The same way the IRS can refuse to release everyone's SSN. In fact, all Federal agencies, employees, contractors, subcontractors, etc. are prohibited from releasing any personal information except when such disclosure falls within several exceptions, thanks to the Privacy Act of 1974.
Exactly -- flying is still safer. Especially if you're planning to drive across an ocean. Somebody with a brain (or someone highly suggestible) please mod parent up.
Additionally, the illusion of total control in a vehicle is just that. There are many circumstances, beyond your control, which can cause you to lose control. You mention not driving in inclimate weather in your reply below, but you can't control the weather, and if you're already on the highway there's nothing you can do. I was in a near fatal crash when my tires lost traction on a wet road after it had started sprinkling. If my car had hit the phone pole head on or sideways, I'd probably be dead or disabled. (And yes, it was a late model car with TCS). Fortunately it did a 180 and hit backwards, which I may or may not have helped intentionally. I honestly can't remember the 5-10 seconds or so before impact when I blacked out. Additionally, there's the person behind and next to you, and, on freeways without dividers (and in some cases, even with dividers) there's the person coming in the opposite direction. There's mechanical failures, there's dumbasses throwing shit from overpasses (and dumbass is a considerable understatement), there's maniacs shooting at other drivers, there's crazy people driving tanks, there's road debris, truck tires going through windshields, falling cargo, driver fatigue (if you tell me you've never driven fatigued, then you've never had a long or hard day at work or taken a road trip), blind spots, excessive speeders (the lane may have been clear when you started to merge..), there's collapsing bridges, collapsing tunnels, potholes, sink holes, open/broken manholes, shifting steel plates, earthquakes, landslides, standing water, black ice, oil slicks, cars with headlights off, cars with high beams on, truck headlights in the mirrors, burned out stoplights, knocked-over stop signs, car jackers, suicide jumpers, falling construction, falling trees and poles, falling power lines, lightning strikes, alien abductions, and, of course, planes falling out of the sky.
Bad analogy, even ignoring the "better you than me" subtext. In both cases, it is the person controlling, or attempting to control, the path of the object which bears responsibility. In the armored car scenario, you were merely protecting yourself; the gunman was the person trying to control the path of the bullet. Hurricane steering is acting as the gunman.
Furthermore, changing the course of a hurricane *necessarily* means it hits someone else, not accidentally, though that doesn't mitigate the responsibility of the act of redirecting it any more than swerving to avoid a dog and instead hitting a child would mitigate the responsibility of a driver. And the longer a storm stays over the warm Gulf of Mexico, the more powerful it's likely to become. Maybe you'd avoid a Category 2 storm in Miami, but instead Galveston gets wiped off the map. If you can find people who will volunteer to get hit by hurricanes, more power to you, but I'm guessing there aren't a whole lot of areas willing to repeatedly "take one for the team," even assuming they could be steered that accurately.
Living in a hurricane-prone region simply carries the risk of getting hit. The solution is better building codes, not displacing that risk, especially not on the backs of unwilling victims.
When I was 8 or 9, a tornado touched down about a mile south of our house. It proceeded steadily north, directly toward us, but skipped right over our house at the last second, then immediately touched back down after it passed our house. Our neighbors' houses on either side were completely destroyed. A few hours later, 5 or 6 black SUVs pulled up in front of our house. A bunch of men got out, and started getting things out of the back of their vehicles while 2-3 came up and knocked on our door. They wanted to know how exactly we managed to prevent the tornado from destroying our house. My dad declined to tell them about the force field generator he had been working on in the basement, and fortunately it was disguised as a common microwave oven. I still remember his words to this day: "Hey, if I could divert the course of a tornado, would I be cooking frozen dinners in my basement?" The men looked displeased with his answer, and they went back to the group and said something in hushed voices. The next thing we knew, they proceeded to start demolishing our house with sledgehammers and crowbars. When they were done, our home looked no different than the splintered houses around us. They even took our refrigerator, trucked it a half mile up the road and dumped it in a field, to make it the damage look authentic. "Tell no one," they said, and left as quickly as they had come.
Later that evening, we were driving around searching for food. We found a KFC open about 30 miles away, but there was a line halfway down the block -- apparently everyone else was doing the same. My dad decided we would just go to the 7-11 across the street instead. I got a hot dog, some milk, and some candy, and my dad got a couple of sodas and some nachos. Back in the car, I offered him some of my candy. "These things are amazing," I said, "You've got to try them!" He poured some Pop Rocks in his mouth, and washed them down with a swig of Pepsi. Almost immediately, he started crying out in pain. My mom rushed him to the nearest hospital, almost 20 minutes away. Fortunately, we got there in time, and the doctors successfully operated on his distended and ruptured stomach. Over the next few days, many well-wishers showed up, one of whom had found our family cat, Patches. The nurses made a special exception, and allowed the cat to sleep in the bed with my old man, who I imagine was rather depressed in light of recent events, though he never showed it. Unfortunately, that cat was NOT Patches, as we later learned, only too late. The next morning, we found my old man cold and still in his bed. The cat had eaten his soul.
Maybe, but what happens when they try to steer the storm and it veers into another country? I'd be pretty pissed if I was a farmer on the outskirts of Calgary and my entire crop was wiped out by hail due to seeding. Likewise, I don't think Mexico would much care that we managed to save Corpus Cristi at the expense of Tampico. If we were on less than amicable terms, it might even be considered an act of war. It seems like weather manipulation, if successful, could open up a whole new can of liability worms, not to mention diplomatic quagmires.
Maybe because they could never find out the results? There's no way for a server to distinguish whether a client is viewing the source or the rendered page.
Sorry, but Ron Paul is not a viable candidate, and even if he was, he's a fruit loop. I wanted to back him, honestly, but he just wants to disestablish too much of government. No FBI, no CIA, no standing military, and on and on. That situation might have cut it in 1792, when the greatest threats to national security were traditional wars and the biggest crimes were bank robbery, but life today without many of the Federal agencies we take for granted (or get upset with when they go too far) would be much worse. An overly weak central government is what we had with the Articles of Confederation. Take a look at the UN to see how ineffective a government can be when it has no real power.
Granted, he probably wouldn't be successful in his efforts without the consent of Congress, but that's all the more reason not to waste a vote on him.
Nothing like intravenous Street Fighter. Anyone know if it's gonna be by prescription only? If so, what symptoms should I present? I'm willing to start smoking again if cancer is necessary.
The main problem with the (US) patent system is that it is a classed, stratified scam. One designed to serve large and/or monied entities, lawyers and their various barnacles...our political system, which drives the legal system, is a classed, stratified scam...the legal system [...] is a classed, stratified scam.
Give me a break. REALITY is a scam. REALITY favors the most powerful. The government, courts, and USPTO are all protections against the unbridled exercise of power. The government is easily voted out, courts are determined by *juries* (which is predicated on an educated populous, so we really have ourselves to blame there), and the USPTO doesn't write patents on its own.
Now I'm not saying that the process is flawless, but I *am* saying that any process without rigid guidelines (and most of those with rigid guidelines) will be open to some amount of abuse and/or gaming by those with more resources to better play the system. The alternative is a society without powerful entities outside of the government, which is pretty much the goal of communism.
Clearly the process itself needs tweaking, but that's a far cry from the conspiratorial claims of a scam that "the man" is using to keep us all down. Perhaps with less of a reward for patents, such as shorter terms of, say, 5-10 years, there would be less incentive for companies to file every patent imaginable. Nonetheless, you're blatantly disregarding two extremely relevant facts:
1) Patents are not diamonds. That is, they're not forever. The more ideas that are patented today, the more that will be freely available n years from now. If you want to ensure the more open use of patentable ideas tomorrow, patent them today. If you can't afford it, establish a thinktank, collect donations, and do it that way, then freely license them if you want. A lack of motivation on your part is not a flaw in the process, or the opposition; rather it is indicative of your own true level of concern.
2) No amount of patent trolling or shotgun patenting will ever supplant or prohibit a truly novel idea, and individuals with new ideas have just as much opportunity to patent those ideas as ever. If it's already covered by an existing patent, then it's not new, and we've lost nothing. If it *is* new, and that person profits from their idea, then that's a fairly strong indication that the "classed, stratified scam" is really not.
I'm not sure how you intend to punish a party who was defrauded (i.e., the business which issued the credit). If I gave you 2 forms of ID, some recent pay stubs, and a VoE (counterfeit, stolen from a mailbox, and forged, respectively), and you gave me a loan, how would you be at fault? Unless you are claiming that the company was derelict in validating the identity of the applicant, in which case, what qualifies as a good faith effort?
That could be because in any two dimensional storage system, as storage density quadruples in two dimensions, it only doubles in one dimension. That means a track on a 40GB platter will only be twice as dense as on a 160GB platter, hence twice as fast given the same rotational speed. As density increases, you'll start to see a curve in the ratio of speed to capacity, not at all unlike this. You can achieve further increases by using multiple platters per drive, but 4 seems to be the limit there, which is why many people use RAID-0 for speed. Of course, the reliability of the array quickly approaches 0 as you add more drives.
Barring increases in rotational speed*, the only way around the speed problem seems to be solid state storage, but that's currently much slower than hard drive speed, and nonvolatile RAM won't catch up for a while, if ever.
* Increasing rotational speed means you need very high quality components manufactured to very tight tolerances, which increases the cost substantially.
I have thought that perhaps natural evolution had already long ago derived the most efficient ways of recovering energy to drive its organisms.
Not usually true. Plants and animals have plenty of other concerns, such as the efficient storage thereof, combating predators, reproducing, etc., any one of which could take precedence over obtaining energy. Is fat the most economical storage medium? It's pretty good, but other factors come into play: it's not toxic to the body, it's pliable, which permits relatively free movement, it's a good insulator, and it provides protection to bones and internal organs (any of which may or may not be an evolutionary side effect). Natural selection is about favoring the most competitive in a particular environment, and obtaining the most energy, while ignoring other factors, is not always the best strategy. A design that extracts more energy from sunlight than pine needles might be more prone to wind damage, pests, molds, fungus, etc. Even if an organism is more efficient at extracting energy than its competitors, that's no guarantee that its the *most* efficient possible design, just that it was good enough.
Additionally, what we're primarily concerned with is electromagnetic energy. There are always losses in any conversion, and if we convert the sunlight into chemical energy, then back into electromagnetic energy, we're guaranteeing more losses than if we can harness/store the sunlight directly. That's why it's often more efficient to use net metering rather than off-grid battery storage alone. Many people opt to include batteries in their solar systems, but that's typically for the purpose of grid independence and/or backup power. Of course there are losses inherent in converting DC to AC, so that must be considered as well. Overall, the more directly you can transfer the power from the source to the load, the more efficient that transition will be.
I'm not a biologist, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night.
Slashdot Mirror
The same way the IRS can refuse to release everyone's SSN. In fact, all Federal agencies, employees, contractors, subcontractors, etc. are prohibited from releasing any personal information except when such disclosure falls within several exceptions, thanks to the Privacy Act of 1974.
Exactly -- flying is still safer. Especially if you're planning to drive across an ocean. Somebody with a brain (or someone highly suggestible) please mod parent up.
With a plane crash, my chance of survival is hovering somewhere around 0%.
Not true. The survival rate in fatal crashes (in which at least 1 person dies) is around 35% (Orange chart, ~1/3 down the page). That includes crashes where everyone dies, but does not includes crashes where nobody dies, so it's "worst case," if you will. Moreover, your risk of dying in a plane crash is *gasp* proportional to the frequency of flights you take. Of course 0 flights = 0 risk, planes falling on you aside, but several flights over a lifetime introduces much less risk than simply walking up and down stairs.
Additionally, the illusion of total control in a vehicle is just that. There are many circumstances, beyond your control, which can cause you to lose control. You mention not driving in inclimate weather in your reply below, but you can't control the weather, and if you're already on the highway there's nothing you can do. I was in a near fatal crash when my tires lost traction on a wet road after it had started sprinkling. If my car had hit the phone pole head on or sideways, I'd probably be dead or disabled. (And yes, it was a late model car with TCS). Fortunately it did a 180 and hit backwards, which I may or may not have helped intentionally. I honestly can't remember the 5-10 seconds or so before impact when I blacked out. Additionally, there's the person behind and next to you, and, on freeways without dividers (and in some cases, even with dividers) there's the person coming in the opposite direction. There's mechanical failures, there's dumbasses throwing shit from overpasses (and dumbass is a considerable understatement), there's maniacs shooting at other drivers, there's crazy people driving tanks, there's road debris, truck tires going through windshields, falling cargo, driver fatigue (if you tell me you've never driven fatigued, then you've never had a long or hard day at work or taken a road trip), blind spots, excessive speeders (the lane may have been clear when you started to merge..), there's collapsing bridges, collapsing tunnels, potholes, sink holes, open/broken manholes, shifting steel plates, earthquakes, landslides, standing water, black ice, oil slicks, cars with headlights off, cars with high beams on, truck headlights in the mirrors, burned out stoplights, knocked-over stop signs, car jackers, suicide jumpers, falling construction, falling trees and poles, falling power lines, lightning strikes, alien abductions, and, of course, planes falling out of the sky.
We didn't start the fire...
Duh.. that's why you use white-out on the screen.
Bad analogy, even ignoring the "better you than me" subtext. In both cases, it is the person controlling, or attempting to control, the path of the object which bears responsibility. In the armored car scenario, you were merely protecting yourself; the gunman was the person trying to control the path of the bullet. Hurricane steering is acting as the gunman.
Furthermore, changing the course of a hurricane *necessarily* means it hits someone else, not accidentally, though that doesn't mitigate the responsibility of the act of redirecting it any more than swerving to avoid a dog and instead hitting a child would mitigate the responsibility of a driver. And the longer a storm stays over the warm Gulf of Mexico, the more powerful it's likely to become. Maybe you'd avoid a Category 2 storm in Miami, but instead Galveston gets wiped off the map. If you can find people who will volunteer to get hit by hurricanes, more power to you, but I'm guessing there aren't a whole lot of areas willing to repeatedly "take one for the team," even assuming they could be steered that accurately.
Living in a hurricane-prone region simply carries the risk of getting hit. The solution is better building codes, not displacing that risk, especially not on the backs of unwilling victims.
We're sorry that the hurricane striked your state
No problem, let's just hope none of them decide to cross the picket line!
When I was 8 or 9, a tornado touched down about a mile south of our house. It proceeded steadily north, directly toward us, but skipped right over our house at the last second, then immediately touched back down after it passed our house. Our neighbors' houses on either side were completely destroyed. A few hours later, 5 or 6 black SUVs pulled up in front of our house. A bunch of men got out, and started getting things out of the back of their vehicles while 2-3 came up and knocked on our door. They wanted to know how exactly we managed to prevent the tornado from destroying our house. My dad declined to tell them about the force field generator he had been working on in the basement, and fortunately it was disguised as a common microwave oven. I still remember his words to this day: "Hey, if I could divert the course of a tornado, would I be cooking frozen dinners in my basement?" The men looked displeased with his answer, and they went back to the group and said something in hushed voices. The next thing we knew, they proceeded to start demolishing our house with sledgehammers and crowbars. When they were done, our home looked no different than the splintered houses around us. They even took our refrigerator, trucked it a half mile up the road and dumped it in a field, to make it the damage look authentic. "Tell no one," they said, and left as quickly as they had come.
Later that evening, we were driving around searching for food. We found a KFC open about 30 miles away, but there was a line halfway down the block -- apparently everyone else was doing the same. My dad decided we would just go to the 7-11 across the street instead. I got a hot dog, some milk, and some candy, and my dad got a couple of sodas and some nachos. Back in the car, I offered him some of my candy. "These things are amazing," I said, "You've got to try them!" He poured some Pop Rocks in his mouth, and washed them down with a swig of Pepsi. Almost immediately, he started crying out in pain. My mom rushed him to the nearest hospital, almost 20 minutes away. Fortunately, we got there in time, and the doctors successfully operated on his distended and ruptured stomach. Over the next few days, many well-wishers showed up, one of whom had found our family cat, Patches. The nurses made a special exception, and allowed the cat to sleep in the bed with my old man, who I imagine was rather depressed in light of recent events, though he never showed it. Unfortunately, that cat was NOT Patches, as we later learned, only too late. The next morning, we found my old man cold and still in his bed. The cat had eaten his soul.
Maybe, but what happens when they try to steer the storm and it veers into another country? I'd be pretty pissed if I was a farmer on the outskirts of Calgary and my entire crop was wiped out by hail due to seeding. Likewise, I don't think Mexico would much care that we managed to save Corpus Cristi at the expense of Tampico. If we were on less than amicable terms, it might even be considered an act of war. It seems like weather manipulation, if successful, could open up a whole new can of liability worms, not to mention diplomatic quagmires.
Sure, but why pay when your wife does it for free?
This is very appealing and also probably about 50 years away from reality.
Just in time to save me from Alzheimer's!
This is very appealing and also probably about 50 years away from reality.
Just in time to save me from Alzheimer's!
Apt then, that my Slashquote is currently:
Living in the complex world of the future is somewhat like having bees live in your head. But, there they are.
Maybe because they could never find out the results? There's no way for a server to distinguish whether a client is viewing the source or the rendered page.
Sorry, but Ron Paul is not a viable candidate, and even if he was, he's a fruit loop. I wanted to back him, honestly, but he just wants to disestablish too much of government. No FBI, no CIA, no standing military, and on and on. That situation might have cut it in 1792, when the greatest threats to national security were traditional wars and the biggest crimes were bank robbery, but life today without many of the Federal agencies we take for granted (or get upset with when they go too far) would be much worse. An overly weak central government is what we had with the Articles of Confederation. Take a look at the UN to see how ineffective a government can be when it has no real power.
Granted, he probably wouldn't be successful in his efforts without the consent of Congress, but that's all the more reason not to waste a vote on him.
Unfortunately, the problem this year is the same problem we've had every other year: The candidates suck.
Personally, I'm voting for Colbert/Kasperov '08.
What would you recomend as a replacement for the iPod?
A car.
Nothing like intravenous Street Fighter. Anyone know if it's gonna be by prescription only? If so, what symptoms should I present? I'm willing to start smoking again if cancer is necessary.
The main problem with the (US) patent system is that it is a classed, stratified scam. One designed to serve large and/or monied entities, lawyers and their various barnacles...our political system, which drives the legal system, is a classed, stratified scam...the legal system [...] is a classed, stratified scam.
Give me a break. REALITY is a scam. REALITY favors the most powerful. The government, courts, and USPTO are all protections against the unbridled exercise of power. The government is easily voted out, courts are determined by *juries* (which is predicated on an educated populous, so we really have ourselves to blame there), and the USPTO doesn't write patents on its own.
Now I'm not saying that the process is flawless, but I *am* saying that any process without rigid guidelines (and most of those with rigid guidelines) will be open to some amount of abuse and/or gaming by those with more resources to better play the system. The alternative is a society without powerful entities outside of the government, which is pretty much the goal of communism.
Clearly the process itself needs tweaking, but that's a far cry from the conspiratorial claims of a scam that "the man" is using to keep us all down. Perhaps with less of a reward for patents, such as shorter terms of, say, 5-10 years, there would be less incentive for companies to file every patent imaginable. Nonetheless, you're blatantly disregarding two extremely relevant facts:
1) Patents are not diamonds. That is, they're not forever. The more ideas that are patented today, the more that will be freely available n years from now. If you want to ensure the more open use of patentable ideas tomorrow, patent them today. If you can't afford it, establish a thinktank, collect donations, and do it that way, then freely license them if you want. A lack of motivation on your part is not a flaw in the process, or the opposition; rather it is indicative of your own true level of concern.
2) No amount of patent trolling or shotgun patenting will ever supplant or prohibit a truly novel idea, and individuals with new ideas have just as much opportunity to patent those ideas as ever. If it's already covered by an existing patent, then it's not new, and we've lost nothing. If it *is* new, and that person profits from their idea, then that's a fairly strong indication that the "classed, stratified scam" is really not.
I'm not sure how you intend to punish a party who was defrauded (i.e., the business which issued the credit). If I gave you 2 forms of ID, some recent pay stubs, and a VoE (counterfeit, stolen from a mailbox, and forged, respectively), and you gave me a loan, how would you be at fault? Unless you are claiming that the company was derelict in validating the identity of the applicant, in which case, what qualifies as a good faith effort?
I was hoping it was a new version of the game where you have to cluster together three or more gems to eliminate them and earn points.
When I assume, I get Iodine-Arsenic-Sulfur-Uranium-Methyl. Or something. Chemistry I fail it.
I favor post-dusk raids you insensitive clod!
That could be because in any two dimensional storage system, as storage density quadruples in two dimensions, it only doubles in one dimension. That means a track on a 40GB platter will only be twice as dense as on a 160GB platter, hence twice as fast given the same rotational speed. As density increases, you'll start to see a curve in the ratio of speed to capacity, not at all unlike this. You can achieve further increases by using multiple platters per drive, but 4 seems to be the limit there, which is why many people use RAID-0 for speed. Of course, the reliability of the array quickly approaches 0 as you add more drives.
Barring increases in rotational speed*, the only way around the speed problem seems to be solid state storage, but that's currently much slower than hard drive speed, and nonvolatile RAM won't catch up for a while, if ever.
* Increasing rotational speed means you need very high quality components manufactured to very tight tolerances, which increases the cost substantially.
If theory says that black holes beyond 10 solar masses cannot form, how do they explain the conjectured supermassive black holes
Like This.
Or, more pedantically, black holes may never form at all from the point of view of an observer outside the event horizon.
The argument there would not be that it isn't 32-bit, but whether or not it qualifies as an operating system. A turd by any other name...
Anyway, it was just a joke. I consider XP to be a fairly good OS.
I have thought that perhaps natural evolution had already long ago derived the most efficient ways of recovering energy to drive its organisms.
Not usually true. Plants and animals have plenty of other concerns, such as the efficient storage thereof, combating predators, reproducing, etc., any one of which could take precedence over obtaining energy. Is fat the most economical storage medium? It's pretty good, but other factors come into play: it's not toxic to the body, it's pliable, which permits relatively free movement, it's a good insulator, and it provides protection to bones and internal organs (any of which may or may not be an evolutionary side effect). Natural selection is about favoring the most competitive in a particular environment, and obtaining the most energy, while ignoring other factors, is not always the best strategy. A design that extracts more energy from sunlight than pine needles might be more prone to wind damage, pests, molds, fungus, etc. Even if an organism is more efficient at extracting energy than its competitors, that's no guarantee that its the *most* efficient possible design, just that it was good enough.
Additionally, what we're primarily concerned with is electromagnetic energy. There are always losses in any conversion, and if we convert the sunlight into chemical energy, then back into electromagnetic energy, we're guaranteeing more losses than if we can harness/store the sunlight directly. That's why it's often more efficient to use net metering rather than off-grid battery storage alone. Many people opt to include batteries in their solar systems, but that's typically for the purpose of grid independence and/or backup power. Of course there are losses inherent in converting DC to AC, so that must be considered as well. Overall, the more directly you can transfer the power from the source to the load, the more efficient that transition will be.
I'm not a biologist, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night.