire metropolitan area. There was no way to make it hit an individual high-value target.
First, a thermonuclear bomb will create a double pulse. A regular old nuclear bomb only creates a single pulse of light. The double pulse is because the fission explosion that is required to set off the fusion blast.
The way I remember it, all nuclear explosions create a double pulse. The interval between the pulses depends on the size of the explosion. Fission bombs are measured in milliseconds and may not be perceptible to observers; the largest thermonuclear bombs have a delay between pulses of about a second. In an H-bomb, the time between the fission trigger and the fusion reaction is measured in microseconds, so that's not an issue.
The effect is due to the physics of the expanding fireball. The initial reaction directly emits light, which is seen as the first pulse. Right after this, the expanding ball of opaque plasma surrounds the bomb debris, obscuring further light. The plasma itself is hot and bright, however, and as its surface area grows the total emitted light increases again. This is seen as the second pulse.
Nothing this brief note says is unique to software.
Except that every time he mentions the word "patent", it is either specified as "software patent", or used in a context that could only mean "software patent".
The patent system didn't cause the collapse of the entire Industrial Revolution due to patent infringement, so it seems more than a bit like crying wolf to assume it will be any more harmful with software.
During much of the Industrial Revolution, there were most likely no more that a few dozen patents per year issued that could potentially affect any particular product. It took over a century to issue the first 1 million patents.
Since software patents are typically very broad, overlapping and non-novel, each one can have a much larger impact than some patent on an improved shoelace. For the shoelace, only a handful of shoe designers have to worry about the patent. In the software case, every single one of the millions of software developers worldwide have to worry.
If RMS's figure is right and 100,000 software patents issue each year, and you assume that a typical patent has about 10 claims, then each and every day you need to check your entire codebase against more than 2700 additional new claims. That's an incredible burden on the software industry; one that has not been proven to be offset by any gains provided by software patents. The worth of software patents is especially questionable given that most of the major innovations in the software field took place either before software patents were allowed or were introduced as free public standards.
buy a cell phone off ebay... anything with GPS locationing will work... don't activate it... 911 ALWAYS works
That's only true for analog phones. Consumer Reports had an article on this a while back. Digital cellphones have some kind of loophole where they're not actually required to support 911 if they're not registered. The Consumer Reports tests found that many dual-mode phones will automatically chose digital over analog if both are available at a particular location, and then the 911 calls didn't work even if the phone could have made an analog call.
Luckily, I happen to have a couple of ancient analog-only cellphones with the promotional 12-V car adapters they came with (the phones' self-draining NiCd batteries would be useless for this kind of purpose), and I keep them in my cars just for emergencies.
he started asking n00b questions about removing all files from the/tmp directory... well after not understanding the more advanced users' advice in the form of RTFM, someone got fed up of the dude and told him that the best way to do so was... obviously... rm -rf /
There is one way to help prevent this kind of problem: The bash shell could be modified so that whenever the user attempts to cd into a system directory, the shell should throw up a page of ASCII art that shows a picture of a bunch of gears and cogs. It would prompt the user with a message like "The/tmp directory contains important system files blah blah. Continue (y/N)?" That would probably scare most of them off.
$how do i read a file from my floppy? "mount?" who woulda thought.
Actually, on the latest SuSE release, just browse into/media/floppy. It just works; no mounting required. To someone who has never used any computer, that would be even more intuitive than "A:\".
The same goes for USB thumb drives. The biggest problem I had with this new feature was letting go of my years of conditioning (including needing to "eject" a plug&play device in Windows) that I had to mount or unmount the device at all.
My writing belongs to me. I use a life-time of intellect and experience to produce it. Just who the hell are you to say it isn't mine?
There's only one way that you can ensure that you maintain complete control of your writings: don't show them to anybody.
Once you've released them, you are at the mercy of others with regards to how much they let you control their use. If they agree with your arguments, then good for you. Otherwise, tough luck.
Without copyright, Warner Brothers sells CDs at non-monopoly prices (probably around $1.79 per disk), and the artists make no money from recordings. They only make money off of live performances.
With copyright, Warner Brothers sells CDs at monopoly pricing of $17.99 each, and the artists still make no significant money from recordings. They only make money off of live performances.
Net effect: a large transfer of money from the public at large into Warner Brother's bank account.
This whole thing is just a bunch of socialists using the liberal biased court system to attack a tax-paying company. A company that actually does something for this country instead of living off the hard work of others
It looks like what they have been doing for this country is to undermine the integrity of our electoral process at the taxpayer's expense. BTW, it's mathematically impossible for them to pay more taxes than they absorb when they sell goods to the government.
The state shouldn't intervene with the marketplace, only a freemarket will bring true equality to all people.
If they want to sell crappy machines that don't work, that's fine. But they can't knowingly do that while at the same time claiming that the machines do work. That's fraud, and that's what they're being sued over.
Any free market depends on the purchasers having access to accurate information about the products. There is no such thing as a free market when the the sellers of the goods are making fraudulent claims about them.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the article in Scientific American from a year or so ago. It says just that.
Alcohol, not any other ingredients in the drink, significantly lowers the risk of heart disease. People who drink in moderation live longer on average; this has been confirmed in many studies.
The key is the correct dose. No more than 2 drinks per day for men, 1 for women. Beyond that, the detriments outweigh the benefits.
Like any medication, it has possible side effects. One is that the user becomes a lush. That's why many researchers are hesitant to recommend that someone who has never had a drink take up this regime; they may be a lush and just not know it yet. OTOH, the dosage guidelines from the studies may help convince others who drink too much cut back to the proper dosage.
There were even better deals to be had in those days. Carling's Black Label returnable longnecks were usually available on sale for $4.99 for a case of 24. And it tasted marginally better than Schaefer, IMHO. (Rhinelander was often available for $3.99/24pk, but it was undrinkable by any standards.)
It's kind of odd how almost every single one of the dozens of cheap brands I remember from my school days have been absorbed into the Pabst Brewing Company borg.
While colder can often mean faster, sometimes a signal requires some minimum delay to work correctly. This is especially true of the minimum hold times required on inputs after a clock transition. So it's possible that some signal might go out of spec if you drop the temperature too far. It only takes a single bad signal to hose the whole system.
Unlike just dropping the temperature of the CPU chip which will have relatively uniform characteristics, getting the whole system cold might cause a wider range of timing variations. Moreover, even dropping the external heat sink of a CPU to extreme cold doesn't mean the chip itself is in the cryogenic range. They usually run at temps well above the bulk of the heatsink.
That "method of" and "system comprising" junk is just a semantic game that patent lawyers like to play. Patents are all about owning ideas, no matter how they try to spin it.
Probably the same reason symphonies have been replaying Beethoven for centuries.
(And the $85B, which I assume is your estimate for the Iraq war costs, isn't really the issue. The big factor is how much larger the US military needs to be to stabilize oil supplies worldwide, year in and year out. Over the decades, this has added up to hundreds of $Billions.)
Remember, the original poster was all upset because he suspected that wind power might be getting some kind of subsidy, therefore concluding that wind power is a total sham.
The US dedicates so much of its military budget to that region (ignoring for now the additional costs of Iraq) because that region is the most likely to become unstable and it has a big fraction of global oil output.
Of course the price of oil is heavily subsidized as well. In order to keep the oil flowing, much of the US military is currently stationed in the Middle East to enforce relative stability in the region. The huge costs of this effort are charged to the taxpayers rather than being added directly to the price of oil.
Don't worry about that. No matter what happens, NASA technicians will most likely be able to recover some useful mission data.
It's different because the users are supposed to use the machine simultaneously. It comes with a book explaining the arts of Pair Data Entry and of Extreme Clericing.
Orrin Hatch and his colleagues are working hard every day to realize your vision of a civilized society. Until then, that still doesn't mean that an app should wipe a hard drive if it is under the impression that someone might be using it without authorization.
Irrelevant. Two wrongs don't make a right.
If he wants recompense, he has to do something himself.
Then he should do something that's not illegal and harmful.
In a civilized society, consequences are doled out by a court of law, not by vigilantes their software.
Except that it didn't work. I've never seen anybody suggest that Great Britain considered surrendering due to fear of the V2.
The Germans were WAY ahead of their time in weapons development
Yes, and they dedicated so many resources into this not-yet-effective weapons system that it hastened their defeat. With the guidance systems of the 40s-60s, missiles weren't really worthwhile without nuclear warheads. Conventional warhead missiles didn't become worthwhile until precision terminal guidance was introduced in the 1970s with cruise missiles.
High altitude bombers had similar accuracy, and it usually took countless thousands of bombs per raid to effectively destroy major targets. Each large bomber raid carried more explosive power than the all V2s combined delivered over the entire life of the program.
Moreover, submarine-based launches would have lacked the frame-of-reference required to accurately aim the missiles even if they had perfect guidance.
If you think that there is any way that the US could have kept a monopoly on the secret of how nuclear weapons work for 50 years, you're smoking some good stuff.
Even if used at short range, the V2 was never "accurate". It had extremely primitive guidance, and was no better than throwing a dart at a map of an entire metropolitan area. There was no way to make it hit an individual high-value target.
The way I remember it, all nuclear explosions create a double pulse. The interval between the pulses depends on the size of the explosion. Fission bombs are measured in milliseconds and may not be perceptible to observers; the largest thermonuclear bombs have a delay between pulses of about a second. In an H-bomb, the time between the fission trigger and the fusion reaction is measured in microseconds, so that's not an issue.
The effect is due to the physics of the expanding fireball. The initial reaction directly emits light, which is seen as the first pulse. Right after this, the expanding ball of opaque plasma surrounds the bomb debris, obscuring further light. The plasma itself is hot and bright, however, and as its surface area grows the total emitted light increases again. This is seen as the second pulse.
Except that every time he mentions the word "patent", it is either specified as "software patent", or used in a context that could only mean "software patent".
The patent system didn't cause the collapse of the entire Industrial Revolution due to patent infringement, so it seems more than a bit like crying wolf to assume it will be any more harmful with software.
During much of the Industrial Revolution, there were most likely no more that a few dozen patents per year issued that could potentially affect any particular product. It took over a century to issue the first 1 million patents.
Since software patents are typically very broad, overlapping and non-novel, each one can have a much larger impact than some patent on an improved shoelace. For the shoelace, only a handful of shoe designers have to worry about the patent. In the software case, every single one of the millions of software developers worldwide have to worry.
If RMS's figure is right and 100,000 software patents issue each year, and you assume that a typical patent has about 10 claims, then each and every day you need to check your entire codebase against more than 2700 additional new claims. That's an incredible burden on the software industry; one that has not been proven to be offset by any gains provided by software patents. The worth of software patents is especially questionable given that most of the major innovations in the software field took place either before software patents were allowed or were introduced as free public standards.
That's only true for analog phones. Consumer Reports had an article on this a while back. Digital cellphones have some kind of loophole where they're not actually required to support 911 if they're not registered. The Consumer Reports tests found that many dual-mode phones will automatically chose digital over analog if both are available at a particular location, and then the 911 calls didn't work even if the phone could have made an analog call.
Luckily, I happen to have a couple of ancient analog-only cellphones with the promotional 12-V car adapters they came with (the phones' self-draining NiCd batteries would be useless for this kind of purpose), and I keep them in my cars just for emergencies.
There is one way to help prevent this kind of problem: The bash shell could be modified so that whenever the user attempts to cd into a system directory, the shell should throw up a page of ASCII art that shows a picture of a bunch of gears and cogs. It would prompt the user with a message like "The /tmp directory contains important system files blah blah. Continue (y/N)?" That would probably scare most of them off.
Actually, on the latest SuSE release, just browse into /media/floppy. It just works; no mounting required. To someone who has never used any computer, that would be even more intuitive than "A:\".
The same goes for USB thumb drives. The biggest problem I had with this new feature was letting go of my years of conditioning (including needing to "eject" a plug&play device in Windows) that I had to mount or unmount the device at all.
There's only one way that you can ensure that you maintain complete control of your writings: don't show them to anybody.
Once you've released them, you are at the mercy of others with regards to how much they let you control their use. If they agree with your arguments, then good for you. Otherwise, tough luck.
With copyright, Warner Brothers sells CDs at monopoly pricing of $17.99 each, and the artists still make no significant money from recordings. They only make money off of live performances.
Net effect: a large transfer of money from the public at large into Warner Brother's bank account.
It looks like what they have been doing for this country is to undermine the integrity of our electoral process at the taxpayer's expense. BTW, it's mathematically impossible for them to pay more taxes than they absorb when they sell goods to the government.
The state shouldn't intervene with the marketplace, only a freemarket will bring true equality to all people.
If they want to sell crappy machines that don't work, that's fine. But they can't knowingly do that while at the same time claiming that the machines do work. That's fraud, and that's what they're being sued over.
Any free market depends on the purchasers having access to accurate information about the products. There is no such thing as a free market when the the sellers of the goods are making fraudulent claims about them.