Although I would argue that, properly secured, the reverse would eventually be true: that paper ballots would be easier to tamper with than electronic ones.
If by "properly secured" you mean that I get to examine every chip in the voting machines and vote counting machines with an electron microscope then yeah, I'd agree.
But since that's never going to happen, the only important fact is that unlike paper, computers can be programmed to lie. Computers can even be programmed to lie about the fact that they're programmed to lie.
If you think you have a rootkit on your computer, the only way to be sure you've gotten rid of it is to reformat and reinstall from scratch - and even if you do that, you're still forced to trust that none of your hardware manufacturers or operating system programmers are working for the rootkit authors. For my home PC that trust is sufficient, but I would never want to hand democracy over to some "trusted" companies and neither should you.
Nobody thinks paper ballots are "foolproof" - that's a strawman argument. They're just a lot harder to tamper with en masse than electronic ballots, and people are better at understanding and guarding against the tampering. If a "voting machine" was a Diebold employee who took your paper ballot, wrote down a copy of your votes without letting you see the copy, then shredded the original, you'd be up in arms against the possibility for corruption and fraud... but that's essentially a *better* system than what's happening with electronic ballots, because it would be easier to subvert a few human voting machine programmers than it would be to subvert hundreds of thousands of "human voting machines".
If you let people cast votes without enforcing that they do so in total privacy, it makes it possible for others to demand to see those votes if they've got enough leverage to commit blackmail or enough money to commit bribery. Also, if your ballot has both your name and your vote on it, it makes it possible for the vote counters to report that fact to whoever you voted against.
Maybe those are tolerable problems. But if we don't care about having a perfectly secret ballot, why make it a physical ballot at all? If you reduce the anonymity requirements, secure electronic voting becomes trivial. You go to the polling website, you vote, and you save a copy of your ballot as well as an encrypted copy of your unique voter ID (e.g. your full name + voter registration number, whose encryption you can doublecheck yourself using the public key). The website then publishes to the public an alphabetically sorted list of unencrypted voter IDs, as well as a numerically sorted list of encrypted IDs with their corresponding ballots.
If you're worried that your vote got changed, you download the list of encrypted IDs and doublecheck your vote yourself. If you're worried that the votes weren't counted correctly, you download the lists of IDs and count them yourself. If you're worried that nonvoters were fraudulently added to the list, you look some random names up in the phone book and call to ask them if they really voted. Fraud is still possible, but it's always detectable.
Of course, I wouldn't ever want this system to be implemented - one of the safeguards of democracy is the secret ballot which makes it impossible for an elected official to retaliate against someone who voted against him. (As an aside, that's an unintended danger of transparency in campaign financing too...) Anyway, since that secrecy is lost to a similar extent when we use mail-in ballots; why not get even more verifiability and convenience out of it in exchange?
This actually happens, as the increase in temperature causing ground soil to give up more C02. This is why it is an accelerating trend.
That's right - although I seem to recall decreased solubility of CO2 in the oceans being a bigger positive feedback problem.
That trend ends at Venus.
No, it doesn't. There is negative feedback in the system as well as positive, and based on what we know about CO2 concentrations and temperatures through prehistory, the negative feedback should keep global temperatures down to about 10 Celsius (18 degrees for Americans) hotter than the present day no matter what we might plausibly do to CO2 levels. That would be hot enough to be the biggest disaster in human history, but it's not going to sterilize the planet.
Until we stop putting out CO2 or the species dies off, plunging the earth into a permanent ice age.
Not likely. For one thing, an orbital sunshade would be easier to deactivate than it was to activate in the first place. If the CO2 levels start to drop (which won't happen until a very long time after we start putting the stuff out), we could always deliberately reduce or remove the shade.
For another, you don't even have to make much of an effort to steer something out of L-1 orbit - it's unstable. Anything that's orbiting at L-1 quickly gets perturbed a little ways away, at which point the instability of the orbital dynamics pushes it further away, and further, until it's not between the Earth and Sun at all. These things are supposed to use light pressure for orbital corrections; it wouldn't be hard to put a "dead-man's switch" into the correction systems that says "If you don't receive this coded transmission from Earth every year, leave L-1 orbit".
In any case, except for the R&D expense this idea certainly beats out our current inadvertent sunlight-reduction policy of "everybody spit lots of particulate pollutants into the air". Stepping up that policy could work too, and the direct costs of implementing it would be less than nothing, but the indirect costs like medical bills are hard to quantify, and unlike satellites, once you've released pollutants they rarely follow any further orders.
Not one metion of whether Saddam is a Mac, Windows or Linux user. Dammit/., what gives!
On the one hand, America used Saddam all the time years ago but is rightfully ashamed of that history now, which is awfully similar to how I feel about Windows, so it's tempting to say Saddam's a Windows user.
But then again, we know that Saddam likes palaces that use paper-thin marble facades and gold plating to hide cheap material underneath. If that doesn't scream "pre-OS X Mac user", I don't know what does - and Saddam's certainly unpopular enough to be a modern Mac user too.
In the wake of this trial, though, I think that what stands out most about Saddam is that he spent decades being a sadistic bastard to everyone but his inner circle; then after being beaten down in the early 90s he made an attempt to put on a cooperative, friendly face in recent years, a transparent attempt which nobody believed. That's the clear mark of a Unix man.
We had unregulated medicine. Throughout the 19th century. And what did we get? A bunch of traveling quacks with patent syrup. And very little real healing for anybody.
And if you think unregulated medicine was bad, you should have seen what the unregulated computer industry was like back then!
Seriously, you're comparing two time periods separated by hundreds of years of biological and medical research, and you think government regulation is the most important distinguishing factor? It sounds like you've been drinking a little too much of the patent syrup yourself...
I miss some programs like this, there is also avi splitter to grab something out of an avi (mpeg4 content I think it works best with) without reencoding. Are there any equivlents for linux?
This is what I started using instead of VirtualDub:
I don't know if they do auto commercial detection yet, but there's at least some "next black frame", "previous black frame" buttons that make manual commercial deletion easy.
I also seem to remember that they can't split without encoding unless the parts you're cutting out correspond to keyframes; if you try to cut a segment that ends on a random non-keyframe, it'll have to do a tiny bit of reencoding to turn the first non-cut image into a new keyframe and to encode the following few images up until the next old keyframe.
is that there are still some of us left with unreduced libidos, who are capable of stepping up and picking up the slack. I'm willing to score with your girlfriend or with any other attractive women who share her problem, working round the clock if that's the kind of unflagging effort necessary to keep up the American birthrate.
No need to thank me. The chance to service my country is all the thanks I need.
I mean, did you ever really think that the Republican Congress would not pass acts enabling wiretapping and dismantling oversight, enabling torture and disabling oversight, enabling arbitrary arrests, and disabling oversight.
Well, call me naive, but I didn't think so. To legally enable wiretapping without judical oversight, they would need a supermajority to repeal or cripple the Fourth Amendment, and they wouldn't have had it. To legally enable torture, they would need a supermajority to repeal or cripple the Eighth Amendment, and they wouldn't have had it. To legally enable arbitrary incarceration without due process, they would need a supermajority to repeal or cripple the Fifth and Sixth Amendments (and part of Article I), and they wouldn't have had it.
I should have realized that passing more Constitutional amendments isn't the Federal M.O. anymore. If you want to pass an unconstitutional law, you don't bother to change the Constitution, you just pass the law and see if you can slip it by the Supreme Court. The Supremes tend to be bigger sticklers about some rules (like the First Amendment) than others (like the forgotten Tenth Amendment), but even if they overturn your law, these days the voters are less likely to get mad at the legislators who vote for unconstituional laws than at the "activist judges" who notice.
I don't get what this has to do with the DMCA...I mean, I think the DMCA is as much a piece of crap as everyone else, but Comedy Central would still have the right to force YouTube to take the content down even without the DMCA. It's just a copyright law violation.
The DMCA isn't all about "no circumventing futile copy protection attempts" and "no telling other people how to circumvent futile copy protection attempts" - this is actually about the good part of the DMCA.
You're right that this would have been a copyright law violation without the DMCA - and YouTube might have been in some serious trouble over it. It's YouTube's servers that were making countless copies of the Colbert Report segments and sending them out, after all. So what is YouTube supposed to do? They can't look at every single user-uploaded video clip and try to match it against every one of the millions of copyrighted works it might be a copy or derivative of. They'd never succeed, and they'd eventually go down in court harder than Napster 1.0. It wouldn't just be YouTube, either - ISPs who run web servers for copyright infringing users' content, maybe even just ISPs who provide bandwidth for infringing users' uploads might have become legal targets.
Part of the DMCA gives service providers a way out. If you want to help someone publish on the internet, but you want to avoid being liable for assisting them if it turns out that what they publish infringes on a copyright, you register an agent with the Copyright office, that agent responds to legal "takedown" notices and counter-notices, and so long as you do basically what YouTube is doing now (give your users a chance to rebut the copyright claim, and keep their material offline unless they do) you're in the clear.
It's not a perfect law, but if all new internet legislation made this much sense I'd feel quite a bit better about the US Congress. How this got stuck in the same bill as the "you can't decrypt the movies you bought" BS, I have no idea.
My interpretation of the top post was that it claimed Yuri Gagarin was the first *nerd* in space (because any astronaut is likely to be a bit of a nerd), whereas Dr. Simonyi would be the first *geek* in space (using the distinct "computer geek" associations of that word); so I was trying to point out that even if you change "nerd" to a restrictively defined "geek" the statement about Dr. Simonyi wouldn't be true. Your interpretation's more reasonable, though; now I feel illiterate.
According to The Fine Article, the "first nerd in space" moniker is actually Dr. Simonyi's speculation about himself, not just the mistake of some clueless reporter - in fact the reporter mentioned three previous nerdy space tourists. My mind boggles - surely before deciding to spend millions of dollars on this trip, Dr. Simonyi thought to learn a little about his predecessors?
Of course the presence of oil on another body would show that life once existed there. What book have you read that said that oil can be created in any manner other than through decomposing biological material?
How about "Dissociation of Methane into Hydrocarbons at. Extreme (Planetary) Pressure and Temperature.", by F. Ancilotto, G. L. Chiarotti, S. Scandolo, and E. Tosatti, in the February 28, 1997 issue of Science? Their molecular dynamics simulations show that methane is likely to breakdown into a mixture including ethane, butane, and even alkanes (i.e. oil) at the high pressures and temperatures found deep within the interiors of Neptune and Uranus. No living organisms involved.
Let me guess, you probably think that oil is an infinite resource that magically renews itself.
Even when you feel certain that you're right, you should try to be more polite about it just in case you're wrong. Otherwise people may end up giving your opinions the same disdain you've shown to others.
It sounds like you saw the topic, immediately thought "abiotic oil nutjob", and hurried to wail on him. However, just because you recognize the biological history of oil on Earth doesn't mean you have to jump to the conclusion that no other processes operate elsewhere. Take that attitude too far and you'll end up trying to find the alien messages in pulsars.
Yes, they do: specifically, Chinese society values free speech, which is why the Chinese government has to take extreme effort when they want to suppress it. If Chinese society didn't value free speech, as you seem to want to imply, there would be no need for laws limiting speech because Chinese citizens would restrict themselves.
I read, "Are we inadvertently getting closer to software that can understand us by killing the seed of telemarketers who need to know when I'm upset that they just interrupted my dinner?"
Which depending on your definition of "seed" may be going too far. I'm all in favor of sterilizing telemarketers, but once they've actually mated killing the resulting progeny would be wrong.
I thought they kept the humans in the matrix because if you didn't stimulate the human mind, then it would shut down and thats how the machines lost crops of people.
Exactly, because some of the software that the computers run on is actually executing on the hardware of the human brain, which you have to keep in good shape. That's why they have to use humans, too, because that's the animal with the most advanced brain; if they were just extracting energy then, in addition to the thermodynamics problems, they'd save themselves a lot of trouble by raising crops of cows instead.
I know, I know, you recall seeing The Matrix, and you're pretty sure there was something in it about using humans for energy, and you want to figure out how that makes any kind of sense. Trust me: just forget about it, fast forward through that section in the future while recalling the less irrational alternative explanation I've given above, and let your ensuing cognitive dissonance work it's magic. Voila, the movie's fixed!
In The Matrix, the computers used a cheap form of fusion for energy; what they were keeping humans in jars for was the subconscious processing power of human brains. You've probably got a copy of the movie which, like mine, inexplicably skips ahead when Morpheus is explaining all this; but trust me, that's the only way the plot could go which could make thermodynamic sense.
Man, The Matrix was the best sci-fi movie ever, without a single gaping flaw. I hope they make a sequel someday.
Anyone willing to take another chance at the death penalty?
Well now you're just comparing apples and oranges.
In Jesus' case, the world's only superpower had an army occupying the Middle East, was so unpopular among the natives that it felt the need to crack down hard on any sign of rebellion, and thus ended up regularly torturing and murdering suspected insurgents. Sometimes it based those suspicions on nothing more than the accusations of grudge-bearing local leaders, and it justified that torture and death by pointing out the enemies' apocalyptic religious fanaticism. Obviously in such a situation Rome was going to make a few mistakes in whom they killed, but Americans are good students of history and would never let their own country be so reckless!
Yes, I can. It is specifically allowed by the legal definition of fair use.
The factors to be considered for fair use include:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Google definitely loses on (1) and (2). They may or may not have found a loophole in (3). It looks bad because their "portion used" is the entire book, but it may help that they take measures to prevent any one customer from seeing more than a few pages. Of course, once people start successfully circumventing those measures, (4) goes right out the window too: every book publisher's nightmare is to see PDFs of their books popping up next to MP3s on the filesharing search engines.
Have you seen any of the constitutional amendments they've been trying to pass lately? Have you seen how close some of the anti-freedom votes have been? I'd frankly feel safer if the amendment process required modern politicians to build a time machine and get John Hancock's signature first.
Otherwise you have to figure in the opportunity cost of not investing that $9K. Even in CDs you can get about 3% on that, which means you can withdraw more than $580 a year from it for 20 years, not just $450; that works out to over $0.11 per kWh. As alternative power plant designs become more durable, this kind of calculation becomes more important: a $9,000 windmill that produces 5,000 kWh/year for infinity years instead of twenty sounds like it will produce free energy, but that "free" will really cost you more than $0.05 per kWh when you do the math.
The electric companies factor these sorts of costs into their bill when they build a new power plant. If you don't do the same, you might think you're successfully competing with them when you're really just tricking yourself.
How long do you think that straight track would have to be to obviate the need for high-g payloads?
Shorter than a ring with the same g requirements. If you have a ring of radius r and you want to launch a payload at velocity v, then the "g force" on the payload will be at least centrifugal acceleration, v^2/r. If you stretch that out into a straight track of length 2*pi*r and you want to launch a payload at velocity v, then you need acceleration a such that v = a*t and 2*pi*r = a*t^2/2 = v^2/2a, so you need a = v^2 / (4*pi*r), an order of magnitude less force. You can try to cheat by making the straight track length 2*r instead, so it wouldn't just be as long as the ring it would fit inside the ring entirely, and the straight track would still have lower acceleration requirements.
The only reason I can see for using a circular track is to cut the power requirements - that centrifugal acceleration is all perpendicular to your velocity, so it doesn't directly cost you any energy. With a linear track every bit of acceleration costs power, and trying to add 20,000 m/s^2 to an 8,000 m/s payload should cost you at least 160 megawatts per kilogram. It might be nice to add that kinetic energy more gradually.
Of course, maybe I'm just doing my math wrong. v^2/r at v = 7,800 m/s and r = 1,000 m gives you over 6,000 g's, not 2,000. Did I get something wrong or did the article?
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Although I would argue that, properly secured, the reverse would eventually be true: that paper ballots would be easier to tamper with than electronic ones.
If by "properly secured" you mean that I get to examine every chip in the voting machines and vote counting machines with an electron microscope then yeah, I'd agree.
But since that's never going to happen, the only important fact is that unlike paper, computers can be programmed to lie. Computers can even be programmed to lie about the fact that they're programmed to lie.
If you think you have a rootkit on your computer, the only way to be sure you've gotten rid of it is to reformat and reinstall from scratch - and even if you do that, you're still forced to trust that none of your hardware manufacturers or operating system programmers are working for the rootkit authors. For my home PC that trust is sufficient, but I would never want to hand democracy over to some "trusted" companies and neither should you.
Nobody thinks paper ballots are "foolproof" - that's a strawman argument. They're just a lot harder to tamper with en masse than electronic ballots, and people are better at understanding and guarding against the tampering. If a "voting machine" was a Diebold employee who took your paper ballot, wrote down a copy of your votes without letting you see the copy, then shredded the original, you'd be up in arms against the possibility for corruption and fraud... but that's essentially a *better* system than what's happening with electronic ballots, because it would be easier to subvert a few human voting machine programmers than it would be to subvert hundreds of thousands of "human voting machines".
If you let people cast votes without enforcing that they do so in total privacy, it makes it possible for others to demand to see those votes if they've got enough leverage to commit blackmail or enough money to commit bribery. Also, if your ballot has both your name and your vote on it, it makes it possible for the vote counters to report that fact to whoever you voted against.
Maybe those are tolerable problems. But if we don't care about having a perfectly secret ballot, why make it a physical ballot at all? If you reduce the anonymity requirements, secure electronic voting becomes trivial. You go to the polling website, you vote, and you save a copy of your ballot as well as an encrypted copy of your unique voter ID (e.g. your full name + voter registration number, whose encryption you can doublecheck yourself using the public key). The website then publishes to the public an alphabetically sorted list of unencrypted voter IDs, as well as a numerically sorted list of encrypted IDs with their corresponding ballots.
If you're worried that your vote got changed, you download the list of encrypted IDs and doublecheck your vote yourself. If you're worried that the votes weren't counted correctly, you download the lists of IDs and count them yourself. If you're worried that nonvoters were fraudulently added to the list, you look some random names up in the phone book and call to ask them if they really voted. Fraud is still possible, but it's always detectable.
Of course, I wouldn't ever want this system to be implemented - one of the safeguards of democracy is the secret ballot which makes it impossible for an elected official to retaliate against someone who voted against him. (As an aside, that's an unintended danger of transparency in campaign financing too...) Anyway, since that secrecy is lost to a similar extent when we use mail-in ballots; why not get even more verifiability and convenience out of it in exchange?
This actually happens, as the increase in temperature causing ground soil to give up more C02. This is why it is an accelerating trend.
That's right - although I seem to recall decreased solubility of CO2 in the oceans being a bigger positive feedback problem.
That trend ends at Venus.
No, it doesn't. There is negative feedback in the system as well as positive, and based on what we know about CO2 concentrations and temperatures through prehistory, the negative feedback should keep global temperatures down to about 10 Celsius (18 degrees for Americans) hotter than the present day no matter what we might plausibly do to CO2 levels. That would be hot enough to be the biggest disaster in human history, but it's not going to sterilize the planet.
Until we stop putting out CO2 or the species dies off, plunging the earth into a permanent ice age.
Not likely. For one thing, an orbital sunshade would be easier to deactivate than it was to activate in the first place. If the CO2 levels start to drop (which won't happen until a very long time after we start putting the stuff out), we could always deliberately reduce or remove the shade.
For another, you don't even have to make much of an effort to steer something out of L-1 orbit - it's unstable. Anything that's orbiting at L-1 quickly gets perturbed a little ways away, at which point the instability of the orbital dynamics pushes it further away, and further, until it's not between the Earth and Sun at all. These things are supposed to use light pressure for orbital corrections; it wouldn't be hard to put a "dead-man's switch" into the correction systems that says "If you don't receive this coded transmission from Earth every year, leave L-1 orbit".
In any case, except for the R&D expense this idea certainly beats out our current inadvertent sunlight-reduction policy of "everybody spit lots of particulate pollutants into the air". Stepping up that policy could work too, and the direct costs of implementing it would be less than nothing, but the indirect costs like medical bills are hard to quantify, and unlike satellites, once you've released pollutants they rarely follow any further orders.
Not one metion of whether Saddam is a Mac, Windows or Linux user. Dammit /., what gives!
On the one hand, America used Saddam all the time years ago but is rightfully ashamed of that history now, which is awfully similar to how I feel about Windows, so it's tempting to say Saddam's a Windows user.
But then again, we know that Saddam likes palaces that use paper-thin marble facades and gold plating to hide cheap material underneath. If that doesn't scream "pre-OS X Mac user", I don't know what does - and Saddam's certainly unpopular enough to be a modern Mac user too.
In the wake of this trial, though, I think that what stands out most about Saddam is that he spent decades being a sadistic bastard to everyone but his inner circle; then after being beaten down in the early 90s he made an attempt to put on a cooperative, friendly face in recent years, a transparent attempt which nobody believed. That's the clear mark of a Unix man.
We had unregulated medicine. Throughout the 19th century. And what did we get? A bunch of traveling quacks with patent syrup. And very little real healing for anybody.
And if you think unregulated medicine was bad, you should have seen what the unregulated computer industry was like back then!
Seriously, you're comparing two time periods separated by hundreds of years of biological and medical research, and you think government regulation is the most important distinguishing factor? It sounds like you've been drinking a little too much of the patent syrup yourself...
I miss some programs like this, there is also avi splitter to grab something out of an avi (mpeg4 content I think it works best with) without reencoding. Are there any equivlents for linux?
This is what I started using instead of VirtualDub:
http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/
I don't know if they do auto commercial detection yet, but there's at least some "next black frame", "previous black frame" buttons that make manual commercial deletion easy.
I also seem to remember that they can't split without encoding unless the parts you're cutting out correspond to keyframes; if you try to cut a segment that ends on a random non-keyframe, it'll have to do a tiny bit of reencoding to turn the first non-cut image into a new keyframe and to encode the following few images up until the next old keyframe.
is that there are still some of us left with unreduced libidos, who are capable of stepping up and picking up the slack. I'm willing to score with your girlfriend or with any other attractive women who share her problem, working round the clock if that's the kind of unflagging effort necessary to keep up the American birthrate.
No need to thank me. The chance to service my country is all the thanks I need.
it would have been much better to have a Singularity base system with legacy support via WoW emulator.
That might fix a few Windows kernel bugs, but imagine the hordes of new bug reports you'd see instead:
"I want to start Excel, but it's in the Arathi Highlands and I keep getting PKed by a level 60!"
I mean, did you ever really think that the Republican Congress would not pass acts enabling wiretapping and dismantling oversight, enabling torture and disabling oversight, enabling arbitrary arrests, and disabling oversight.
Well, call me naive, but I didn't think so. To legally enable wiretapping without judical oversight, they would need a supermajority to repeal or cripple the Fourth Amendment, and they wouldn't have had it. To legally enable torture, they would need a supermajority to repeal or cripple the Eighth Amendment, and they wouldn't have had it. To legally enable arbitrary incarceration without due process, they would need a supermajority to repeal or cripple the Fifth and Sixth Amendments (and part of Article I), and they wouldn't have had it.
I should have realized that passing more Constitutional amendments isn't the Federal M.O. anymore. If you want to pass an unconstitutional law, you don't bother to change the Constitution, you just pass the law and see if you can slip it by the Supreme Court. The Supremes tend to be bigger sticklers about some rules (like the First Amendment) than others (like the forgotten Tenth Amendment), but even if they overturn your law, these days the voters are less likely to get mad at the legislators who vote for unconstituional laws than at the "activist judges" who notice.
I don't get what this has to do with the DMCA...I mean, I think the DMCA is as much a piece of crap as everyone else, but Comedy Central would still have the right to force YouTube to take the content down even without the DMCA. It's just a copyright law violation.
The DMCA isn't all about "no circumventing futile copy protection attempts" and "no telling other people how to circumvent futile copy protection attempts" - this is actually about the good part of the DMCA.
You're right that this would have been a copyright law violation without the DMCA - and YouTube might have been in some serious trouble over it. It's YouTube's servers that were making countless copies of the Colbert Report segments and sending them out, after all. So what is YouTube supposed to do? They can't look at every single user-uploaded video clip and try to match it against every one of the millions of copyrighted works it might be a copy or derivative of. They'd never succeed, and they'd eventually go down in court harder than Napster 1.0. It wouldn't just be YouTube, either - ISPs who run web servers for copyright infringing users' content, maybe even just ISPs who provide bandwidth for infringing users' uploads might have become legal targets.
Part of the DMCA gives service providers a way out. If you want to help someone publish on the internet, but you want to avoid being liable for assisting them if it turns out that what they publish infringes on a copyright, you register an agent with the Copyright office, that agent responds to legal "takedown" notices and counter-notices, and so long as you do basically what YouTube is doing now (give your users a chance to rebut the copyright claim, and keep their material offline unless they do) you're in the clear.
It's not a perfect law, but if all new internet legislation made this much sense I'd feel quite a bit better about the US Congress. How this got stuck in the same bill as the "you can't decrypt the movies you bought" BS, I have no idea.
My interpretation of the top post was that it claimed Yuri Gagarin was the first *nerd* in space (because any astronaut is likely to be a bit of a nerd), whereas Dr. Simonyi would be the first *geek* in space (using the distinct "computer geek" associations of that word); so I was trying to point out that even if you change "nerd" to a restrictively defined "geek" the statement about Dr. Simonyi wouldn't be true. Your interpretation's more reasonable, though; now I feel illiterate.
Wouldn't he qualify as first geek in space?
No; he's not even the first geek in space this fall.
According to The Fine Article, the "first nerd in space" moniker is actually Dr. Simonyi's speculation about himself, not just the mistake of some clueless reporter - in fact the reporter mentioned three previous nerdy space tourists. My mind boggles - surely before deciding to spend millions of dollars on this trip, Dr. Simonyi thought to learn a little about his predecessors?
Of course the presence of oil on another body would show that life once existed there. What book have you read that said that oil can be created in any manner other than through decomposing biological material?
How about "Dissociation of Methane into Hydrocarbons at. Extreme (Planetary) Pressure and Temperature.", by F. Ancilotto, G. L. Chiarotti, S. Scandolo, and E. Tosatti, in the February 28, 1997 issue of Science? Their molecular dynamics simulations show that methane is likely to breakdown into a mixture including ethane, butane, and even alkanes (i.e. oil) at the high pressures and temperatures found deep within the interiors of Neptune and Uranus. No living organisms involved.
Let me guess, you probably think that oil is an infinite resource that magically renews itself.
Even when you feel certain that you're right, you should try to be more polite about it just in case you're wrong. Otherwise people may end up giving your opinions the same disdain you've shown to others.
It sounds like you saw the topic, immediately thought "abiotic oil nutjob", and hurried to wail on him. However, just because you recognize the biological history of oil on Earth doesn't mean you have to jump to the conclusion that no other processes operate elsewhere. Take that attitude too far and you'll end up trying to find the alien messages in pulsars.
If it wasn't for the Firefox team, we'd all still be stuck with IE6 and the Internet Explorer team would have had to look for new jobs.
Different societies have different values
Yes, they do: specifically, Chinese society values free speech, which is why the Chinese government has to take extreme effort when they want to suppress it. If Chinese society didn't value free speech, as you seem to want to imply, there would be no need for laws limiting speech because Chinese citizens would restrict themselves.
I read, "Are we inadvertently getting closer to software that can understand us by killing the seed of telemarketers who need to know when I'm upset that they just interrupted my dinner?"
Which depending on your definition of "seed" may be going too far. I'm all in favor of sterilizing telemarketers, but once they've actually mated killing the resulting progeny would be wrong.
I thought they kept the humans in the matrix because if you didn't stimulate the human mind, then it would shut down and thats how the machines lost crops of people.
Exactly, because some of the software that the computers run on is actually executing on the hardware of the human brain, which you have to keep in good shape. That's why they have to use humans, too, because that's the animal with the most advanced brain; if they were just extracting energy then, in addition to the thermodynamics problems, they'd save themselves a lot of trouble by raising crops of cows instead.
I know, I know, you recall seeing The Matrix, and you're pretty sure there was something in it about using humans for energy, and you want to figure out how that makes any kind of sense. Trust me: just forget about it, fast forward through that section in the future while recalling the less irrational alternative explanation I've given above, and let your ensuing cognitive dissonance work it's magic. Voila, the movie's fixed!
In The Matrix, the computers used a cheap form of fusion for energy; what they were keeping humans in jars for was the subconscious processing power of human brains. You've probably got a copy of the movie which, like mine, inexplicably skips ahead when Morpheus is explaining all this; but trust me, that's the only way the plot could go which could make thermodynamic sense.
Man, The Matrix was the best sci-fi movie ever, without a single gaping flaw. I hope they make a sequel someday.
Got it wrong once with Jesus...
Anyone willing to take another chance at the death penalty?
Well now you're just comparing apples and oranges.
In Jesus' case, the world's only superpower had an army occupying the Middle East, was so unpopular among the natives that it felt the need to crack down hard on any sign of rebellion, and thus ended up regularly torturing and murdering suspected insurgents. Sometimes it based those suspicions on nothing more than the accusations of grudge-bearing local leaders, and it justified that torture and death by pointing out the enemies' apocalyptic religious fanaticism. Obviously in such a situation Rome was going to make a few mistakes in whom they killed, but Americans are good students of history and would never let their own country be so reckless!
Yes, I can. It is specifically allowed by the legal definition of fair use.
The factors to be considered for fair use include:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Google definitely loses on (1) and (2). They may or may not have found a loophole in (3). It looks bad because their "portion used" is the entire book, but it may help that they take measures to prevent any one customer from seeing more than a few pages. Of course, once people start successfully circumventing those measures, (4) goes right out the window too: every book publisher's nightmare is to see PDFs of their books popping up next to MP3s on the filesharing search engines.
the constitution is (IMHO) too hard to amend.
Have you seen any of the constitutional amendments they've been trying to pass lately? Have you seen how close some of the anti-freedom votes have been? I'd frankly feel safer if the amendment process required modern politicians to build a time machine and get John Hancock's signature first.
Otherwise you have to figure in the opportunity cost of not investing that $9K. Even in CDs you can get about 3% on that, which means you can withdraw more than $580 a year from it for 20 years, not just $450; that works out to over $0.11 per kWh. As alternative power plant designs become more durable, this kind of calculation becomes more important: a $9,000 windmill that produces 5,000 kWh/year for infinity years instead of twenty sounds like it will produce free energy, but that "free" will really cost you more than $0.05 per kWh when you do the math.
The electric companies factor these sorts of costs into their bill when they build a new power plant. If you don't do the same, you might think you're successfully competing with them when you're really just tricking yourself.
How long do you think that straight track would have to be to obviate the need for high-g payloads?
Shorter than a ring with the same g requirements. If you have a ring of radius r and you want to launch a payload at velocity v, then the "g force" on the payload will be at least centrifugal acceleration, v^2/r. If you stretch that out into a straight track of length 2*pi*r and you want to launch a payload at velocity v, then you need acceleration a such that v = a*t and 2*pi*r = a*t^2/2 = v^2/2a, so you need a = v^2 / (4*pi*r), an order of magnitude less force. You can try to cheat by making the straight track length 2*r instead, so it wouldn't just be as long as the ring it would fit inside the ring entirely, and the straight track would still have lower acceleration requirements.
The only reason I can see for using a circular track is to cut the power requirements - that centrifugal acceleration is all perpendicular to your velocity, so it doesn't directly cost you any energy. With a linear track every bit of acceleration costs power, and trying to add 20,000 m/s^2 to an 8,000 m/s payload should cost you at least 160 megawatts per kilogram. It might be nice to add that kinetic energy more gradually.
Of course, maybe I'm just doing my math wrong. v^2/r at v = 7,800 m/s and r = 1,000 m gives you over 6,000 g's, not 2,000. Did I get something wrong or did the article?
If you're interested, you can read a rundown on the prize-winning work (pdf) provided by the prize organization.
That's still several pages, and while it's all good, there is a more concise description of the COBE observations available.