"Which contributes more to your daily productivity [or enjoyment of life]?" is a valid question.
But you can't take away one or the other (especially just for me) without positing some random, strange change to the world. Why is it gone? Government intervention? Lunatic planting an email-controlled bomb in my head? Broken mouse preventing me from accessing that icon? Bizarre bug in IP routers worldwide?
I gave up asking asking pointless what-if questions as a sophomore. Try rephrasing the question and you might actually learn something. (And the answer appears to be damn-near unanimous by people interpreting what the questioner meant rather than what it said.)
Actually, most of that debt is owed to Americans rather than to foreigners. About 1/4 is owed to foreign governments, 1/2 to future social security recipients, and the remaining 1/4 to banks, pension funds, etc.
Not that that should make you feel any better. At least with foreign bondholders we could default and screw them. With the rest of it, we'd just be screwing ourselves.
I often enjoy movie trailers, but some days... Clerks II was preceded by a half-dozen Halloween horror film trailers. Any kids movie I might want to see (Harry Potter or anything from Pixar) is always accompanied by revolting drivel.
Some days it sucks being outside the target audience.
Pretty bad, actually. They've already had to change makeup styles for HDTV. It's not that the old makeup is insufficient to cover the flaws. It's that in high enough resolution, it looks made-up. Good makeup doesn't look like makeup.
Film makeup is very heavy. If you meet an actor on a set, they look weird. (It's not as heavy as stage makeup, which is what I do, but it's in the same vicinity).
Street makeup also has limitations. It's designed to attract you from across a room and look good from across a table, but it's not designed to look good from close-enough-to-screw distance. By the time you've gotten there the makeup is usually kinda smeared anyway, but it's done its job.
Porn actors don't get that advantage; they're supposed to look that good with the camera right in their faces. Trying to cover up flaws (pores, uneven skin) and add highlights (cheek bones, wider lips) from a distance of three inches without looking like makeup... that's going to be a whole new challenge. Even if the women are physically perfect, getting them to look right under the lights is going to be a nightmare.
Not to mention what it's going to do with every gram of cellulite.
Does the judge have any authority to speak on their behalf? If the defendant doesn't show up, does the judge have to grant default judgment, or can he ask why? Is there somebody in the process who could throw this case out on jurisdictional matters?
It's vaguely worrying to me that somebody could file a lawsuit against me in a different country such that I have to fly transatlantically just to plead that I'm not there.
It seems unlikely. They just released a bunch of new iPods this week, and in conjunction with a video event (selling movies online). It would look like "Hey, we had one more thing but we couldn't get the demo ready in time."
Never. But pirates are anti-DRM. And those who oppose DRM without suggesting an alternative to protect the copyright owner's rights are favoring a legal position that makes things easier on pirates than copyright owners.
That doesn't make you a pirate. If all you want to do is play your music on alternative devices, make backups, post snippets for review, etc. then you're entirely within your legal rights. But currently, the technologies that allow you to do that also enable wholesale trading of music in violation of copyright.
If you've got a solution that allows fair use without allowing unfair use, we'd love to hear it. Meantime, there's going to be a conflict between the two sets of rights. Currently that's one you lose, since they're the ones with the music to sell, and so they set the terms of the sale. I'd happily see that turned around.
The moderation-in-place has come in particularly handy. Many times I'd moderate something, then wait until I'd read down the rest of the page to hit "save", but forget to hit it.
The flip side of that is that I don't get to say, "Hey, here was a better way of saying the same thing." The mod point's gone. It's common for me to think, "This was a correct and useful answer, but impolite" and prefer to wait until I found a more polite way of phrasing the same information. If I don't find one, though, the correct answer is sometimes worth modding up if the question is important.
The box for setting viewing levels was kind of hard to get used to, but I think I finally understand it. "Down" doesn't mean "less of this"; it means "expand to take up some of the territory covered by the other box." If they change its behavior, I'd have to learn it all over again, and it makes sense once you've figured out what all of the arrows mean.
All in all I've been using D2 and sticking with it.
The really crummy part is the underlying notion that a song is always three minutes long (which is why you should just grit your teeth and say "about two dozen").
You can't make your songs significantly longer or shorter, or they won't fit into the radio format. No radio, no free advertising. No free advertising, stay in your garage and make whatever music you like but best of luck getting people to listen to it.
Works for Netflix: 1.4 million movies per day, 7.5 gigs on a DVD: over 10 million gigabytes per day, about a terabit per second. And that all goes out on trucks. But the latency sure sucks.
A lawsuit isn't the only way that shareholders have to express displeasure with corporate management. The easier and often more effective route is to simply sell the shares, depressing the price.
While I can't cite an example of a shareholder suing management for fiscal malpractice for doing something ethical, there are examples of companies whose share prices are depressed because of the effects of them behaving ethically.
One example I can cite off the top of my head is Ben and Jerry's, who couldn't find a competent CEO because of their ethical decision to pay nobody more than seven times the price of their lowest-paid employee. In the end they had to abandon their ethical principles to hire competent management, and their stock price went up because of it.
Can you give a citation for that (the US censoring Hezbollah sites)? I'm not disbelieving; I just hadn't heard it.
As far as I'm aware the US doesn't usually force sites to shut down unless they're participating in something actively illegal (child porn, gambling). It's not uncommon for them to take down organizations by charging them with a crime, and that results in the removal of a web site, but I'm not aware of them merely ordering an ISP to remove a web site without also pressing charges against the organization or individual putting it up.
So if you can cite me some examples it would be appreciated.
I don't recall an appearance by Strider in The Hobbit, though a cameo could be arranged without messing up the story.
Of more concern to me is that Ian Holm couldn't possibly do Bilbo: his brief appearance as the young Bilbo in Fellowship was accomplished only with very painful techniques to smooth out his face. Re-casting him is a bigger break to continuity than re-casting Gandalf, who makes some pivotal appearances but is absent for much of the book.
I would like to see John Rhys-Davies play Gimli's father Gloin. And given how much fancy camera work went into nearly every shot in the LotR movies, why not have him play Oin, too?
One problem with stacking is heat; the transistors give out heat and if there's another transistor on top of it also giving out heat there's no place for that heat to go, eventually melting/burning the chip.
In processors and ordinary refreshing RAM, the transistors are continually being exercised. I wonder if part of the solution in this case is that stable memory exercises the transistors less often, giving more time for heat dissipation. You'd risk overheating if you continually read the same block, though. Perhaps tie it to a cache; stuff you've read more than once stays in a flat easily-cooled RAM cache until the primary store has cooled.
I believe that there was legislation trying to ensure that credit card companies and banks weren't allowed to pay gambling sites, but I'm not certain of the outcome of that legislation.
Even without it, I gather that many credit card companies were disallowing charges to betting companies anyway. They were getting a lot of chargebacks, people claiming that their cards were stolen and that it wasn't them doing the gambling, and it just wasn't worth it to continue to support those sites.
That's correct. That's the inertial mass of the photon; the photon has gravity proportional to that mass. It doesn't change when the speed of light is "slowed down", either. What happens there is complicated, as the mass is temporarily transferred to the electrons of the atoms and then re-emitted later in an identical form. But the energy is neither lost nor gained anywhere in the process.
No. The photon never has any "rest mass". It has momentum without mass. That falls out of the equations. You can think of the speed of light as infinity, because under special relativity the equations have a term 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). When v=c, the term goes to 1/0, and numbers pop out of nowhere.
The term "c" is the speed of light in a vacuum. Experiments like these don't happen in a vacuum. Light isn't really being slowed down per se; it's still moving at c when it's away from the atoms. These experiments are a very clever way to keep the light pulses intact while keeping the light itself from actually going very far. The net effect is to slow down the light pulse without actually slowing the light itself, so the mass of the light is unchanged, as is its net momentum. Inside the system the momentum of the light is bounced around and interacting with electrons, but at that level the light is just behaving as light does with nothing to affect its speed beyond plain old quantum juju, so there's no change in mass or momentum there, either.
Your street atlas GPS probably doesn't use NDGPS. It uses plain old satellite-based GPS, and that's just fine.
Differential GPS greatly improves your precision, from meters to centimeters, but you don't really need that to give directions. You'd want it if you were actually letting the thing steer your car, but we're not there yet.
Mostly I think it's a great idea. What's "not to love" is that printers are complicated, fickle beasts. They run out of toner/ink/paper, paper gets jammed, they have moving parts and therefore mechanical problems. And if an election worker has to open the voting booth to fix it, that compromises the privacy of whoever was voting. The election worker will get a good look at a half-printed ballot jammed in the feed, even if that worker is careful to shred it immediately after getting it out.
I suspect that there are probably solutions to those problems. Grocery store cash registers print out miles of receipts quietly and with pretty good reliability (though the receipts themselves are easily spoiled by light and time, another problem). If you schedule ink/paper refills fairly often (rather than waiting for them to run out) you can avoid problems in the middle of a voting session.
I think that a combination electronic/paper solution may be the best, despite the problems. And personally I never had any problems with the kind we used to use, which had mechanical levers which punched out paper cards. (At least, that's what I think they did. I never really got to see the insides or the final ballot. But they certainly gave a satisfying "thunk" when you pulled the lever.)
The weaknesses of paper have less to do with hacking as with other failures. In 2000 paper ballots caused all sorts of problems. Some marks were ambiguous. Ballot designs were confusing, and some people either checked the wrong boxes or missed some votes entirely. There's no way to have a "is this who you meant to vote for?" checksum step at the end.
Electronic voting machines, at least the way they're implemented now, are a terrible way to fix those problems. But I just want to remind people that paper ballots have their own problems, because people seem to have forgotten what a fiasco the 2000 election was.
It's not a question of closing multiple tabs. It's the fact that if you want to close the current tab, you have to hunt it down visually, rather than going to the same place in the window no matter what tab you're viewing.
We're talking about a difference of perhaps a tenth of a second, but of such microscopic units of time are human-factors decisions made. Interfaces are all about developing habits, and things that make it hard to form habits interfere with smooth operation. Maybe the new interface would make different and better habits; maybe not. I didn't think so, but YMMV.
In which case it's up to the contract to determine whether email delivery is guaranteed or not. Betcha it isn't. In fact, I suspect that the contract promises just about squat with respect to delivery of email, and probably has a specific exception for stuff that they think is spam.
The comma in the quote is misleading. It's not just that the organism (or organ) is complex, but that it not have developed incrementally.
Even "incrementally" is a bit of a challenge to define here. It sounds like this organism may have started as two separate ones that developed a symbiosis, then merged completely. That would appear as a rather sudden change in the genome, adding thousands of genes at once rather than reinforcing one new mutated allele.
It's rare, but it does happen. You yourself have a split DNA code, with the mitochondrial DNA appearing to come from a bacteria that became part of your cells.
So yes, this is a complex organism, by Darwin's definition. Darwin's definition is wrong in that "slight" modifications can actually be rather large under certain rare circumstances. What he should have said was "unitary" or "individual" modifications, where each change produces an intermediate state that is stable enough to survive and reproduce and thrive.
That's almost always a very small change, and almost always one change at a time, since changes are rare, two changes at once rarer, and two beneficial, mutually-reinforcing changes rarer still. It may have happened anyway a few times; the four billion year history of life on this planet is plenty of time for astonishingly rare things to happen numerous times, in aggregate.
That's what makes the theory so difficult for some people to accept. We're talking about a lot of very rare things that are almost impossible to observe because they're so rare. One of the key things that Darwin himself had to discover was that the earth was far, far older than anybody could have imagined. He had some nice bits of proof, like the seashells on mountaintops (put there by slow geological changes) or the depth of soil (put there by worm droppings, aggregated very slowly).
It's that aggregation that makes it work: small changes that stick accumulate over a long time. But "four billion years" is a very hard thing to grasp, even with the evidence in front of you.
Slashdot Mirror
"Which contributes more to your daily productivity [or enjoyment of life]?" is a valid question.
But you can't take away one or the other (especially just for me) without positing some random, strange change to the world. Why is it gone? Government intervention? Lunatic planting an email-controlled bomb in my head? Broken mouse preventing me from accessing that icon? Bizarre bug in IP routers worldwide?
I gave up asking asking pointless what-if questions as a sophomore. Try rephrasing the question and you might actually learn something. (And the answer appears to be damn-near unanimous by people interpreting what the questioner meant rather than what it said.)
Actually, most of that debt is owed to Americans rather than to foreigners. About 1/4 is owed to foreign governments, 1/2 to future social security recipients, and the remaining 1/4 to banks, pension funds, etc.
Not that that should make you feel any better. At least with foreign bondholders we could default and screw them. With the rest of it, we'd just be screwing ourselves.
Hope your 401(k) is well topped up.
I often enjoy movie trailers, but some days... Clerks II was preceded by a half-dozen Halloween horror film trailers. Any kids movie I might want to see (Harry Potter or anything from Pixar) is always accompanied by revolting drivel.
Some days it sucks being outside the target audience.
Pretty bad, actually. They've already had to change makeup styles for HDTV. It's not that the old makeup is insufficient to cover the flaws. It's that in high enough resolution, it looks made-up. Good makeup doesn't look like makeup.
Film makeup is very heavy. If you meet an actor on a set, they look weird. (It's not as heavy as stage makeup, which is what I do, but it's in the same vicinity).
Street makeup also has limitations. It's designed to attract you from across a room and look good from across a table, but it's not designed to look good from close-enough-to-screw distance. By the time you've gotten there the makeup is usually kinda smeared anyway, but it's done its job.
Porn actors don't get that advantage; they're supposed to look that good with the camera right in their faces. Trying to cover up flaws (pores, uneven skin) and add highlights (cheek bones, wider lips) from a distance of three inches without looking like makeup... that's going to be a whole new challenge. Even if the women are physically perfect, getting them to look right under the lights is going to be a nightmare.
Not to mention what it's going to do with every gram of cellulite.
Does the judge have any authority to speak on their behalf? If the defendant doesn't show up, does the judge have to grant default judgment, or can he ask why? Is there somebody in the process who could throw this case out on jurisdictional matters?
It's vaguely worrying to me that somebody could file a lawsuit against me in a different country such that I have to fly transatlantically just to plead that I'm not there.
It seems unlikely. They just released a bunch of new iPods this week, and in conjunction with a video event (selling movies online). It would look like "Hey, we had one more thing but we couldn't get the demo ready in time."
Never. But pirates are anti-DRM. And those who oppose DRM without suggesting an alternative to protect the copyright owner's rights are favoring a legal position that makes things easier on pirates than copyright owners.
That doesn't make you a pirate. If all you want to do is play your music on alternative devices, make backups, post snippets for review, etc. then you're entirely within your legal rights. But currently, the technologies that allow you to do that also enable wholesale trading of music in violation of copyright.
If you've got a solution that allows fair use without allowing unfair use, we'd love to hear it. Meantime, there's going to be a conflict between the two sets of rights. Currently that's one you lose, since they're the ones with the music to sell, and so they set the terms of the sale. I'd happily see that turned around.
The moderation-in-place has come in particularly handy. Many times I'd moderate something, then wait until I'd read down the rest of the page to hit "save", but forget to hit it.
The flip side of that is that I don't get to say, "Hey, here was a better way of saying the same thing." The mod point's gone. It's common for me to think, "This was a correct and useful answer, but impolite" and prefer to wait until I found a more polite way of phrasing the same information. If I don't find one, though, the correct answer is sometimes worth modding up if the question is important.
The box for setting viewing levels was kind of hard to get used to, but I think I finally understand it. "Down" doesn't mean "less of this"; it means "expand to take up some of the territory covered by the other box." If they change its behavior, I'd have to learn it all over again, and it makes sense once you've figured out what all of the arrows mean.
All in all I've been using D2 and sticking with it.
The really crummy part is the underlying notion that a song is always three minutes long (which is why you should just grit your teeth and say "about two dozen").
You can't make your songs significantly longer or shorter, or they won't fit into the radio format. No radio, no free advertising. No free advertising, stay in your garage and make whatever music you like but best of luck getting people to listen to it.
No mod points for ya, because I already posted in this thread, but that's pretty funny.
Works for Netflix: 1.4 million movies per day, 7.5 gigs on a DVD: over 10 million gigabytes per day, about a terabit per second. And that all goes out on trucks. But the latency sure sucks.
A lawsuit isn't the only way that shareholders have to express displeasure with corporate management. The easier and often more effective route is to simply sell the shares, depressing the price.
While I can't cite an example of a shareholder suing management for fiscal malpractice for doing something ethical, there are examples of companies whose share prices are depressed because of the effects of them behaving ethically.
One example I can cite off the top of my head is Ben and Jerry's, who couldn't find a competent CEO because of their ethical decision to pay nobody more than seven times the price of their lowest-paid employee. In the end they had to abandon their ethical principles to hire competent management, and their stock price went up because of it.
Can you give a citation for that (the US censoring Hezbollah sites)? I'm not disbelieving; I just hadn't heard it.
As far as I'm aware the US doesn't usually force sites to shut down unless they're participating in something actively illegal (child porn, gambling). It's not uncommon for them to take down organizations by charging them with a crime, and that results in the removal of a web site, but I'm not aware of them merely ordering an ISP to remove a web site without also pressing charges against the organization or individual putting it up.
So if you can cite me some examples it would be appreciated.
I don't recall an appearance by Strider in The Hobbit, though a cameo could be arranged without messing up the story.
Of more concern to me is that Ian Holm couldn't possibly do Bilbo: his brief appearance as the young Bilbo in Fellowship was accomplished only with very painful techniques to smooth out his face. Re-casting him is a bigger break to continuity than re-casting Gandalf, who makes some pivotal appearances but is absent for much of the book.
I would like to see John Rhys-Davies play Gimli's father Gloin. And given how much fancy camera work went into nearly every shot in the LotR movies, why not have him play Oin, too?
One problem with stacking is heat; the transistors give out heat and if there's another transistor on top of it also giving out heat there's no place for that heat to go, eventually melting/burning the chip.
In processors and ordinary refreshing RAM, the transistors are continually being exercised. I wonder if part of the solution in this case is that stable memory exercises the transistors less often, giving more time for heat dissipation. You'd risk overheating if you continually read the same block, though. Perhaps tie it to a cache; stuff you've read more than once stays in a flat easily-cooled RAM cache until the primary store has cooled.
I believe that there was legislation trying to ensure that credit card companies and banks weren't allowed to pay gambling sites, but I'm not certain of the outcome of that legislation.
Even without it, I gather that many credit card companies were disallowing charges to betting companies anyway. They were getting a lot of chargebacks, people claiming that their cards were stolen and that it wasn't them doing the gambling, and it just wasn't worth it to continue to support those sites.
That's correct. That's the inertial mass of the photon; the photon has gravity proportional to that mass. It doesn't change when the speed of light is "slowed down", either. What happens there is complicated, as the mass is temporarily transferred to the electrons of the atoms and then re-emitted later in an identical form. But the energy is neither lost nor gained anywhere in the process.
No. The photon never has any "rest mass". It has momentum without mass. That falls out of the equations. You can think of the speed of light as infinity, because under special relativity the equations have a term 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). When v=c, the term goes to 1/0, and numbers pop out of nowhere.
The term "c" is the speed of light in a vacuum. Experiments like these don't happen in a vacuum. Light isn't really being slowed down per se; it's still moving at c when it's away from the atoms. These experiments are a very clever way to keep the light pulses intact while keeping the light itself from actually going very far. The net effect is to slow down the light pulse without actually slowing the light itself, so the mass of the light is unchanged, as is its net momentum. Inside the system the momentum of the light is bounced around and interacting with electrons, but at that level the light is just behaving as light does with nothing to affect its speed beyond plain old quantum juju, so there's no change in mass or momentum there, either.
Your street atlas GPS probably doesn't use NDGPS. It uses plain old satellite-based GPS, and that's just fine.
Differential GPS greatly improves your precision, from meters to centimeters, but you don't really need that to give directions. You'd want it if you were actually letting the thing steer your car, but we're not there yet.
Mostly I think it's a great idea. What's "not to love" is that printers are complicated, fickle beasts. They run out of toner/ink/paper, paper gets jammed, they have moving parts and therefore mechanical problems. And if an election worker has to open the voting booth to fix it, that compromises the privacy of whoever was voting. The election worker will get a good look at a half-printed ballot jammed in the feed, even if that worker is careful to shred it immediately after getting it out.
I suspect that there are probably solutions to those problems. Grocery store cash registers print out miles of receipts quietly and with pretty good reliability (though the receipts themselves are easily spoiled by light and time, another problem). If you schedule ink/paper refills fairly often (rather than waiting for them to run out) you can avoid problems in the middle of a voting session.
I think that a combination electronic/paper solution may be the best, despite the problems. And personally I never had any problems with the kind we used to use, which had mechanical levers which punched out paper cards. (At least, that's what I think they did. I never really got to see the insides or the final ballot. But they certainly gave a satisfying "thunk" when you pulled the lever.)
The weaknesses of paper have less to do with hacking as with other failures. In 2000 paper ballots caused all sorts of problems. Some marks were ambiguous. Ballot designs were confusing, and some people either checked the wrong boxes or missed some votes entirely. There's no way to have a "is this who you meant to vote for?" checksum step at the end.
Electronic voting machines, at least the way they're implemented now, are a terrible way to fix those problems. But I just want to remind people that paper ballots have their own problems, because people seem to have forgotten what a fiasco the 2000 election was.
The important thing is, now that we've found the gene, will be able able to find a cure?
It's not a question of closing multiple tabs. It's the fact that if you want to close the current tab, you have to hunt it down visually, rather than going to the same place in the window no matter what tab you're viewing.
We're talking about a difference of perhaps a tenth of a second, but of such microscopic units of time are human-factors decisions made. Interfaces are all about developing habits, and things that make it hard to form habits interfere with smooth operation. Maybe the new interface would make different and better habits; maybe not. I didn't think so, but YMMV.
In which case it's up to the contract to determine whether email delivery is guaranteed or not. Betcha it isn't. In fact, I suspect that the contract promises just about squat with respect to delivery of email, and probably has a specific exception for stuff that they think is spam.
The comma in the quote is misleading. It's not just that the organism (or organ) is complex, but that it not have developed incrementally.
Even "incrementally" is a bit of a challenge to define here. It sounds like this organism may have started as two separate ones that developed a symbiosis, then merged completely. That would appear as a rather sudden change in the genome, adding thousands of genes at once rather than reinforcing one new mutated allele.
It's rare, but it does happen. You yourself have a split DNA code, with the mitochondrial DNA appearing to come from a bacteria that became part of your cells.
So yes, this is a complex organism, by Darwin's definition. Darwin's definition is wrong in that "slight" modifications can actually be rather large under certain rare circumstances. What he should have said was "unitary" or "individual" modifications, where each change produces an intermediate state that is stable enough to survive and reproduce and thrive.
That's almost always a very small change, and almost always one change at a time, since changes are rare, two changes at once rarer, and two beneficial, mutually-reinforcing changes rarer still. It may have happened anyway a few times; the four billion year history of life on this planet is plenty of time for astonishingly rare things to happen numerous times, in aggregate.
That's what makes the theory so difficult for some people to accept. We're talking about a lot of very rare things that are almost impossible to observe because they're so rare. One of the key things that Darwin himself had to discover was that the earth was far, far older than anybody could have imagined. He had some nice bits of proof, like the seashells on mountaintops (put there by slow geological changes) or the depth of soil (put there by worm droppings, aggregated very slowly).
It's that aggregation that makes it work: small changes that stick accumulate over a long time. But "four billion years" is a very hard thing to grasp, even with the evidence in front of you.