The US are a bunch of Facists. The US was not previously at war with Iraq. Iraq did not violate the terms of the ceasefire. Saddam did not buy homes for families that sent teenage boys to blow themselves up on Israeli buses.
Yeah, repeat it often enough and people will believe it. I like how you quote 1984 for its geek cachet and then go on to repeat your particular hatred without justification.
Regardless of your feelings about the US in general, the US federal government in particular, or specifically the George W. Bush administration, if you're going to argue against a tactic (in this case empty repetition) don't turn around and use it in the same post. If you have a gripe, gripe. Don't just repeat your conclusion.
What business I conduct and with whom is proprietary information, and very much private. My client list is worth money to me, and what services I'm performing for those clients is worth even more. It's not public, and it would be worth a good deal to my competition. I might also discuss other things with my business partner, such as future marketing plans. Those are private as well.
What the government wants is a complete record of everything, in case you might have evidence that could convict you of something you may have done, or in case it supports a civil case against you. Deleting proprietary information or spam email, or the occasional dirty joke that goes around the office, is not destroying evidence if it wasn't evidence of anything. There's no right granted to the government by the Constitution of the United States saying they can require you to produce a record of every communication you've had. In fact, just the opposite is true. You're supposed to be secure in your person, papers, and effects against unreasonable search and seizure. Making me save a conversation about whether to have Italian or Greek for lunch in case it needs to be searched for nefarious motives later is an undue burden.
Wait... did I miss something about the software flat out not running? Or was TFA about Dell not offering support? "Not supporting" when talking about a vendor doesn't mean it won't work, just that they won't help you with it when you need help. It's not saying that Linux on Dell machines "doesn't support" TuxRacer.
Everyone with any illusions about what Dell is please repeat after me, "Dell is a hardware vendor. Dell is not a systems integrator or a consulting firm. Dell wants to sell me a box. What I do with the box is beyond Dell's control. If I want expert advice and hand-holding for my software, I need to go somewhere other than Dell to get it. Dell is a hardware vendor..."
You can say the same little mantra over and over, replacing "Dell" with "Gateway", "Acer", "Asus", "Lenovo", "Toshiba", "Sony", or lots of other companies. IBM, Microway, HP, Sun, Apple, SGI, and Tadpole are not the same sort of company as Dell. They're just not. Some companies write software. Some companies make hardware. Some integrate the software with the hardware. Some do it all. If you want OS support, use a company that develops an OS, does actual integration, or has a consulting arm. IBM, for example, does all of these. Microway and Tadpole build hardware specifically for certain in-depth software needs. Apple writes its own OS and some of the applications besides designing and contracting out the hardware. HP, Sun, and SGI are all platform companies, too.
Even when the OS is from Microsoft, you're going to get better OS support from a consulting firm or integrator than a hardware vendor that happens to preload the OS. Dell is not an integrator or consulting firm. They sell hardware.
...and Linux, which TFA is about. I'd call that a "non-Vista option".
Also, if someone has an OS preference and is the IT department or has purchasing power in the IT department, one should be able to install the preferred OS. Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Suse, OpenSuse, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, eComStation, QNX, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and probably a hundred other non-Vista OS distributions will install on most Dell server and desktop systems.
If world-class OS support is necessary, it's probably best to sign a contract with an OS vendor or a third party specializing in supporting the OS. Depending on a hardware vendor to support the OS is kind of risky anyway.
I've had RedHat and Mandriva on lots of PowerEdge and Optiplex systems, and I've never gotten Dell's permission or asked them for support. The only companies that make hardware that should be your final stop for supporting software are companies like IBM, Sun, SGI, or Apple that make the hardware and software both.
The kernel doesn't have to handle anything but scheduling and loading device drivers and the application programmer can still have plenty of features. There's this little set of things called shared libraries, and another called user-space device drivers. The OS being a microkernel or a monolithic kernel has little to nothing to do with the OS offering a full set of features. The kernel, after all, is not the whole OS.
Flash's SWF file format is documented well enough that several other products and open source projects can produce it and some are capable of playing it back. The FLA unpublished save format is basically a memory dump of how the Flash program works with the project, so it's considerably harder to develop outside software to save or load that format.
I know ActionScript, but I prefer to write what little Flash stuff I do in HaXe, for example. There are also Rebol Flash dialect (RSWF), an ActionScript virtual machine assembler called flasm, swfmill, Laszlo, and more.
For players, there's at least Gnash, Swfdec, SWF.max, Eltima's SWF and FLV Player, and IrfanView (which is what I use to play Flash games without opening a big memory-hogging browser).
It's entirely possible to maintain authority and not be an ass about it. The teacher was being an ass. You've just given the respone from the teacher that would have not only kept this out of the news, but also earned the teacher some respect as an open-minded (if technologically ignorant) and reasonable person.
You wouldn't need to read the message, but in order for it to be an invasion the invaders would have to know that it was created with a purpose. Noone's going to plan an armed invasion of a big lump of metal that reflects the odd random-ish signals of a dozen other solar systems. A quasar, neutron star, pulsar, black hole, and lots of other things stick out from the background, but that doesn't mean there's any intelligence behind the signals they give off.
An Earth-like planet is not guaranteed to have life, that's true. It's also true that life could theoretically evolve on planets that aren't like Earth at all. However, any aliens we would be most likely to acknowledge as intelligent -- or even notice possessing a life-like quality about them -- would probably come from planets not too dissimilar from our own. An amorphous cloud of thinking methane gas isn't going to look very lively to us, and we're not going to be able to communicate with it very easily.
Chances are Clemens did write that, but in allusion to Pascal. He was a very bright satirist, and often drew from well-known philosophers, statesmen, and the news when writing novels or essays. As any gifted writer, he tended to make words his own and to be credited for more than he originated.
He really was an excellent writer, too. Unfortunately I haven't read most of his stuff for enjoyment yet because either his writing or information about him was required study at every level of school in our mutual hometown, which got a little old by senior year of high school.
I grew up in Hannibal, Missouri. We studied Mark Twain for 13 years in public school there, for obvious reasons. I'm not familiar with Mark Twain as the source of this quote, although he may have repeated it. I've always heard it attributed to Blaise Pascal, but it seems he may have been paraphrasing someone earlier. Pascal lived well before Sam Clemens.
It possibly dates back to St. Augustine or even Cicero, but the most common wording of the idea in English is a straightforward translation from Pascal's.
Minimizing the boom at ground level means minimizing the volume of the shock cone, since the boom front on land is where the shock cone intersects the ground. Minimizing the volume of the shock cone is achieved by minimizing the angle of incidence of the plane with the air it's pushing, which is a necessary part of making the planes go as fast as what they're talking about here.
IOW, the higher mach number you want to hit without the plane burning up or tearing apart, the smaller the boom area will have to be. That's my understanding, anyway. Anyone with the aerospace chops to back that up or refute it care to comment?
There are two simple reasons music on CDs costs so much. There's money in mking a theft-resistant container, shipping it, storing it, having a big brick-and-mortar store (often at mall rent rates) and people to move them. That's a lot of markup. Another is that the record labels want to maximize profits and essentially fix prices with one another.
The whole issue with getting the labels to change their ways is that it's the very infrastructure that made them that is currently destroying them. They keep thinking it's the new technology that's hurting them, but it's their failure to adopt it that's doing so. Moving from technology to technology used to be their strength, after all. They changed from 98 and 78 RPM records to 33 and 45. They moved from 4-track reel-to-reel to 8-track tapes. Eight-tracks went out with the surge in cassette tapes. Vinyl mostly went away with CDs. Yet, for all that, they appear unwilling to move to SuperAudioCD, DVD Audio, or Minidisc. They largely seem unwilling to go to MP3, OGG, or AAC or unhappy about the whole idea. They're attacking fans of their talent pool for just about anything to do with technology.
I'd be fine with them cracking down on heavy sharers of their copyrighted work. To say stupid things like making an MP3 for myself to use from a CD I own is stealing is stupid, wrong-headed, arrogant, and not in line with copyright laws. In fact, any company that has said it's okay to make personal copies for a second device or to make backup copies who has turned around and said it isn't has committed promissory estoppel and cannot enforce any thing of the sort because they can't sue you for doing something they told you was okay. That's even if the law was on their side.
One thing people need to realize is that if you download files with certain P2P software, it places those files by default into the directory you're sharing back out. That changes a minor copyright issue (grabbing files from someone) into a major one (offering copyrighted files to the public). It'd be better to just not make illegal copies of other people's copyrighted work without their permission at all. P2P users who use the technology for legal purposes are getting pretty pissed at leeches who keep the P2P networks on the defensive. But if you think you're just grabbing a song or two here or there and not sharing anything, and that's acceptable to you, then be careful enough where you save the files so that they're not shared back out. Oh, and if you think it's okay to take what's shared but not to share it back out, who do you think you're condoning by copying it from their share?
I'm guessing someone might redo this one, even the same team, with different instrumentation and looking specifically for this behavior and more information about it. It wouldn't be entirely the same experiment, since this complete trapping of the light apparently was not the behavior they intended to see.
Not only is it isotropic, but it's also spread among many frequencies, encoded many different ways (analog FM, analog AM, TDMA, FDMA, CDMA,...), in many different languages, encoded into many different formats on top of the carrier (QAM, ATSC, NTSC, GSM, etc), and much of it is encrypted. In short, unless someone is specifically looking for a pattern it's probably indistuinduishable from noise. Surely there are natural phenomena that put out more than a gigawatt of radio noise spread across a spectrum.
It would probably be easier for aliens to find us via lensing and detecting the wobble of our sun. That's how we're attempting to find Earth-like planets, and so far it's been more promising than figuring out a pattern in what SETI's been receiving.
You not seeing him in his chair after looking is absence of evidence from his chair because you did an exhaustive search of the chair. Just because he's not in the chair doesn't mean he's not in the building. He could be sick in the toilet all day but too silly to stay home. He could be in the boss's office being reamed by the boss (figuratively or literally). He could be dead in the drop ceiling, or asleep in a broom closet. Anything motile has to be searched for sufficiently faster than it can move to provide sufficient evidence it's not present somewhere.
A better word in that quote would make it "Absence of proof is not proof of absence", or "Absence of evidence is not sufficient evidence of absence" either of which would be more accurate. If your office mate is not in his chair all day, that's certainly some evidence, but it's not sufficient evidence to say he's not in the building.
It's the same sort of saying as "You can't prove a negative." Well, for one, that statement is negative. Prove to me you can't prove a negative... Yet it's taken widely to be true despite being internally contradictory. Besides, you can, under certain circumstances, prove a negative. A good example is a well-supported alibi. Someone can't have been in a hotel in Detroit and have committed a murder in Miami at the same time. However, you can't prove that person didn't help plan the murder unless you know what they did every moment of every day since they became acquainted with the fact the deceased existed -- an exhaustive search.
So, more accurately than the popular sayings, how about "One cannot prove some item, actor, or force is unconnected with a certain place or event barring the use of an exhaustive search". Of course, an exhaustive search of the galaxy is a bit beyond our resources and expertise this budget year...
If they're not interested in exploration or communication, are peaceful, and look cool, then the point is probably going to be to exploit them or take them as pets. If they produce chemicals that improve our quality of life, they'd be used as drug production stock. If they're tasty and nutritious, they'd be food. If they're cute and easy to care for, they'd be pets. If they're cute and hard to care for, they'd be in zoos. If we deem them intelligent but can't figure out how to communicate with them, we'd keep some in zoos and pay to swim with them (like dolphins), and eat their neighbors (the tuna).
If we could find life that's not poisonous or violent toward us, we'd probably also look to colonization if there wasn't any claim to the area by sentient beings.
Of course, these things assume travel and not just contact. Of course, if there's nothing on the planet interested in exploration or communication, how would they receive our radio signals and why would they bother to decode them?
That's the inverse square law again there, as an AC already pointed out. You see, a radio transmission has strength equal to the inverse square of the distance from its source.
Here's some simple numbers... as you get twice as far away, you only see one quarter the signal. As you get four times as far away, you see 1/16th of the signal. As you get 100 times as far away, you see 1/10,000th the signal. Let's say your wireless computer headset starts to fade at 10 feet from the base transceiver on your USB port... that's not going to make it to next door, let alone Alpha Centauri.
Yes, they have. Black powder, repeating rifles, the steam engine, the radio, interchangeable parts, the assembly line, the affordable and reliable motor car, the airplane, the telegraph, the telephone, cocaine, television, LSD... technology is more than the Internet and public-key cryptography. Many advances that have changed life and civilization have had to be considered by our ancestors.
The governments of the world, if they were not effected by technology, would still be fighting wars using rocks and sticks and would not be taxing or regulating driving a car. Stories like Watergate may have never broken, and Tienamen Square almost certainly not. Our entire economy would be quite different if it wasn't for large sea-traveling things called ships which allow for import and export of goods.
People are running political campaigns online now. The people in Washington are trying to get a grasp on what "digital" means in connection with "copyright". They realize that it doesn't take thousands of dollars or hundreds of hours to make a printing press followed by a substantial effort to make a pamphlet. They also realize it takes just a few moments to get an entire book, movie, or music album copied now. That's why they're trying to adapt. They're clueless about it, and are doing a generally bad job. The next generation of people won't be.
The thing I find most humorous is this is largely the rebellious, rioting, demonstrating, power-fighting generation of the 1960's that is trying to squash the expression and civil disobedience of a younger generation. What's that old saying about maturity, that "Youth is when you blame everything on your parents, while maturity is when you learn everything is the fault of the younger generation." See, the problem is the 60's generation didn't grow up -- they just sold out. They changed what they believe and are still blaming everything on someone other than themselves. Meanwhile, the people who think it's wrong to upload copyrighted content for the whole world but who borrow an MP3 or two here or there are being made villains in the press and before Congress like they're pressing disks and making millions of dollars in some back alley.
It's good to remember that "theory" and "hypothesis" are quite distinct in scientific circles. In science, a belief is not a theory. A belief is either a hypothesis that can be tested or an article of faith. Since these are research scientists and this has no clear ties to any religion I can see, I'm going to bet they'll want their hypothesis tested.
They'll want the experiment set up specifically with storage of the light in mind, since this was a surprise discovery this time. Then they'll want some way to prove, mathematically or empirically (preferably both) that the light is getting trapped consistently and how that's being done.
Then, they'll want others to repeat the experiment in other labs from their write-up and get consistent results.
Then, when scientists can use the explanation for the light getting trapped as a portion of further work and it become useful to just assume the explanation is true and move on to work based on it... then it's a theory.
Or... that's how I'd think of the words "hypothesis" and "theory" from my interested lay understanding of research science. In short, a hypothesis is an idea about something happening under certain circumstances or why something happens in those circumstances that has not been properly vetted by experiments and mathematics. A hypothesis can be right or wrong, and noone knows until it is tested. A theory is a hypothesis that has been proven reasonably correct by multiple individual teams and can be used as a basis for further work. A theory is sometimes wrong in part, like Newtonian mechanics, but should offer a good enough model to make more discoveries.
In even shorter terms, a scientist says "theoretically" only if the basis for the belief is tested and accepted. Otherwise, it's "hypothetically".
DO you read whole threads? I've already answered that yes, industrialized cities used to produce war machines were attacked and included civilian casualties 60 years ago, and that the US's huge investment in smarter weapons was to prevent that from being necessary again.
Oh, and thanks for thinking you can think ahead of me just because you disagree with me. It's your particular brand of arrogance that makes people hate Slashdotters. "He disagrees, so I can think circles around him because he has to be stupid to disagree! Whee!" You're sure I'm going to try to lie and argue around it. Yippee for you! Does it hurt being such as ass?
And maybe the British, who built all that oil infrastructure, was rightfully pissed when the government of Iran tried to nationalize it.
Perhaps you didn't realize that as a precondition of the US involvement in organizing the coup, they demanded that the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (BP now) give up their monopoly, so that the oil fields would benefit more people. That's in the same Wikipedia article to which you almost linked.
There was, at least initially, enough support for the Shah as leader within Iran for the coup to take place. A coup is not an external thing. It was assisted and organized by Western countries, but the overthrowers of the government were Iranian.
Kim Jong-il and Fidel Castro are "democratically elected", too. So is Mugabe. So was Saddam Hussein, sometimes with a 100% margin of victory.
Colonization of inhabited areas is a touchy subject. However, why former colonies sometimes nationalize industries with millions or billions of dollars invested from abroad instead of levying taxes against those assets has nothing to do with being former colonies. It has to do with greed and want of power. One of the major ideas the free (freer, anyway) nations of the world agree upon is fair compensation if the government takes your property. A forced buyout might be acceptable. High taxes on an industry controlled by foreign interests would be fair enough. You don't just steal things simply because you're voted into power, though, even if the elections turn out to be truly legitimate.
We're actually, optimistically, a few years from a prototype direct methanol fuel cell car. That's a quick refill, because it's a liquid that can be stored and poured. There are patents and research papers flying around about ways to purify the methanol, how to make the fuel cells more efficient, and how to deal with catalyst costs. They generate CO2, but it's from methane alcohol and methane is a much more potent gas than carbon dioxide. The CO2 output is half of combustion engines, and the rest of the exhaust is water or water vapor. There are no oxides of nitrogen or sulfur. They're already more efficient than diesel, and more work is being done on the cells. That's a good alternative to hydrogen fuel cells at least in the short term I think, especially since the distribution network and the car fuel tanks would be mostly existing technology. The fuel cell itself has no moving parts, too. Methanol can be produced from livestock and human waste and from landfill gas, thus cleaning up some of our other effects on the environment.
If ultracapacitors work out as projected, electric cars will have more power and more range than anything with lead acid, metal hydride, or lithium ion batteries. That's another promising thing.
Also, in addition to plug-in charging and regenerative braking, solar cells are becoming lighter, cheaper, longer lasting, and more reliable under stresses of temperature change. Having a car roof covered with them wouldn't charge a car fully in any reasonable manner, but it could certainly help top off the batteries.
As for rare six-person trips, I know quite a few families with four or five kids. The six or seven person trip is a daily thing for them. Again, that's an unusual need, but it's part of the market that needs consideration. A Prius doesn't fit two toddler seats, two booster seats, and two adults. A Ford Escape Hybrid does, so that's a decent compromise between efficiency and capacity for some people.
I don't mean to take anything away from the research or the researchers. There just needs to be some realism surrounding the excitement generated by this sort of announcement. As for making people pay their fair share, I had a Slashdot post not long ago in which I advocated backing the dollar with carbon credits as opposed to specific taxes on specific energy products. It seems simpler in the long run to me. Of course, while carbon dioxide is the big-news culprit lately, there are other greenhouse gases and many ways to damage the world besides warming it.
I think you are hurting the government by doing this, but unfortunately the people suffer too. In fact, the people typically suffer first, worse, and in more ways than the government.
If the people make less money, though, there's less to tax. Even if you raise tax rates, you can only take so much because there's only so much there. Ideally, any suffering the government earns for the people and any additional burdens it places on them because of the embargo will turn into pressure on that government from its people.
There's actually quite a bit of resentment toward the Iranian government internally now, as a mater of fact, over this as well as many other issues. Governments that oppress their people to the extent the Iranian government does can't be changed just by being unpopular though. They have to be unpopular enough for people to risk their freedom, their lives,and even their family's lives in order to force a change.
If it's ethnic cleansing, then please explain why there are peaceful, non-militant Palestinians living in Israel and in the "occupied territories" that have not been targeted and killed?
I call them the "occupied territories", quotes included, because how often in the history of the world has one nation been invaded by three others, counterattacked, and been made to look the culprit because they were able to push back the enemy lines? Anything gained from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria should be considered Israeli lands, but they're willing to give it all to the Palestinian people in exchange for peace and normalized relations. The Golan, the West Bank, the Sinai, and the Gaza strip were all gained in the Six Days War, in which Israel was the invaded nation.
In the Yom Kippur war, Israel was again attacked. The first Lebanon war started with the PLO shelling Israeli villages. The second Lebanon war (if you can call it a war) was started when shells fell on an Israeli village from Lebanon, two soldiers were captured on Israeli soil, and they were not being returned after diplomatic efforts. Some big, bad, horrible imperialism there, huh?
As for murder, I'm not sure if you're talking about IDF or something alleged to have been done by Metsada division of the Mossad.
An offshoot branch of the Haganah took a civilian village well after the Arabs killed all the Jews in Hebron. Most of the "terrorist" activity of Haganah was blowing up locomotive rails and other British occupying assets.
Slashdot Mirror
The US are a bunch of Facists.
The US was not previously at war with Iraq.
Iraq did not violate the terms of the ceasefire.
Saddam did not buy homes for families that sent teenage boys to blow themselves up on Israeli buses.
Yeah, repeat it often enough and people will believe it. I like how you quote 1984 for its geek cachet and then go on to repeat your particular hatred without justification.
Regardless of your feelings about the US in general, the US federal government in particular, or specifically the George W. Bush administration, if you're going to argue against a tactic (in this case empty repetition) don't turn around and use it in the same post. If you have a gripe, gripe. Don't just repeat your conclusion.
What business I conduct and with whom is proprietary information, and very much private. My client list is worth money to me, and what services I'm performing for those clients is worth even more. It's not public, and it would be worth a good deal to my competition. I might also discuss other things with my business partner, such as future marketing plans. Those are private as well.
What the government wants is a complete record of everything, in case you might have evidence that could convict you of something you may have done, or in case it supports a civil case against you. Deleting proprietary information or spam email, or the occasional dirty joke that goes around the office, is not destroying evidence if it wasn't evidence of anything. There's no right granted to the government by the Constitution of the United States saying they can require you to produce a record of every communication you've had. In fact, just the opposite is true. You're supposed to be secure in your person, papers, and effects against unreasonable search and seizure. Making me save a conversation about whether to have Italian or Greek for lunch in case it needs to be searched for nefarious motives later is an undue burden.
Wait... did I miss something about the software flat out not running? Or was TFA about Dell not offering support? "Not supporting" when talking about a vendor doesn't mean it won't work, just that they won't help you with it when you need help. It's not saying that Linux on Dell machines "doesn't support" TuxRacer.
Everyone with any illusions about what Dell is please repeat after me, "Dell is a hardware vendor. Dell is not a systems integrator or a consulting firm. Dell wants to sell me a box. What I do with the box is beyond Dell's control. If I want expert advice and hand-holding for my software, I need to go somewhere other than Dell to get it. Dell is a hardware vendor..."
You can say the same little mantra over and over, replacing "Dell" with "Gateway", "Acer", "Asus", "Lenovo", "Toshiba", "Sony", or lots of other companies. IBM, Microway, HP, Sun, Apple, SGI, and Tadpole are not the same sort of company as Dell. They're just not. Some companies write software. Some companies make hardware. Some integrate the software with the hardware. Some do it all. If you want OS support, use a company that develops an OS, does actual integration, or has a consulting arm. IBM, for example, does all of these. Microway and Tadpole build hardware specifically for certain in-depth software needs. Apple writes its own OS and some of the applications besides designing and contracting out the hardware. HP, Sun, and SGI are all platform companies, too.
Even when the OS is from Microsoft, you're going to get better OS support from a consulting firm or integrator than a hardware vendor that happens to preload the OS. Dell is not an integrator or consulting firm. They sell hardware.
...and Linux, which TFA is about. I'd call that a "non-Vista option".
Also, if someone has an OS preference and is the IT department or has purchasing power in the IT department, one should be able to install the preferred OS. Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Suse, OpenSuse, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, eComStation, QNX, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and probably a hundred other non-Vista OS distributions will install on most Dell server and desktop systems.
If world-class OS support is necessary, it's probably best to sign a contract with an OS vendor or a third party specializing in supporting the OS. Depending on a hardware vendor to support the OS is kind of risky anyway.
I've had RedHat and Mandriva on lots of PowerEdge and Optiplex systems, and I've never gotten Dell's permission or asked them for support. The only companies that make hardware that should be your final stop for supporting software are companies like IBM, Sun, SGI, or Apple that make the hardware and software both.
The kernel doesn't have to handle anything but scheduling and loading device drivers and the application programmer can still have plenty of features. There's this little set of things called shared libraries, and another called user-space device drivers. The OS being a microkernel or a monolithic kernel has little to nothing to do with the OS offering a full set of features. The kernel, after all, is not the whole OS.
Flash's SWF file format is documented well enough that several other products and open source projects can produce it and some are capable of playing it back. The FLA unpublished save format is basically a memory dump of how the Flash program works with the project, so it's considerably harder to develop outside software to save or load that format.
I know ActionScript, but I prefer to write what little Flash stuff I do in HaXe, for example. There are also Rebol Flash dialect (RSWF), an ActionScript virtual machine assembler called flasm, swfmill, Laszlo, and more.
There are also other graphical programs for Flash publishing. Everything from the Zmag web app to SWF Quicker by SoThink and their SWF Easy.
For players, there's at least Gnash, Swfdec, SWF.max, Eltima's SWF and FLV Player, and IrfanView (which is what I use to play Flash games without opening a big memory-hogging browser).
Hell, Adobe's own Flex authoring suite for Flash is supposed to be MPL within a few months. How much more open do you people want?
Give this poster a cookie!
It's entirely possible to maintain authority and not be an ass about it. The teacher was being an ass. You've just given the respone from the teacher that would have not only kept this out of the news, but also earned the teacher some respect as an open-minded (if technologically ignorant) and reasonable person.
You wouldn't need to read the message, but in order for it to be an invasion the invaders would have to know that it was created with a purpose. Noone's going to plan an armed invasion of a big lump of metal that reflects the odd random-ish signals of a dozen other solar systems. A quasar, neutron star, pulsar, black hole, and lots of other things stick out from the background, but that doesn't mean there's any intelligence behind the signals they give off.
An Earth-like planet is not guaranteed to have life, that's true. It's also true that life could theoretically evolve on planets that aren't like Earth at all. However, any aliens we would be most likely to acknowledge as intelligent -- or even notice possessing a life-like quality about them -- would probably come from planets not too dissimilar from our own. An amorphous cloud of thinking methane gas isn't going to look very lively to us, and we're not going to be able to communicate with it very easily.
Chances are Clemens did write that, but in allusion to Pascal. He was a very bright satirist, and often drew from well-known philosophers, statesmen, and the news when writing novels or essays. As any gifted writer, he tended to make words his own and to be credited for more than he originated.
He really was an excellent writer, too. Unfortunately I haven't read most of his stuff for enjoyment yet because either his writing or information about him was required study at every level of school in our mutual hometown, which got a little old by senior year of high school.
I grew up in Hannibal, Missouri. We studied Mark Twain for 13 years in public school there, for obvious reasons. I'm not familiar with Mark Twain as the source of this quote, although he may have repeated it. I've always heard it attributed to Blaise Pascal, but it seems he may have been paraphrasing someone earlier. Pascal lived well before Sam Clemens.
It possibly dates back to St. Augustine or even Cicero, but the most common wording of the idea in English is a straightforward translation from Pascal's.
Minimizing the boom at ground level means minimizing the volume of the shock cone, since the boom front on land is where the shock cone intersects the ground. Minimizing the volume of the shock cone is achieved by minimizing the angle of incidence of the plane with the air it's pushing, which is a necessary part of making the planes go as fast as what they're talking about here.
IOW, the higher mach number you want to hit without the plane burning up or tearing apart, the smaller the boom area will have to be. That's my understanding, anyway. Anyone with the aerospace chops to back that up or refute it care to comment?
There are two simple reasons music on CDs costs so much. There's money in mking a theft-resistant container, shipping it, storing it, having a big brick-and-mortar store (often at mall rent rates) and people to move them. That's a lot of markup. Another is that the record labels want to maximize profits and essentially fix prices with one another.
The whole issue with getting the labels to change their ways is that it's the very infrastructure that made them that is currently destroying them. They keep thinking it's the new technology that's hurting them, but it's their failure to adopt it that's doing so. Moving from technology to technology used to be their strength, after all. They changed from 98 and 78 RPM records to 33 and 45. They moved from 4-track reel-to-reel to 8-track tapes. Eight-tracks went out with the surge in cassette tapes. Vinyl mostly went away with CDs. Yet, for all that, they appear unwilling to move to SuperAudioCD, DVD Audio, or Minidisc. They largely seem unwilling to go to MP3, OGG, or AAC or unhappy about the whole idea. They're attacking fans of their talent pool for just about anything to do with technology.
I'd be fine with them cracking down on heavy sharers of their copyrighted work. To say stupid things like making an MP3 for myself to use from a CD I own is stealing is stupid, wrong-headed, arrogant, and not in line with copyright laws. In fact, any company that has said it's okay to make personal copies for a second device or to make backup copies who has turned around and said it isn't has committed promissory estoppel and cannot enforce any thing of the sort because they can't sue you for doing something they told you was okay. That's even if the law was on their side.
One thing people need to realize is that if you download files with certain P2P software, it places those files by default into the directory you're sharing back out. That changes a minor copyright issue (grabbing files from someone) into a major one (offering copyrighted files to the public). It'd be better to just not make illegal copies of other people's copyrighted work without their permission at all. P2P users who use the technology for legal purposes are getting pretty pissed at leeches who keep the P2P networks on the defensive. But if you think you're just grabbing a song or two here or there and not sharing anything, and that's acceptable to you, then be careful enough where you save the files so that they're not shared back out. Oh, and if you think it's okay to take what's shared but not to share it back out, who do you think you're condoning by copying it from their share?
I'm guessing someone might redo this one, even the same team, with different instrumentation and looking specifically for this behavior and more information about it. It wouldn't be entirely the same experiment, since this complete trapping of the light apparently was not the behavior they intended to see.
Not only is it isotropic, but it's also spread among many frequencies, encoded many different ways (analog FM, analog AM, TDMA, FDMA, CDMA, ...), in many different languages, encoded into many different formats on top of the carrier (QAM, ATSC, NTSC, GSM, etc), and much of it is encrypted. In short, unless someone is specifically looking for a pattern it's probably indistuinduishable from noise. Surely there are natural phenomena that put out more than a gigawatt of radio noise spread across a spectrum.
It would probably be easier for aliens to find us via lensing and detecting the wobble of our sun. That's how we're attempting to find Earth-like planets, and so far it's been more promising than figuring out a pattern in what SETI's been receiving.
You not seeing him in his chair after looking is absence of evidence from his chair because you did an exhaustive search of the chair. Just because he's not in the chair doesn't mean he's not in the building. He could be sick in the toilet all day but too silly to stay home. He could be in the boss's office being reamed by the boss (figuratively or literally). He could be dead in the drop ceiling, or asleep in a broom closet. Anything motile has to be searched for sufficiently faster than it can move to provide sufficient evidence it's not present somewhere.
A better word in that quote would make it "Absence of proof is not proof of absence", or "Absence of evidence is not sufficient evidence of absence" either of which would be more accurate. If your office mate is not in his chair all day, that's certainly some evidence, but it's not sufficient evidence to say he's not in the building.
It's the same sort of saying as "You can't prove a negative." Well, for one, that statement is negative. Prove to me you can't prove a negative... Yet it's taken widely to be true despite being internally contradictory. Besides, you can, under certain circumstances, prove a negative. A good example is a well-supported alibi. Someone can't have been in a hotel in Detroit and have committed a murder in Miami at the same time. However, you can't prove that person didn't help plan the murder unless you know what they did every moment of every day since they became acquainted with the fact the deceased existed -- an exhaustive search.
So, more accurately than the popular sayings, how about "One cannot prove some item, actor, or force is unconnected with a certain place or event barring the use of an exhaustive search". Of course, an exhaustive search of the galaxy is a bit beyond our resources and expertise this budget year...
If they're not interested in exploration or communication, are peaceful, and look cool, then the point is probably going to be to exploit them or take them as pets. If they produce chemicals that improve our quality of life, they'd be used as drug production stock. If they're tasty and nutritious, they'd be food. If they're cute and easy to care for, they'd be pets. If they're cute and hard to care for, they'd be in zoos. If we deem them intelligent but can't figure out how to communicate with them, we'd keep some in zoos and pay to swim with them (like dolphins), and eat their neighbors (the tuna).
If we could find life that's not poisonous or violent toward us, we'd probably also look to colonization if there wasn't any claim to the area by sentient beings.
Of course, these things assume travel and not just contact. Of course, if there's nothing on the planet interested in exploration or communication, how would they receive our radio signals and why would they bother to decode them?
That's the inverse square law again there, as an AC already pointed out. You see, a radio transmission has strength equal to the inverse square of the distance from its source.
Here's some simple numbers... as you get twice as far away, you only see one quarter the signal. As you get four times as far away, you see 1/16th of the signal. As you get 100 times as far away, you see 1/10,000th the signal. Let's say your wireless computer headset starts to fade at 10 feet from the base transceiver on your USB port... that's not going to make it to next door, let alone Alpha Centauri.
Yes, they have. Black powder, repeating rifles, the steam engine, the radio, interchangeable parts, the assembly line, the affordable and reliable motor car, the airplane, the telegraph, the telephone, cocaine, television, LSD... technology is more than the Internet and public-key cryptography. Many advances that have changed life and civilization have had to be considered by our ancestors.
The governments of the world, if they were not effected by technology, would still be fighting wars using rocks and sticks and would not be taxing or regulating driving a car. Stories like Watergate may have never broken, and Tienamen Square almost certainly not. Our entire economy would be quite different if it wasn't for large sea-traveling things called ships which allow for import and export of goods.
People are running political campaigns online now. The people in Washington are trying to get a grasp on what "digital" means in connection with "copyright". They realize that it doesn't take thousands of dollars or hundreds of hours to make a printing press followed by a substantial effort to make a pamphlet. They also realize it takes just a few moments to get an entire book, movie, or music album copied now. That's why they're trying to adapt. They're clueless about it, and are doing a generally bad job. The next generation of people won't be.
The thing I find most humorous is this is largely the rebellious, rioting, demonstrating, power-fighting generation of the 1960's that is trying to squash the expression and civil disobedience of a younger generation. What's that old saying about maturity, that "Youth is when you blame everything on your parents, while maturity is when you learn everything is the fault of the younger generation." See, the problem is the 60's generation didn't grow up -- they just sold out. They changed what they believe and are still blaming everything on someone other than themselves. Meanwhile, the people who think it's wrong to upload copyrighted content for the whole world but who borrow an MP3 or two here or there are being made villains in the press and before Congress like they're pressing disks and making millions of dollars in some back alley.
Hopefully this or similar work will help solve some of those problems.
From TFA: "but the researchers believe that"
It's good to remember that "theory" and "hypothesis" are quite distinct in scientific circles. In science, a belief is not a theory. A belief is either a hypothesis that can be tested or an article of faith. Since these are research scientists and this has no clear ties to any religion I can see, I'm going to bet they'll want their hypothesis tested.
They'll want the experiment set up specifically with storage of the light in mind, since this was a surprise discovery this time. Then they'll want some way to prove, mathematically or empirically (preferably both) that the light is getting trapped consistently and how that's being done.
Then, they'll want others to repeat the experiment in other labs from their write-up and get consistent results.
Then, when scientists can use the explanation for the light getting trapped as a portion of further work and it become useful to just assume the explanation is true and move on to work based on it... then it's a theory.
Or... that's how I'd think of the words "hypothesis" and "theory" from my interested lay understanding of research science. In short, a hypothesis is an idea about something happening under certain circumstances or why something happens in those circumstances that has not been properly vetted by experiments and mathematics. A hypothesis can be right or wrong, and noone knows until it is tested. A theory is a hypothesis that has been proven reasonably correct by multiple individual teams and can be used as a basis for further work. A theory is sometimes wrong in part, like Newtonian mechanics, but should offer a good enough model to make more discoveries.
In even shorter terms, a scientist says "theoretically" only if the basis for the belief is tested and accepted. Otherwise, it's "hypothetically".
DO you read whole threads? I've already answered that yes, industrialized cities used to produce war machines were attacked and included civilian casualties 60 years ago, and that the US's huge investment in smarter weapons was to prevent that from being necessary again.
Oh, and thanks for thinking you can think ahead of me just because you disagree with me. It's your particular brand of arrogance that makes people hate Slashdotters. "He disagrees, so I can think circles around him because he has to be stupid to disagree! Whee!" You're sure I'm going to try to lie and argue around it. Yippee for you! Does it hurt being such as ass?
And maybe the British, who built all that oil infrastructure, was rightfully pissed when the government of Iran tried to nationalize it.
Perhaps you didn't realize that as a precondition of the US involvement in organizing the coup, they demanded that the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (BP now) give up their monopoly, so that the oil fields would benefit more people. That's in the same Wikipedia article to which you almost linked.
There was, at least initially, enough support for the Shah as leader within Iran for the coup to take place. A coup is not an external thing. It was assisted and organized by Western countries, but the overthrowers of the government were Iranian.
Kim Jong-il and Fidel Castro are "democratically elected", too. So is Mugabe. So was Saddam Hussein, sometimes with a 100% margin of victory.
Colonization of inhabited areas is a touchy subject. However, why former colonies sometimes nationalize industries with millions or billions of dollars invested from abroad instead of levying taxes against those assets has nothing to do with being former colonies. It has to do with greed and want of power. One of the major ideas the free (freer, anyway) nations of the world agree upon is fair compensation if the government takes your property. A forced buyout might be acceptable. High taxes on an industry controlled by foreign interests would be fair enough. You don't just steal things simply because you're voted into power, though, even if the elections turn out to be truly legitimate.
We're actually, optimistically, a few years from a prototype direct methanol fuel cell car. That's a quick refill, because it's a liquid that can be stored and poured. There are patents and research papers flying around about ways to purify the methanol, how to make the fuel cells more efficient, and how to deal with catalyst costs. They generate CO2, but it's from methane alcohol and methane is a much more potent gas than carbon dioxide. The CO2 output is half of combustion engines, and the rest of the exhaust is water or water vapor. There are no oxides of nitrogen or sulfur. They're already more efficient than diesel, and more work is being done on the cells. That's a good alternative to hydrogen fuel cells at least in the short term I think, especially since the distribution network and the car fuel tanks would be mostly existing technology. The fuel cell itself has no moving parts, too. Methanol can be produced from livestock and human waste and from landfill gas, thus cleaning up some of our other effects on the environment.
If ultracapacitors work out as projected, electric cars will have more power and more range than anything with lead acid, metal hydride, or lithium ion batteries. That's another promising thing.
Also, in addition to plug-in charging and regenerative braking, solar cells are becoming lighter, cheaper, longer lasting, and more reliable under stresses of temperature change. Having a car roof covered with them wouldn't charge a car fully in any reasonable manner, but it could certainly help top off the batteries.
As for rare six-person trips, I know quite a few families with four or five kids. The six or seven person trip is a daily thing for them. Again, that's an unusual need, but it's part of the market that needs consideration. A Prius doesn't fit two toddler seats, two booster seats, and two adults. A Ford Escape Hybrid does, so that's a decent compromise between efficiency and capacity for some people.
I don't mean to take anything away from the research or the researchers. There just needs to be some realism surrounding the excitement generated by this sort of announcement. As for making people pay their fair share, I had a Slashdot post not long ago in which I advocated backing the dollar with carbon credits as opposed to specific taxes on specific energy products. It seems simpler in the long run to me. Of course, while carbon dioxide is the big-news culprit lately, there are other greenhouse gases and many ways to damage the world besides warming it.
I think you are hurting the government by doing this, but unfortunately the people suffer too. In fact, the people typically suffer first, worse, and in more ways than the government.
If the people make less money, though, there's less to tax. Even if you raise tax rates, you can only take so much because there's only so much there. Ideally, any suffering the government earns for the people and any additional burdens it places on them because of the embargo will turn into pressure on that government from its people.
There's actually quite a bit of resentment toward the Iranian government internally now, as a mater of fact, over this as well as many other issues. Governments that oppress their people to the extent the Iranian government does can't be changed just by being unpopular though. They have to be unpopular enough for people to risk their freedom, their lives,and even their family's lives in order to force a change.
If it's ethnic cleansing, then please explain why there are peaceful, non-militant Palestinians living in Israel and in the "occupied territories" that have not been targeted and killed?
I call them the "occupied territories", quotes included, because how often in the history of the world has one nation been invaded by three others, counterattacked, and been made to look the culprit because they were able to push back the enemy lines? Anything gained from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria should be considered Israeli lands, but they're willing to give it all to the Palestinian people in exchange for peace and normalized relations. The Golan, the West Bank, the Sinai, and the Gaza strip were all gained in the Six Days War, in which Israel was the invaded nation.
In the Yom Kippur war, Israel was again attacked. The first Lebanon war started with the PLO shelling Israeli villages. The second Lebanon war (if you can call it a war) was started when shells fell on an Israeli village from Lebanon, two soldiers were captured on Israeli soil, and they were not being returned after diplomatic efforts. Some big, bad, horrible imperialism there, huh?
As for murder, I'm not sure if you're talking about IDF or something alleged to have been done by Metsada division of the Mossad.
An offshoot branch of the Haganah took a civilian village well after the Arabs killed all the Jews in Hebron. Most of the "terrorist" activity of Haganah was blowing up locomotive rails and other British occupying assets.