Perhaps even more revealingly, they were paying the jurors (from the jury contract page). They appear very confident - and the figures that they've mentioned are that the process is about 285% - 400% efficient!
From an article on the Guardian http://www.steorn.com/news/coverage/?id=261
the company has spent £2.7m developing the technology. Steorn has also gone into partnership with a European micro-generator company to develop prototypes. On the attitudes shown by the scientific community
"It's the Pons-Fleischmann factor," says McCarthy, "No one in the scientific community wants to become embroiled in the kind of controversy that Pons and Fleishmann faced."... until their claims have been assessed by the jury, McCarthy says they won't be accepting any investor offers. So if this is a hoax, it would appear not to be a money-making scheme; Walshe says the Economist ad alone cost £75,000... According to McCarthy and Walshe, the marketing manager, there have been no fewer than eight independent validations of their work conducted by electrical engineers and academics "with multiple PhDs" from world-class universities. But none of them will talk to me, even off the record...And that European partner, the one with the moving, almost perpetual, prototypes? It won't talk to me either and Steorn has undertaken not to name it. I want to believe they have something. I want to believe it so much. But then I also want to believe in Santa:(
Hmmmm, it IS an interesting point you raise. It also raises the worrying spectre of this being used outside of the scenarios for which it was envisaged (e.g. in the case of a witness for trial, perhaps?).
The article mentions more detailed research involving rats. I suppose I've one question - does this actually remove memories (as in cause them to no longer be able to be recalled) or does it "smooth the landing", by which I mean disassociate the memories from the intense anguish/pain that they cause. I'd be broadly in favour of option 2, but not too happy about option 1.
I guess I'm just not comfortable with the thought of being able to alter someone's memories at will.
I thought that this would be a story about thePirateBay.org taking over Seaworld and defending themselves with missile armed dolphins. The real story is an anti-climax:(
I personally believe the problem with "innovation" today is that it's marketing - rather than something genuine. Every product, from Bounty kitchen rolls to the latest TV to make-up is "innovative" and "futuristic" and will "change your life forever".
Amazingly, none of them do. Many of the significant innovations are less tangible - the tank is a product built on the application of innovations such as the internal combustion engine, electricity (for factories), mechanised metalworking machines, and, perhaps most importantly, product line engineering. Products generally aren't innovations, although they can be innovative (a minor distinction, I'm aware, but important enough).
Anyway, the thing is that world-changing innovation is relatively rare, and take time to catch on (eg, electricity or computing), and products based on known principles are not innovations, they're innovative. It's different. Think about it.
Saddam was very secular indeed, and Iraq was strongly secular also under his booted heel. He was gassing Kurds because they dared challenge his regime (at the instigation of the US, who promised to support them after the 1st Gulf War; however, because of the lack of support to drive on Baghdad from the UN, Saddam stayed in power and took it out on those who he was able to beat up).
So... please don't blame an entire religion for something that it had nothing to do with.
The problem with Islam is that it was originally intended for people to get their own meaning out of the Koran (this is true of the original gospels in Christianity, too). But because most people were ill-educated, they delegated Imams/Priests to do the job for them. The result has been: For Islam, the Imams and clerics have a disproportionate amount of power over people, and the more radical they are, the better known they become, and the more people they can influence; For Christianity, a large organisation built around the 'Word of God', which has since been corrupted by translation, in some cases whole-scale editing, and the decrees of the various Popes (these carry the weight of the Word of God, and so can never be changed).
People are people, whether they are clerics or not. As a result, they're as thick-headed, opinionated, stubborn and prejudiced as the rest of us, no matter how good their intentions. These people have leveraged their spiritual influence to gain temporal power at great costs to their followers and it's quite sad to see that it isn't changing - despite education, people still refuse to look at the evidence and make their own minds up, they'll follow a leader. I would like to make clear that I'm not in favour of any particular result from this, but it'd be nice to see people think for themselves.
There was this date, right, the 11th of September in 2001, that caused the airline industry in the states to be shut down for some time. 36,000 - 40,000 flights PER DAY. Interestingly, planes cause quite a lot of pollution (and, as it turned out, significantly contribute to cloud formation)[PDF]
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the shutdown depressed the overall emissions figures.
I've yet to be convinced that human factors are accounting for the current rise in global temperatures. However, I think it's irrelevant - the massive CO2 production, and the lesser mentioned waste heat production) is clearly unsustainable in the long (or even medium) term. I quite like Ireland the way it is now, and we'd be pretty severely affected by a rise in sea levels or change in the Gulf Stream. At the moment, Nuclear appears the only way to go, and surely there are realistic ways of getting rid of the waste (for instance, disposing of them on fault lines a-la David Brin). Even without that you cannot tell me that there is no way of filtering the output from power plants with the technology available today. There just needs to be the will to do it, and the costs can be shared, surely, between governments and private industry.
Interestingly, China recognise the problem for all that they're mulish in public. They're planning 2,000km of MagLev track instead of laying conventional rail - it's safer and apparently more efficient. They're also cutting down on road building in favour of other transport mechanisms. Centralising power generation means it can be controlled at the source, and if that's not happening now it can happen in the future.
The problem is that the debate is so political now that there will be no consensus on how to fix it, and the EU, US, India, China, Russia and everyone else will just go their own way - or not bother. Another problem is that the Gaia theory is not really taken into account - if it's right (I personally think it is) then the earth is a self regulating system, or at least a balanced system. Without understanding the system, pretty much anything we do is doomed to failure, and much research is focused on a very small section of the overall system (because the overall system is so complex). But it IS a system, and we need to understand all the inputs into that system, and their effects on the system until we can make definitive statements about climate.
You, sir, are an idiot. Yes, an idiot. Let me explain what actually happened without your paranoiac comments about Stalinist Europeans. Despite the fact that most of the EU were allied with you for over half a century. Prick.
We have a large company who over the years have gained a monopoly. Congratulations! There is a problem, The US government and the EU have rules, some of which annoyingly prevent this monopoly crushing all-comers by abusing their monopolistic powers. The US government convicts them, attempts to remedy this, faces legal challenges, and meekly cries off, having done all but nothing to fix the problem. The EU takes a slightly different tack, and says "You broke the rules. You can't keep breaking the rules. One of the rules you're breaking the one about muscleing your competition using your monopoly so you're to 1. Stop forcing Internet Explorer, and your own solutions on everyone, let them make their own minds up and 2. Give others the information to interoperate correctly. You can charge for 2, if the patents that cover it are innovatve you can charge more. The innovative restriction applies because in europe you're not allowed to patent any and every kind of software no matter how obvious*."
So they're saying "fix your behaviour, or we'll get annoyed and do drastic things".
MS wibble off muttering and after acting outraged for a while, decide on a different tack, which is, to delay. The EU's response was, "Delay all you want. Incidentally, if you manage to delat too much, there's a time-based fine after April 3rd if you're delaying". Again, a behavioural solution. As the request of MS, they extended the deadline to today, and MS's response is "How much should we charge?" This is a delaying tactic again, and I think MS are going to get a nasty shock if they keep it up. Y'see, the EU WILL apply fines of 4,000,000 per DAY if MS keep it up, and even with reported cash reserves of $30 billion that'll sting. Espcially as it'll be retroactive to last August 1st.
For the next section, we've to be a bit more specific and informative. The specs in question are technical information to competing groups allowing them to design better Windows-compatible server software, specifically work group servers. The ruling was some time back, the final appeal which MS lost was in December 2004. Yes, that's right, 2 and a half years ago. They missed numerous deadlines to submit the information, finally coughing it up in July 2006.
The real problem here is that MS don't want to release those specs, and if they do, they want it to be extremely unattractive to actually license them. So much so that they're demanding up to 5.95% of a licensee's server revenues as royalties, which is completely unreasonable considering that the market rate for such specifications (according to IBM, Oracle, Sun as well the commission's expert, Prof. Neil Barrett, who was suggested by Microsoft.) is between 0% and 1%.
Mant of MS's other API's are available (for 0%, incidentally) at msdn.microsoft.com, so they've set a standard themselves. The ones that aren't are areas where they're using monopoly power to leverage a market, for instance, MSN Messenger had to be reverse-engineered (and that would probably be illegal in the states now!).
All the EU has been/is doing is trying to improve competition, for everyone, using behavioural remedies to attempt to correct a monopoly dominated market (as the DoJ tried, and failed, to do). All MS has been doing is delaying the inevitable to squeeze another few Euro's out of the market. And if they keep it up, the behavioural remedy will become structural and Microsoft will not be allowed to trade in Europe as it currently stands. Which is fine by me, although it'd be a royal PITA for a while.
So do you understand what's happening now? And why you're ridiculous attitude makes you look ridiculous and an embarassment to your country ("Down with the commies" is very 50's. I suppose you still think pot is a commie drug?) ?
interesting point. If I may also bring up the idea of how readable these devices are. For any type of long reading session, paper with ink on it is the best solution at the moment. Screens are still simply too bright, and if you darken them, they look all odd-like. I'd much prefer to see a black background with light grey text... or as a power saving measure, I'd like to see only the relevant pixels being lit (giving the impression of a black background). All the white radiating from our screens is very bad for our eyes, and tiring.
Please note that P&F "inquisition" was allegedly hijacked by the people who are getting billions of dollars per year to investigate "hot fusion".
Do a quick search for "Dr. Eugene Mallove" (RIP), who was the lead technical writer on the report for MIT, and who subsequently left, accusing them of obfuscating and downright tampering with results to make things look bad for Pons and Fleischmann. He also accused ALL the insitutions involved of debunking the research, then looking for grants to continue it.
For the conspiracy theorists, Dr. Mallove was murdered in his front garden, but "little of value" was taken and the first attempt by the police to find a suspect led to a dead guy. Also interesting reading!
While I'm definitely one of the disbelievers of "cold fusion", it's disheartening to hear about this kind of jockeying, although not surprising. For the headline writers: There's a phrase to describe non-cold fusion in small devices, "Tabletop fusion" (the idea being that you can keep your fusion device on a table.
Well said. I _don't_ have any of these disorders, although I know people who are autistic, or slightly retarded. But it makes no difference. By deciding that being creepy is not "normal" you're defining "normal" as a relatively narrow range.
At various places and times it was not "normal" to be black, or Jewish, or Irish... going back further you'd have to feel that the first humanoids that started living out of the trees were not "normal". These people are different rather than abnormal, if only because abnormal has negative connotations. I won't go on about how many autistic people are brilliant in a particular area, or as smart or smarter than the rest of us. I'll just say that these people need to be encouraged to live their lives as much as possible without worrying too much about "normality".
Perhaps, but there is a real phenomenon of corporate momentum. It's more than possible that 48% of record executives believe that non-DRM is the way forward, but who actually decides the policies of the company? Partially, it's decided by "this is what we've always done" and partially by the conservative 10% who live at the top. They're the ones that a survey of would be interesting.
The difference being that everybody sat down and mostly agreed on a couple of points such as "Massive CO2 emissions are bad" and "perhaps cutting down on them might help stabilize the ecological balance" . Most agreed until the cost of it came up, then a few went "Holy shit, count me out". The list, incidentally, is available online at http://unfccc.int/files/kyoto_protocol/background/ status_of_ratification/application/pdf/kp_rat_1312 06.pdf
China and Russia have ratified it, along with most of Europe. but the US, along with Hungary, Belize, Iran, Syria, Jordan and many other third world nations decided that the cost was too high for their businesses. Which was their right, although it shows the shocking attitude of the US establishment towards their home.
Here what you have is faceless corporations pressurizing the US government to lean on a friendly nation to change their internal policies for the profit ONLY of those corporations. Wow. How the Canadians put up with their southern neighbours sometimes baffles me. First Canada's accused of exporting a load of marijuana to the states (despite the fact that this http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/drugfact/marij uana/index.html, the White house policy says different, and I quote
Most of the marijuana available in the domestic drug markets is lower potency commercial-grade marijuana--usually derived from outdoor cannabis grow sites in Mexico and the United States.... Most foreign-source marijuana smuggled into the United States enters through or between points of entry at the U.S.-Mexico border. And now this hysterical piracy claims. It's all very unnecessarily aggressive.
Maybe, maybe not, but I'll buy it anyway! In fact, I have it pre-ordered. I suspect you will to. B&W was a bit boring, but I liked it because it was different and entertaining (and you could throw your worshippers into the sea if they got stroppy:) ). This looks like it might be entertaining, and it's definitely different!
Can we all stop using the fear phrase "Global Warming", and refer to it as "Doom, Doom, Doom". Then put the research (not the FUD) back in the correct boxes, "Climatology" and "Atmospheric Studies".
There IS a real trend at the moment that any work at all that contradicts "Doom, Doom, Doom" has trouble getting funding, and trouble getting published. The same phenomenon prevented odd results from being published in fusion research... the establishment can be hard to crack.
My question is: Does anyone _seriously_ believe that we can continue to produce so much CO2 and not affect the ecology of the planet over the short to medium term? While I'm one of those that believes that the majority of the temperature variations are not anthropogenic, I do believe that a lot of the climate change IS anthropogenic. I also believe that if you removed humans tomorrow, the plant would have re-asserted a natural balance fairly quickly, by geological or evolutionary terms. So essentially, the advice seems to be "Don't shit on your own doorstep". Seems fair to me!
I'd prefer much less biased and sensationalist coverage of both the problem and the proposed solutions. Not necessarily here on/. I'm not an idiot, but specifically in the scientific community.
Except it's already used in humans for other reasons and shows minimal, minor, side effects. So the clinical trials are a case of equipment (to test for cancer progression rates or lack thereof) and patients. Plenty of people suffer cancer, I can't imagine many of them turning this down, can you?
So the cost should be minimal compared to other clinical trials. Does this mean we can smoke again?
So it's ok to eulogise on a regime that murdered millions of innocents, started wars of agression with almost all its neighbours and brought the country to the brink of annihilation? The reason that it was banned in the first place was because of, y'know, the events of 1938 to 1945. What they did wasn't acceptable then and isn't acceptable now, and the Germans, rightly in my opinion, decided that they would have no tolerance for it. If you voted there today, and _everyone_ in the country voted on it, the vast majority would vote to uphold that ban.
As for the income tax, it's not a blanket 42% tax on everyone. Besides, tax laws _everywhere_ are a mess so no-one can really throw stones. And at least in the German federal systems that cash goes to maintain a superb road network and effecient public transport, two things that are a mess in many countries.
The reputation that they want they can only get within their specific community, though, so most of them don't care as long as they're one of the big names in their field.
google scholar is excellent resource, by the way, I prefer it to CiteSeer. Then I use http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/index.html, the computer science bibliography, for the reference if I use the paper. I'm researching something to do with computer science, by the way:)
Yes, I would tend to agree, but I don't think this has anything to do with the features in Vista or any other OS for that matter. It is the content producers choice to use DRM on their content and they are rightfully to blame for it. Except it doesn't seem to cause any problems for the PS3's blu-ray playback! And because of the "signed driver" and "authorised hardware" issues there will be problem with a lot of legacy hardware (by which I mean anything in your machine that the manufacturer hasn't got signed drivers for).
It appears that MS is making more of an issue of DRM than anyone, including the content producers expected. And their EULA says that they accept no responsibility for any breakages or lost data. Pah! On the other hand, I hold the heretical view (here anyway) that XP SP2 patched is a decent OS.
Unless, of course, the availability of abundant cheap energy leads to massive heat pollution of the atmosphere (rather than massive C02 pollution). There's an argument against everything (of course, there's also an argument FOR everything):)
Although, we could build a couple of space elevators, and have them conduct heat out into space. As a bonus, the heat could be used to power them!
I'm really sick of these "bloggers are great" article. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there. Nearly all of them are irrelevent crap. Some have evolved through effort and investment into almost proper news sites. Congratualtions to them. Now stop calling yourself blogs. You're news sites (because you don't just post unsubstanciated crap).
Face it folks, your "blogosphere" is a mob of people who believe anything that their favorite "blog aka news site" posts, and that is ANYTHING AT ALL at times, and repost it themselves, often not even bothering to change a single character. They have no power, and never will. It's essentially the same as the fat outraged bloke in the pub that never shuts up about what he read in The Sun, despite not ever checking facts, figures, or common sense. I wish people would stop glamorising this crap.
And I'd like to say one more time, to all those who DO use their brains, and use sources, and not fly off the handle (like the O'Reilly incident), thanks for the news. To Slashdot I say: Check the stories.
FTA: The quantum cryptographic research project is supported by a five-year, $5.4 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Slashdot Mirror
From an article on the Guardian http://www.steorn.com/news/coverage/?id=261 the company has spent £2.7m developing the technology. Steorn has also gone into partnership with a European micro-generator company to develop prototypes. On the attitudes shown by the scientific community "It's the Pons-Fleischmann factor," says McCarthy, "No one in the scientific community wants to become embroiled in the kind of controversy that Pons and Fleishmann faced."... until their claims have been assessed by the jury, McCarthy says they won't be accepting any investor offers. So if this is a hoax, it would appear not to be a money-making scheme; Walshe says the Economist ad alone cost £75,000... According to McCarthy and Walshe, the marketing manager, there have been no fewer than eight independent validations of their work conducted by electrical engineers and academics "with multiple PhDs" from world-class universities. But none of them will talk to me, even off the record...And that European partner, the one with the moving, almost perpetual, prototypes? It won't talk to me either and Steorn has undertaken not to name it. I want to believe they have something. I want to believe it so much. But then I also want to believe in Santa
Hmmmm, it IS an interesting point you raise. It also raises the worrying spectre of this being used outside of the scenarios for which it was envisaged (e.g. in the case of a witness for trial, perhaps?).
The article mentions more detailed research involving rats. I suppose I've one question - does this actually remove memories (as in cause them to no longer be able to be recalled) or does it "smooth the landing", by which I mean disassociate the memories from the intense anguish/pain that they cause. I'd be broadly in favour of option 2, but not too happy about option 1.
I guess I'm just not comfortable with the thought of being able to alter someone's memories at will.
I thought that this would be a story about thePirateBay.org taking over Seaworld and defending themselves with missile armed dolphins. The real story is an anti-climax :(
Good points.
I personally believe the problem with "innovation" today is that it's marketing - rather than something genuine. Every product, from Bounty kitchen rolls to the latest TV to make-up is "innovative" and "futuristic" and will "change your life forever".
Amazingly, none of them do. Many of the significant innovations are less tangible - the tank is a product built on the application of innovations such as the internal combustion engine, electricity (for factories), mechanised metalworking machines, and, perhaps most importantly, product line engineering. Products generally aren't innovations, although they can be innovative (a minor distinction, I'm aware, but important enough).
Anyway, the thing is that world-changing innovation is relatively rare, and take time to catch on (eg, electricity or computing), and products based on known principles are not innovations, they're innovative. It's different. Think about it.
Sorry, but your facts are incorrect.
Saddam was very secular indeed, and Iraq was strongly secular also under his booted heel. He was gassing Kurds because they dared challenge his regime (at the instigation of the US, who promised to support them after the 1st Gulf War; however, because of the lack of support to drive on Baghdad from the UN, Saddam stayed in power and took it out on those who he was able to beat up).
So... please don't blame an entire religion for something that it had nothing to do with.
The problem with Islam is that it was originally intended for people to get their own meaning out of the Koran (this is true of the original gospels in Christianity, too). But because most people were ill-educated, they delegated Imams/Priests to do the job for them. The result has been: For Islam, the Imams and clerics have a disproportionate amount of power over people, and the more radical they are, the better known they become, and the more people they can influence; For Christianity, a large organisation built around the 'Word of God', which has since been corrupted by translation, in some cases whole-scale editing, and the decrees of the various Popes (these carry the weight of the Word of God, and so can never be changed).
People are people, whether they are clerics or not. As a result, they're as thick-headed, opinionated, stubborn and prejudiced as the rest of us, no matter how good their intentions. These people have leveraged their spiritual influence to gain temporal power at great costs to their followers and it's quite sad to see that it isn't changing - despite education, people still refuse to look at the evidence and make their own minds up, they'll follow a leader. I would like to make clear that I'm not in favour of any particular result from this, but it'd be nice to see people think for themselves.
And, of course, the ESA's SMART-1, which was a lunar science mission
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/SMART-1/index.html
There was this date, right, the 11th of September in 2001, that caused the airline industry in the states to be shut down for some time. 36,000 - 40,000 flights PER DAY. Interestingly, planes cause quite a lot of pollution (and, as it turned out, significantly contribute to cloud formation)[PDF]
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the shutdown depressed the overall emissions figures.
I've yet to be convinced that human factors are accounting for the current rise in global temperatures. However, I think it's irrelevant - the massive CO2 production, and the lesser mentioned waste heat production) is clearly unsustainable in the long (or even medium) term. I quite like Ireland the way it is now, and we'd be pretty severely affected by a rise in sea levels or change in the Gulf Stream. At the moment, Nuclear appears the only way to go, and surely there are realistic ways of getting rid of the waste (for instance, disposing of them on fault lines a-la David Brin). Even without that you cannot tell me that there is no way of filtering the output from power plants with the technology available today. There just needs to be the will to do it, and the costs can be shared, surely, between governments and private industry.
Interestingly, China recognise the problem for all that they're mulish in public. They're planning 2,000km of MagLev track instead of laying conventional rail - it's safer and apparently more efficient. They're also cutting down on road building in favour of other transport mechanisms. Centralising power generation means it can be controlled at the source, and if that's not happening now it can happen in the future.
The problem is that the debate is so political now that there will be no consensus on how to fix it, and the EU, US, India, China, Russia and everyone else will just go their own way - or not bother. Another problem is that the Gaia theory is not really taken into account - if it's right (I personally think it is) then the earth is a self regulating system, or at least a balanced system. Without understanding the system, pretty much anything we do is doomed to failure, and much research is focused on a very small section of the overall system (because the overall system is so complex). But it IS a system, and we need to understand all the inputs into that system, and their effects on the system until we can make definitive statements about climate.
You, sir, are an idiot. Yes, an idiot. Let me explain what actually happened without your paranoiac comments about Stalinist Europeans. Despite the fact that most of the EU were allied with you for over half a century. Prick.
We have a large company who over the years have gained a monopoly. Congratulations! There is a problem, The US government and the EU have rules, some of which annoyingly prevent this monopoly crushing all-comers by abusing their monopolistic powers.
The US government convicts them, attempts to remedy this, faces legal challenges, and meekly cries off, having done all but nothing to fix the problem.
The EU takes a slightly different tack, and says "You broke the rules. You can't keep breaking the rules. One of the rules you're breaking the one about muscleing your competition using your monopoly so you're to 1. Stop forcing Internet Explorer, and your own solutions on everyone, let them make their own minds up and 2. Give others the information to interoperate correctly. You can charge for 2, if the patents that cover it are innovatve you can charge more. The innovative restriction applies because in europe you're not allowed to patent any and every kind of software no matter how obvious*."
So they're saying "fix your behaviour, or we'll get annoyed and do drastic things".
MS wibble off muttering and after acting outraged for a while, decide on a different tack, which is, to delay. The EU's response was, "Delay all you want. Incidentally, if you manage to delat too much, there's a time-based fine after April 3rd if you're delaying". Again, a behavioural solution.
As the request of MS, they extended the deadline to today, and MS's response is "How much should we charge?"
This is a delaying tactic again, and I think MS are going to get a nasty shock if they keep it up. Y'see, the EU WILL apply fines of 4,000,000 per DAY if MS keep it up, and even with reported cash reserves of $30 billion that'll sting. Espcially as it'll be retroactive to last August 1st.
For the next section, we've to be a bit more specific and informative.
The specs in question are technical information to competing groups allowing them to design better Windows-compatible server software, specifically work group servers. The ruling was some time back, the final appeal which MS lost was in December 2004. Yes, that's right, 2 and a half years ago.
They missed numerous deadlines to submit the information, finally coughing it up in July 2006.
The real problem here is that MS don't want to release those specs, and if they do, they want it to be extremely unattractive to actually license them. So much so that they're demanding up to 5.95% of a licensee's server revenues as royalties, which is completely unreasonable considering that the market rate for such specifications (according to IBM, Oracle, Sun as well the commission's expert, Prof. Neil Barrett, who was suggested by Microsoft.) is between 0% and 1%.
Mant of MS's other API's are available (for 0%, incidentally) at msdn.microsoft.com, so they've set a standard themselves. The ones that aren't are areas where they're using monopoly power to leverage a market, for instance, MSN Messenger had to be reverse-engineered (and that would probably be illegal in the states now!).
All the EU has been/is doing is trying to improve competition, for everyone, using behavioural remedies to attempt to correct a monopoly dominated market (as the DoJ tried, and failed, to do). All MS has been doing is delaying the inevitable to squeeze another few Euro's out of the market.
And if they keep it up, the behavioural remedy will become structural and Microsoft will not be allowed to trade in Europe as it currently stands. Which is fine by me, although it'd be a royal PITA for a while.
So do you understand what's happening now? And why you're ridiculous attitude makes you look ridiculous and an embarassment to your country ("Down with the commies" is very 50's. I suppose you still think pot is a commie drug?) ?
Also, as
interesting point. If I may also bring up the idea of how readable these devices are. For any type of long reading session, paper with ink on it is the best solution at the moment. Screens are still simply too bright, and if you darken them, they look all odd-like. I'd much prefer to see a black background with light grey text... or as a power saving measure, I'd like to see only the relevant pixels being lit (giving the impression of a black background). All the white radiating from our screens is very bad for our eyes, and tiring.
Please note that P&F "inquisition" was allegedly hijacked by the people who are getting billions of dollars per year to investigate "hot fusion".
v e1.html, that covers a lot of the basic background.
Do a quick search for "Dr. Eugene Mallove" (RIP), who was the lead technical writer on the report for MIT, and who subsequently left, accusing them of obfuscating and downright tampering with results to make things look bad for Pons and Fleischmann. He also accused ALL the insitutions involved of debunking the research, then looking for grants to continue it.
Here's a good interview from 2000 http://www.evworld.com/archives/interviews2/mallo
For the conspiracy theorists, Dr. Mallove was murdered in his front garden, but "little of value" was taken and the first attempt by the police to find a suspect led to a dead guy. Also interesting reading!
While I'm definitely one of the disbelievers of "cold fusion", it's disheartening to hear about this kind of jockeying, although not surprising. For the headline writers: There's a phrase to describe non-cold fusion in small devices, "Tabletop fusion" (the idea being that you can keep your fusion device on a table.
Well said. I _don't_ have any of these disorders, although I know people who are autistic, or slightly retarded. But it makes no difference. By deciding that being creepy is not "normal" you're defining "normal" as a relatively narrow range.
At various places and times it was not "normal" to be black, or Jewish, or Irish... going back further you'd have to feel that the first humanoids that started living out of the trees were not "normal". These people are different rather than abnormal, if only because abnormal has negative connotations. I won't go on about how many autistic people are brilliant in a particular area, or as smart or smarter than the rest of us. I'll just say that these people need to be encouraged to live their lives as much as possible without worrying too much about "normality".
Perhaps, but there is a real phenomenon of corporate momentum. It's more than possible that 48% of record executives believe that non-DRM is the way forward, but who actually decides the policies of the company? Partially, it's decided by "this is what we've always done" and partially by the conservative 10% who live at the top. They're the ones that a survey of would be interesting.
China and Russia have ratified it, along with most of Europe. but the US, along with Hungary, Belize, Iran, Syria, Jordan and many other third world nations decided that the cost was too high for their businesses. Which was their right, although it shows the shocking attitude of the US establishment towards their home.
Here what you have is faceless corporations pressurizing the US government to lean on a friendly nation to change their internal policies for the profit ONLY of those corporations. Wow.
How the Canadians put up with their southern neighbours sometimes baffles me. First Canada's accused of exporting a load of marijuana to the states (despite the fact that this http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/drugfact/mari
Most foreign-source marijuana smuggled into the United States enters through or between points of entry at the U.S.-Mexico border. And now this hysterical piracy claims. It's all very unnecessarily aggressive.
Maybe, maybe not, but I'll buy it anyway! In fact, I have it pre-ordered. I suspect you will to. B&W was a bit boring, but I liked it because it was different and entertaining (and you could throw your worshippers into the sea if they got stroppy :) ). This looks like it might be entertaining, and it's definitely different!
Can we all stop using the fear phrase "Global Warming", and refer to it as "Doom, Doom, Doom". Then put the research (not the FUD) back in the correct boxes, "Climatology" and "Atmospheric Studies".
/. I'm not an idiot, but specifically in the scientific community.
There IS a real trend at the moment that any work at all that contradicts "Doom, Doom, Doom" has trouble getting funding, and trouble getting published. The same phenomenon prevented odd results from being published in fusion research... the establishment can be hard to crack.
My question is: Does anyone _seriously_ believe that we can continue to produce so much CO2 and not affect the ecology of the planet over the short to medium term? While I'm one of those that believes that the majority of the temperature variations are not anthropogenic, I do believe that a lot of the climate change IS anthropogenic. I also believe that if you removed humans tomorrow, the plant would have re-asserted a natural balance fairly quickly, by geological or evolutionary terms.
So essentially, the advice seems to be "Don't shit on your own doorstep". Seems fair to me!
I'd prefer much less biased and sensationalist coverage of both the problem and the proposed solutions. Not necessarily here on
Except it's already used in humans for other reasons and shows minimal, minor, side effects. So the clinical trials are a case of equipment (to test for cancer progression rates or lack thereof) and patients. Plenty of people suffer cancer, I can't imagine many of them turning this down, can you?
So the cost should be minimal compared to other clinical trials. Does this mean we can smoke again?
So it's ok to eulogise on a regime that murdered millions of innocents, started wars of agression with almost all its neighbours and brought the country to the brink of annihilation? The reason that it was banned in the first place was because of, y'know, the events of 1938 to 1945. What they did wasn't acceptable then and isn't acceptable now, and the Germans, rightly in my opinion, decided that they would have no tolerance for it. If you voted there today, and _everyone_ in the country voted on it, the vast majority would vote to uphold that ban.
As for the income tax, it's not a blanket 42% tax on everyone. Besides, tax laws _everywhere_ are a mess so no-one can really throw stones. And at least in the German federal systems that cash goes to maintain a superb road network and effecient public transport, two things that are a mess in many countries.
The reputation that they want they can only get within their specific community, though, so most of them don't care as long as they're one of the big names in their field.
, the computer science bibliography, for the reference if I use the paper. I'm researching something to do with computer science, by the way :)
google scholar is excellent resource, by the way, I prefer it to CiteSeer. Then I use http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/index.html
It appears that MS is making more of an issue of DRM than anyone, including the content producers expected. And their EULA says that they accept no responsibility for any breakages or lost data. Pah! On the other hand, I hold the heretical view (here anyway) that XP SP2 patched is a decent OS.
That used to be true, but not any more! Now it can be bought in Dollars AND Euro
Unless, of course, the availability of abundant cheap energy leads to massive heat pollution of the atmosphere (rather than massive C02 pollution). There's an argument against everything (of course, there's also an argument FOR everything) :)
Although, we could build a couple of space elevators, and have them conduct heat out into space. As a bonus, the heat could be used to power them!
Just don't post it!
I'm all for it, as long as he's Denny Crane, civilian advisor to Stargate ops.
"You think you're a god, but I'm Denny Crane. Say it!".
I'm really sick of these "bloggers are great" article. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there. Nearly all of them are irrelevent crap. Some have evolved through effort and investment into almost proper news sites. Congratualtions to them. Now stop calling yourself blogs. You're news sites (because you don't just post unsubstanciated crap).
:)
Face it folks, your "blogosphere" is a mob of people who believe anything that their favorite "blog aka news site" posts, and that is ANYTHING AT ALL at times, and repost it themselves, often not even bothering to change a single character. They have no power, and never will. It's essentially the same as the fat outraged bloke in the pub that never shuts up about what he read in The Sun, despite not ever checking facts, figures, or common sense. I wish people would stop glamorising this crap.
And I'd like to say one more time, to all those who DO use their brains, and use sources, and not fly off the handle (like the O'Reilly incident), thanks for the news.
To Slashdot I say: Check the stories.
End of Rant
Well Duh! :)
FTA:
The quantum cryptographic research project is supported by a five-year, $5.4 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).