On the other hand, if we do the conservation measures, then the TOU might not be such a big deal, because we wouldn't be buying much energy at the summer, peak rate of $.36/kW.hr.
The cheapest, cleanest energy you can buy is the energy you don't use. Until you've squeezed your energy use down to the smallest reasonable level (where you'll have to provide your own definition of "reasonable"!) it is unlikely to make financial sense to make a major investment in solar or any other type of alternative power.
That said, you have clearly identified your pool pump as a large load, and there are companies that sell solar energy units that are aimed directly at that particular point load, for example: http://www.etaengineering.com/pool_pump/intro.shtm l That was just the first hit on googling "solar power pool pump"--there were lots of others. It may make sense to make a much smaller investment to reduce this load. One interesting aspect here is that the system may include a DC motor, so you avoid the inverter loss, which is fairly significant.
As we think about alternative energy we need to move away from the "universal plug" idea of traditional on-demand energy sources, and focus on disruptive uses that do not serve every imaginable need, but which are well-matched to particular needs.
The general public has basically no need for this sort of information
I have an epistemological question: How do you know what I need? And for that matter, how do you know what the 300-odd-million people living in the United States need?
It may "just makes sense" to you that no one anywhere has any need of any of this information, but there is a word for an epistemology built on what "just makes sense": faith.
I don't see why your faith should restrict my access to information, particularly when it is information that the public has been able to access for many, many years. Your statements about restrictions on information such as layouts of dams, refineries and nuclear plants are mostly false: as a child I toured several such facilities in Canada and the United States on family vacations They were open to the public, even to the extent of having viewing galleries over the turbine halls in some power plants, and being able to enter some dams and see the penstocks. No restrictions on picture-taking were in place, and in any case a sketch artist or engineer with a competent memory could easily have ascertained most of the salient details and recorded them subsequently.
This was in the days when the Cold War was still moderately warm, and the West was being threatened with extermination by people who actually had the capability to do widespread damage, rather than a bunch of rats in a hole somewhere whose dreams extend to shooting fewer innocent people than are killed every day by domestic violence in the U.S. In those days it was illegal to take pictures of bridges and other public infrastructure in the Soviet Union, but not in Canada or America.
So while the ubiquity of high quality aerial and satellite photography is unfortunate from a security standpoint, it is by no means clear why the highly speculative needs of the organs of the state should trump the public's undoubted need to oversee government and private installations by any and all means available, because we know from millennia of experience that if we ever let the organs of the state or private industry go unwatched for a moment that some individuals charged with the public trust will violate that trust in very dangerous ways.
Re:So lemme get this straight....
on
The Human Mutation
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm assuming here that the mutation is involved in communication...
Why? I mean, sure, it seems to have a role in the forward part of the brain, but rather a lot of things go on there.
What you are doing is variously known as "idle speculation" at best and "jumping to conclusions" at worst. Neither serve the ends of science particularly well, although a little bit of idle speculation can be scientifically valuable.
As usual for/., the headline is false. This gene does not "make us human." It appears to be an important locus in differentiating early hominids from there closest relatives. Only an idiot, a liar, or a journalist would confuse that with "making us human."
In the words of State Senator Richard T. Moore, D-Uxbridge, "...I don't think it's a good move and I would be reluctant to see why we are going to that step."
Is it just me, or is this barely even English?
I know that we all sound funny when quoted verbatim, but I'd like to think most of us can form a coherent sentence, especially when it's really a prepared sound-bite for the media.
I would rather they have lots of false positives to avoid true negatives
Unfortunately, this sort of indiscriminate paranoia ensures that the true negatives will be missed in the midst of a sea of garbage.
The intelligent response to events like 9/11 is to recognize that law enforcement effort should be prioritized as always, focussing resources on the people most likely to do harm, and to accept that a certain level of risk is necessary to preserve some essential liberty.
The Constitution never explicitly granted the right to duplicate copyrighted materials on the Internet.
Neither the American Constitution nor the Bill of Rights "grant" rights. The "enumerate" them--that is, "specify one after another; list".
The 9th Amendment to the Constitution specifically states, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." And the 10th Amendment states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people."
Ergo, anything that is not forbidden to the people is permitted. Anything that is not permitted to the United States or the several States is forbidden.
A "right" in the Framer's language is either endowed by God, or in secular terms is a political condition necessary for the life of a morally autonomous being, in precisely the same sense that light is a physical condition necessary for the life of a photosynthesising being. One can neither "grant" nor "deny" the necessity of light to a photosynthesising being--because that is simply a fact about the being. If you take the light away, or give it in inappropriate amounts and times and spectra, the being will not thrive. The same is true, on the secular view, of rights.
It does not purport to be a breakthrough, although it does claim that the observations must be due to a nuclear reaction.
As I have no access to the paper it is hard to judge the results, but from this and other comments it appears that their work substantially contradicts P&F's observations, which could not possibly have been due to any fusion reaction that produced energetic charged particles, because there is no way at all for a sufficiently high-energy charged particle to move through a palladium lattice without knocking neutrons off palladium nuclei in the process.
This is an interesting result due to its reproducibility, which has been notably lacking in the cold fusion community. Fusion cross-sections for deuterium particularly are very sensitive to the details of the nuclear wavefunction, and it is by no means impossible that there is something going on that could produce some fusion in the lattice. But it is certainly not what P&F saw, because anyone with a Geiger counter could have detected the residual radioactivity that would have come from the neutron burst generated with their apparatus burned up.
To wit: Can I publicly post your credit card number, expiration date, and CVN? They're just numbers... and how can ordinary numbers have implications for property and finances?
So are credit card numbers etc covered by the DMCA? Or some other law? Like something to do with fraud, perhaps?
If the case of publishing 09 F9 11 etc is just the same as publishing a credit card number, then why isn't it covered by just the same law? If your argument were correct then there would be no need for the DMCA at all, because secret keys that were given to every customer who bought a product would be protected by just the same laws as those that protect secret credit card numbers that are given to every seller by the credit card user.
I don't particularly see this as a free speech issue, but rather as a fair use issue. Anti-copying technology is an attempt to impose on the user by technological means limits that are far more restrictive than fair use restrictions. The DMCA is an attempt to undermine centuries of common and statute law protecting fair use of legal copies. It is a radical departure from existing law, and has not proven itself to be effective in its fundamental aim of making bits harder to copy, which is not exactly a surprise to anyone who isn't an alchemist or inventor of perpetual motion machines.
In contrast, the completely different laws that protect credit card numbers (or rather, the use of credit card numbers by those not authorized to do so) are based on financial fraud laws that date back centuries, and have proven to be relatively effective.
To neglect this rather large difference is a serious mistake, although admittedly the people who are making claims about free speech rather fair use and civil disobedience are pretty much openly inviting you to make it.
That hasn't stopped the perpetual "war against drugs".
True, although there are differences. For one, drugs have the capability to do actual harm, which makes the case for legalization more problematic. When you consider that people can and do have their lives ruined by drug use (and alcohol and tobacco and casino gambling and lotteries and video slot machines...) it is understandable that some people make the erroneous argument that "if only they were banned" the harm they do would not occur.
But no one has ever or will ever die from an overdose of information. No individuals suffer, other than possibly shareholders in media companies that are stupid enough to bet their future on bits becoming harder to copy. Even then, the short-sellers will make money out of it, thanks to the magic of capitalism.
So I'm betting that public tolerance for a "War on Integers" is going to be a lot lower than that for the "War on Drugs."
Thanks for the link. May as well go to the source.
The first independent claim seems to describe is the following: putting a call to a void function containing no program instructions into your code, and having a second process running that detects when that function is called and then doing something. As is typical of software patents, it is both absurdly broad and stupidly narrow. Read one way it would cover almost any external debugger. But then it defines a specific sequence of actions that the second process will take using a narrowly defined set of components. Also, it specifies in the first independent claim that the called function is void and free of program code, so a system implementing this that made a call to:
This crack relies on just one person having one of these cracked drives
More deeply, it depends on the fundamental mistake of trying to use encryption for content protection. As the article says:
The real problem with trying to create an "uncrackable" copy protection is that the media must come with the keys used to decrypt it somewhere on the device and the media itself. Hiding these keys in different places--security by obscurity--merely delays the inevitable. Of course, for the content providers, any delay is still better than no delay at all, so expect the battles between copy protection and hackers to continue.
From a crypto point of view you are handing an attacker the ciphertext, the plaintext, and the private key. All these fancy tricks to is to try to make it hard to get at the private key and maybe the ciphertext. But those three things must always be present for any crypto-based content-protection scheme to work, and that means that all such schemes will always be vulnerable. The only way around it is to change the private key on a regular basis, which works for broadcast signals like satellite TV that can be re-encrypted on the fly, but which cannot work for static media that can only be encrypted once.
And that last comment in the paragraph above from the article is wrong: a delay really doesn't do you much good, when the cost of designing and implementing a new crypto scheme is years and millions, while the cost of breaking it is weeks and thousands. And once a scheme is cracked, as the article suggests, software extraction of the keys from the raw media will inevitably follow, meaning that even if it takes weeks or months to crack the first disk, cracking the second will take seconds.
This is a race that content providers cannot possibly win. Draconian legal moves always fail in the face of widespread civil disobedience, which is what we are seeing here.
So the technological problem of crypto-based content protection is unsolvable, and the social/legal problem of crytpo-based content protection is now known to be unsolvable: when content packagers try to impose the law, the wired masses make fun of them. Ergo, content packagers may try to wiggle their way out of this for a while, but their situation is unsustainable.
This is a good day for freedom. As G30RG3 0RW3LL might have said, "Freedom is the freedom to say that 0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688BE plus two makes 0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0. If that is granted, all else follows."
The article also fails the mention something that all "extreme calorie restriction will make you live longer!" articles fail to mention: that all mammals except humans live about a billion heartbeats, while humans live about two billion heartbeats. So we already have anomalously long lives, which makes any extrapolation from animal models very chancy with regard to life extension.
It will be at least a few decades before we have anything like decent statistics on the effects of extreme calorie restriction on humans, and anyone who tries this is taking a very speculative leap in the dark. Go for it if you like, but don't be surprised when you drop dead twenty years from now due to some unexpected side effect because your physiology turns out to be very different in this regard from a flatworm or a mouse.
Population studies on the few brave, hopeful and foolish souls go this route may very well teach us something about human physiology, so even if it doesn't work for them it might do some good for the rest of us.
The more land we turn into farmland, the more kids we have, that again will need to turn new land into farmland, or squeeze even more out of what is allready there to stay alive, and have more kids that needs more farmland... and so on, so forth...
That would explain why the amount of land farmed in North America has been falling for decades, and the population would be stable or shrinking were it not for immigration, yes?
The fact is that by the time I am old the "population crisis" will be under-population, not over-population, at least so long as religious nutjobs don't get their way. You see, regardless of what your faith tells you "just makes sense", the fact is that increasing the status of women, and increasing urban populations (which increases wealth while decreasing ecological footprint--the most environmentally friendly place to live in North America is downtown New York City) both result in large decreases in the birth rate.
If you want to "enact population control" you only need advocate equal rights and strong legal protections for women, and increased urbanization. Those two things, which are happening at a great rate in places like India, will moderate human population growth within a few decades. I fully expect to be alive as part of the largest human cohort that has ever existed, and it will continue to be the largest for some centuries, until we start colonizing other planets in a serious way.
As with all stories about incremental progress in solar cell there are still a few hurdles yet to overcome:
Yet scientists can confidently predict that solar cells made with techniques that don't exist yet will be cheaper than conventional solar cells.
As a scientist I have always tended to dismiss Mark Twain's comment that science was the field where you got the greatest return in speculation on the tiniest investment of fact. But apparently he understood the human aspects of science pretty well.
sorry, their MAIN problem is not in any way a dysfunctional backup system. ever heard of verifying backuped data?
I'm sure they've heard of it, in a conversation that went something like this:
IT Guy: We need a system for verifying our backups.
Suit: How come? Don't the backups work?
IT Guy: We need to be sure that if there is a failure, the backups will be ok.
Suit: But they're just copies, aren't they? I copy files all the time and it never goes wrong.
IT Guy: This is a little more complicated than that.
Suit: How hard can it be?
IT Guy: Well, I was thinking we might need to hire a part-timer just to take care of backups and verification.
Suit: But we've never had a failure! Sounds like empire building to me. I know that's what I'd be doing in your position. Nice try. We'll keep the backup system the way it is, thanks.
IT Guy: But..!
Suit: Moving on to the next item on the agenda... ok, Executive Bonuses!
in Linux it won't open unless you enter the code, which changes with each new hardware installation
Mathematica is very nearly the only piece of commercial software I own, and I've used it off-and-on since 2.0 came out. But I haven't upgraded my 4 to 5 and don't plan to buy 6 because it is such a pain to reactivate every time my hardware changes on Linux. I'm not sure what the parameters are for requiring reactivation, but IIRC things like adding a new hard-drive will do it. It just got to be too much of a hassle, particularly as I use it only now-and-then to do the heavy algebraic lifting during the exploration phase of a new project. That, and the fact that anything I write in Mathematica is going to require I always have a copy available, doesn't make it a good choice for serious scientific work.
I love the program--the consistency of syntax and naming means I can reasonably guess everything from function names to arguments most of the time, and it is nice to have every special function known to man at my fingertips, and even nicer to know that I haven't dropped a sign in the derivation of equation 13 that will induce me to waste two years performing the wrong experiment (I've seen this happen). But at the end of the day it is a proprietary language with no free/open implementation (think R/S or Matlab/Octave). And that isn't something that is ever going to completely suit the needs of a working scientist.
Two. Although I haven't read anything by Eco after I read Foucault's Pendulum. It was a brilliant study of the hermeneutics of arcana and all, but there is something about the subject as such that just fails. I've gotten to the point where I simply don't read anything that might so much as mention the Templars because they are just not a very interesting dead monastic order, and simply mentioning them seems to draw even the most competent author into a welter of pointless digression. Eco's digressions are way more interesting than most, but there's a limit, so no more Templars for me.
Any serious reader needs some fairly arbitrary "rules for not reading", and that's one of mine. Another is refusing to read anything about or by anyone who has anything to do with Ireland, although I make an exception for Nuala O'Faolain, and you should too.
Eh, c'mon, this is Slashdot, what do you expect? First-class journalism? Pfft.
I expect headlines that aren't outright falsehoods, which a large number have been recently. Sometimes they just repeat falsehoods in the linked stories ("hot ice burns!") but they are often the pure fabrication of/. editors, who apparently believe that "news for nerds" means, "headlines that lie".
One of the things that distinguishes nerds from normal people is that nerds have a low tolerance for falsehood. This is why we don't have any friends. The technology we work with every day has no sense of humour. The system of 19 coupled differential equations I am banging my head against right now doesn't care how I feel or what I think: the only thing that matters is that my code--and my math--is exactly right.
This is the way nerds approach the world, and we have nothing but pity for people who are so stupid as to put anything ahead of truth, because we know that the truth is what moves the world. Everything else--however deadly or destructive it sometimes can be--is just the transient flailing of sad little people who want to put their fantasies in place of reality.
Note the reporting periods are slightly different (MS is 2006, Apple is 2006Q1 TTM), but the numbers are essentially comparable.
So while is might be that Apple has higher productivity, and in fact I fully expected that would be the case, a naive reading of these numbers (ex MS perma-temps etc) suggests otherwise.
One quirk that I noticed a while back whilst writing a company site that listed news headlines from a couple of news agencies, was that the site was appearing in conjunction with some weird search terms, like "$companyname terrorists" and "$companyname organised crime". Its not just the search terms you want to be associated with that will work - but anything that is available on your site, dynamic content and all.
This can happen to any site with lots of words. I was once worked on a site that had a bunch of classic philosophical essays, and noticed that it was getting hits on things like "sex on a billiard table" and "sex with elephants". It turns out they were hitting on things like Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, where sex is sometimes mentioned as a means of categorizing things, in close conjunction with other forms of categorization involving biological species and the purpose of manufactured artefacts.
My general advice for people who want lots of hits: lots of on-topic, original words are the way to go, as well as submitting to legit categorized indices in only the appropriate categories. If your site is easy for spiders to find and has lots of relevant words for them to chew on it will rise in the ranks pretty quickly.
That is about 1.2% as much as the 5 milligrams of mercury in a typical CF bulb -- nowhere close to 50%
While the OP is clearly wrong about the numbers, there is still a valid point to be made here: environmental mercury levels are a result of many factors. Others have pointed out that the EPA has argued that the mercury reduction from less coal burned will more than make up for the mercury in CFLs. This is a bit of lame argument to me because I have no coal plants in my house, but quite a few CFLs, so in terms of risk to my kids the smaller amount in the CFLs poses a bigger risk.
But by the same token, the mercury we EAT seems to me to be a more significant risk than the mercury that might escape from a broken CFL. If I drop a single CFL every five years and somehow managed to ingest 75% of the mercury released thereby, I would be getting about as much mercury as if I ate one 170 g can of tuna (at 0.353 ppm) once a month.
Obviously if I'm clumsy I could put myself at greater risk, although really, I find it hard to imagine how I would ingest 75% of the released mercury.
And finally, one thing about the "this is an outrage" nonsense in the silly story: did the guy have the mercury levels in the OTHER rooms in his house tested? At the ng/m**3 level it is perfectly possible that there were other sources of environmental contamination that had nothing to do with CFLs. Without some kind of control or background measurement the whole thing is just hot air.
And really finally, where were all these staunch anti-mercury advocates when we all used mercury thermometers?
The StumbleUpon signup process says "Join and Download". Apparently you can't get an account without letting them install some random stuff on your computer. No thank you.
If it is possible to join without them downloading some random, undescribed, undocumented software, I'd be interested. But I have zero interest in a site that simply wants me to trust them that whatever they are downloading is no big deal (probably a toolbar, which is mostly harmless but which I certainly don't want).
The assignment: "Write whatever comes into your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing."
The result: "Blood, sex and booze. Drugs, drugs, drugs are fun. Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, s...t...a...b..., puke. So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P 90s and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did."
The response: Cary Police arrested Lee, 18, near his home Tuesday morning on disorderly conduct charges after Cary-Grove Principal Susan Popp called police.
The conclusion: "Write whatever comes to mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing" was supposed to mean "Write whatever comes to mind that falls within your teacher's comfort zone. Do not judge or censor what you are writing unless you think it might offend or disturb someone in a position of authority."
The silent provisos that the teacher and the school officials and the police clearly expected everyone to understand are characteristic of authoritarian cultures whose hegemons are so blind to the free will of others that they can't even imagine that anyone would ever transgress their own arbitrary standards of propriety.
To paraphrase Orwell, "Freedom is the freedom to believe that 'Write whatever comes to mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing' means 'Write whatever comes to mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing'. From that, everything else follows."
Hell, right now, hitting the Times front page - NOTHING, which means that this move is pointless. Without the public talking about this, you might as well not even try it.
This is the question the rest of us are asking: what will it take for the American people to wake up?
Here in Canada we are having a major flap about Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan following NATO protocols for the war there and turning their POWs over to Afghan forces, in possible violation of the Geneva Conventions and international treaties on torture. There's some evidence of incompetence in the government's handling of the problem, but so far little or no evidence of wilful wrongdoing. And yet the Minister of Defence is likely to be out on his ear over it, and it could well be a significant issue in the next election.
In the U.S. you have a government that has suspended habeas corpus, lied to the public for the purpose of invading a peaceful nation that had no ability to do you any harm, and continues to spend your children and grandchildren into poverty.
And in a dazzling display of irony, you just plagiarized Jon Stewart's Tonight Show from last night, word for word.
False. I just watched the clip again (which I did see on TV, and which did inspire my thought) and what Jon Stewart says is: "Alberto Gonzales doesn't know what happened, but he assures you what he doesn't remember was handled properly."
I was obviously echoing this, but in my own words: "the U.S. Attorney General can assure us that nothing he can't recall had anything untoward about it."
Same thought? Yes. Similar wording? Yes. Plagiarism? No. Word for word? Don't make me laugh. There are only so many ways of expressing the same thought, and I'm comfortable with the distance between my words and Stewart's.
Plagiarism, by the way, is a fairly serious accusation. You should probably have bothered to check before making false claims.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, if we do the conservation measures, then the TOU might not be such a big deal, because we wouldn't be buying much energy at the summer, peak rate of $.36/kW.hr.
m l That was just the first hit on googling "solar power pool pump"--there were lots of others. It may make sense to make a much smaller investment to reduce this load. One interesting aspect here is that the system may include a DC motor, so you avoid the inverter loss, which is fairly significant.
The cheapest, cleanest energy you can buy is the energy you don't use. Until you've squeezed your energy use down to the smallest reasonable level (where you'll have to provide your own definition of "reasonable"!) it is unlikely to make financial sense to make a major investment in solar or any other type of alternative power.
That said, you have clearly identified your pool pump as a large load, and there are companies that sell solar energy units that are aimed directly at that particular point load, for example: http://www.etaengineering.com/pool_pump/intro.sht
As we think about alternative energy we need to move away from the "universal plug" idea of traditional on-demand energy sources, and focus on disruptive uses that do not serve every imaginable need, but which are well-matched to particular needs.
The general public has basically no need for this sort of information
I have an epistemological question: How do you know what I need? And for that matter, how do you know what the 300-odd-million people living in the United States need?
It may "just makes sense" to you that no one anywhere has any need of any of this information, but there is a word for an epistemology built on what "just makes sense": faith.
I don't see why your faith should restrict my access to information, particularly when it is information that the public has been able to access for many, many years. Your statements about restrictions on information such as layouts of dams, refineries and nuclear plants are mostly false: as a child I toured several such facilities in Canada and the United States on family vacations They were open to the public, even to the extent of having viewing galleries over the turbine halls in some power plants, and being able to enter some dams and see the penstocks. No restrictions on picture-taking were in place, and in any case a sketch artist or engineer with a competent memory could easily have ascertained most of the salient details and recorded them subsequently.
This was in the days when the Cold War was still moderately warm, and the West was being threatened with extermination by people who actually had the capability to do widespread damage, rather than a bunch of rats in a hole somewhere whose dreams extend to shooting fewer innocent people than are killed every day by domestic violence in the U.S. In those days it was illegal to take pictures of bridges and other public infrastructure in the Soviet Union, but not in Canada or America.
So while the ubiquity of high quality aerial and satellite photography is unfortunate from a security standpoint, it is by no means clear why the highly speculative needs of the organs of the state should trump the public's undoubted need to oversee government and private installations by any and all means available, because we know from millennia of experience that if we ever let the organs of the state or private industry go unwatched for a moment that some individuals charged with the public trust will violate that trust in very dangerous ways.
I'm assuming here that the mutation is involved in communication...
/., the headline is false. This gene does not "make us human." It appears to be an important locus in differentiating early hominids from there closest relatives. Only an idiot, a liar, or a journalist would confuse that with "making us human."
Why? I mean, sure, it seems to have a role in the forward part of the brain, but rather a lot of things go on there.
What you are doing is variously known as "idle speculation" at best and "jumping to conclusions" at worst. Neither serve the ends of science particularly well, although a little bit of idle speculation can be scientifically valuable.
As usual for
In the words of State Senator Richard T. Moore, D-Uxbridge, "...I don't think it's a good move and I would be reluctant to see why we are going to that step."
Is it just me, or is this barely even English?
I know that we all sound funny when quoted verbatim, but I'd like to think most of us can form a coherent sentence, especially when it's really a prepared sound-bite for the media.
I would rather they have lots of false positives to avoid true negatives
Unfortunately, this sort of indiscriminate paranoia ensures that the true negatives will be missed in the midst of a sea of garbage.
The intelligent response to events like 9/11 is to recognize that law enforcement effort should be prioritized as always, focussing resources on the people most likely to do harm, and to accept that a certain level of risk is necessary to preserve some essential liberty.
The Constitution never explicitly granted the right to duplicate copyrighted materials on the Internet.
Neither the American Constitution nor the Bill of Rights "grant" rights. The "enumerate" them--that is, "specify one after another; list".
The 9th Amendment to the Constitution specifically states, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." And the 10th Amendment states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people."
Ergo, anything that is not forbidden to the people is permitted. Anything that is not permitted to the United States or the several States is forbidden.
A "right" in the Framer's language is either endowed by God, or in secular terms is a political condition necessary for the life of a morally autonomous being, in precisely the same sense that light is a physical condition necessary for the life of a photosynthesising being. One can neither "grant" nor "deny" the necessity of light to a photosynthesising being--because that is simply a fact about the being. If you take the light away, or give it in inappropriate amounts and times and spectra, the being will not thrive. The same is true, on the secular view, of rights.
It does not purport to be a breakthrough, although it does claim that the observations must be due to a nuclear reaction.
As I have no access to the paper it is hard to judge the results, but from this and other comments it appears that their work substantially contradicts P&F's observations, which could not possibly have been due to any fusion reaction that produced energetic charged particles, because there is no way at all for a sufficiently high-energy charged particle to move through a palladium lattice without knocking neutrons off palladium nuclei in the process.
This is an interesting result due to its reproducibility, which has been notably lacking in the cold fusion community. Fusion cross-sections for deuterium particularly are very sensitive to the details of the nuclear wavefunction, and it is by no means impossible that there is something going on that could produce some fusion in the lattice. But it is certainly not what P&F saw, because anyone with a Geiger counter could have detected the residual radioactivity that would have come from the neutron burst generated with their apparatus burned up.
To wit: Can I publicly post your credit card number, expiration date, and CVN? They're just numbers... and how can ordinary numbers have implications for property and finances?
So are credit card numbers etc covered by the DMCA? Or some other law? Like something to do with fraud, perhaps?
If the case of publishing 09 F9 11 etc is just the same as publishing a credit card number, then why isn't it covered by just the same law? If your argument were correct then there would be no need for the DMCA at all, because secret keys that were given to every customer who bought a product would be protected by just the same laws as those that protect secret credit card numbers that are given to every seller by the credit card user.
I don't particularly see this as a free speech issue, but rather as a fair use issue. Anti-copying technology is an attempt to impose on the user by technological means limits that are far more restrictive than fair use restrictions. The DMCA is an attempt to undermine centuries of common and statute law protecting fair use of legal copies. It is a radical departure from existing law, and has not proven itself to be effective in its fundamental aim of making bits harder to copy, which is not exactly a surprise to anyone who isn't an alchemist or inventor of perpetual motion machines.
In contrast, the completely different laws that protect credit card numbers (or rather, the use of credit card numbers by those not authorized to do so) are based on financial fraud laws that date back centuries, and have proven to be relatively effective.
To neglect this rather large difference is a serious mistake, although admittedly the people who are making claims about free speech rather fair use and civil disobedience are pretty much openly inviting you to make it.
That hasn't stopped the perpetual "war against drugs".
True, although there are differences. For one, drugs have the capability to do actual harm, which makes the case for legalization more problematic. When you consider that people can and do have their lives ruined by drug use (and alcohol and tobacco and casino gambling and lotteries and video slot machines...) it is understandable that some people make the erroneous argument that "if only they were banned" the harm they do would not occur.
But no one has ever or will ever die from an overdose of information. No individuals suffer, other than possibly shareholders in media companies that are stupid enough to bet their future on bits becoming harder to copy. Even then, the short-sellers will make money out of it, thanks to the magic of capitalism.
So I'm betting that public tolerance for a "War on Integers" is going to be a lot lower than that for the "War on Drugs."
Thanks for the link. May as well go to the source.
The first independent claim seems to describe is the following: putting a call to a void function containing no program instructions into your code, and having a second process running that detects when that function is called and then doing something. As is typical of software patents, it is both absurdly broad and stupidly narrow. Read one way it would cover almost any external debugger. But then it defines a specific sequence of actions that the second process will take using a narrowly defined set of components. Also, it specifies in the first independent claim that the called function is void and free of program code, so a system implementing this that made a call to:
void foo() {}
would violate the patent but a call to:
void foo() {int n = 1;}
would not.
This crack relies on just one person having one of these cracked drives
More deeply, it depends on the fundamental mistake of trying to use encryption for content protection. As the article says:
The real problem with trying to create an "uncrackable" copy protection is that the media must come with the keys used to decrypt it somewhere on the device and the media itself. Hiding these keys in different places--security by obscurity--merely delays the inevitable. Of course, for the content providers, any delay is still better than no delay at all, so expect the battles between copy protection and hackers to continue.
From a crypto point of view you are handing an attacker the ciphertext, the plaintext, and the private key. All these fancy tricks to is to try to make it hard to get at the private key and maybe the ciphertext. But those three things must always be present for any crypto-based content-protection scheme to work, and that means that all such schemes will always be vulnerable. The only way around it is to change the private key on a regular basis, which works for broadcast signals like satellite TV that can be re-encrypted on the fly, but which cannot work for static media that can only be encrypted once.
And that last comment in the paragraph above from the article is wrong: a delay really doesn't do you much good, when the cost of designing and implementing a new crypto scheme is years and millions, while the cost of breaking it is weeks and thousands. And once a scheme is cracked, as the article suggests, software extraction of the keys from the raw media will inevitably follow, meaning that even if it takes weeks or months to crack the first disk, cracking the second will take seconds.
This is a race that content providers cannot possibly win. Draconian legal moves always fail in the face of widespread civil disobedience, which is what we are seeing here.
So the technological problem of crypto-based content protection is unsolvable, and the social/legal problem of crytpo-based content protection is now known to be unsolvable: when content packagers try to impose the law, the wired masses make fun of them. Ergo, content packagers may try to wiggle their way out of this for a while, but their situation is unsustainable.
This is a good day for freedom. As G30RG3 0RW3LL might have said, "Freedom is the freedom to say that 0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688BE plus two makes 0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0. If that is granted, all else follows."
The article also fails the mention something that all "extreme calorie restriction will make you live longer!" articles fail to mention: that all mammals except humans live about a billion heartbeats, while humans live about two billion heartbeats. So we already have anomalously long lives, which makes any extrapolation from animal models very chancy with regard to life extension.
It will be at least a few decades before we have anything like decent statistics on the effects of extreme calorie restriction on humans, and anyone who tries this is taking a very speculative leap in the dark. Go for it if you like, but don't be surprised when you drop dead twenty years from now due to some unexpected side effect because your physiology turns out to be very different in this regard from a flatworm or a mouse.
Population studies on the few brave, hopeful and foolish souls go this route may very well teach us something about human physiology, so even if it doesn't work for them it might do some good for the rest of us.
The more land we turn into farmland, the more kids we have, that again will need to turn new land into farmland, or squeeze even more out of what is allready there to stay alive, and have more kids that needs more farmland... and so on, so forth...
That would explain why the amount of land farmed in North America has been falling for decades, and the population would be stable or shrinking were it not for immigration, yes?
The fact is that by the time I am old the "population crisis" will be under-population, not over-population, at least so long as religious nutjobs don't get their way. You see, regardless of what your faith tells you "just makes sense", the fact is that increasing the status of women, and increasing urban populations (which increases wealth while decreasing ecological footprint--the most environmentally friendly place to live in North America is downtown New York City) both result in large decreases in the birth rate.
If you want to "enact population control" you only need advocate equal rights and strong legal protections for women, and increased urbanization. Those two things, which are happening at a great rate in places like India, will moderate human population growth within a few decades. I fully expect to be alive as part of the largest human cohort that has ever existed, and it will continue to be the largest for some centuries, until we start colonizing other planets in a serious way.
As with all stories about incremental progress in solar cell there are still a few hurdles yet to overcome:
Yet scientists can confidently predict that solar cells made with techniques that don't exist yet will be cheaper than conventional solar cells.
As a scientist I have always tended to dismiss Mark Twain's comment that science was the field where you got the greatest return in speculation on the tiniest investment of fact. But apparently he understood the human aspects of science pretty well.
sorry, their MAIN problem is not in any way a dysfunctional backup system. ever heard of verifying backuped data?
I'm sure they've heard of it, in a conversation that went something like this:
IT Guy: We need a system for verifying our backups.
Suit: How come? Don't the backups work?
IT Guy: We need to be sure that if there is a failure, the backups will be ok.
Suit: But they're just copies, aren't they? I copy files all the time and it never goes wrong.
IT Guy: This is a little more complicated than that.
Suit: How hard can it be?
IT Guy: Well, I was thinking we might need to hire a part-timer just to take care of backups and verification.
Suit: But we've never had a failure! Sounds like empire building to me. I know that's what I'd be doing in your position. Nice try. We'll keep the backup system the way it is, thanks.
IT Guy: But..!
Suit: Moving on to the next item on the agenda... ok, Executive Bonuses!
in Linux it won't open unless you enter the code, which changes with each new hardware installation
Mathematica is very nearly the only piece of commercial software I own, and I've used it off-and-on since 2.0 came out. But I haven't upgraded my 4 to 5 and don't plan to buy 6 because it is such a pain to reactivate every time my hardware changes on Linux. I'm not sure what the parameters are for requiring reactivation, but IIRC things like adding a new hard-drive will do it. It just got to be too much of a hassle, particularly as I use it only now-and-then to do the heavy algebraic lifting during the exploration phase of a new project. That, and the fact that anything I write in Mathematica is going to require I always have a copy available, doesn't make it a good choice for serious scientific work.
I love the program--the consistency of syntax and naming means I can reasonably guess everything from function names to arguments most of the time, and it is nice to have every special function known to man at my fingertips, and even nicer to know that I haven't dropped a sign in the derivation of equation 13 that will induce me to waste two years performing the wrong experiment (I've seen this happen). But at the end of the day it is a proprietary language with no free/open implementation (think R/S or Matlab/Octave). And that isn't something that is ever going to completely suit the needs of a working scientist.
Two. Although I haven't read anything by Eco after I read Foucault's Pendulum. It was a brilliant study of the hermeneutics of arcana and all, but there is something about the subject as such that just fails. I've gotten to the point where I simply don't read anything that might so much as mention the Templars because they are just not a very interesting dead monastic order, and simply mentioning them seems to draw even the most competent author into a welter of pointless digression. Eco's digressions are way more interesting than most, but there's a limit, so no more Templars for me.
Any serious reader needs some fairly arbitrary "rules for not reading", and that's one of mine. Another is refusing to read anything about or by anyone who has anything to do with Ireland, although I make an exception for Nuala O'Faolain, and you should too.
Eh, c'mon, this is Slashdot, what do you expect? First-class journalism? Pfft.
/. editors, who apparently believe that "news for nerds" means, "headlines that lie".
I expect headlines that aren't outright falsehoods, which a large number have been recently. Sometimes they just repeat falsehoods in the linked stories ("hot ice burns!") but they are often the pure fabrication of
One of the things that distinguishes nerds from normal people is that nerds have a low tolerance for falsehood. This is why we don't have any friends. The technology we work with every day has no sense of humour. The system of 19 coupled differential equations I am banging my head against right now doesn't care how I feel or what I think: the only thing that matters is that my code--and my math--is exactly right.
This is the way nerds approach the world, and we have nothing but pity for people who are so stupid as to put anything ahead of truth, because we know that the truth is what moves the world. Everything else--however deadly or destructive it sometimes can be--is just the transient flailing of sad little people who want to put their fantasies in place of reality.
But if you calculate the amount of profit per employee Apple might be doing much better than MS.
Speculation of this kind is passe' in the Internet Age. Google "microsoft number of employees" and find some helpful Wikipedia articles:
Microsoft: $12.6B/71712 employees = $177,035.91/employee
Apple: $1.73B/17787 employees = $97,262.05/employee
Note the reporting periods are slightly different (MS is 2006, Apple is 2006Q1 TTM), but the numbers are essentially comparable.
So while is might be that Apple has higher productivity, and in fact I fully expected that would be the case, a naive reading of these numbers (ex MS perma-temps etc) suggests otherwise.
One quirk that I noticed a while back whilst writing a company site that listed news headlines from a couple of news agencies, was that the site was appearing in conjunction with some weird search terms, like "$companyname terrorists" and "$companyname organised crime". Its not just the search terms you want to be associated with that will work - but anything that is available on your site, dynamic content and all.
This can happen to any site with lots of words. I was once worked on a site that had a bunch of classic philosophical essays, and noticed that it was getting hits on things like "sex on a billiard table" and "sex with elephants". It turns out they were hitting on things like Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, where sex is sometimes mentioned as a means of categorizing things, in close conjunction with other forms of categorization involving biological species and the purpose of manufactured artefacts.
My general advice for people who want lots of hits: lots of on-topic, original words are the way to go, as well as submitting to legit categorized indices in only the appropriate categories. If your site is easy for spiders to find and has lots of relevant words for them to chew on it will rise in the ranks pretty quickly.
That is about 1.2% as much as the 5 milligrams of mercury in a typical CF bulb -- nowhere close to 50%
While the OP is clearly wrong about the numbers, there is still a valid point to be made here: environmental mercury levels are a result of many factors. Others have pointed out that the EPA has argued that the mercury reduction from less coal burned will more than make up for the mercury in CFLs. This is a bit of lame argument to me because I have no coal plants in my house, but quite a few CFLs, so in terms of risk to my kids the smaller amount in the CFLs poses a bigger risk.
But by the same token, the mercury we EAT seems to me to be a more significant risk than the mercury that might escape from a broken CFL. If I drop a single CFL every five years and somehow managed to ingest 75% of the mercury released thereby, I would be getting about as much mercury as if I ate one 170 g can of tuna (at 0.353 ppm) once a month.
Obviously if I'm clumsy I could put myself at greater risk, although really, I find it hard to imagine how I would ingest 75% of the released mercury.
And finally, one thing about the "this is an outrage" nonsense in the silly story: did the guy have the mercury levels in the OTHER rooms in his house tested? At the ng/m**3 level it is perfectly possible that there were other sources of environmental contamination that had nothing to do with CFLs. Without some kind of control or background measurement the whole thing is just hot air.
And really finally, where were all these staunch anti-mercury advocates when we all used mercury thermometers?
The StumbleUpon signup process says "Join and Download". Apparently you can't get an account without letting them install some random stuff on your computer. No thank you.
If it is possible to join without them downloading some random, undescribed, undocumented software, I'd be interested. But I have zero interest in a site that simply wants me to trust them that whatever they are downloading is no big deal (probably a toolbar, which is mostly harmless but which I certainly don't want).
The assignment: "Write whatever comes into your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing."
The result: "Blood, sex and booze. Drugs, drugs, drugs are fun. Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, s...t...a...b..., puke. So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P 90s and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did."
The response: Cary Police arrested Lee, 18, near his home Tuesday morning on disorderly conduct charges after Cary-Grove Principal Susan Popp called police.
The conclusion: "Write whatever comes to mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing" was supposed to mean "Write whatever comes to mind that falls within your teacher's comfort zone. Do not judge or censor what you are writing unless you think it might offend or disturb someone in a position of authority."
The silent provisos that the teacher and the school officials and the police clearly expected everyone to understand are characteristic of authoritarian cultures whose hegemons are so blind to the free will of others that they can't even imagine that anyone would ever transgress their own arbitrary standards of propriety.
To paraphrase Orwell, "Freedom is the freedom to believe that 'Write whatever comes to mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing' means 'Write whatever comes to mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing'. From that, everything else follows."
Hell, right now, hitting the Times front page - NOTHING, which means that this move is pointless. Without the public talking about this, you might as well not even try it.
This is the question the rest of us are asking: what will it take for the American people to wake up?
Here in Canada we are having a major flap about Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan following NATO protocols for the war there and turning their POWs over to Afghan forces, in possible violation of the Geneva Conventions and international treaties on torture. There's some evidence of incompetence in the government's handling of the problem, but so far little or no evidence of wilful wrongdoing. And yet the Minister of Defence is likely to be out on his ear over it, and it could well be a significant issue in the next election.
In the U.S. you have a government that has suspended habeas corpus, lied to the public for the purpose of invading a peaceful nation that had no ability to do you any harm, and continues to spend your children and grandchildren into poverty.
Why don't you care?
And in a dazzling display of irony, you just plagiarized Jon Stewart's Tonight Show from last night, word for word.
False. I just watched the clip again (which I did see on TV, and which did inspire my thought) and what Jon Stewart says is: "Alberto Gonzales doesn't know what happened, but he assures you what he doesn't remember was handled properly."
I was obviously echoing this, but in my own words: "the U.S. Attorney General can assure us that nothing he can't recall had anything untoward about it."
Same thought? Yes. Similar wording? Yes. Plagiarism? No. Word for word? Don't make me laugh. There are only so many ways of expressing the same thought, and I'm comfortable with the distance between my words and Stewart's.
Plagiarism, by the way, is a fairly serious accusation. You should probably have bothered to check before making false claims.