Then again Vista isn't exactly good PR for Microsoft.
I recently bought a notebook with Vista Home Premium preloaded. Due to all negative things I've heard about Vista, I was prepared to downgrade. I was determined not to waste my time fixing a broken OS just because I could. However I was pleasantly surprised. It is, of course, nothing like what was promised a few years ago but it is an improvement over XP. The only problem I've had (about networking with XP) took five minutes to solve. It has also been rock solid so far (with a directx 10 card, despite all horror stories.) I still don't see any reason to upgrade my XP boxes but I also don't see any reason to avoid Vista.
I live in Turkey and I never had any problem accessing any adult site. I'm not saying no sites are censored but I never stumbled upon one. I can't test www.megaupload.com, as it is currently down. Either that or my ISP found a way to block sites even when they are accessed thru anonymizers.
Turkish assembly did not vote for censoring web sites. There are many groups in the Turkish National Assembly who can propose voting on something. This is one of those. It is not a new law, it is not a new policy; it is just a stupid proposal for one.
Just start spitting out a million digits. You just claim it's a million digits from somewhere in the billion-digits-of-pi range..
If pi is a normal number (which probably is the case), the claim is true. That is the clever bit.
The article is light on details but it seems that they are using unmodified linear polyurethane as the polymer base. In that case, prolonged stretching (due to constant load) will lead to extension set, i.e. the polymer will no longer stretch back if the load is removed. It will also sag, as the "pulling" force will decrease over time. This material is probably suitable for intermittent loads only.
I think you are missing the point of the article. Organic compounds (not necessarily of biological origin) are expected to be found on Mars. The experiment failed to find any. That was taken as a evidence of strongly oxidazing agents in the Martian environment, one that destroys all organic compounds on surface very quickly. That does not mean organic compounds of biological origin cannot exist on Mars, it just means they wouldn't survive very long. The article explains why such compounds would be missed even if the environment is only moderately oxidazing (which probably is the case.) The article doesn't say anything about existance of life. It just proves the organic compounds expected to be there are undetectable by GC-MS equipment used, therefore the negative results does not mean anything at all.
Striking a balance is exactly what Greenpeace is not doing. I'm not a native English speaker but AFAICT you are not just paraphrasing the quote, you are adding your own policy to it. The quote advocates eliminating use of chemicals if there is any doubt of their safety. It doesn't mention doing more research to establish if it is really unsafe, it doesn't have your "until we can be sure..." phrase. Ceasing all industrial production is not a strawman, it is the logical conclusion of policy of eliminating use of chemicals when there is any possibility of harm. As you say nothing is ever %100 safe, so the policy as stated bans everything and anything. OTOH your strawman has nothing to do with my stated arguments. I support banning of unsafe chemicals. I just don't like harmful until proven harmless type of thinking. It goes nowhere and is unscientific.
Humanity can choose to have a lesser impact on environment but that can't be done by adhering to a very restricted precautionary criteria. If we are to be really precautious about environmental effects, we must cease all industrial production. We don't and can't ever know our green products are actually, really safe in the long term. If they are not safe, "by the time the effects become painfully obvious it'll be already too late." So stop producing now.
There must be a better way than going back to stone age, and I think there is: stick to what is known when assesing risk of environmental damage. If the knowledge is missing, do research instead of assuming the product in question is harmful (or harmless) to the environment. Do not jump into conclusions.
It goes without saying that your research will be incomplete and sometimes you won't have the information until it is too late to undo the damage. I don't think there is any practical way to avoid taking that risk.
I don't know if the universe is simple because I don't know how to define "simple." But I do think the universe is simpler than we assume. Much of the complexity we see arises from simple interactions of simple agents. Whenever you have simple forces/molecules/cells/ants whatever interacting, obeying to simple rules, their population behaviour is sometimes very complex to describe. We usually attribute complexity to these behaviours, overlooking their simple roots. As we learn more about what governs these emergent complexity, thing become simpler. You could say that the complexity emerged is every bit as defining as simplicity of its causes, but I think the emergent behaviour is secondary and the its simple roots are primary simply as a result of causation. If you accept this POV, classifying complex emergent phenomena as "simple" as long as its foundations are simple, you have your evidence. The history of science is abound with examples of explaining complex phenomena with simple causes.
Why do you think the external insulation must be stiff enough to withstand launch? AFAICT it is totally useless at T-0. If I designed the thing, I would make foam so soft atthat it could barely lift its own weight when it is sufficiently cold, say a few degrees above freezing point of water. The launch would quickly heat the foam, transforming it into harmless goo.
Turbine cars have been tried but failed. The reason is simple thermodynamics. Their compression rate is too low. Lower compression rate means less work extracted from a given amount of heat generated, hence lower efficiency.
Although you are right that may scientists support that view, that is not Science with capital s; it is positivism. There are also many scientists who are primarily concerned with explanations, as in "what really is", which is deeper than models of data.
This may sound ridiculous, even RTFAing is only known as an FLA to many slashdotters, but why don't you read the preprints?
Couldn't you take a ring of ANY material and spin it to cause this effect?
Yes you could. Even the blurb says so. It also says the observed effect is many orders of magnitude larger than the GR prediction.
The only way this could be considered a breakthrough is if a superconducting coil is the only material or one of many materials to somehow enhance this effect above and beyond the expected result according to the Theory of Relativity.
This is where the preprint helps. The disperancy between observed values and predicted (by relativity) values are only detectable when the disc's temperature is lowered to its superconduction temperature threshold. And not just with any supercondutor, it only happens with Type I SCs (but they only tested three distinct materials.)
IANAP but the paper clearly addresses both issues. The most convincing data was that this effect is restricted to low temperature superconductors. Presumably (again IANAP) magnetic effects should be unaffected by superconductor type.
Others have already answered this but their approach is somewhat theoratical. In practice watermarking may work like this: during production each song is initially sampled at a higher bit depth and sampling rate. For simplicity say the original is in 32 bit integers with same sampling rate. When these samples are converted to CD format, it wouldn't be good to just discard lowest 16 bits: they still have information that can be noisly encoded in the LSB. 0x???0FFFF is better represented with 0x???1 than 0x???0 in 16 bits. Of course the change might not be restricted to LSB: 0x??7FFFFF is best represented by 0x??80. Normally, this is not done by simple rounding either, even though that would be as faitful to original as possible numerically, adding a low volume, zero centered random noise to original and then dividing by 0xFFFF and rounding sounds better. Now, the watermark can simply be the noise profile used before rounding. It is sufficient to keep records of random number seeds used for producing noise in the database. There will be many 1-bit differences between any two copies. Depending on the volume of the noise (assuming a sensible upper bound), as much as one quarter of the samples in a copy will be 1 more or less than corresponding sample in another copy. Not only that will make removing the watermark very hard, arguably all watermarked copies are as faithful copies as they can be too. There is no such thing as a copy without the watermark. You could try averaging different copies, and that will remove some information, but without sufficient number of different copies the composite file can still be traced back to all originals. Adding some random noise works the same way, it destroys some information but it doesn't mask the original watermark if it is not loud enough. A lossy compression by you will defeat this kind of watermark, but the same principle can be used to create faithful watermarked copies if the compression is made by the content owner.
I'm not a muslim myself but I live in Turkey and naturally know quite a few muslims. You are correct that I've never seen them chanting "Down with Al Queda!" But what may not be apperant to an outsider like you is that they don't think Al Queda has anything special to do with them. They have never condoned islamic terrorism in the first place just because they happen to be muslims, so they don't protest agains islamic terrorism any more than they protest against any other type of terrorism either. OTOH the prophet has everything to do with their religion, so they might feel like protesting against the cartoons.
The muslims I know are not actually activists, so they don't protest about cartoons either. But I would understand if they did (peacefully), even if they never went out to protest against Al Queda.
I haven't discussed anybody about the cartoons personally but if Turkish newspapers are any indication, most people feel violent protestors are much worse than cartoons themselves.
According to my chemisty books' statistics, if you have a priori knowledge of distribution the sweet spot is twenty-something. Even 30 is almost synonymous with infinity.
It had never occured to me that someone could get angry over not getting mod points. I see why you don't want new random elements in the system.
Presumably, people who do use mod points fairly and regularly know how to deal with randomly allocated rights. Giving them ability to trade mod points with future stories or to earn future story views by fair moderation might work.
I think that is a minor abuse of subscribers. They pay you the money, they should expect better content. The system you describe uses them to make better content for non-subscribers.
Here is an idea: grant previews to non-subscriber logged in users randomly along the lines of moderation point grants. The preview may include an explicit feedback form. This way who does work for you has the privilage of seeing a story early. You get work from who owes to you, not the other way around.
I misspelled GURPS, shame on me! http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/lite/ If you download a character designer program, you and your wife can skip boring details about character creation too.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently bought a notebook with Vista Home Premium preloaded. Due to all negative things I've heard about Vista, I was prepared to downgrade. I was determined not to waste my time fixing a broken OS just because I could. However I was pleasantly surprised. It is, of course, nothing like what was promised a few years ago but it is an improvement over XP. The only problem I've had (about networking with XP) took five minutes to solve. It has also been rock solid so far (with a directx 10 card, despite all horror stories.) I still don't see any reason to upgrade my XP boxes but I also don't see any reason to avoid Vista.
I live in Turkey and I never had any problem accessing any adult site. I'm not saying no sites are censored but I never stumbled upon one. I can't test www.megaupload.com, as it is currently down. Either that or my ISP found a way to block sites even when they are accessed thru anonymizers.
Turkish assembly did not vote for censoring web sites. There are many groups in the Turkish National Assembly who can propose voting on something. This is one of those. It is not a new law, it is not a new policy; it is just a stupid proposal for one.
Just start spitting out a million digits. You just claim it's a million digits from somewhere in the billion-digits-of-pi range ..
If pi is a normal number (which probably is the case), the claim is true. That is the clever bit.
GP is probably a troll. Making polyurethane requires phosgene. Sulfuric acid is far less dangerous.
The article is light on details but it seems that they are using unmodified linear polyurethane as the polymer base. In that case, prolonged stretching (due to constant load) will lead to extension set, i.e. the polymer will no longer stretch back if the load is removed. It will also sag, as the "pulling" force will decrease over time. This material is probably suitable for intermittent loads only.
I think you are missing the point of the article. Organic compounds (not necessarily of biological origin) are expected to be found on Mars. The experiment failed to find any. That was taken as a evidence of strongly oxidazing agents in the Martian environment, one that destroys all organic compounds on surface very quickly. That does not mean organic compounds of biological origin cannot exist on Mars, it just means they wouldn't survive very long. The article explains why such compounds would be missed even if the environment is only moderately oxidazing (which probably is the case.) The article doesn't say anything about existance of life. It just proves the organic compounds expected to be there are undetectable by GC-MS equipment used, therefore the negative results does not mean anything at all.
Striking a balance is exactly what Greenpeace is not doing. I'm not a native English speaker but AFAICT you are not just paraphrasing the quote, you are adding your own policy to it. The quote advocates eliminating use of chemicals if there is any doubt of their safety. It doesn't mention doing more research to establish if it is really unsafe, it doesn't have your "until we can be sure..." phrase. Ceasing all industrial production is not a strawman, it is the logical conclusion of policy of eliminating use of chemicals when there is any possibility of harm. As you say nothing is ever %100 safe, so the policy as stated bans everything and anything. OTOH your strawman has nothing to do with my stated arguments. I support banning of unsafe chemicals. I just don't like harmful until proven harmless type of thinking. It goes nowhere and is unscientific.
There must be a better way than going back to stone age, and I think there is: stick to what is known when assesing risk of environmental damage. If the knowledge is missing, do research instead of assuming the product in question is harmful (or harmless) to the environment. Do not jump into conclusions.
It goes without saying that your research will be incomplete and sometimes you won't have the information until it is too late to undo the damage. I don't think there is any practical way to avoid taking that risk.
I don't know if the universe is simple because I don't know how to define "simple." But I do think the universe is simpler than we assume. Much of the complexity we see arises from simple interactions of simple agents. Whenever you have simple forces/molecules/cells/ants whatever interacting, obeying to simple rules, their population behaviour is sometimes very complex to describe. We usually attribute complexity to these behaviours, overlooking their simple roots. As we learn more about what governs these emergent complexity, thing become simpler. You could say that the complexity emerged is every bit as defining as simplicity of its causes, but I think the emergent behaviour is secondary and the its simple roots are primary simply as a result of causation. If you accept this POV, classifying complex emergent phenomena as "simple" as long as its foundations are simple, you have your evidence. The history of science is abound with examples of explaining complex phenomena with simple causes.
Why do you think the external insulation must be stiff enough to withstand launch? AFAICT it is totally useless at T-0. If I designed the thing, I would make foam so soft atthat it could barely lift its own weight when it is sufficiently cold, say a few degrees above freezing point of water. The launch would quickly heat the foam, transforming it into harmless goo.
Turbine cars have been tried but failed. The reason is simple thermodynamics. Their compression rate is too low. Lower compression rate means less work extracted from a given amount of heat generated, hence lower efficiency.
Have you read Ubik? It might be useful to be able to return from death briefly.
Although you are right that may scientists support that view, that is not Science with capital s; it is positivism. There are also many scientists who are primarily concerned with explanations, as in "what really is", which is deeper than models of data.
Couldn't you take a ring of ANY material and spin it to cause this effect?
Yes you could. Even the blurb says so. It also says the observed effect is many orders of magnitude larger than the GR prediction.
The only way this could be considered a breakthrough is if a superconducting coil is the only material or one of many materials to somehow enhance this effect above and beyond the expected result according to the Theory of Relativity.
This is where the preprint helps. The disperancy between observed values and predicted (by relativity) values are only detectable when the disc's temperature is lowered to its superconduction temperature threshold. And not just with any supercondutor, it only happens with Type I SCs (but they only tested three distinct materials.)
IANAP but the paper clearly addresses both issues. The most convincing data was that this effect is restricted to low temperature superconductors. Presumably (again IANAP) magnetic effects should be unaffected by superconductor type.
You should check driver model for NT 3.51 sometime.
Others have already answered this but their approach is somewhat theoratical. In practice watermarking may work like this: during production each song is initially sampled at a higher bit depth and sampling rate. For simplicity say the original is in 32 bit integers with same sampling rate. When these samples are converted to CD format, it wouldn't be good to just discard lowest 16 bits: they still have information that can be noisly encoded in the LSB. 0x???0FFFF is better represented with 0x???1 than 0x???0 in 16 bits. Of course the change might not be restricted to LSB: 0x??7FFFFF is best represented by 0x??80. Normally, this is not done by simple rounding either, even though that would be as faitful to original as possible numerically, adding a low volume, zero centered random noise to original and then dividing by 0xFFFF and rounding sounds better. Now, the watermark can simply be the noise profile used before rounding. It is sufficient to keep records of random number seeds used for producing noise in the database. There will be many 1-bit differences between any two copies. Depending on the volume of the noise (assuming a sensible upper bound), as much as one quarter of the samples in a copy will be 1 more or less than corresponding sample in another copy. Not only that will make removing the watermark very hard, arguably all watermarked copies are as faithful copies as they can be too. There is no such thing as a copy without the watermark. You could try averaging different copies, and that will remove some information, but without sufficient number of different copies the composite file can still be traced back to all originals. Adding some random noise works the same way, it destroys some information but it doesn't mask the original watermark if it is not loud enough. A lossy compression by you will defeat this kind of watermark, but the same principle can be used to create faithful watermarked copies if the compression is made by the content owner.
The muslims I know are not actually activists, so they don't protest about cartoons either. But I would understand if they did (peacefully), even if they never went out to protest against Al Queda.
I haven't discussed anybody about the cartoons personally but if Turkish newspapers are any indication, most people feel violent protestors are much worse than cartoons themselves.
According to my chemisty books' statistics, if you have a priori knowledge of distribution the sweet spot is twenty-something. Even 30 is almost synonymous with infinity.
Presumably, people who do use mod points fairly and regularly know how to deal with randomly allocated rights. Giving them ability to trade mod points with future stories or to earn future story views by fair moderation might work.
Here is an idea: grant previews to non-subscriber logged in users randomly along the lines of moderation point grants. The preview may include an explicit feedback form. This way who does work for you has the privilage of seeing a story early. You get work from who owes to you, not the other way around.
I misspelled GURPS, shame on me! http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/lite/ If you download a character designer program, you and your wife can skip boring details about character creation too.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Well, one of those "unusual exceptions" is road covered with snow.