First of all, the standard for threats, as interpreted by the Supreme Court during the Vietnam era, permits one to say that if one is drafted, the first person one will shoot with ones newly issued rifle is the President of the United States. Such a comment is clearly political speech, and carries with it no actual threat to the President.
By such a standard, there was no risk at all of criminal prosecution for the icon, and the sheriff's department did the correct thing in declaring that no crime had been committed.
Which brings us to the school. Schools think they can do anything to students without consequences. They keep pushing the envelope in terms of claiming jurisdiction over students 24 hours a day, in their homes, in their communities, on their Web logs, and anywhere else they can get away with it. Schools are making themselves into an unelected ersatz government over everyone under 18 in this country, in all aspects of their lives, and are using the post-Columbine mentality of the country to get away with it. Courts won't interfere, because they don't want to be bothered with kids' issues, and they don't want to waste court time in quibbles over things that happen at school.
What if this icon had said that the teacher was a idiot, and his feelings were hurt. Nothing prevents a school system that claims jurisdiction over the speech of students in their homes from suspending him for a semester over that either.
I'm surprised the Lost in Space robot hasn't been included. He was designed by some of the same people who did Robby, and although the show was a bit campy, he was a big hit with the fans.
These days, the robot would have sounded an Amber Alert everytime Will went somewhere unsupervised with Doctor Smith.
Of course, the battlefield is strewn with the corpses of those who have tried to provide support for one OS under another.
While OS/2 is the example most people cite, I recall DOS emulation in QNX, which lasted well into DOS 3, when feature creep forced people running DOS programs under QNX to switch to DOS. If you can't even keep up with DOS, your chances of keeping up with Windows is slim.
The central problem here is that Microsoft will enhance the API. People writing apps will employ the new calls and the OS X Win support will constantly be playing catch-up. So you basically force Apple to replicate Microsoft's development cycle, in order to maintain compatibility.
Historically, this has always been a losing game, which occurs even in the hardware realm. Amdahl hardcoded IBM's instruction set in his compatible machines. IBM hardware was microcoded, and they added new instructions and used them in the OS. Amdahl was out of business.
Committing to support the WIN32 API in OS X would make it pretty easy for Microsoft to bankrupt Apple by continuously creating new hoops for them to jump through.
It's interesting speculation, but API emulation, even in the kernel, is never exactly like the real thing.
Erm, how the hell would you contain something neutral? electromagnetic containment, while damn tricky, does at least work. I can't see how you'd stop a neutral object flying into your chamber wall and anhiliating (sp?).
Very strong electric and magnetic fields can attract neutral matter by inducing a dipole moment. Perhaps you've never seen a strong superconducting magnet levitate a spider. The spider gets very confused.
Considerable research has been done on antimatter drives which employ antiprotons, and the consensus of researchers seems to be that the small number of high energy gamma rays produced by the neutral pions can be absorbed by high density shielding such as Tungsten.
I doubt NASA and others are investing money to develop ways of killing astronauts with radiation.
Storing any quantity of charged antimatter in electromagnetic vacuum containment will be problematical because of the strong mutual electrostatic repulsion. It is more likely practical storage schemes will employ antihydrogen microcrystals, which are neutral.
The NASA article says that positrons are preferable to antiprotons for propulsion, because they do not produce as high energy gamma rays. However, proton/antiproton anihilation at rest produces lots of charged and some neutral pions.
The charged pions can be directed with magnetic fields, and either used directly as exhaust for a high specific inpulse, or employed to heat a working fluid. The neutral pions decay almost immediately into high energy gamma rays.
So the situation with antiprotons is slightly more complex than the article suggests, and the stated reasoning for preferring positrons overly simplistic.
First of all, the standard for threats, as interpreted by the Supreme Court during the Vietnam era, permits one to say that if one is drafted, the first person one will shoot with ones newly issued rifle is the President of the United States. Such a comment is clearly political speech, and carries with it no actual threat to the President.
By such a standard, there was no risk at all of criminal prosecution for the icon, and the sheriff's department did the correct thing in declaring that no crime had been committed.
Which brings us to the school. Schools think they can do anything to students without consequences. They keep pushing the envelope in terms of claiming jurisdiction over students 24 hours a day, in their homes, in their communities, on their Web logs, and anywhere else they can get away with it. Schools are making themselves into an unelected ersatz government over everyone under 18 in this country, in all aspects of their lives, and are using the post-Columbine mentality of the country to get away with it. Courts won't interfere, because they don't want to be bothered with kids' issues, and they don't want to waste court time in quibbles over things that happen at school.
What if this icon had said that the teacher was a idiot, and his feelings were hurt. Nothing prevents a school system that claims jurisdiction over the speech of students in their homes from suspending him for a semester over that either.
The ACLU will take it only if it doesn't distract from their primary mission of protecting Jewish children from Christmas.
I'm surprised the Lost in Space robot hasn't been included. He was designed by some of the same people who did Robby, and although the show was a bit campy, he was a big hit with the fans.
These days, the robot would have sounded an Amber Alert everytime Will went somewhere unsupervised with Doctor Smith.
Of course, the battlefield is strewn with the corpses of those who have tried to provide support for one OS under another.
While OS/2 is the example most people cite, I recall DOS emulation in QNX, which lasted well into DOS 3, when feature creep forced people running DOS programs under QNX to switch to DOS. If you can't even keep up with DOS, your chances of keeping up with Windows is slim.
The central problem here is that Microsoft will enhance the API. People writing apps will employ the new calls and the OS X Win support will constantly be playing catch-up. So you basically force Apple to replicate Microsoft's development cycle, in order to maintain compatibility.
Historically, this has always been a losing game, which occurs even in the hardware realm. Amdahl hardcoded IBM's instruction set in his compatible machines. IBM hardware was microcoded, and they added new instructions and used them in the OS. Amdahl was out of business.
Committing to support the WIN32 API in OS X would make it pretty easy for Microsoft to bankrupt Apple by continuously creating new hoops for them to jump through.
It's interesting speculation, but API emulation, even in the kernel, is never exactly like the real thing.
Erm, how the hell would you contain something neutral? electromagnetic containment, while damn tricky, does at least work. I can't see how you'd stop a neutral object flying into your chamber wall and anhiliating (sp?).
Very strong electric and magnetic fields can attract neutral matter by inducing a dipole moment. Perhaps you've never seen a strong superconducting magnet levitate a spider. The spider gets very confused.
Considerable research has been done on antimatter drives which employ antiprotons, and the consensus of researchers seems to be that the small number of high energy gamma rays produced by the neutral pions can be absorbed by high density shielding such as Tungsten.
I doubt NASA and others are investing money to develop ways of killing astronauts with radiation.
Storing any quantity of charged antimatter in electromagnetic vacuum containment will be problematical because of the strong mutual electrostatic repulsion. It is more likely practical storage schemes will employ antihydrogen microcrystals, which are neutral.
The NASA article says that positrons are preferable to antiprotons for propulsion, because they do not produce as high energy gamma rays. However, proton/antiproton anihilation at rest produces lots of charged and some neutral pions.
The charged pions can be directed with magnetic fields, and either used directly as exhaust for a high specific inpulse, or employed to heat a working fluid. The neutral pions decay almost immediately into high energy gamma rays.
So the situation with antiprotons is slightly more complex than the article suggests, and the stated reasoning for preferring positrons overly simplistic.