How often does this happen to you? Evangelicals generally dislike Catholics nearly as much as they dislike atheists. They think that the Catholics aren't even really Christians. If they were old-fashioned enough they'd call them "papists".
Plus a bunch of other legislation that didn't make it past the filibuster, a rather high bar that has now become de rigeur. And a lot of regulatory redesign that doesn't require the Congress, like the EPA deciding to regulate CO2 as a pollutant.
So yeah, I'd say there is a difference in the two parties. Maybe not as big as you'd like, but if you don't see any difference, you're not looking.
Well, besides not being fictional, the big idea is that the thing (potentially) has a negative index of refraction, something not even the fictional lenses do.
Negative refraction is useful in making invisibility shields, by directing light completely around object surrounded by it.
This doesn't go nearly that far; it's a step towards a new way of constructing metamaterials with negative indexes. That's important; the "invisibility" stuff is just press-release science because invisibility is far more interesting than magnetically-controlled metamaterials.
As with so much of science: if you went out there and didn't find it, that would be much bigger news, because it would cast doubt on your present theory.
Confirmation is never as exciting as falsification, but it's good that science isn't all that exciting, or nothing would ever get done. The more confirmations you get, the further you can speculate, with the chance of getting something that can be falsified.
Some Guy In A Blog, apparently. It's attributed to Fumio Ohtsubo, President of Panasonic (under a different, less common spelling) but links to no press releases or speeches.
Ohtsubo did an interview about Panasonic working on a kind of fuel cell/LiIon hybrid battery and making a $1B investment (in 2012!) in home power systems, including solar. Here is a link to an actual reputable news source rather than a blogger with poor reading comprehension skills:
I find this story very perplexing. The Science-Based Medicine article claims that they were getting yes-no answers from him using a toe he could control, but other sources don't seem to mention that part.
If it's true, it should be easy enough to ask, "So, is this facilitated communication actually any good, or just a load of hooey?" and get a direct, unfacilitated answer. If he gives an unambiguous yes, then FC is validated and you get the rest out that way.
From what I've heard the FC seems extremely dubious, in this case as in all of the others. The inconsistencies in the story contribute to my wariness.
Very much so. Michael Pollan's book "Botany of Desire" is about the way four plants' usefulness has been a great advantage to the plant. Not just deliciousness (apples and potatoes) but also attractiveness (tulips) and, uh... cannabis.
Their web site claims, "We also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers." Have they actually prosecuted any spammers using this?
If it helps create better spam filters, yay. But I'd really like to know if any spammers are being punished as well.
1:27 is all you need. He draws a minute hand. He waits a minute. He erases it, then draws another one.
It's tedious enough as it is. I can't imagine anybody watching more than two minutes, much less the full twelve hours.
The full video would be useful only for the actual clock installation, which is more novelty act than clock. And for what it's worth, it's his. You want yours, make your own.
What the article is talking about isn't "bloat", but rather extra algorithms to remove unnecessary detail. As Pascal put it, "I made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it short." It takes more work to include only and exactly the right information.
That's extremely hard with navigation, since leaving the wrong thing out can be worse than the original information overload.
So, Republican representatives... when WikiLeaks is being used to post information you object to, you want it investigated.
I trust the same outrage applies to the emails stolen from the CRU and posted on WikiLeaks? Or does your interest in privacy only apply to issues you care about?
I actually don't care if a site displays ads at me, so long as they're well-behaved.
But I don't want a site to do ANYTHING that moves unless I give it permission. NoScript handles that pretty well.
There is a Flashblock extension there, which is a good start, but I'm going to hold off switching to Chrome full-time until I can selectively disable Javascript. (There are many good uses of it as well, so I don't want it disabled entirely.)
I know this thing is sub-orbital, but in theory, how far could it go, if you let it go?
It seems to me that your next tourist market might be launching it in the US and landing it in, say, Japan. It would hit a market a bit like the Concorde: a somewhat faster trip with a really high markup for coolness.
I doubt you'd make it a daily flight, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could drum up enough business to make a flight from the US to Japan and back once a month. Or maybe even once a week, once the price tag comes down below six figures.
Even the WSJ article they linked to included the key word "temporarily". They relegated it to the subtitle, but it was there. (The WSJ, owned by Rupert Murdoch, also owner of Fox News, can be assumed to to take the climate-denialist position on everything.)
Temporarily stepping down is very different from an admission of guilt. It can be a way of allowing work to go on while investigations are under way, when a controversial figure attracts so much attention as to detract from the real work.
Maybe there are some real failures here, for which the guy does deserve to be removed from his job, but so much of what I've read about the hacked emails is hyped and deliberately misinterpreted that I'm unimpressed by this incident.
Nitpicky, I know, but the title of the Slashdot article (not the underlying article) uses "SarBox", as if it were some brand name for a kind of box.
It's the "Sarbanes-Oxley" Act, sometimes "Sarbox" or "SARBOX" (for those who feel compelled to treat every new word they don't know as an initialism) but "SarBox" is right out.
Actually, they're not. When somebody says "half-truth", they mean a lie, "a partially true statement intended to deceive or mislead". "Pieces of the truth" can easily lead to invalid conclusions, especially when those "pieces" were deliberately picked to do so.
COME FROM is a joke, but it really does kind of model what they're doing here. The "one instruction" is a MOVE, but every time you move something to a particular location, some other part of the chip notices and performs operations on it.
Move one number into location A and another into location B, and magically the CPU knows to multiply them and stick it in location C, like sticking a COME FROM at the instruction that stores into B. It's not exactly a COME FROM since control returns to your next instruction (even before the operation is complete, making for some interesting parallel operations) but it's not completely dissimilar.
If I were to program it, I'd probably end up implementing HCF anyway.
What the article fails to mention is that the world 'ploutos' is derived from the name of the Greek god Pluto
"Pluto" is actually a Roman god, adapted from the Greek god Hades.
"Ploutos" was the Greek word for wealth, with connotations of "gold and jewels", i.e. from underground. The Romans took the name of the underworld god Pluto from there.
(There was a Greek Pluto, but she was a nymph, and therefore aquatic. I believe it's unrelated.)
In an attempt to patent a thing rather than the software itself, they say:
One or more computer-readable media having computer-readable instructions therein that, when executed by a computing device, cause the computing device to perform acts comprising:
In other words, it's not the operation itself, or the software, but the actual _disc_ that they're claiming. The medium, not the message, as it were. At least it's a physical thing.
I don't know if "downloaded software" would violate the patent, or if they'd try to claim that having it on the server's discs would violate it. (Surely they wouldn't try to claim that your hard disc on which you've downloaded it would violate the patent, would they?)
Those folks weren't looking to take delivery, they were looking to sell the futures to the companies that would take delivery once the contracts came due.
If so, they lost a lot of money when the price crumbled. Either them, or the suckers they sold it to.
Those losses should be showing up on somebody's balance sheets, and I'd kind of like to know who. The oil companies continued to turn substantial profits. Was it individual investors?
This is why we had $147/barrel oil a few years ago, not speculators.
If the world population were the only factor, oil would still be at $147/bbl, because the world population hasn't gone down.
I suspect that there was rampant speculation going on, and that a great many speculators lost their shirts when the bubble they'd created burst. But I don't know who the winners and losers were.
If you "smooth out" the spike, the price of oil is still going up pretty fast since its trough in the late 90s, even if not quite as fast as the speculation-fueled spike. That would suggest that you're correct: we are looking at a price rise, possibly just based on the supply and demand, and the current dip is just the spike evening itself out.
If that's the case, we'd expect to see oil continue a gradual rise of roughly 5% per year over inflation. But the spikes make it tricky to observe that with anything less than a five-year window.
Slashdot Mirror
How often does this happen to you? Evangelicals generally dislike Catholics nearly as much as they dislike atheists. They think that the Catholics aren't even really Christians. If they were old-fashioned enough they'd call them "papists".
Well, off the top of my head, there's the Credit CARD Act of 2009:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_CARD_Act_of_2009
And the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilly_Ledbetter_Fair_Pay_Act
And a big act for managing public lands:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnibus_Public_Land_Management_Act
Plus a bunch of other legislation that didn't make it past the filibuster, a rather high bar that has now become de rigeur. And a lot of regulatory redesign that doesn't require the Congress, like the EPA deciding to regulate CO2 as a pollutant.
So yeah, I'd say there is a difference in the two parties. Maybe not as big as you'd like, but if you don't see any difference, you're not looking.
The big question though is this something new?
Well, besides not being fictional, the big idea is that the thing (potentially) has a negative index of refraction, something not even the fictional lenses do.
Negative refraction is useful in making invisibility shields, by directing light completely around object surrounded by it.
This doesn't go nearly that far; it's a step towards a new way of constructing metamaterials with negative indexes. That's important; the "invisibility" stuff is just press-release science because invisibility is far more interesting than magnetically-controlled metamaterials.
As with so much of science: if you went out there and didn't find it, that would be much bigger news, because it would cast doubt on your present theory.
Confirmation is never as exciting as falsification, but it's good that science isn't all that exciting, or nothing would ever get done. The more confirmations you get, the further you can speculate, with the chance of getting something that can be falsified.
Who wrote this?
Some Guy In A Blog, apparently. It's attributed to Fumio Ohtsubo, President of Panasonic (under a different, less common spelling) but links to no press releases or speeches.
Ohtsubo did an interview about Panasonic working on a kind of fuel cell/LiIon hybrid battery and making a $1B investment (in 2012!) in home power systems, including solar. Here is a link to an actual reputable news source rather than a blogger with poor reading comprehension skills:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=ajhto3eO4fpM
I find this story very perplexing. The Science-Based Medicine article claims that they were getting yes-no answers from him using a toe he could control, but other sources don't seem to mention that part.
If it's true, it should be easy enough to ask, "So, is this facilitated communication actually any good, or just a load of hooey?" and get a direct, unfacilitated answer. If he gives an unambiguous yes, then FC is validated and you get the rest out that way.
From what I've heard the FC seems extremely dubious, in this case as in all of the others. The inconsistencies in the story contribute to my wariness.
Very much so. Michael Pollan's book "Botany of Desire" is about the way four plants' usefulness has been a great advantage to the plant. Not just deliciousness (apples and potatoes) but also attractiveness (tulips) and, uh... cannabis.
Very good read.
http://www.amazon.com/Botany-Desire-Plants-Eye-View-World/dp/0375501290#reader_0375501290
Too bad, too, seeing as dealing with the media would have been completely irrelevant to her job as President.
See, suppose there were a million doors...
Their web site claims, "We also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers." Have they actually prosecuted any spammers using this?
If it helps create better spam filters, yay. But I'd really like to know if any spammers are being punished as well.
1:27 is all you need. He draws a minute hand. He waits a minute. He erases it, then draws another one.
It's tedious enough as it is. I can't imagine anybody watching more than two minutes, much less the full twelve hours.
The full video would be useful only for the actual clock installation, which is more novelty act than clock. And for what it's worth, it's his. You want yours, make your own.
What the article is talking about isn't "bloat", but rather extra algorithms to remove unnecessary detail. As Pascal put it, "I made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it short." It takes more work to include only and exactly the right information.
That's extremely hard with navigation, since leaving the wrong thing out can be worse than the original information overload.
So, Republican representatives... when WikiLeaks is being used to post information you object to, you want it investigated.
I trust the same outrage applies to the emails stolen from the CRU and posted on WikiLeaks? Or does your interest in privacy only apply to issues you care about?
Since I don't have any mod points, let me just say that that is the nerdiest thing I've read all day. Thank you.
I actually don't care if a site displays ads at me, so long as they're well-behaved.
But I don't want a site to do ANYTHING that moves unless I give it permission. NoScript handles that pretty well.
There is a Flashblock extension there, which is a good start, but I'm going to hold off switching to Chrome full-time until I can selectively disable Javascript. (There are many good uses of it as well, so I don't want it disabled entirely.)
I know this thing is sub-orbital, but in theory, how far could it go, if you let it go?
It seems to me that your next tourist market might be launching it in the US and landing it in, say, Japan. It would hit a market a bit like the Concorde: a somewhat faster trip with a really high markup for coolness.
I doubt you'd make it a daily flight, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could drum up enough business to make a flight from the US to Japan and back once a month. Or maybe even once a week, once the price tag comes down below six figures.
Even the WSJ article they linked to included the key word "temporarily". They relegated it to the subtitle, but it was there. (The WSJ, owned by Rupert Murdoch, also owner of Fox News, can be assumed to to take the climate-denialist position on everything.)
Temporarily stepping down is very different from an admission of guilt. It can be a way of allowing work to go on while investigations are under way, when a controversial figure attracts so much attention as to detract from the real work.
Maybe there are some real failures here, for which the guy does deserve to be removed from his job, but so much of what I've read about the hacked emails is hyped and deliberately misinterpreted that I'm unimpressed by this incident.
Nitpicky, I know, but the title of the Slashdot article (not the underlying article) uses "SarBox", as if it were some brand name for a kind of box.
It's the "Sarbanes-Oxley" Act, sometimes "Sarbox" or "SARBOX" (for those who feel compelled to treat every new word they don't know as an initialism) but "SarBox" is right out.
"SOx" or "SOX" are much more common.
> Pieces of the truth are still the truth.
Actually, they're not. When somebody says "half-truth", they mean a lie, "a partially true statement intended to deceive or mislead". "Pieces of the truth" can easily lead to invalid conclusions, especially when those "pieces" were deliberately picked to do so.
Knowingly doing so is called "lying".
COME FROM is a joke, but it really does kind of model what they're doing here. The "one instruction" is a MOVE, but every time you move something to a particular location, some other part of the chip notices and performs operations on it.
Move one number into location A and another into location B, and magically the CPU knows to multiply them and stick it in location C, like sticking a COME FROM at the instruction that stores into B. It's not exactly a COME FROM since control returns to your next instruction (even before the operation is complete, making for some interesting parallel operations) but it's not completely dissimilar.
If I were to program it, I'd probably end up implementing HCF anyway.
Actually, it sounds an awful lot like a COME FROM instruction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_from
What the article fails to mention is that the world 'ploutos' is derived from the name of the Greek god Pluto
"Pluto" is actually a Roman god, adapted from the Greek god Hades.
"Ploutos" was the Greek word for wealth, with connotations of "gold and jewels", i.e. from underground. The Romans took the name of the underworld god Pluto from there.
(There was a Greek Pluto, but she was a nymph, and therefore aquatic. I believe it's unrelated.)
In an attempt to patent a thing rather than the software itself, they say:
One or more computer-readable media having computer-readable instructions therein that, when executed by a computing device, cause the computing device to perform acts comprising:
In other words, it's not the operation itself, or the software, but the actual _disc_ that they're claiming. The medium, not the message, as it were. At least it's a physical thing.
I don't know if "downloaded software" would violate the patent, or if they'd try to claim that having it on the server's discs would violate it. (Surely they wouldn't try to claim that your hard disc on which you've downloaded it would violate the patent, would they?)
Those folks weren't looking to take delivery, they were looking to sell the futures to the companies that would take delivery once the contracts came due.
If so, they lost a lot of money when the price crumbled. Either them, or the suckers they sold it to.
Those losses should be showing up on somebody's balance sheets, and I'd kind of like to know who. The oil companies continued to turn substantial profits. Was it individual investors?
This is why we had $147/barrel oil a few years ago, not speculators.
If the world population were the only factor, oil would still be at $147/bbl, because the world population hasn't gone down.
I suspect that there was rampant speculation going on, and that a great many speculators lost their shirts when the bubble they'd created burst. But I don't know who the winners and losers were.
If you "smooth out" the spike, the price of oil is still going up pretty fast since its trough in the late 90s, even if not quite as fast as the speculation-fueled spike. That would suggest that you're correct: we are looking at a price rise, possibly just based on the supply and demand, and the current dip is just the spike evening itself out.
If that's the case, we'd expect to see oil continue a gradual rise of roughly 5% per year over inflation. But the spikes make it tricky to observe that with anything less than a five-year window.