Huh? I thought we Americans were the only ones to drink our beer cold?
The worse the beer tastes, the colder you have to drink it. Most beer produced in high volume in both the US and Australia (note: this list is not exhaustive) taste like shit and must be consumed cold. Of course, warm beer (like actually above room temperature) tastes pretty shitty, too.
Ignoring the overly stiff penalties for a second, he should have ABSOLUTELY been stuck with a felony for putting a laptop in a wiring closet. That is a serious no-no and a felony level crime.
The overly stiff penalties are what characterize a felony. A felony is supposed to be an extremely serious crime. In the US, it comes with the loss of the right to vote, own firearms, take certain jobs, etc. A felon is basically a pariah that is branded as permanently unredeemable to society. The classic felonies are murder, treason, rape, arson, grand theft, and so on.
It is crazy what passes for felonies these days, and putting a laptop in a wiring closet isn't even in the same ballgame as murder or rape. If you can call it a "no-no" without sounding sarcastic, it shouldn't be a felony.
I think I'm not explaining what bugs be well enough. I know that languages and dictionaries are messy. I'm just annoyed (and that's all this is, by the way. It's not some existential crisis to me.) that simple rules like no abbreviations are made complicated by an official Scrabble branded dictionary that contains abbreviations. In the case of a non-official other dictionary, you can disregard proper nouns, abbreviations, etc since they're clearly against the rules. The existence of an official dictionary, however, implies that all of the words contained within it are vetted and ok to play.
Legitimizing certain, seemingly random, exceptions to simple rules (which is pretty much the definition of lawyery!) makes the rules less simple. That's all I'm saying.
My issue is that the exceptions to the excluded words are arbitrary. If you choose a particular spelling (especially different romanizations of Chinese words) of a particular foreign word, there's no saying whether or not it will be in the Scrabble dictionary. Some abbreviations are in the Scrabble dictionary, but not all of them. And so on...
It's the arbitrary nature of the special "allowed" exceptions that I dislike about the Scrabble dictionary. The Scrabble dictionary introduces the "lawyer games" by making the rules arcane instead of simple and straightforward.
That's a pretty decent rule. It's balanced to the point where you wouldn't always want to make the trade. I assume you can only do this on your turn. Does it cost a turn to take it?
So if English has changed since 1938 it's not outrageous to suggest a new distribution/scoring mix. Desire to keep the game "the same" is also understandable, but that would require using a 1938 dictionary and not allowing new words.
It's not even about the actual English language changing. Have you ever seen an official Scrabble dictionary? Utter crap. It's a huge mixture of real English words and a random collection of exceptions to the excluded words (some, but not all, abbreviations, proper nouns, foreign words, nonsense words, misspelled words, etc). The best way to play is with a single real English (or whatever language you're playing with) dictionary.
I'm pretty sure that as long as you did not try to claim that they were Scrabble tiles, and simply sold them simply as lettered tiles with score values, intended generally for assorted home word and spelling games, you'd be fine with regards to IP issues.
There are games other than Scrabble which can make use of such tiles, you know... and some of them aren't even the intellectual property of any company.
You'd probably be fine with regards to IP issues, but I bet you'd have to prove it in court. Probably not worth it, overall. (Which is the point of them taking you to court. It would be worth it for them, overall.)
If people won't seek treatment because it could jeopardize their guns, then they really DO need treatment.
Will it have the opposite effect? I hope not. But if people aren't seeking treatment when they think they need it, regardless of the possible implications for their gun possession, then they're just being stupid.
A gun collection can be extremely expensive. What if seeking help for depression after a personal tragedy meant that you'd have your vintage car collection confiscated. Would that mean that you "really DO need treatment"?
Due to realistic constraints on energy requirements for space vehicles, the best you are looking at for reaching a distant star system is a couple of years of local starship time, at some significant fraction of c, but considerably less than 99%. (Probably closer to 20 to 40% c, at best, assuming a crazy powerful engine.)
At relativistic velocities, every tiny hydrogen atom in front of the ship floating listlessly in space suddenly becomes a high energy alpha particle, and every electron becomes a high energy beta particle. This means the ship needs absurd amounts of radiation shielding to make the trip feasible.
At those speeds, the vacuum of space starts to look like a thick sea of fuel and Bussard ramjets start to really make sense. This would also largely solve the issue of shielding.
Making a good mold is tricky. If the tolerances on 3D printers are good enough, having them to make molds would be a great boon to small scale manufacturing.
Part of the reason of the decline in the DIY movement in ham radio is the obsolescence of through-hole parts for RF circuitry.
I don't really see where all of the hate for SMT comes from. Through-hole is great for your first little flashing LED kits and certain high power gear, but SMT isn't really much harder work with. Once you're comfortable with it, you are able to design much more complex circuits and lay them out much more easily. You also have access to an enormous stock of ICs for every purpose, simplifying circuit design even more.
I think that SMT is a godsend to radio amateurs. Most of my experimentation is in smallish portable radios and SMDs allow me to make powerful equipment in a reasonable size and weight.
Any post starting with the phrase "According to Wikipedia" ought to be insta-modded into the dirt.
The Wikipedia is not a reference source for facts. It is a reference source for what the currently prevailing opinion is, in regards to the facts.
Wikipedia is actually a pretty good source for facts (dates, places, etc). It's interpretation of those facts where opinion comes into play and it falls flat.
You're not correct here. Go read the ToS on their site. The old ToS (the one currently in use) doesn't include "sub-licensable". I don't know why people keep talking about them back-tracking and going back to their old ToS. Nothing has changed. They're still adding the "sub-licensable" term.
Instagram does NOT claim ANY ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post on or through the Instagram Services. By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content not shared publicly ("private") will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services.
Instagram does not claim ownership of any Content that you post on or through the Service. Instead, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service, subject to the Service's Privacy Policy, available here http://instagram.com/legal/privacy/, including but not limited to sections 3 ("Sharing of Your Information"), 4 ("How We Store Your Information"), and 5 ("Your Choices About Your Information"). You can choose who can view your Content and activities, including your photos, as described in the Privacy Policy.
The replicants in Blade Runner were of the Nexus-6 series. I'm assuming UID 2919 has been engineered to live a little longer (given the low UID, he must be older than four).
No, it's the "we would build a perfectly good engine, then not use it when it makes the most sense so that I can win an argument on Slashdot." argument.
But that isn't the case. Nuclear rocket engines have high Isp and low thrust. It only makes sense to use them as an upper stage, in space. Turning them on in the atmosphere would just waste fuel. As an upper stage engine, the reactor would be cold until the rocket was in space ("when it makes the most sense").
If the original content doesn't have any value to you, why do you want it in the first place?
The value was added by the pirates, who went to the trouble of removing those things.
The pirates did not add anything to the content. Thus if the entire value to you is in the additions the pirates made, then we're back at the original content having no value.
The pirates added value by removing the offending bits. A cake full of razor blades has no value to me. It may look delicious, but I don't want to fuck with it. If someone were to take a large magnet and remove the razor blades, the cake would now have value to me, even though they technically added nothing.
In your case, you are removing the razors yourself. It really is a trivial process, but some people are too lazy or don't know how. We can criticize them for not paying for the cake and de-razoring it themselves (and I dislike my metaphor now for equating copyright infringement to stealing... I really didn't intend to carry it this far), but you can't hold those that put razors into otherwise fine cakes faultless.
One problem, as I understand it: a projectile launched from a big space gun would need to have its orbit adjusted or it will return to Earth. The video mentioned this issue briefly
All gun schemes mention this 'briefly', if they mention it at all (most don't) - mostly in hopes that nobody will notice. The mass of the engines and fuel needed to circularize the orbit dominates the payload, and is *very* difficult to make resistant to the shock and acceleration. It's pretty much a showstopper all by itself, without even mentioning the need for (the currently non-existent) heat shielding needed to protect the payload on ascent. As the vehicle bleeds off energy to atmospheric drag and gravitational forces as it coasts upward, it has to leave the muzzle of the gun at considerably more than orbital velocity... essentialy exposing the payload to re-entry conditions at launch.
That's a feature, not a bug. A layer of heat shielding would cover the nose of the projectile, allowing it to survive ascent. During ascent, however, the shield would be ablated. If the projectile is not captured before it deorbits, it vaporizes on reentry.
After the construction of the gun, each launch is relatively cheap. The high G forces experienced by the payload would exclude using a gun for fragile materials. It's a perfect system for putting lots of dead mass into orbit cheaply, though (water, soil, construction supplies).
You mean an electrolysis tank and a power source? Ok, granted there's some engineering to do there but considering the kinds of engineering that would go into building a spacecraft, it's a pretty trivial amount.
Screw the power source. Panels and reactors are light enough to get up there through traditional means (and with fewer Gs and less chance of damage to them). The water is the heavy part. Just lob tanks of water up there, one after another, and capture them in orbit.
Almost everyone on Google Talk. If you use Google Talk and don't set up SRV records pointing to Google's server for XMPP, other Google Talk users can talk to you, but other XMPP users can't.
I don't understand. Can you elaborate on this?
Why would you set up SRV records pointing at Google's server instead of running your own server and using s2s to talk to Google's server? The latter configuration seems to be how XMPP was designed to work and will allow federation with any other server.
I even have my own domain's Jabber setup ready to roll if it comes to it.
If you have your own domain and a Jabber server on it, you can easily allow server-to-server communication. Mine is federated with Google's (and others), so I can use my local account to keep in touch with people using Google's chat services without having to keep a Google account active.
Right, not counting all of the magic hocus-pocus stuff he did, because he wasn't, really, right?
You mean become enlightened? Just like Jesus and all of the others, the Buddha was just a righteous dude with some good ideas. Too bad all of the troglodytes surrounding them think it's more important to worship them as gods than listen to a word they had to say.
The reason that the metric system is better than the imperial system is because of its advantages in scientific and industrial applications. And so the reason that the US should adopt the metric system is so that future scientists and engineers have an intuitive feel for the units.
In scientific and industrial settings, though, metric is the standard used in the US. I may not have an intuitive feel for kilometers or kilograms, but millimeters, grams, and degrees Celsius feel more natural than the US alternatives. It didn't take long at all to develop this, either.
Sadly, those all look like industry jobs. As I'm (recently) becoming disillusioned with academia, however, I'm enjoying poking through the possibilities. Thanks!
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? I thought we Americans were the only ones to drink our beer cold?
The worse the beer tastes, the colder you have to drink it. Most beer produced in high volume in both the US and Australia (note: this list is not exhaustive) taste like shit and must be consumed cold. Of course, warm beer (like actually above room temperature) tastes pretty shitty, too.
Ignoring the overly stiff penalties for a second, he should have ABSOLUTELY been stuck with a felony for putting a laptop in a wiring closet. That is a serious no-no and a felony level crime.
The overly stiff penalties are what characterize a felony. A felony is supposed to be an extremely serious crime. In the US, it comes with the loss of the right to vote, own firearms, take certain jobs, etc. A felon is basically a pariah that is branded as permanently unredeemable to society. The classic felonies are murder, treason, rape, arson, grand theft, and so on.
It is crazy what passes for felonies these days, and putting a laptop in a wiring closet isn't even in the same ballgame as murder or rape. If you can call it a "no-no" without sounding sarcastic, it shouldn't be a felony.
I think I'm not explaining what bugs be well enough. I know that languages and dictionaries are messy. I'm just annoyed (and that's all this is, by the way. It's not some existential crisis to me.) that simple rules like no abbreviations are made complicated by an official Scrabble branded dictionary that contains abbreviations. In the case of a non-official other dictionary, you can disregard proper nouns, abbreviations, etc since they're clearly against the rules. The existence of an official dictionary, however, implies that all of the words contained within it are vetted and ok to play.
Legitimizing certain, seemingly random, exceptions to simple rules (which is pretty much the definition of lawyery!) makes the rules less simple. That's all I'm saying.
My issue is that the exceptions to the excluded words are arbitrary. If you choose a particular spelling (especially different romanizations of Chinese words) of a particular foreign word, there's no saying whether or not it will be in the Scrabble dictionary. Some abbreviations are in the Scrabble dictionary, but not all of them. And so on...
It's the arbitrary nature of the special "allowed" exceptions that I dislike about the Scrabble dictionary. The Scrabble dictionary introduces the "lawyer games" by making the rules arcane instead of simple and straightforward.
That's a pretty decent rule. It's balanced to the point where you wouldn't always want to make the trade. I assume you can only do this on your turn. Does it cost a turn to take it?
So if English has changed since 1938 it's not outrageous to suggest a new distribution/scoring mix. Desire to keep the game "the same" is also understandable, but that would require using a 1938 dictionary and not allowing new words.
It's not even about the actual English language changing. Have you ever seen an official Scrabble dictionary? Utter crap. It's a huge mixture of real English words and a random collection of exceptions to the excluded words (some, but not all, abbreviations, proper nouns, foreign words, nonsense words, misspelled words, etc). The best way to play is with a single real English (or whatever language you're playing with) dictionary.
I'm pretty sure that as long as you did not try to claim that they were Scrabble tiles, and simply sold them simply as lettered tiles with score values, intended generally for assorted home word and spelling games, you'd be fine with regards to IP issues.
There are games other than Scrabble which can make use of such tiles, you know... and some of them aren't even the intellectual property of any company.
You'd probably be fine with regards to IP issues, but I bet you'd have to prove it in court. Probably not worth it, overall. (Which is the point of them taking you to court. It would be worth it for them, overall.)
If people won't seek treatment because it could jeopardize their guns, then they really DO need treatment.
Will it have the opposite effect? I hope not. But if people aren't seeking treatment when they think they need it, regardless of the possible implications for their gun possession, then they're just being stupid.
A gun collection can be extremely expensive. What if seeking help for depression after a personal tragedy meant that you'd have your vintage car collection confiscated. Would that mean that you "really DO need treatment"?
You have obviously never been shot with body armor on. It's not paintball.
Posted by a guy named crakbone, too. He's not joking around!
Due to realistic constraints on energy requirements for space vehicles, the best you are looking at for reaching a distant star system is a couple of years of local starship time, at some significant fraction of c, but considerably less than 99%. (Probably closer to 20 to 40% c, at best, assuming a crazy powerful engine.)
At relativistic velocities, every tiny hydrogen atom in front of the ship floating listlessly in space suddenly becomes a high energy alpha particle, and every electron becomes a high energy beta particle. This means the ship needs absurd amounts of radiation shielding to make the trip feasible.
At those speeds, the vacuum of space starts to look like a thick sea of fuel and Bussard ramjets start to really make sense. This would also largely solve the issue of shielding.
Making a good mold is tricky. If the tolerances on 3D printers are good enough, having them to make molds would be a great boon to small scale manufacturing.
Part of the reason of the decline in the DIY movement in ham radio is the obsolescence of through-hole parts for RF circuitry.
I don't really see where all of the hate for SMT comes from. Through-hole is great for your first little flashing LED kits and certain high power gear, but SMT isn't really much harder work with. Once you're comfortable with it, you are able to design much more complex circuits and lay them out much more easily. You also have access to an enormous stock of ICs for every purpose, simplifying circuit design even more.
I think that SMT is a godsend to radio amateurs. Most of my experimentation is in smallish portable radios and SMDs allow me to make powerful equipment in a reasonable size and weight.
Any post starting with the phrase "According to Wikipedia" ought to be insta-modded into the dirt.
The Wikipedia is not a reference source for facts. It is a reference source for what the currently prevailing opinion is, in regards to the facts.
Wikipedia is actually a pretty good source for facts (dates, places, etc). It's interpretation of those facts where opinion comes into play and it falls flat.
You're not correct here. Go read the ToS on their site. The old ToS (the one currently in use) doesn't include "sub-licensable". I don't know why people keep talking about them back-tracking and going back to their old ToS. Nothing has changed. They're still adding the "sub-licensable" term.
Here's their old ToS:
Instagram does NOT claim ANY ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post on or through the Instagram Services. By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content not shared publicly ("private") will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services.
The new ToS does include "sub-licensible":
the new, updated ToS:
Instagram does not claim ownership of any Content that you post on or through the Service. Instead, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service, subject to the Service's Privacy Policy, available here http://instagram.com/legal/privacy/, including but not limited to sections 3 ("Sharing of Your Information"), 4 ("How We Store Your Information"), and 5 ("Your Choices About Your Information"). You can choose who can view your Content and activities, including your photos, as described in the Privacy Policy.
The replicants in Blade Runner were of the Nexus-6 series. I'm assuming UID 2919 has been engineered to live a little longer (given the low UID, he must be older than four).
No, it's the "we would build a perfectly good engine, then not use it when it makes the most sense so that I can win an argument on Slashdot." argument.
But that isn't the case. Nuclear rocket engines have high Isp and low thrust. It only makes sense to use them as an upper stage, in space. Turning them on in the atmosphere would just waste fuel. As an upper stage engine, the reactor would be cold until the rocket was in space ("when it makes the most sense").
If it has ads and/or drm, it doesn't have value.
If the original content doesn't have any value to you, why do you want it in the first place?
The value was added by the pirates, who went to the trouble of removing those things.
The pirates did not add anything to the content. Thus if the entire value to you is in the additions the pirates made, then we're back at the original content having no value.
The pirates added value by removing the offending bits. A cake full of razor blades has no value to me. It may look delicious, but I don't want to fuck with it. If someone were to take a large magnet and remove the razor blades, the cake would now have value to me, even though they technically added nothing.
In your case, you are removing the razors yourself. It really is a trivial process, but some people are too lazy or don't know how. We can criticize them for not paying for the cake and de-razoring it themselves (and I dislike my metaphor now for equating copyright infringement to stealing... I really didn't intend to carry it this far), but you can't hold those that put razors into otherwise fine cakes faultless.
All gun schemes mention this 'briefly', if they mention it at all (most don't) - mostly in hopes that nobody will notice. The mass of the engines and fuel needed to circularize the orbit dominates the payload, and is *very* difficult to make resistant to the shock and acceleration. It's pretty much a showstopper all by itself, without even mentioning the need for (the currently non-existent) heat shielding needed to protect the payload on ascent. As the vehicle bleeds off energy to atmospheric drag and gravitational forces as it coasts upward, it has to leave the muzzle of the gun at considerably more than orbital velocity... essentialy exposing the payload to re-entry conditions at launch.
That's a feature, not a bug. A layer of heat shielding would cover the nose of the projectile, allowing it to survive ascent. During ascent, however, the shield would be ablated. If the projectile is not captured before it deorbits, it vaporizes on reentry.
After the construction of the gun, each launch is relatively cheap. The high G forces experienced by the payload would exclude using a gun for fragile materials. It's a perfect system for putting lots of dead mass into orbit cheaply, though (water, soil, construction supplies).
a whole bunch of magical technology to do so?
You mean an electrolysis tank and a power source? Ok, granted there's some engineering to do there but considering the kinds of engineering that would go into building a spacecraft, it's a pretty trivial amount.
Screw the power source. Panels and reactors are light enough to get up there through traditional means (and with fewer Gs and less chance of damage to them). The water is the heavy part. Just lob tanks of water up there, one after another, and capture them in orbit.
Geez, you're really pushing the old Android phone thing pretty hard. Did a raspberry eat your mother or something?
I don't have an old Android phone. What now, o' wise one?
Almost everyone on Google Talk. If you use Google Talk and don't set up SRV records pointing to Google's server for XMPP, other Google Talk users can talk to you, but other XMPP users can't.
I don't understand. Can you elaborate on this?
Why would you set up SRV records pointing at Google's server instead of running your own server and using s2s to talk to Google's server? The latter configuration seems to be how XMPP was designed to work and will allow federation with any other server.
I even have my own domain's Jabber setup ready to roll if it comes to it.
If you have your own domain and a Jabber server on it, you can easily allow server-to-server communication. Mine is federated with Google's (and others), so I can use my local account to keep in touch with people using Google's chat services without having to keep a Google account active.
He was a mortal man like you and I
Right, not counting all of the magic hocus-pocus stuff he did, because he wasn't, really, right?
You mean become enlightened? Just like Jesus and all of the others, the Buddha was just a righteous dude with some good ideas. Too bad all of the troglodytes surrounding them think it's more important to worship them as gods than listen to a word they had to say.
The reason that the metric system is better than the imperial system is because of its advantages in scientific and industrial applications. And so the reason that the US should adopt the metric system is so that future scientists and engineers have an intuitive feel for the units.
In scientific and industrial settings, though, metric is the standard used in the US. I may not have an intuitive feel for kilometers or kilograms, but millimeters, grams, and degrees Celsius feel more natural than the US alternatives. It didn't take long at all to develop this, either.
*ahem* ;)
Sadly, those all look like industry jobs. As I'm (recently) becoming disillusioned with academia, however, I'm enjoying poking through the possibilities. Thanks!