The article seems to imply that these are the first ever vegetables grown in space by astronauts, but this isn't true.
According to NASA's website about the International Space Station "Since 2002, the Lada greenhouse has been used to perform almost continuous plant growth experiments on the station. Fifteen modules containing root media, or root modules, have been launched to the station and 20 separate plant growth experiments have been performed. "
The Constitution also allows for federal law to prevail whenever there is a conflict between a state law and federal one.
While the federal government may not appear to have the ability to impinge on the states' rights, in fact it probably could if it wanted to.
The external affairs laws, which allow the federal goverment to legislate to adhere to external treaties and obligations has been used in the past to circumvent state rights.
The way it could work is that the federal government would just say "we have signed a UN declaration against children being exposed to violence" therefore they use the external affairs power to pass a law making RC content illegal.
The states can't do much about it though, because when there is a conflict, federal law prevails.
Advertisement is still a cost, and they have to make back their up-front costs such as advances, layout, editing, and proofreading. If that cost them $50,000 and they expect to sell 10,000 copies, then that sets the price at $5 minimum just to recoup their costs..
Um right, so grabbing a softcopy of a book from a publisher, converting it into a different format, and cleaning up the layout costs $50,000.
I would guess the real cost is under $100.
You don't really need proofreading for most ebooks, as the publishers give them the softcopies. The book publishers are working with Amazon.
For some older books you may have to scan them manually and then check to make sure the spelling all comes up OK, but there is no way it will cost $50,000.
I think the model is probably more like: Amazon tells publishers 'cooperate and give us softcopy of a book. Amazon then gets the copy, hits Control-V and converts it into their own format. Amazon then pays someone to make sure the links to chapters work fine and that the cover art illustrates fine. Amazon then advertises the book somewhere on their own site (not a cost to the company). Amazon then waits for people to order the book, getting $10 for essentially doing nothing.
They are like Google News, using the endeavours of others to profit. Now don't get me wrong, I love Google News. I also love my Kindle, but I am not so naive as to not realise how the system works.
History has shown over and over that expansion into new areas returns money. BIG money. THat is how EU became large from an economic POV.
I think you will find that the EU became large from an ecomomic POV because it amalgamated some of the world's largest individual economies, such as Germany's Italy's and France's.
There isn't a lot Mars will add to earth's GDP (although that creepy face may indicate otherwise) in the short, or even medium term, even if we colonise it.
I will admit to having limited understanding of exactly what the article meant, but maybe someone more enlightened than I am can tell me whether it will work with a 2G phone, or whether you will need 3G.
I have a 3G handset, but my gf is stuck in last millennium and uses only 2G. She is a huge Facebook user.
uranium gets used up, you switch to thorium. lots of that. enough for a century or two. by then, if we haven't figured out fusion, which marks the end of energy problems, then we deserve what we get
I think the problem is that we have worked out fusion. The problem is that we have worked out it only works under massive pressures and temperatures. That is fine in the sun, but here on earth it just doesn't add up financially.
I would love to see cold water fusion a reality, but living in the real world, it would take a quantum leap in our understanding of the fusion process.
Without exception, the captions were humorless and(at least without some knowledge of Weppler's background and/or personal life/activities) not at all cutting. A few generic insults, some just nonsensical.
I read the captions, and while some were humourous, I reckon quite a few were vague, and a few were downright nasty.
I doubt "I take cybersex to a whole new level" and "I can show you my dick" are particularly humouous, particularly to a kid in teens.
In any case, it is probably up to Mr Weppler to decide what constitutes harmless fun and what is just harassment.
If one accepts the premise of natural selection based evolution, then the only possibility is that the egg came first.
The first chicken would have been laid in an egg, whose parent was something other than a chicken (perhaps a bit more dinosaur like, reflecting its earlier origins).
The paper as I understand it isn't showing whether the "chicken" or the egg came first, but rather, the original chicken-like organism (either a dinosaur or something earlier) or the egg it came in. These are actually two very different things.
It occurs to me that it probably shouldn't be up to the US alone to carry the can for global space exploration.
The International Space Station showed the world can cooperate to push the boundaries in outer space when it is just too damn expensive for any one country to undertake the work unilaterally.
Perhaps if we earthlings saw ourselves as that, representatives of this planet, rather than citizens aligned to arbitrary markings on a map, we could start to see some real progress being made.
If the USA, Russia, Japan, Europe and China pitched in and worked in unison, I am betting we would have had earthlings on Mars about the same time the rovers made it there.
Yeah it would seem to be pretty amazing that North Korea, for all its spit and bile, has managed not only to create working rockets, but nukes as well, despite the world being against it.
South Korea, despite all the world's major powers backing it, has ended up with egg on its face.
Of course, if push really ever came to shove it doesn't really matter how many working missiles South Korea has, as long as the USA has plenty that work correctly.
And so the good ole Gnutella network will find another platform so the masses can file share, just like it has been doing since it was released in 2000.
All the legal arguments and judgements in the world won't make a spit of difference. If people want to trade files online, the chances of anything happening to them are remote, so they will continue.
Remember how shutting down KaZaa was supposed to deal a huge blow to filesharing, as were the lawsuits against a host of others?
Wasn't the lawsuit that saw the Pirate Bay founders jailed supposed to send a message the law enforcement was tough on piracy?
Forgive my scepticism, but I look at this news and wonder, does it really matter to anyone save those directly employed by Lime.
Any Aussies here? You've got what: rabbits, poisonous toads, some kind of insect, and.... what else? Much of Australia's wildlife has been decimated by introduced species. You left out foxes, cats, carp and I think the insect you refer to is the European wasp, or maybe it is fire ants, both of which are wild.
Probably the worst invasive species is Homo sapiens, which brought in all the other species (that includes our indigenous people, who introduced the dingo a few thousand years ago, decimating wildlife on the mainland, and rats).
If economic deterioation meant nuclear powers were more likely to start using their bombs, then you could never have wanted to see the end of the Soviet Union.
The facts are that even if it hurts nations economically, trying to alleviate global warming is far easier than what the overwhelming consensus from science tells us in the alternative.
Scaremongering about Chinese and Indian nukes doesn't really add very much.
Actually the last glacial maximum was about 18,000 years ago, marking the begining of the interglacial period, which should draw to an end in just a few thousand years, as the oscillating earth tilts slightly back.
It all sounds so fantastic, that all children should have access to a laptop.
Well, recently I was in the tiny Pacific country of Niue, where every child actually has a laptop.
More than that, basically the entire nation (of 1,500 people) is a wireless hotspot, so every child can access the internet.
But don't be misled, the laptops given to the children perform about three functions. They do connect to the internet, but even doing something as simple as a google search is next to impossible, because the speed is so slow.
If you don't mind using a keyboard that looks like a child's toy (huge letters that require a few fingers to press, thus making typing impossible) and a screen that is tiny, I guess you could use a notepad to write a school essay.
Perhaps they achieved what every third world nation seems to want, one laptop per child, and have bragging rights as the first place on earth to do this, but surely the next step should be "one half decent laptop per child".
At the risk of joining the flame war about free speech, I wanted to say that I appreciate free speech, and the USA clamps down on it from time to time, just as all countries do. Don't believe me? Think about this.
As a journalist I travelled into the USA recently. Apparently as part of the US "war on terror" foreign journalists are now required to explain why they are entering the United States. They have to explain details of any stories they want to work on, and say which states I was travelling in. This is designed apparently to stop the wrong type of reporters getting news out of America.
This is nothing new. When Mike Moore travelled to Cuba as part of a documentary he was making, he was threatened with legal action, because there are restrictions in place regarding travel to Cuba. The USA is content for negative messages about Cuba, but cannot bear for a documentary to be made about the country that may tell a different story.
I remember how the US TV networks stopped running footage of Osama Bin Laden too, apparently because his hand gestures were giving coded signals to operatives about when and where to attack. Mind you it had absolutely nothing to do with the US government trying to stamp out political speech. The fact that Al Qaeda operatives could freely watch his speeches online apparently slipped by the US govt.
Cuba clamping down on anti-government activists is nothing new, but lets not pretend the US govt doesn't play the same games when it suits them.
When the Mars rovers were sent out, Mars was unusually close to Earth. Sending out similar vehicles now would be much tougher, take much longer, require much bigger fuel loads, cost much more money, and give many more opportunities for errors.
At some point the US may want to ask whether it desperately wants a functional healthcare system, or six more Mars rovers. I mean, the rovers did a great job at first, but apart from difficulties in continuing their journey, what have they added scientifically to our understanding of Mars in the past year?
Not only can rehabilitation work, as the legions of successfully reformed criminals shows, but I think it shows a level of maturity in a society when rehabilitation is considered as an option over 'lock em up and forget em'.
As an example, look at the civilised way Norway reacted when two children murdered another, compared to the hysterical overreaction in Britain when James Bulger was killed by two children.
Years down the track, I know I would prefer to live next to the Norwegian children, who were treated via rehabilitation, compared to the Bulger killers, who were locked up for long periods before ultimately being released.
I think the death penalty is the signature of a society too stupid to realise that you don't teach people life is sacred by taking it away. If you need any further proof of this, take a look at the homicide rate in countries that have the death penalty, as compared to those that don't. You could also look at homicide rates in the US states with the death penalty, compared to the rate in those that don't.
In Canada the number of people murdered has declined since the death penalty was abolished. In 2007 (the most recent figures I could find), there were 594 homicides in Canada, 159 fewer than in 1975 (one year prior to the abolition of capital punishment), after a long trend downwards.
As for Germany's laws on suppression of criminals' names, I disagree with it because I believe in free speech. Nevertheless, this call to have them killed I think is just barbaric.
Kindles always spout how great it is you can read in the sun, because their eInk allows better viewing in direct light, but without that technology, this new device will be far less useful. I thought this would have been fairly obvious, but from TFA: We hope that LG has included a passively-lit e-paper display option in the device.
Slashdot Mirror
The article seems to imply that these are the first ever vegetables grown in space by astronauts, but this isn't true.
According to NASA's website about the International Space Station "Since 2002, the Lada greenhouse has been used to perform almost continuous plant growth experiments on the station. Fifteen modules containing root media, or root modules, have been launched to the station and 20 separate plant growth experiments have been performed. "
The Constitution also allows for federal law to prevail whenever there is a conflict between a state law and federal one.
While the federal government may not appear to have the ability to impinge on the states' rights, in fact it probably could if it wanted to.
The external affairs laws, which allow the federal goverment to legislate to adhere to external treaties and obligations has been used in the past to circumvent state rights.
The way it could work is that the federal government would just say "we have signed a UN declaration against children being exposed to violence" therefore they use the external affairs power to pass a law making RC content illegal.
The states can't do much about it though, because when there is a conflict, federal law prevails.
Advertisement is still a cost, and they have to make back their up-front costs such as advances, layout, editing, and proofreading. If that cost them $50,000 and they expect to sell 10,000 copies, then that sets the price at $5 minimum just to recoup their costs..
Um right, so grabbing a softcopy of a book from a publisher, converting it into a different format, and cleaning up the layout costs $50,000.
I would guess the real cost is under $100.
You don't really need proofreading for most ebooks, as the publishers give them the softcopies. The book publishers are working with Amazon.
For some older books you may have to scan them manually and then check to make sure the spelling all comes up OK, but there is no way it will cost $50,000.
I think the model is probably more like: Amazon tells publishers 'cooperate and give us softcopy of a book. Amazon then gets the copy, hits Control-V and converts it into their own format.
Amazon then pays someone to make sure the links to chapters work fine and that the cover art illustrates fine.
Amazon then advertises the book somewhere on their own site (not a cost to the company).
Amazon then waits for people to order the book, getting $10 for essentially doing nothing.
They are like Google News, using the endeavours of others to profit. Now don't get me wrong, I love Google News. I also love my Kindle, but I am not so naive as to not realise how the system works.
The cost of text messages, down greatly.
The time taken to delete spam texts, up exponentially.
History has shown over and over that expansion into new areas returns money. BIG money. THat is how EU became large from an economic POV.
I think you will find that the EU became large from an ecomomic POV because it amalgamated some of the world's largest individual economies, such as Germany's Italy's and France's.
There isn't a lot Mars will add to earth's GDP (although that creepy face may indicate otherwise) in the short, or even medium term, even if we colonise it.
I will admit to having limited understanding of exactly what the article meant, but maybe someone more enlightened than I am can tell me whether it will work with a 2G phone, or whether you will need 3G.
I have a 3G handset, but my gf is stuck in last millennium and uses only 2G. She is a huge Facebook user.
uranium gets used up, you switch to thorium. lots of that. enough for a century or two. by then, if we haven't figured out fusion, which marks the end of energy problems, then we deserve what we get
I think the problem is that we have worked out fusion. The problem is that we have worked out it only works under massive pressures and temperatures. That is fine in the sun, but here on earth it just doesn't add up financially.
I would love to see cold water fusion a reality, but living in the real world, it would take a quantum leap in our understanding of the fusion process.
Without exception, the captions were humorless and(at least without some knowledge of Weppler's background and/or personal life/activities) not at all cutting. A few generic insults, some just nonsensical.
I read the captions, and while some were humourous, I reckon quite a few were vague, and a few were downright nasty.
I doubt "I take cybersex to a whole new level" and "I can show you my dick" are particularly humouous, particularly to a kid in teens.
In any case, it is probably up to Mr Weppler to decide what constitutes harmless fun and what is just harassment.
Make a crapload of money working as a lawyer, then donate some of it to your favourite open source project.
If one accepts the premise of natural selection based evolution, then the only possibility is that the egg came first.
The first chicken would have been laid in an egg, whose parent was something other than a chicken (perhaps a bit more dinosaur like, reflecting its earlier origins).
The paper as I understand it isn't showing whether the "chicken" or the egg came first, but rather, the original chicken-like organism (either a dinosaur or something earlier) or the egg it came in. These are actually two very different things.
It occurs to me that it probably shouldn't be up to the US alone to carry the can for global space exploration.
The International Space Station showed the world can cooperate to push the boundaries in outer space when it is just too damn expensive for any one country to undertake the work unilaterally.
Perhaps if we earthlings saw ourselves as that, representatives of this planet, rather than citizens aligned to arbitrary markings on a map, we could start to see some real progress being made.
If the USA, Russia, Japan, Europe and China pitched in and worked in unison, I am betting we would have had earthlings on Mars about the same time the rovers made it there.
Yeah it would seem to be pretty amazing that North Korea, for all its spit and bile, has managed not only to create working rockets, but nukes as well, despite the world being against it.
South Korea, despite all the world's major powers backing it, has ended up with egg on its face.
Of course, if push really ever came to shove it doesn't really matter how many working missiles South Korea has, as long as the USA has plenty that work correctly.
Since all companies cooperated with the probe, they received a 10% reduction in fines, so it could have been worse.
Surely you mean, it could have been better. Reducing the fines is a negative from where I am sitting.
And so the good ole Gnutella network will find another platform so the masses can file share, just like it has been doing since it was released in 2000.
All the legal arguments and judgements in the world won't make a spit of difference. If people want to trade files online, the chances of anything happening to them are remote, so they will continue.
Remember how shutting down KaZaa was supposed to deal a huge blow to filesharing, as were the lawsuits against a host of others?
Wasn't the lawsuit that saw the Pirate Bay founders jailed supposed to send a message the law enforcement was tough on piracy?
Forgive my scepticism, but I look at this news and wonder, does it really matter to anyone save those directly employed by Lime.
I am a journalist, and once interviewed a guy who received an email telling him he could make $500 if he sent them his bank details.
He had a vacant account and figured, 'what do I have to lose?' so sent them the details.
He received a second email saying that they were going to deposit $1000 and he had to just forward $500 to an account with the details they sent him.
In a few days sure enough, $1000 ended up in his account and he forwarded on the $500.
He then got an email saying that because things went so well, they would up the amount.
They sent him $40,000 and asked him to keep $5000, sending $35,000 to a nominated account.
He went ahead and did it, and then he contacted the authorities.
He was never prosecuted, and he never heard whether anyone else was, but hey, he got to keep the $5,500.
Never did he receive any more emails from the group though.
Any Aussies here? You've got what: rabbits, poisonous toads, some kind of insect, and.... what else?
Much of Australia's wildlife has been decimated by introduced species. You left out foxes, cats, carp and I think the insect you refer to is the European wasp, or maybe it is fire ants, both of which are wild.
Probably the worst invasive species is Homo sapiens, which brought in all the other species (that includes our indigenous people, who introduced the dingo a few thousand years ago, decimating wildlife on the mainland, and rats).
"In noisy places like bars and clubs you could make yourself heard without having to shout."
Or more likely, used by men in conjunction with Babel Fish to chat-up women who don't speak English.
If economic deterioation meant nuclear powers were more likely to start using their bombs, then you could never have wanted to see the end of the Soviet Union.
The facts are that even if it hurts nations economically, trying to alleviate global warming is far easier than what the overwhelming consensus from science tells us in the alternative.
Scaremongering about Chinese and Indian nukes doesn't really add very much.
Actually the last glacial maximum was about 18,000 years ago, marking the begining of the interglacial period, which should draw to an end in just a few thousand years, as the oscillating earth tilts slightly back.
It all sounds so fantastic, that all children should have access to a laptop.
Well, recently I was in the tiny Pacific country of Niue, where every child actually has a laptop.
More than that, basically the entire nation (of 1,500 people) is a wireless hotspot, so every child can access the internet.
But don't be misled, the laptops given to the children perform about three functions. They do connect to the internet, but even doing something as simple as a google search is next to impossible, because the speed is so slow.
If you don't mind using a keyboard that looks like a child's toy (huge letters that require a few fingers to press, thus making typing impossible) and a screen that is tiny, I guess you could use a notepad to write a school essay.
Perhaps they achieved what every third world nation seems to want, one laptop per child, and have bragging rights as the first place on earth to do this, but surely the next step should be "one half decent laptop per child".
At the risk of joining the flame war about free speech, I wanted to say that I appreciate free speech, and the USA clamps down on it from time to time, just as all countries do.
Don't believe me? Think about this.
As a journalist I travelled into the USA recently. Apparently as part of the US "war on terror" foreign journalists are now required to explain why they are entering the United States. They have to explain details of any stories they want to work on, and say which states I was travelling in. This is designed apparently to stop the wrong type of reporters getting news out of America.
This is nothing new. When Mike Moore travelled to Cuba as part of a documentary he was making, he was threatened with legal action, because there are restrictions in place regarding travel to Cuba. The USA is content for negative messages about Cuba, but cannot bear for a documentary to be made about the country that may tell a different story.
I remember how the US TV networks stopped running footage of Osama Bin Laden too, apparently because his hand gestures were giving coded signals to operatives about when and where to attack. Mind you it had absolutely nothing to do with the US government trying to stamp out political speech.
The fact that Al Qaeda operatives could freely watch his speeches online apparently slipped by the US govt.
Cuba clamping down on anti-government activists is nothing new, but lets not pretend the US govt doesn't play the same games when it suits them.
When the Mars rovers were sent out, Mars was unusually close to Earth. Sending out similar vehicles now would be much tougher, take much longer, require much bigger fuel loads, cost much more money, and give many more opportunities for errors.
At some point the US may want to ask whether it desperately wants a functional healthcare system, or six more Mars rovers. I mean, the rovers did a great job at first, but apart from difficulties in continuing their journey, what have they added scientifically to our understanding of Mars in the past year?
Well, a pretty pessimistic attitude.
Not only can rehabilitation work, as the legions of successfully reformed criminals shows, but I think it shows a level of maturity in a society when rehabilitation is considered as an option over 'lock em up and forget em'.
As an example, look at the civilised way Norway reacted when two children murdered another, compared to the hysterical overreaction in Britain when James Bulger was killed by two children.
Years down the track, I know I would prefer to live next to the Norwegian children, who were treated via rehabilitation, compared to the Bulger killers, who were locked up for long periods before ultimately being released.
I think the death penalty is the signature of a society too stupid to realise that you don't teach people life is sacred by taking it away. If you need any further proof of this, take a look at the homicide rate in countries that have the death penalty, as compared to those that don't. You could also look at homicide rates in the US states with the death penalty, compared to the rate in those that don't.
In Canada the number of people murdered has declined since the death penalty was abolished. In 2007 (the most recent figures I could find), there were 594 homicides in Canada, 159 fewer than in 1975 (one year prior to the abolition of capital punishment), after a long trend downwards.
As for Germany's laws on suppression of criminals' names, I disagree with it because I believe in free speech. Nevertheless, this call to have them killed I think is just barbaric.
If you wanted to test out malicious code to see whether it was likely to be discovered, wouldn't this be a great tool to have?
Kindles always spout how great it is you can read in the sun, because their eInk allows better viewing in direct light, but without that technology, this new device will be far less useful.
I thought this would have been fairly obvious, but from TFA: We hope that LG has included a passively-lit e-paper display option in the device.