First, it's idiocy to equate race with the likelihood of being a criminal, as you've done. Second, it's equally idiotic to remove police resources from high-crime areas and put them in low-crime areas in the name of political correctness.
Unfortunately, the numbers disagree with your first point, and the second is exactly how we're fixing the "problem" of more black criminals getting caught. Of course, the net result is massive deterioration of minority neighborhoods.
How about we accept different races are different ? Including when it means they'll have different rates of crime, and that will obviously necessitate different levels of policing.
"In case" you missed it : this software predicts the LOCATION of criminal behavior.
Even if, personally, I don't see what is wrong with profiling. Just calculate how much more effective an inspection can be if there is a 1% increased chance based on some visible property of a person. You'll be utterly amazed by how much this can reduce crime. And then keep in mind that 10% is not at all strange, and the end effect will be equalization : the result is that many more criminals are caught, and the effectiveness of the profiling drops to zero over time.
And why does it drop ? For exactly the right reason : because what used to be unequal (to take the racist, yet obviously true, point : there are much more black criminal muggers than white ones) becomes equal : over time the chance of a white person being criminal will become exactly the same as the chance of a black person being a criminal.
Of course, in the very short term, yes, there will be a potentially rather large difference in the treatment of different ethnic groups... but that situation existed already, so what's the fucking problem ? And of course, there's the "tolerant" alternative : some ethnic groups commits more crimes, but because the police is de-facto forced to lower controls to get an "even" ratio in the people caught, the only choice the police have is to let known criminals commit crimes freely if they have the correct skin color (or whatever distinguishes their group). Letting people commit crimes is effectively the same as encouraging them. So the real consequence of tolerance is that you're taking whatever group is slightly more criminal to start with, and almost forcing them to all become criminals.
But it's the perfect policy, "tolerance" and "racial quotas" : it sounds good, it's extremely short term effects seem to be exactly what you're gunning for, and in the medium and long term, you're accomplishing exactly the opposite of what you want. Racial quotas in universities, for example, make it in practice harder for black people to become well-educated. Racial quotas in police arrests *increase* minority crime rates instead of decreasing them,... Necessitating, of course, much more government and police intervention.
"Profiling" is the way to have a truly equal society, and "positive discrimination", in all it's forms, is the way to racist hell, where all ethnic groups will be on the verge of starting a genocide against eachother. Needless to say, our politicians think the second is the good and moral idea.
And yes, sadly, I live in a region where "positive discrimination" is heavily practiced, and it has exactly the effects described here.
You do realize that this only has effect in 30+ years, right ? (Arguably it only has definitive effect once the current childbearing cohort starts dying off, so that means that if people have kids at 30, and live to 80, we're talking 50 years)
If you want to have a real effect through changing the population I'm afraid "direct intervention" (think socialist eugenics in the 1930's) is the only viable option.
But your idea sounds good, it is a horrible idea (because it will lower the amount of productive citizens who have to pay and build the renewable infrastructure a LOT sooner than it will start lowering the population). We can be sure our politicians will implement it.
Besides, rewarding having no children is essentially putting a reward on leeching of society, such a policy will destroy us long before the population numbers actually start moving.
This is exactly what bail is for : you give something to the authorities, whether a house, goods, money, or..., to be returned to you when you show up at trial. In trade, they don't arrest you, even though an arrest order has been given, and you get to leave prison with a stern letter asking you not to leave the country. For bail, the question is not guilt, the question is "what can you give the authorities so that they can be assured you won't leave the country to run from trial". The general practice for kids is a large sum of money from the parents, obviously this is hardly an optimal solution.
Note that arresting someone before trial, never mind a minor, requires the authorization of 2 judges, with possibility for appeal, which was either not taken, or failed. Generally this occurs because the person was caught red-handed by the police and arrested during the crime, or running from the cops. That may not equate to a conviction for theft, but it was the judicial system that ordered his arrest, not the police or the government.
I'll repeat it so it's obvious : he'll get this back at trial (whether or not he's convicted). Meanwhile, the kid doesn't have to miss school.
I mean the pandora is horribly, horribly expensive. 500 dollars just to have four knobs, a keyboard, and a machine that does nothing but play games ? ( no wonder they don't show the price on the homepage )
I'd rather have an Xperia Play. It's cheaper (not a lot, though), better games, it plays PSX and N64 ! Plays legacy games and emulators just fine, and it's also a phone, so you always have it on you. To idiots (say, your boss) it looks like a phone and thus can be brought anywhere without people getting their knickers in a twist.
It has cheap (or even free) emulators for everything including the old sierra games (discworld on android ! Hurray !),... even dosbox !
Well, they could try that, however you have to take into account that what the court does (in this case, or in a previous one) can never be called into question in another case. There's a principle in Latin that basically states "unless God disputes it, the court is right". You do not get to dispute the court.
So suppose you succeed in getting this contract clause overturned by a court. That does not constitute a modification of the contract : rather the judge made clear what the meaning of the original contract was, in a manner which both parties are forced to agree to. So skype cannot do the same as the employee did : they knew exactly what they were getting into when they signed the contract, because that's simply the lawful version of that contract. Also, in Christian law systems there is the basic principle that in the case of unresolvable reasonable doubt, the weaker party is right (customers > companies (assuming they're not both companies), employees > employers, smaller company > bigger company, bigger company > the state, the state > federal state,...), so if Skype tried to make an identical claim, they'd lose.
Besides, since skype violated the law in making the original contract, which has been remedied by the original judgement, what basis do they have for a case ? So what argument would Skype have to invalidate the initial contract ? "The judge modified the contract we agreed to, because it was illegal, and we didn't know that would happen to illegal contracts"... they'll get laughed out of court.
A private person suing a legal person does not have to "prove" anything in a civil case. It is not the case, in Christian nations, that "a contract is a contract". In nations with laws based on torah law you might be fucked (and I'd say sharia, except all such nations adopted napoleonistic law or english common law for reasons that are obvious to anyone reading even basic principles of sharia. So those nations only partially apply sharia where pertaining to "family matters" (inheritance, custody and divorce cases) ). Especially in this case, the requirements for a contract CLAUSE to be binding (esp. in Luxembourg) are that :
both parties must express explicit consent for the explicit agreement to be made (whether written or verbal) (every clause is looked at as a separate agreement, and any clause can be invalidated separately, and the judge is supposed to leave as much as humanly possible intact. So invalidating a clause in your employment contract in court never means the company can get your pay back)
A contract is not a paper with a signature in pen. A contract is the written form of an explicit mutual agreement in which both parties enter voluntary.
The big exceptions to contract law : 1) the law does not allow such contracts (e.g. slavery contracts are unenforceable no matter how well they're written) 2) there was no mutual agreement of wills (e.g. one party was drunk (if you try that excuse in court, expect to pay damages), or insane, or under custody) 3) the contract is one-sided : all advantage go to one party, a contract is supposed to benefit both sides, if it doesn't -> no contract 4) the contract has an escape clause : an escape clause cannot allow one side to back out of the contract without consequences (you can have escape clauses that pay damages, though. E.g. an employer CAN say : we can deny you your options by paying you the profit you would have made from immediately selling them)
So in this case that explicit consent obviously doesn't exist for that clause, and it violates other basic principles of contract law as well. One of the parties did not understand the contents of the contract, and the case can be made that it was not reasonable to expect him to (that is the critical part). So obviously there was no explicit consent about this clause. It seems to me that it would be quite easy to get a Luxembourg judge to agree that this clause is therefore not enforceable, and the firm is both forced to allow him to vest his options normally and liable for damages for trying this.
Well, I suppose we'll know that soon enough. If it turns out not to be, in a sufficiently spectacular fashion, then at least Texas has a good reason to add the big bang to the history books.
Nothing in your post addresses the real issue : to be considered valid a theory has to make correct predictions. That means a climate theory, like the ones laid out in AR1 to AR4. AR1 to AR3 make predictions, and the predictions of AR1 and AR2 are wrong. There can be no debate about this. They are as wrong as 1+1=3. They do not match reality. AR3 is at the very edge of it's confidence interval, and not looking good. So your reply is... "but AR4 is so much better". Sorry. I may owe you an apology in 10 years, but for now the IPCC has to rebuild it's credibility, and that means making correct predictions for *at least* 10 years. Is that such an unreasonable demand ?
This is science. If what you say were true and "we know" then why do research at all ? You're putting theory before measurements, which is a cardinal sin in the exact sciences. You have a "beautiful" "obviously right" "fantastic" "simple".... theory ? Great ! Let's measure ! Awwwwww.... no match. Sorry, get your ass back to the drawing board and try again. No matter how many reasons there are to believe in the correctness of your theory, it's "God" who decides. It either matches nature, or it doesn't. The IPCC was claiming *in 1990* to be able to predict the climate 100 years out, their longest lasting predictions lasted 12 years...
And then there is AR4. AR4 was written quite recently. It predicts the solar cycle oscillation is the universal eternal gospel truth, continuing from 3 billion years ago until kingdom come... and this effect is now predicted to stop. Nicely done guys ! And you refuse to make predictions. Well sorry. As I said, claiming this is science is borderline fraud. At a physics conference, you'd get a "friendly referral to the applied sciences" (which is not a compliment).
"if we drop co2 production, climate change won't happen" is an extreme exaggeration of what they are saying. In the first place, it's already happening and that's well documented. What they are really saying is something like "the sooner and more drastically we curb the rise in greenhouse gases the better the final outcome will be".
I don't agree that's the message they're spreading, but even this message is completely wrong. The co2 added by humans to the atmosphere, counted against the total volume (from all the years we have been seeing global warming)... is negligible. All the co2 combined is but a minor player in the whole atmospheric forcing phenomenon. In other words, stopping co2 prediction will cause a almost invisible delay (invisible in climactic timescales : 30-50 years, maybe even less). The end outcome will be exactly the same. We just get a little more time. There will not be 1 mm difference in the sea level (according to their own - very inaccurate - models). We're in an exponential feedback loop according to their models and stopping co2 production will merely stop the cause of the loop. That's great and all, but again, it is about as effective of slamming your foot on the brakes when the car is already over the cliff.
So how about the message becomes "we're over the cliff, too bad, and it's probably this-or-that-guy's fault, but right now our only option is : let's forgive and forget about the cause and start thinking about the landing". But nobody's interested. Assigning blame, forcing others to implement popular agendas, that's what's important, not the science, and most certainly not solving the problem.
We all know why we're focusing on the cause, assigning blame evokes a sense of guilt, which means a lot of people consider themselves guilty and feel the need to implement the greenies' agendas as "repayment" : it doesn't help, in fact it makes things worse, but it is the excuse greenies use to force others to implement their pre-existing ideas, no matter how useless or counterproductive they are. The only thing the climate tre
Oh no, I have woken the paranoids. No, apart from a stealth surveillance drone, gees.
Believe it or not, the most important property of a stealth surveillance drone is stealth. And a 2-by-2 meter platform may be able to maneuver inside buildings, it sure as hell will not do so without getting noticed.
Quadcopters have better maneuverability (especially the ones with ducted fans) and they have been built to measure 5 by 5 centimeters capable of carrying 200 grams of custom electronics. Now that's a stealth platform, especially if it can fly fast.
Well I do count electrical fly-by wire systems controlling hydraulic mechanisms as "non-mechanical". And they can fail for the same reasons other electronics do.
Both small fixed wing and helicopters have simple mechanical controls that are very reliable, and quite often the failure of one of these controls results in a brown-pants moment for the pilot but the aircraft can still be controlled to a landing.
But only for tiny aircraft is this possible. It most certainly is not the case for any helicopter that can seat more than 2 people, and it certainly isn't true for bigger fixed-wing aircraft like a passenger carrier.
Also quadcopters use very, very light propellers, so mechanical failure disables that engine entirely, leading at least to limited control (and if the control software is not capable of running a propeller in both forward and reverse it will spin out of control immediately). And quadcopters are not very efficient flying machines, and the loss of one propeller implies that the opposite propeller can no longer be used for thrust, that would cause it to spin out of control. This means that any failure leads immediately to loss of 50% trust capacity, so if you want to make a decent landing with an engine failure make sure you implement extra powerful propellers.
Add to that that the article seems to be describing the second coming, not any realistic plane. If it can do what the article says, you could at least show it moving, no ? It is quite hard to believe that nobody tried putting a movable wing directly behind the propellor before.
But that's quite typical of these kinds of articles of course.
Don't worry... we went from mainframes (first computers) to PC's... to mainframes... to PC's... to mainframes ("cloud computing").
You might want to get a job at a bank, they're funny because they still haven't fully migrated away from the former version of the mainframes and COBOL. Then they link it to PC's using all sorts of weird protocols (like screen scraping a terminal emulator to translate to xml... oh the horror). And now of course, on top of that xml they're implementing web2.0 interfaces and webservices.
Needless to say, bugs tend to be epic, extremely hairy bugs, 5 permissions required in writing before you can tie your shoelaces on company grounds. Fixing tiny one-line bugs takes weeks. But the monetary aspect of the job unfortunately makes up for much of this.
Except the C++ version of this does support many things that functional languages do. Currying for example (binding only part of the arguments of a function). In C++ you can do this :
int substract(int a, int b) { return a - b; }
substract(2,1);// 1 auto f = bind(substract, _2, _1); f(2,1);// -1
auto f2 = bind(substract, _1, 3); f2(4);// 1
auto f3 = bind(substract, _1, _1); f3(1);// 0, obviously gives 0 for all inputs
You have to admit, pretty functional, no ? But it doesn't stop at currying. And you get all this with *zero* runtime overhead (as long as you stay away from "virtual"). The final program does not execute anything it doesn't actually have to, it doesn't dereference pointers, it doesn't do weird string lookups, it doesn't... In general you tell it to substract 2 numbers, and it substracts 2 numbers. Nothing more, nothing less.
Simply the temperature predictions. The IPCC's "business as usual scenario" predicts 2005 temperature anomaly to be between 0.5 and 0.7 degrees celcius, at 95% certainty. For 2010, 0.6 and 0.85 respectively. The IPCC's "what if we stopped today" scenario predicts 2005 temperature anomaly to be between 0.3 and 0.45 degrees celcius at 95% certainty.
Just to make things clear, we did not implement any of the AR1 recommendations, so the first interval is the one to take into account. But we're even below the second interval. The second interval is just mentioned to illustrate just how bad their predictions were.
The observed temperature anomaly ? 0.45 degrees celcius for 2005, 0.45 degrees celcius for 2010 (values averaged by 1 years, which frankly is what wolfram alpha gives by default, and I'm using the most-used study (HADCRUT), not cherry-picking one that makes my point best (which would give 0.3 for 2005 and even less for 2010))
Let's also note that is not just outside of their predictions, but we're actually close to a standard deviation away from their predicted values (assuming normal distribution, which is probably not correct, but still). That means that a random dice roll would have made a far better prediction than the IPCC has. In fact the predictions of the anti-AGW crowd (0 degrees change) was far more correct than the IPCC's prediction, despite being based on zero data at all.
Yes apparently 2000-2010 was FAR cooler than the IPCC and the entire academic community expected, and for unknown reasons (or at least I have yet to read about a huge climate event happening in 2000). The same problem exists on with the 1995 predictions, and we're very close to exiting the 95% range of the 2000 predicted temperature anomaly.
And the final nail in the coffin of the IPCC ? The AR4 report doesn't include a prediction of the temperature anomaly anymore. I'll let you decide how that affects their credibility, but if you want my opinion : it's borderline fraud.
(and frankly, they've already screwed up AR4 too, because of the continuing drop in solar output they had absolutely no idea about that has now been observed and is predicted to continue dropping for 20 years at least, they have *once again* already missed a major factor influencing the climate. I'm not saying the earth will cool because of solar cycle 24, I'm saying I don't know, AND I'm saying the IPCC doesn't have a clue either. Just so you know, the solar cycle is responsible for the major oscillation of the temperature anomaly, it's a far more powerful effect than global warming, it just "averages out" to zero over 20 years. However it is dropping far below it's lowest value of the last 500 years, so something big is happening. Obviously at the very least if the solar predictions are correct that oscillation should dissipate and disappear, then re-appear in 2050-2060 or so). And there's no excuse : if you can't predict the sun, you can't predict the climate. It's not like the sun is a previously unknown factor they didn't know they had to model).
And I *resent* how they represent climate forcing theory. That IS fraud, there's no other word for it. They tell the world community "if we drop co2 production, climate change won't happen". Do their models say that ? No, not at all. Their models say that we're in a feedback loop and temperature *will* rise, no matter what we do. Only active measures (like artificially influencing albedo) stand a chance of maintaining the status-quo. But every article I read, both popular and scientific ones, tell us that humans are responsible. That's correct, and yet it's also a huge lie. Humans living in 1850-1900 are responsible (and dead, of course) (and even then, volcanoes did more damage than humans, but hey, let's throw them that bone : our great-grandfathers are certainly not innocent), and they created a self-reinforcing temperature change. THAT's what the models tell us.
Humans alive today are simply making the situation a little bit worse. Not even that much. That's wh
Where F is force, m is mass, a is acceleration and i is the phase of the moon in puppies per cubic litre
Obviously 1) is the most normal thing in the world, whereas 2) is not tolerated. If you construct a formula, and people make measurements against your predictions, and they *fail*, then you're out. Better luck next time.
So if one were to take the first IPCC report. Take the 95% certain error bands. Notice that we're FAR outside those error bands. That's not a measurement error that's a formula error. So *pzzzzzt* IPCC out ! Better luck next time. Or at least, that's what would happen in an ideal world (and obviously all treaties based on the wrong prediction should be undone and their effects nullified insofar that's reasonably possible). Of course, none of this has happened.... and for some reason this is an entirely unreasonable position to take... why ?
And claiming that the fact that the IPCC 95% predictions fail after an average of 12 years is to be taken as an omen that they're very unlikely to be correct after 100 years... that's just not done. And yes, there are excuses, like the 1995 report going outside of the 95% error bands because of a volcanic eruption which clearly in some unknown way massively affected the el nino event. Great, and I don't blame anyone, and yes, you are not geologists and you don't understand el nino, no problem at all. But if you can't predict that... obviously that means you can't predict the climate. So stop claiming you can.
Except, of course, you're basically referring to a measurement error that modifies the underlying values. This is not what I'm talking about. And, frankly, even on the initial discovery of pluto people put quite wide error bars on their discovery. If the size of the actual planet falls outside of these error bars, then there was no discovery at all. Besides, real astronomers don't really look at the sky. Engineers, applied scientists,... do that for them.
Besides, climate science is not a single measurement to be explained. Climate science purports to be a theory explaining all sorts of situations, giving formulas, working principles, for calculating the climate given a set of input data... It's more akin to a theory like optics, describing the path of light given the materials in it's path.
And only a moron would claim that in theories large errors are tolerated. In theory NO errors are tolerated. None at all.
Of course, climate science isn't an exact science. It merely boils down to running a few pseudo-statistical algorithms on a dataset. (pseudo-statistical because of the chaos problem, which is simply ignored)
Oh dear, you've attacked the sacred almighty science reputation ! Kill the traitor ! Oh wait, it's climate "science" (I'm of the exact sciences persuasion, and well, they don't measure up) ! Exterminate the traitor, slowly, neuter his dog and kill his family !
The sad fact is, attempt to hold up climate science to the standards of other exact sciences, like physics, and nothing remains. Predictions made by climate scientists in the past "with 95% certainty" (and higher) have failed to materialize. Do that in physics, and your theory gets laughed out of every conference.
What is by far the most disgusting bit about climate science is that "skeptic" has become an insult. Imho, the basis of science is doubt, and so everybody should be a climate skeptic, even when it comes to established theories. If anyone needs more proof that this science is overly politicized, there you have it. Everybody also knows that this is done for political reasons (the climate treaties)...
Robots still require more than a few relatively high-skilled jobs, even if they don't require the hundreds of drones normal manufacturing requires. So this could be a good thing, freeing up more people for more interesting and varied jobs.
Or rather, you build a Fusor. We are perfectly capable of building fusion reactors, despite what seems to be the prevailing opinion here on slashdot. They're just not Q>1 (in fact they're mostly Q = 1/10000000 or so).
These reactors are the cheapest and easiest neutron source we know, and they come with a knob do select the speed of the produced neutrons. But neutron radiation is hardly ever used for detection or measurement of anything that has to do with living things. It's activating radiation : a large number of materials, most notably water, will transform into radioactive materials when hit with neutrons.
Activation properties are the excuse green nuts use to oppose nuclear fusion reactors (nuts, because the environmental impact of a fusion reactor is much less than the environmental impact of solar or wind power, both in absolute values, and embarrassingly less when measured on a per-kWh basis).
Though, of course, the industry has again made the terminal mistake : treat the "concerns" of green nuts as pseudo-serious and research neutron-free fusion reactions.
Slashdot Mirror
First, it's idiocy to equate race with the likelihood of being a criminal, as you've done. Second, it's equally idiotic to remove police resources from high-crime areas and put them in low-crime areas in the name of political correctness.
Unfortunately, the numbers disagree with your first point, and the second is exactly how we're fixing the "problem" of more black criminals getting caught. Of course, the net result is massive deterioration of minority neighborhoods.
How about we accept different races are different ? Including when it means they'll have different rates of crime, and that will obviously necessitate different levels of policing.
"In case" you missed it : this software predicts the LOCATION of criminal behavior.
Even if, personally, I don't see what is wrong with profiling. Just calculate how much more effective an inspection can be if there is a 1% increased chance based on some visible property of a person. You'll be utterly amazed by how much this can reduce crime. And then keep in mind that 10% is not at all strange, and the end effect will be equalization : the result is that many more criminals are caught, and the effectiveness of the profiling drops to zero over time.
And why does it drop ? For exactly the right reason : because what used to be unequal (to take the racist, yet obviously true, point : there are much more black criminal muggers than white ones) becomes equal : over time the chance of a white person being criminal will become exactly the same as the chance of a black person being a criminal.
Of course, in the very short term, yes, there will be a potentially rather large difference in the treatment of different ethnic groups ... but that situation existed already, so what's the fucking problem ? And of course, there's the "tolerant" alternative : some ethnic groups commits more crimes, but because the police is de-facto forced to lower controls to get an "even" ratio in the people caught, the only choice the police have is to let known criminals commit crimes freely if they have the correct skin color (or whatever distinguishes their group). Letting people commit crimes is effectively the same as encouraging them. So the real consequence of tolerance is that you're taking whatever group is slightly more criminal to start with, and almost forcing them to all become criminals.
But it's the perfect policy, "tolerance" and "racial quotas" : it sounds good, it's extremely short term effects seem to be exactly what you're gunning for, and in the medium and long term, you're accomplishing exactly the opposite of what you want. Racial quotas in universities, for example, make it in practice harder for black people to become well-educated. Racial quotas in police arrests *increase* minority crime rates instead of decreasing them, ... Necessitating, of course, much more government and police intervention.
"Profiling" is the way to have a truly equal society, and "positive discrimination", in all it's forms, is the way to racist hell, where all ethnic groups will be on the verge of starting a genocide against eachother. Needless to say, our politicians think the second is the good and moral idea.
And yes, sadly, I live in a region where "positive discrimination" is heavily practiced, and it has exactly the effects described here.
Despite that smug remark (probably illegal for a judge : it shows the judge is presuming guilt). This action is a good thing.
The kid gets to leave jail (without his parents needing a bundle). Presumably there wasn't much xbox playing in jail either.
You do realize that this only has effect in 30+ years, right ? (Arguably it only has definitive effect once the current childbearing cohort starts dying off, so that means that if people have kids at 30, and live to 80, we're talking 50 years)
If you want to have a real effect through changing the population I'm afraid "direct intervention" (think socialist eugenics in the 1930's) is the only viable option.
But your idea sounds good, it is a horrible idea (because it will lower the amount of productive citizens who have to pay and build the renewable infrastructure a LOT sooner than it will start lowering the population). We can be sure our politicians will implement it.
Besides, rewarding having no children is essentially putting a reward on leeching of society, such a policy will destroy us long before the population numbers actually start moving.
This is exactly what bail is for : you give something to the authorities, whether a house, goods, money, or ..., to be returned to you when you show up at trial. In trade, they don't arrest you, even though an arrest order has been given, and you get to leave prison with a stern letter asking you not to leave the country. For bail, the question is not guilt, the question is "what can you give the authorities so that they can be assured you won't leave the country to run from trial". The general practice for kids is a large sum of money from the parents, obviously this is hardly an optimal solution.
Note that arresting someone before trial, never mind a minor, requires the authorization of 2 judges, with possibility for appeal, which was either not taken, or failed. Generally this occurs because the person was caught red-handed by the police and arrested during the crime, or running from the cops. That may not equate to a conviction for theft, but it was the judicial system that ordered his arrest, not the police or the government.
I'll repeat it so it's obvious : he'll get this back at trial (whether or not he's convicted). Meanwhile, the kid doesn't have to miss school.
I mean the pandora is horribly, horribly expensive. 500 dollars just to have four knobs, a keyboard, and a machine that does nothing but play games ? ( no wonder they don't show the price on the homepage )
I'd rather have an Xperia Play. It's cheaper (not a lot, though), better games, it plays PSX and N64 ! Plays legacy games and emulators just fine, and it's also a phone, so you always have it on you. To idiots (say, your boss) it looks like a phone and thus can be brought anywhere without people getting their knickers in a twist.
It has cheap (or even free) emulators for everything including the old sierra games (discworld on android ! Hurray !), ... even dosbox !
So yes, it implements intercept. Obviously. Just try to sell a VOIP PBX to an operator without intercept.
I would be amazed if skype didn't implement intercept yet.
Well, they could try that, however you have to take into account that what the court does (in this case, or in a previous one) can never be called into question in another case. There's a principle in Latin that basically states "unless God disputes it, the court is right". You do not get to dispute the court.
So suppose you succeed in getting this contract clause overturned by a court. That does not constitute a modification of the contract : rather the judge made clear what the meaning of the original contract was, in a manner which both parties are forced to agree to. So skype cannot do the same as the employee did : they knew exactly what they were getting into when they signed the contract, because that's simply the lawful version of that contract. Also, in Christian law systems there is the basic principle that in the case of unresolvable reasonable doubt, the weaker party is right (customers > companies (assuming they're not both companies), employees > employers, smaller company > bigger company, bigger company > the state, the state > federal state, ...), so if Skype tried to make an identical claim, they'd lose.
Besides, since skype violated the law in making the original contract, which has been remedied by the original judgement, what basis do they have for a case ? So what argument would Skype have to invalidate the initial contract ? "The judge modified the contract we agreed to, because it was illegal, and we didn't know that would happen to illegal contracts" ... they'll get laughed out of court.
A private person suing a legal person does not have to "prove" anything in a civil case. It is not the case, in Christian nations, that "a contract is a contract". In nations with laws based on torah law you might be fucked (and I'd say sharia, except all such nations adopted napoleonistic law or english common law for reasons that are obvious to anyone reading even basic principles of sharia. So those nations only partially apply sharia where pertaining to "family matters" (inheritance, custody and divorce cases) ). Especially in this case, the requirements for a contract CLAUSE to be binding (esp. in Luxembourg) are that :
both parties must express explicit consent for the explicit agreement to be made (whether written or verbal) (every clause is looked at as a separate agreement, and any clause can be invalidated separately, and the judge is supposed to leave as much as humanly possible intact. So invalidating a clause in your employment contract in court never means the company can get your pay back)
A contract is not a paper with a signature in pen. A contract is the written form of an explicit mutual agreement in which both parties enter voluntary.
The big exceptions to contract law :
1) the law does not allow such contracts (e.g. slavery contracts are unenforceable no matter how well they're written)
2) there was no mutual agreement of wills (e.g. one party was drunk (if you try that excuse in court, expect to pay damages), or insane, or under custody)
3) the contract is one-sided : all advantage go to one party, a contract is supposed to benefit both sides, if it doesn't -> no contract
4) the contract has an escape clause : an escape clause cannot allow one side to back out of the contract without consequences (you can have escape clauses that pay damages, though. E.g. an employer CAN say : we can deny you your options by paying you the profit you would have made from immediately selling them)
So in this case that explicit consent obviously doesn't exist for that clause, and it violates other basic principles of contract law as well. One of the parties did not understand the contents of the contract, and the case can be made that it was not reasonable to expect him to (that is the critical part). So obviously there was no explicit consent about this clause. It seems to me that it would be quite easy to get a Luxembourg judge to agree that this clause is therefore not enforceable, and the firm is both forced to allow him to vest his options normally and liable for damages for trying this.
Well, I suppose we'll know that soon enough. If it turns out not to be, in a sufficiently spectacular fashion, then at least Texas has a good reason to add the big bang to the history books.
Nothing in your post addresses the real issue : to be considered valid a theory has to make correct predictions. That means a climate theory, like the ones laid out in AR1 to AR4. AR1 to AR3 make predictions, and the predictions of AR1 and AR2 are wrong. There can be no debate about this. They are as wrong as 1+1=3. They do not match reality. AR3 is at the very edge of it's confidence interval, and not looking good. So your reply is ... "but AR4 is so much better". Sorry. I may owe you an apology in 10 years, but for now the IPCC has to rebuild it's credibility, and that means making correct predictions for *at least* 10 years. Is that such an unreasonable demand ?
This is science. If what you say were true and "we know" then why do research at all ? You're putting theory before measurements, which is a cardinal sin in the exact sciences. You have a "beautiful" "obviously right" "fantastic" "simple" .... theory ? Great ! Let's measure ! Awwwwww .... no match. Sorry, get your ass back to the drawing board and try again. No matter how many reasons there are to believe in the correctness of your theory, it's "God" who decides. It either matches nature, or it doesn't. The IPCC was claiming *in 1990* to be able to predict the climate 100 years out, their longest lasting predictions lasted 12 years ...
And then there is AR4. AR4 was written quite recently. It predicts the solar cycle oscillation is the universal eternal gospel truth, continuing from 3 billion years ago until kingdom come ... and this effect is now predicted to stop. Nicely done guys ! And you refuse to make predictions. Well sorry. As I said, claiming this is science is borderline fraud. At a physics conference, you'd get a "friendly referral to the applied sciences" (which is not a compliment).
"if we drop co2 production, climate change won't happen" is an extreme exaggeration of what they are saying. In the first place, it's already happening and that's well documented. What they are really saying is something like "the sooner and more drastically we curb the rise in greenhouse gases the better the final outcome will be".
I don't agree that's the message they're spreading, but even this message is completely wrong. The co2 added by humans to the atmosphere, counted against the total volume (from all the years we have been seeing global warming) ... is negligible. All the co2 combined is but a minor player in the whole atmospheric forcing phenomenon. In other words, stopping co2 prediction will cause a almost invisible delay (invisible in climactic timescales : 30-50 years, maybe even less). The end outcome will be exactly the same. We just get a little more time. There will not be 1 mm difference in the sea level (according to their own - very inaccurate - models). We're in an exponential feedback loop according to their models and stopping co2 production will merely stop the cause of the loop. That's great and all, but again, it is about as effective of slamming your foot on the brakes when the car is already over the cliff.
So how about the message becomes "we're over the cliff, too bad, and it's probably this-or-that-guy's fault, but right now our only option is : let's forgive and forget about the cause and start thinking about the landing". But nobody's interested. Assigning blame, forcing others to implement popular agendas, that's what's important, not the science, and most certainly not solving the problem.
We all know why we're focusing on the cause, assigning blame evokes a sense of guilt, which means a lot of people consider themselves guilty and feel the need to implement the greenies' agendas as "repayment" : it doesn't help, in fact it makes things worse, but it is the excuse greenies use to force others to implement their pre-existing ideas, no matter how useless or counterproductive they are. The only thing the climate tre
Oh no, I have woken the paranoids. No, apart from a stealth surveillance drone, gees.
Believe it or not, the most important property of a stealth surveillance drone is stealth. And a 2-by-2 meter platform may be able to maneuver inside buildings, it sure as hell will not do so without getting noticed.
Quadcopters have better maneuverability (especially the ones with ducted fans) and they have been built to measure 5 by 5 centimeters capable of carrying 200 grams of custom electronics. Now that's a stealth platform, especially if it can fly fast.
Well I do count electrical fly-by wire systems controlling hydraulic mechanisms as "non-mechanical". And they can fail for the same reasons other electronics do.
Both small fixed wing and helicopters have simple mechanical controls that are very reliable, and quite often the failure of one of these controls results in a brown-pants moment for the pilot but the aircraft can still be controlled to a landing.
But only for tiny aircraft is this possible. It most certainly is not the case for any helicopter that can seat more than 2 people, and it certainly isn't true for bigger fixed-wing aircraft like a passenger carrier.
Also quadcopters use very, very light propellers, so mechanical failure disables that engine entirely, leading at least to limited control (and if the control software is not capable of running a propeller in both forward and reverse it will spin out of control immediately). And quadcopters are not very efficient flying machines, and the loss of one propeller implies that the opposite propeller can no longer be used for thrust, that would cause it to spin out of control. This means that any failure leads immediately to loss of 50% trust capacity, so if you want to make a decent landing with an engine failure make sure you implement extra powerful propellers.
Add to that that the article seems to be describing the second coming, not any realistic plane. If it can do what the article says, you could at least show it moving, no ? It is quite hard to believe that nobody tried putting a movable wing directly behind the propellor before.
But that's quite typical of these kinds of articles of course.
Hey if you were a mainframe salesman you could use the same line :
"Mainframes are how things *are* done, I suggest you get used to it"
disclaimer : I might have worked at a bank
Don't worry ... we went from mainframes (first computers) to PC's ... to mainframes ... to PC's ... to mainframes ("cloud computing").
You might want to get a job at a bank, they're funny because they still haven't fully migrated away from the former version of the mainframes and COBOL. Then they link it to PC's using all sorts of weird protocols (like screen scraping a terminal emulator to translate to xml ... oh the horror). And now of course, on top of that xml they're implementing web2.0 interfaces and webservices.
Needless to say, bugs tend to be epic, extremely hairy bugs, 5 permissions required in writing before you can tie your shoelaces on company grounds. Fixing tiny one-line bugs takes weeks. But the monetary aspect of the job unfortunately makes up for much of this.
Except the C++ version of this does support many things that functional languages do. Currying for example (binding only part of the arguments of a function). In C++ you can do this :
int substract(int a, int b) { return a - b; }
substract(2,1); // 1 // -1
auto f = bind(substract, _2, _1);
f(2,1);
auto f2 = bind(substract, _1, 3); // 1
f2(4);
auto f3 = bind(substract, _1, _1); // 0, obviously gives 0 for all inputs
f3(1);
You have to admit, pretty functional, no ? But it doesn't stop at currying. And you get all this with *zero* runtime overhead (as long as you stay away from "virtual"). The final program does not execute anything it doesn't actually have to, it doesn't dereference pointers, it doesn't do weird string lookups, it doesn't ... In general you tell it to substract 2 numbers, and it substracts 2 numbers. Nothing more, nothing less.
Simply the temperature predictions. The IPCC's "business as usual scenario" predicts 2005 temperature anomaly to be between 0.5 and 0.7 degrees celcius, at 95% certainty. For 2010, 0.6 and 0.85 respectively. The IPCC's "what if we stopped today" scenario predicts 2005 temperature anomaly to be between 0.3 and 0.45 degrees celcius at 95% certainty.
Just to make things clear, we did not implement any of the AR1 recommendations, so the first interval is the one to take into account. But we're even below the second interval. The second interval is just mentioned to illustrate just how bad their predictions were.
The observed temperature anomaly ? 0.45 degrees celcius for 2005, 0.45 degrees celcius for 2010 (values averaged by 1 years, which frankly is what wolfram alpha gives by default, and I'm using the most-used study (HADCRUT), not cherry-picking one that makes my point best (which would give 0.3 for 2005 and even less for 2010))
Let's also note that is not just outside of their predictions, but we're actually close to a standard deviation away from their predicted values (assuming normal distribution, which is probably not correct, but still). That means that a random dice roll would have made a far better prediction than the IPCC has. In fact the predictions of the anti-AGW crowd (0 degrees change) was far more correct than the IPCC's prediction, despite being based on zero data at all.
Yes apparently 2000-2010 was FAR cooler than the IPCC and the entire academic community expected, and for unknown reasons (or at least I have yet to read about a huge climate event happening in 2000). The same problem exists on with the 1995 predictions, and we're very close to exiting the 95% range of the 2000 predicted temperature anomaly.
And the final nail in the coffin of the IPCC ? The AR4 report doesn't include a prediction of the temperature anomaly anymore. I'll let you decide how that affects their credibility, but if you want my opinion : it's borderline fraud.
(and frankly, they've already screwed up AR4 too, because of the continuing drop in solar output they had absolutely no idea about that has now been observed and is predicted to continue dropping for 20 years at least, they have *once again* already missed a major factor influencing the climate. I'm not saying the earth will cool because of solar cycle 24, I'm saying I don't know, AND I'm saying the IPCC doesn't have a clue either. Just so you know, the solar cycle is responsible for the major oscillation of the temperature anomaly, it's a far more powerful effect than global warming, it just "averages out" to zero over 20 years. However it is dropping far below it's lowest value of the last 500 years, so something big is happening. Obviously at the very least if the solar predictions are correct that oscillation should dissipate and disappear, then re-appear in 2050-2060 or so). And there's no excuse : if you can't predict the sun, you can't predict the climate. It's not like the sun is a previously unknown factor they didn't know they had to model).
And I *resent* how they represent climate forcing theory. That IS fraud, there's no other word for it. They tell the world community "if we drop co2 production, climate change won't happen". Do their models say that ? No, not at all. Their models say that we're in a feedback loop and temperature *will* rise, no matter what we do. Only active measures (like artificially influencing albedo) stand a chance of maintaining the status-quo. But every article I read, both popular and scientific ones, tell us that humans are responsible. That's correct, and yet it's also a huge lie. Humans living in 1850-1900 are responsible (and dead, of course) (and even then, volcanoes did more damage than humans, but hey, let's throw them that bone : our great-grandfathers are certainly not innocent), and they created a self-reinforcing temperature change. THAT's what the models tell us.
Humans alive today are simply making the situation a little bit worse. Not even that much. That's wh
*sigh* we're talking about 2 different things.
1) An "error" in a measurement :
2100V +- 500V
2) An "error" in a theory:
F = m.a.i
Where F is force, m is mass, a is acceleration and i is the phase of the moon in puppies per cubic litre
Obviously 1) is the most normal thing in the world, whereas 2) is not tolerated. If you construct a formula, and people make measurements against your predictions, and they *fail*, then you're out. Better luck next time.
So if one were to take the first IPCC report. Take the 95% certain error bands. Notice that we're FAR outside those error bands. That's not a measurement error that's a formula error. So *pzzzzzt* IPCC out ! Better luck next time. Or at least, that's what would happen in an ideal world (and obviously all treaties based on the wrong prediction should be undone and their effects nullified insofar that's reasonably possible). Of course, none of this has happened .... and for some reason this is an entirely unreasonable position to take ... why ?
And claiming that the fact that the IPCC 95% predictions fail after an average of 12 years is to be taken as an omen that they're very unlikely to be correct after 100 years ... that's just not done. And yes, there are excuses, like the 1995 report going outside of the 95% error bands because of a volcanic eruption which clearly in some unknown way massively affected the el nino event. Great, and I don't blame anyone, and yes, you are not geologists and you don't understand el nino, no problem at all. But if you can't predict that ... obviously that means you can't predict the climate. So stop claiming you can.
Except, of course, you're basically referring to a measurement error that modifies the underlying values. This is not what I'm talking about. And, frankly, even on the initial discovery of pluto people put quite wide error bars on their discovery. If the size of the actual planet falls outside of these error bars, then there was no discovery at all. Besides, real astronomers don't really look at the sky. Engineers, applied scientists, ... do that for them.
Besides, climate science is not a single measurement to be explained. Climate science purports to be a theory explaining all sorts of situations, giving formulas, working principles, for calculating the climate given a set of input data ... It's more akin to a theory like optics, describing the path of light given the materials in it's path.
And only a moron would claim that in theories large errors are tolerated. In theory NO errors are tolerated. None at all.
Of course, climate science isn't an exact science. It merely boils down to running a few pseudo-statistical algorithms on a dataset. (pseudo-statistical because of the chaos problem, which is simply ignored)
Oh dear, you've attacked the sacred almighty science reputation ! Kill the traitor ! Oh wait, it's climate "science" (I'm of the exact sciences persuasion, and well, they don't measure up) ! Exterminate the traitor, slowly, neuter his dog and kill his family !
You know, this repuation.
The sad fact is, attempt to hold up climate science to the standards of other exact sciences, like physics, and nothing remains. Predictions made by climate scientists in the past "with 95% certainty" (and higher) have failed to materialize. Do that in physics, and your theory gets laughed out of every conference.
What is by far the most disgusting bit about climate science is that "skeptic" has become an insult. Imho, the basis of science is doubt, and so everybody should be a climate skeptic, even when it comes to established theories. If anyone needs more proof that this science is overly politicized, there you have it. Everybody also knows that this is done for political reasons (the climate treaties) ...
this is disgusting
Robots still require more than a few relatively high-skilled jobs, even if they don't require the hundreds of drones normal manufacturing requires. So this could be a good thing, freeing up more people for more interesting and varied jobs.
Why don't you google for commercial neutron sources. They are certainly commercially produced.
Or rather, you build a Fusor. We are perfectly capable of building fusion reactors, despite what seems to be the prevailing opinion here on slashdot. They're just not Q>1 (in fact they're mostly Q = 1/10000000 or so).
These reactors are the cheapest and easiest neutron source we know, and they come with a knob do select the speed of the produced neutrons. But neutron radiation is hardly ever used for detection or measurement of anything that has to do with living things. It's activating radiation : a large number of materials, most notably water, will transform into radioactive materials when hit with neutrons.
Activation properties are the excuse green nuts use to oppose nuclear fusion reactors (nuts, because the environmental impact of a fusion reactor is much less than the environmental impact of solar or wind power, both in absolute values, and embarrassingly less when measured on a per-kWh basis).
Though, of course, the industry has again made the terminal mistake : treat the "concerns" of green nuts as pseudo-serious and research neutron-free fusion reactions.