(land in Iraq, really?) Anyway, jamming isn't terribly difficult, especially when you're that close to the receiver. But "spoofing" GPS signals is a great deal more challenging. It's not the data on the gps signal, it's the timing that is the position information. If they were able to pull THAT off, they deserve the drone. and a pat on the back.
If I had to guess I'd say they were lying about doing that, possibly hoping to make the US start questioning their reliance on GPS, since it's proving such a handy arms tool.
No, because there's lots of super-smart people who are/were bad at multitasking.
Generally very true. It's easier to be very good at anything if you can have a high degree of concentration/focus on it. "Rainman" was a good (but actually very uncommon) example of autism giving someone over-the-top focus and being able to perform stunning mental feats as a result. Of course most autistic people can't capitalize on their "gift" that well. Lots of discussion nowadays about how a lot of the "great people" of the past were "borderline autistic".
I've always felt I fit in that category, and I'd imagine a lot of "geeks" do. Not too good socially, reclusive, highly focused.
But getting closer to the root topic, cell phone use is like any other semiautomatic behavior. It can be done transparently with other things, or it can completely take over your thought process such that only very automatic behaviors can continue. Of course XKCD has covered this perfectly.
So everyone is that way, on different things. It's just a matter of to what degree your brain shuts down when you're trying to talk on the cell phone. I really don't think it has anything to do with formal multitasking. In my opinion, "multitasking" is the performing of more than one task that involves significant mental management at the same time. Autonomous things, like walking, don't count. You wouldn't count "walking and chewing gum" at the same time as multitasking because both walking and chewing can be done fairly well autonomously. Texting and walking OTOH, can get you into trouble because you typically take all higher control away from walking to text, and may walk into a pole as a result. Same thing happens when texting into a car... as long as nothing happens that your peripheral vision and subconscious reactions can't handle comes up. But if a deer runs out or a car swerves ahead, your subconscious may not be able to jar your attention from your phone. That's not really a multitasking failure, multitasking skills really can't help you with that. It's sort of like "muscle memory" but for mental things. And it's like cruise control, it can drive for you but you still have to steer, you can't expect it to do it all.
If you're going to do something like text and walk at the same time, safely, you have to look up frequently, and not get caught up in a series of replies that causes you to not look up during an extended period of time. I don't know what that skill is but I don't think it qualifies for "multitasking". Or maybe it does - and it's a case of these people not multitasking, but instead single-tasking and letting the other activity not be managed consciously. Call it "minortasking" maybe. You can't safely minortask driving while texting. You probably could safely multitask it, but that means you are constantly consciously managing your driving. I don't think too many people are good at that sort of thing though.
And so they want to make it illegal for everyone. I don't think I like that either. The basic mentality there is "if too many people can'd do xxx safely, we're going to make it illegal for anyone to do xxx". That looks ok until you're one of the (minority/few/whatever) that can (or I suppose, think you can) do it safely, and lose the right. There'll always be the argument that a lot of people think they can handle it but can't.
I don't think we'll ever be rid of arguments like this. Too many good arguments in too many different directions.
That's why you have lawyers on retainer to hand these to for review before signing anything. They either hand it back to you and say "looks good" or they tear it up and toss it in their bin and say "we need to talk".
Any decent lawyer can spot BS in a contract. Longer contracts just take longer to examine, they don't add a lot of risk of missing something if the lawyer is any good.
I think it's safe to assume that a university has and uses intelligent lawyers and that they have a case. But time will tell.
inducing precipitation will increase the evaporation rate.
so in layman's terms, not only will they be causing less rain to fall downwind of you, but they'll also be causing more water to evaporate downwind - lowering humidity and making the problem of less-rainfall more severe. (assuming it's over land and not ocean anyway)
That's what I was wondering, where would this water normally be falling mostly? Russia? Japan? Pacific Ocean? If it was just headed for the ocean anyway, it doesn't appear to be selfish of them.
how the fairly basic logic of "they sold me the product with the marketed feature xyz which I valued and used, then disabled it after purchase, without compensation and with only forced permission" doesn't warrant relief?
(by "forced permission" I mean they asked, do you want your OtherOS to continue to work, or do you want your BluRay player to continue to work on new titles?" You were forced to choose which feature they were going to disable)
Further, how was it that all of the individuals that opted out of the class action and took them on themselves also lost?
The Russian nuclear industry, however, argues that lifetime extensions are justified because the original estimate of a 30-year life span was conservative; the plants have been significantly upgraded; and extensions cost significantly less than constructing new reactors.'"
1. Conservative estimates are appropriate for things that can melt down. Bigger impacts from "catastrophic failure" justify wider safety margins. 2. The original estimates already factored in maintenance and upgrades over their lifespan. Trying to factor them in again is just plain wrong. 3. Meltdowns are more expensive than construction. See also: Fukushima
Most all power plants are life-extended past their first thirty years. Why should nuclear be different?
4. Nuclear is a comparatively new technology, and there have been a lot of fundamental changes and advances in reactor design in the last 30 years. A coal plant may change out a turbine for a more energy-efficient model during its term, but you can't just pull a reactor core (along with all its infrastructure) and swap in a totally different design as part of an upgrade. Changes like that generally call for outright replacement anyway.
I was just thinking that - just another good example of the media only showing the extremes. 1 in 30,000 getting kidnapped or killed, and that's the 1 they'll show. You have worse odds of being involved in violent crime in a lot of big cities here in the states.
I think I'd worry less about people with guns that may be interested in me when I'm surrounded by armed guards. You don't get that when walking to your car in the middle of a parking garage late at night after working some OT.
You act as if professors work in the bookstore with a database of book prices open on their computers.
Has absolutely no bearing on the asshat professors that change the book every other year, or every year, just because the publishers are giving them freebies like the latest prof editions of the books with other extra crap. (OR when the book's author is... ooh look at that, that's the prof, and this is his new 9th edition we'll be using this year!) I was in for compsci, and I expected those books to almost all be new editions, but I was having to make a lot of expensive new book purchases in most of my gen-ed classes also - things like history and art. There's really no reason for art and history profs to be changing their books up yearly. All it does is cost the students.
Some of my profs were really cool about it though, I had them more than once while I was there, and at the end of the level 1 class they'd talk about what you were going to need for level 2 next semester, and how they were going to continue using the same books as long as they were still current enough so sign up for his offering on the course and save some cash over the other profs that were cycling through new books all the time. Some of those used books at the bookstore I got for $20-35 and looked like they'd been through at least a half a dozen hands.
*sigh* And then shopping for compsci.... compiler design alone was $249, and the AI books weren't much better, I think the core classes cost about a grand that year in books alone. But I saw that coming and it was understandable. C++ was new then, so that wasn't cheap, all those books were new and nothing was under $150. The pascal books however, were very cheap and looked like war vertrans;)
Second, there has long been a lively secondary market for used books. This infuriated the main line publishers, that they couldn't get fresh money for fresh books every semester/quarter/year.
Until you get to college anyway. Then the publishers "lobby" the professors just like big corps lobby the congressmen, and get them to change what textbook they "require" for their class every few years. Books bought in the spring for $250 are bought back by the book stores that fall for $24 because they won't be used there next semester.
It would be nice if universities required the profs to list the book costs and the average resale value of books bought for their classes in the course list. Then when you had three profs teaching African History and two of them have average end costs of $100 and one has $300 because the prof keeps changing books, enrollment for that one prof plummets and his department head threatens to cut that class off the list. That's the only way to fix that problem.
Hard to say how effective it would be though - so many college students haven't learned how to manage money and are on a "spend/charge/loan now, worry about pay later when I get a lucrative job" attitude that they really don't pay as much attention to up-front costs as they should.
There are no penalties for false take down requests except if the complaining party is not authorized to act on behalf of the owner.
yep, and that's what needs to be changed. Shouldn't need to be changed really, should have never been an issue to begin with. But "that's a good idea" laws like this get freighttrained through the legal system without any attempt to protect them from abuse. Someone runs around the room yelling "vote yes to protect the chidren! vote yes to feed the starving artists!" and everyone just immediately votes for it without reading the fine print or considering the possibilities for abuse. If it weren't such a common issue I'd attribute it to incompetence, but that's just how business is done in the legislatures lately.
Really, if I could have any one law passed, it would be a constitutional ammendment that makes it unlawful to enact a law that does not include adequate provisions for prevention of abuse. That's really the root of most of the "bad laws" we have on the books today. Most of them are good idea "in theory", but put too much power in one party's hands, without proper checks/balances.
Didn't the Earth get hit by another planet, causing it to shoot a ton of crust into orbit..creating the moon?
That's one going theory, but there are good arguments for orbital capture also. The biggest one being the concentration of elements on the moon is different than those found on earth. The moon has a LOT of silicon on it for example, and very little carbon. If it was created by the splash from an impact, one would expect it to have at least a similar concentration of elements as the parent body. Elemental concentration doesn't change a lot over the course of a planet's existence, since elements are formed within stars and planets have to play with the hand they were dealt when they formed. Comets may bring in a little, and atmosphere may bleed away, but the lion's share of the ratio remains unchanged from beginning to end.
Right now the big hangup on that is we don't know a lot about the interior of the moon, other than it's solid. It's possible the surface of the moon just happened to wind up being mostly Si, and the interior is more of an earth-like distribution of elements. But when planets cool, heavy things go to the core and light things float on top, which is why earth has lots of carbon on the crust and iron in the core. You'd expect the same of the moon.
It looks like besides Universal needing to be taken out back and educated a bit, YouTube needs to make some process adjustments as well:
A few minutes after this exchange Kim contacted us with good news. After filing a YouTube copyright takedown dispute, the video was reinstated. But alas, just seconds later, it was taken down again.
"We filed a dispute, the video came back online and now it's blocked again by UMG and the automated YouTube system has threatened to block our account for repeat infringement," Kim explained.
Considering the already ripe-for-abuse design of the automated takedown notice-response system, there should be a catch in their system to track notices and disputes on a single video, and at the very least the automated takedown system should be suspended on a video while it is being disputed... or if that can't be done, at the very least it shouldn't be able to be re-taken-down by another notice from the exact same party that is currently being disputed. That's just common sense.
The next obvious thing for youtube to do is track parties filing complaints and the number of undisputed and disputed claims they have, as well as the outcome of disputes. For example, if a party has filed at least 10 claims, has had at least four of them disputed, and has not successfully defended at least 75% of their claims, their infringement requests must then be manually reviewed by youtube staff before a takedown occurs. These numbers would be on a rising tier, where the burden of sincerity rises with claims filed. (at least 500 claims, requires at least 95% successfully defended to avoid manual review) This would allow small groups a little more leniency in the process, while making sure the heavy hitters didn't get away with any significant abuse. It's american legal tradition to place the burden of proof on the accuser, and what we have right now here is more of a guilty-until-proven-innocent, repeatedly, and that's just doubly-wrong.
I'd like to see some statistics though - this may be a rare incident - if UMG files 1000 takedowns a day (a large number to be sure, but not really that unreasonable considering their and youtube's size) and of that less than 2% of those get disputed, and less than 10% of the disputes are found to have merit, then maybe UMG really isn't being that much of an ogre here.
That COBOL code has been maintained for like 30 years, it would naturally be rock solid by now.
I don't think they were comparing mature cobol apps with new java apps. Or if they were, they shouldn't have been. There are still new apps being written in cobol. There are still some companies running emulated cobol two or more levels deep due to hardware changes where they wanted to continue using some existing apps, and those companies are still requiring fresh new code to be written for them, in addition to the maintenance on the existing apps.
I'd also argue that just because an app is 30 yrs old doesn't mean it's clean and bug-free. It may be gigantic hairball of hacks added in layer after layer over the years.
Photoshopping is so common nowadays (not just for body retouching) you'd be a fool to believe any printed ad didn't have something adjusted. Might be litter removed off the ground, more people in the crowd, a tummy tuck or two, or it could be the entire shot was assembled from a dozen pieces. If you're crying foul when a CGI model is being drawn in, you probably have no idea how gullible you already are.
As long as the product itself isn't being photoshopped or a fake scale comparison (like that pool we saw recently where they'd pasted in kids of pics at about 50% normal size to make the pool appear larger) then I'm ok with it.
This is like complaining that the store has the clothes on mannequins instead of live models. Actually, I wonder if there was a similar ruckus back when stores started using more realistic mannequins?
All you need is a simple jammer that broadcasts over the entire spectrum that the enemy is using.
There's a lot more to jamming than that. Unless your transmitter is absurdly more powerful than the one you're trying to jam out, spread spectrum transmissions can be extremely difficult to jam. The receiver is looking for (simplified here) modulation in a signal pattern. If you know the exact pattern you are looking for, you can very effectively filter out the noise. Then you just demodulate the signal to get your information out clean.
So when brute force isn't going to cut it, you have to really know what you're trying to jam, and more than likely you are going to have to be able to adapt, because critical control systems like this will have multiple fail-over procedures in place to automatically hop to a different band, modulation, whatever they care to mix up to render your jamming ineffective.
Providing a very simple example of why brute force doesn't work: get a whistle, and some really loud speakers and stereo. Have a friend stand by the speaker, occasionally blowing the whistle (maybe in a coded pattern that provides you with information), while the stereo cranks out the sound at ear-splitting levels. Standing 300 feet away, can you hear when the whistle blows? No you can't, the music is jamming you. Now get out a little handheld mic with headphones, and $15 in radio shack hardware for making a notch filter, tuned to the frequency of the whistle. Listen to that. You may hear a very faint trace of the music, but the whistle will be loud and clear every time its blown. Jamming is overcome. Doesn't really matter if you crank up the volume on the music either. Now what if the music happens to hit the note of the whistle and plays a solid or repeating tone at that frequency? So you start hearing that and can't tell when its the whistle or the music. Now your friend can see you waving your arms around indicating you can't hear him, so he puts that whistle in his pocket and takes out a different whistle. You flip a switch on your gear to switch the notch frequency for the next whistle. Now you're back in business. That's how jamming works, brute force often is ineffective.
to the evolving low end consumer electronics market. You can try to sell these at a good margin and turn enough volume to make a fair profit, or you can go the walmart route and make a cheap product, and set your margins very low and make up the same bottom line in volume. Or maybe a smaller bottom line, but profit is profit. At the end of the year, if you clear a thousand or clear a few million, you're still ahead either way, and your effort was worth your while. Obviously it's better to clear millions, but any profit is profit.
Considering the amount of publicity alone they've gotten off this, HP may not have come out nearly as bad with their "tablet fire sale" as a lot of people are thinking they did.
And consider the post-sale baggage on most products - phone support, warranties, etc. By this being a fire-sale, they may escape a lot of the usual post-sale expenses of the other more normal product cycles. So we can't even really tell what the final outcome of this was for a few years to come. It may continue looking better months from now long after all the touchpads are sold.
website was managed using PHP-MyAdmin, and this application allowed database access without a password.
At what point does this become "criminal negligence"?
And you'd expect there would be some sort of periodic audit process in place for anyone that manages a root certificate? hippa-style something or other? Or will they just set up any idiots with a CA that have good credit?
There's a lot of energy in a canonball due to its high mass and usual velocity. (and they tend to be round and rather smooth also) It takes quite a lot to stop one. They're designed to smash through stuff, and they do a pretty good job of it.
Even smaller canon shots would typically go in one side of a ship and out the other unless they hit something really substantial. They also had special twin balls that were chained together and fired out a single barrel, that would be aimed at sail masts. If the shot was on and luck was good, a ball would go past both sides of the mast, and the chain would slice right through the mast and take down some of the sails, allowing the pursuing ship to catch up. Some serious energy there.
What I find most interesting about tsunami is their ability to move energy so efficiently, with next to no loss. It's a wave traveling in a medium that has very little internal friction. This allows it to travel a tremendous distance without losing a lot of its energy.
The other thing is how it moves the energy when it's out in the ocean. Think of the tsunami when it's out in the middle of the ocean, and is generating a swell of say an inch. It's lifting a two mile column of water an inch up. That's a huge amount of energy.
When that wave approaches land, the distance from sea floor to sea level is much smaller, but the energy is mostly still there. So instead of raising it an inch, you get several meters. They refer to this as "coastal amplification" or something like that, but it's quite the nasty thing to pull when it hits landfall. If you were in a little skiff a few miles off the coast you may not even notice your boat rock, but if you were in that same boat a few hundred feet from the beach you'd be surfing in on a 25 meter high wave. What an amazing difference! It's no wonder Japan got yachts parked on streets a mile in from the coast.
Ocean floor topography plays a role in this too. And then you get effects like waves reflecting off entire continents and other large land masses, and opposite cases where little pockets here and there are sheltered from the effects due random luck involving coastal features. Tsunami are easily just as interesting a study as tornadoes or typhoons in their subtlety and power.
Where the campaign money goes doesn't matter if the voters would vote intelligently.
You find me an intelligent ("politically-educated anyway) majority of voters somewhere on the planet, you tell me where. I'll move.
I've gotten over blaming the politicians and congresscritters - it's the voters that have flushed us down the toilet. The politicians do it, but the voters allow it to continue.
It's interesting to see how times have changed and not changed - we have an electoral college because back in 'th day, the average citizen didn't know what was going on in the country or have a good opinion of what was the best overall things to do. Sadly, times apparently haven't changed much. Legislation still occurs without the best interest of the country or the public as the highest priority. Politicians don't listen to popular opinion when it happens to be working on a collectively intelligent plan (DRM), and then does listen when the voting majority is being a selfish, short-sighted bunch of idiots. (tax cuts) Only thing for the average citizen to do is stock up on antacid.
I'd be curious to know how many Mac users install Adobe Reader at all
Preview works very well for reading, but Acrobat Pro is currently the best Mac solution for authoring PDFs. Unfortunately. But there you have it. Open a 5mb PDF in word. Edit. Save. Wow, look at that, did you notice, now it's 45mb? It seems that acrobat pro is one of the few editors that recompresses. Now watch the secretary fill out that PDF form in Word and try to email it back to you.
PDF - Portable Document Format. It does a good job at being universally supported, for reading anyway. Do you want that, or maybe something else proprietary like DOC? (or even better, DOCX) You may hate the reader but the format is very good. It's just insanely bloated with features that are neigh impossible to secure. (it's about as good an idea as when MS added auto running macros to their DOC and XLS spec) So you can count on there being a new exploit almost constantly, and as we're seeing here, a critical exploit every quarter or so.
I personally do as much as possible in RTF format. It's fairly well supported, and doesn't have security-undermining features in the standard. On the mac, the bundled TextEdit does a marvelous job with RTF, reads and authors in it, and has very similar functionality to PDF. I just wish clicking on an RTF document on a web page would display it inline instead of downloading the bloddy thing to the desktop.
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(land in Iraq, really?) Anyway, jamming isn't terribly difficult, especially when you're that close to the receiver. But "spoofing" GPS signals is a great deal more challenging. It's not the data on the gps signal, it's the timing that is the position information. If they were able to pull THAT off, they deserve the drone. and a pat on the back.
If I had to guess I'd say they were lying about doing that, possibly hoping to make the US start questioning their reliance on GPS, since it's proving such a handy arms tool.
Generally very true. It's easier to be very good at anything if you can have a high degree of concentration/focus on it. "Rainman" was a good (but actually very uncommon) example of autism giving someone over-the-top focus and being able to perform stunning mental feats as a result. Of course most autistic people can't capitalize on their "gift" that well. Lots of discussion nowadays about how a lot of the "great people" of the past were "borderline autistic".
I've always felt I fit in that category, and I'd imagine a lot of "geeks" do. Not too good socially, reclusive, highly focused.
But getting closer to the root topic, cell phone use is like any other semiautomatic behavior. It can be done transparently with other things, or it can completely take over your thought process such that only very automatic behaviors can continue. Of course XKCD has covered this perfectly.
So everyone is that way, on different things. It's just a matter of to what degree your brain shuts down when you're trying to talk on the cell phone. I really don't think it has anything to do with formal multitasking. In my opinion, "multitasking" is the performing of more than one task that involves significant mental management at the same time. Autonomous things, like walking, don't count. You wouldn't count "walking and chewing gum" at the same time as multitasking because both walking and chewing can be done fairly well autonomously. Texting and walking OTOH, can get you into trouble because you typically take all higher control away from walking to text, and may walk into a pole as a result. Same thing happens when texting into a car... as long as nothing happens that your peripheral vision and subconscious reactions can't handle comes up. But if a deer runs out or a car swerves ahead, your subconscious may not be able to jar your attention from your phone. That's not really a multitasking failure, multitasking skills really can't help you with that. It's sort of like "muscle memory" but for mental things. And it's like cruise control, it can drive for you but you still have to steer, you can't expect it to do it all.
If you're going to do something like text and walk at the same time, safely, you have to look up frequently, and not get caught up in a series of replies that causes you to not look up during an extended period of time. I don't know what that skill is but I don't think it qualifies for "multitasking". Or maybe it does - and it's a case of these people not multitasking, but instead single-tasking and letting the other activity not be managed consciously. Call it "minortasking" maybe. You can't safely minortask driving while texting. You probably could safely multitask it, but that means you are constantly consciously managing your driving. I don't think too many people are good at that sort of thing though.
And so they want to make it illegal for everyone. I don't think I like that either. The basic mentality there is "if too many people can'd do xxx safely, we're going to make it illegal for anyone to do xxx". That looks ok until you're one of the (minority/few/whatever) that can (or I suppose, think you can) do it safely, and lose the right. There'll always be the argument that a lot of people think they can handle it but can't.
I don't think we'll ever be rid of arguments like this. Too many good arguments in too many different directions.
That's why you have lawyers on retainer to hand these to for review before signing anything. They either hand it back to you and say "looks good" or they tear it up and toss it in their bin and say "we need to talk".
Any decent lawyer can spot BS in a contract. Longer contracts just take longer to examine, they don't add a lot of risk of missing something if the lawyer is any good.
I think it's safe to assume that a university has and uses intelligent lawyers and that they have a case. But time will tell.
so in layman's terms, not only will they be causing less rain to fall downwind of you, but they'll also be causing more water to evaporate downwind - lowering humidity and making the problem of less-rainfall more severe. (assuming it's over land and not ocean anyway)
That's what I was wondering, where would this water normally be falling mostly? Russia? Japan? Pacific Ocean? If it was just headed for the ocean anyway, it doesn't appear to be selfish of them.
how the fairly basic logic of "they sold me the product with the marketed feature xyz which I valued and used, then disabled it after purchase, without compensation and with only forced permission" doesn't warrant relief?
(by "forced permission" I mean they asked, do you want your OtherOS to continue to work, or do you want your BluRay player to continue to work on new titles?" You were forced to choose which feature they were going to disable)
Further, how was it that all of the individuals that opted out of the class action and took them on themselves also lost?
1. Conservative estimates are appropriate for things that can melt down. Bigger impacts from "catastrophic failure" justify wider safety margins.
2. The original estimates already factored in maintenance and upgrades over their lifespan. Trying to factor them in again is just plain wrong.
3. Meltdowns are more expensive than construction. See also: Fukushima
4. Nuclear is a comparatively new technology, and there have been a lot of fundamental changes and advances in reactor design in the last 30 years. A coal plant may change out a turbine for a more energy-efficient model during its term, but you can't just pull a reactor core (along with all its infrastructure) and swap in a totally different design as part of an upgrade. Changes like that generally call for outright replacement anyway.
I was just thinking that - just another good example of the media only showing the extremes. 1 in 30,000 getting kidnapped or killed, and that's the 1 they'll show. You have worse odds of being involved in violent crime in a lot of big cities here in the states.
I think I'd worry less about people with guns that may be interested in me when I'm surrounded by armed guards. You don't get that when walking to your car in the middle of a parking garage late at night after working some OT.
Has absolutely no bearing on the asshat professors that change the book every other year, or every year, just because the publishers are giving them freebies like the latest prof editions of the books with other extra crap. (OR when the book's author is... ooh look at that, that's the prof, and this is his new 9th edition we'll be using this year!) I was in for compsci, and I expected those books to almost all be new editions, but I was having to make a lot of expensive new book purchases in most of my gen-ed classes also - things like history and art. There's really no reason for art and history profs to be changing their books up yearly. All it does is cost the students.
Some of my profs were really cool about it though, I had them more than once while I was there, and at the end of the level 1 class they'd talk about what you were going to need for level 2 next semester, and how they were going to continue using the same books as long as they were still current enough so sign up for his offering on the course and save some cash over the other profs that were cycling through new books all the time. Some of those used books at the bookstore I got for $20-35 and looked like they'd been through at least a half a dozen hands.
*sigh* And then shopping for compsci.... compiler design alone was $249, and the AI books weren't much better, I think the core classes cost about a grand that year in books alone. But I saw that coming and it was understandable. C++ was new then, so that wasn't cheap, all those books were new and nothing was under $150. The pascal books however, were very cheap and looked like war vertrans ;)
Until you get to college anyway. Then the publishers "lobby" the professors just like big corps lobby the congressmen, and get them to change what textbook they "require" for their class every few years. Books bought in the spring for $250 are bought back by the book stores that fall for $24 because they won't be used there next semester.
It would be nice if universities required the profs to list the book costs and the average resale value of books bought for their classes in the course list. Then when you had three profs teaching African History and two of them have average end costs of $100 and one has $300 because the prof keeps changing books, enrollment for that one prof plummets and his department head threatens to cut that class off the list. That's the only way to fix that problem.
Hard to say how effective it would be though - so many college students haven't learned how to manage money and are on a "spend/charge/loan now, worry about pay later when I get a lucrative job" attitude that they really don't pay as much attention to up-front costs as they should.
why can't we just all GET ALONG?
yep, and that's what needs to be changed. Shouldn't need to be changed really, should have never been an issue to begin with. But "that's a good idea" laws like this get freighttrained through the legal system without any attempt to protect them from abuse. Someone runs around the room yelling "vote yes to protect the chidren! vote yes to feed the starving artists!" and everyone just immediately votes for it without reading the fine print or considering the possibilities for abuse. If it weren't such a common issue I'd attribute it to incompetence, but that's just how business is done in the legislatures lately.
Really, if I could have any one law passed, it would be a constitutional ammendment that makes it unlawful to enact a law that does not include adequate provisions for prevention of abuse. That's really the root of most of the "bad laws" we have on the books today. Most of them are good idea "in theory", but put too much power in one party's hands, without proper checks/balances.
That's one going theory, but there are good arguments for orbital capture also. The biggest one being the concentration of elements on the moon is different than those found on earth. The moon has a LOT of silicon on it for example, and very little carbon. If it was created by the splash from an impact, one would expect it to have at least a similar concentration of elements as the parent body. Elemental concentration doesn't change a lot over the course of a planet's existence, since elements are formed within stars and planets have to play with the hand they were dealt when they formed. Comets may bring in a little, and atmosphere may bleed away, but the lion's share of the ratio remains unchanged from beginning to end.
Right now the big hangup on that is we don't know a lot about the interior of the moon, other than it's solid. It's possible the surface of the moon just happened to wind up being mostly Si, and the interior is more of an earth-like distribution of elements. But when planets cool, heavy things go to the core and light things float on top, which is why earth has lots of carbon on the crust and iron in the core. You'd expect the same of the moon.
It looks like besides Universal needing to be taken out back and educated a bit, YouTube needs to make some process adjustments as well:
Considering the already ripe-for-abuse design of the automated takedown notice-response system, there should be a catch in their system to track notices and disputes on a single video, and at the very least the automated takedown system should be suspended on a video while it is being disputed... or if that can't be done, at the very least it shouldn't be able to be re-taken-down by another notice from the exact same party that is currently being disputed. That's just common sense.
The next obvious thing for youtube to do is track parties filing complaints and the number of undisputed and disputed claims they have, as well as the outcome of disputes. For example, if a party has filed at least 10 claims, has had at least four of them disputed, and has not successfully defended at least 75% of their claims, their infringement requests must then be manually reviewed by youtube staff before a takedown occurs. These numbers would be on a rising tier, where the burden of sincerity rises with claims filed. (at least 500 claims, requires at least 95% successfully defended to avoid manual review) This would allow small groups a little more leniency in the process, while making sure the heavy hitters didn't get away with any significant abuse. It's american legal tradition to place the burden of proof on the accuser, and what we have right now here is more of a guilty-until-proven-innocent, repeatedly, and that's just doubly-wrong.
I'd like to see some statistics though - this may be a rare incident - if UMG files 1000 takedowns a day (a large number to be sure, but not really that unreasonable considering their and youtube's size) and of that less than 2% of those get disputed, and less than 10% of the disputes are found to have merit, then maybe UMG really isn't being that much of an ogre here.
I don't think they were comparing mature cobol apps with new java apps. Or if they were, they shouldn't have been. There are still new apps being written in cobol. There are still some companies running emulated cobol two or more levels deep due to hardware changes where they wanted to continue using some existing apps, and those companies are still requiring fresh new code to be written for them, in addition to the maintenance on the existing apps.
I'd also argue that just because an app is 30 yrs old doesn't mean it's clean and bug-free. It may be gigantic hairball of hacks added in layer after layer over the years.
Photoshopping is so common nowadays (not just for body retouching) you'd be a fool to believe any printed ad didn't have something adjusted. Might be litter removed off the ground, more people in the crowd, a tummy tuck or two, or it could be the entire shot was assembled from a dozen pieces. If you're crying foul when a CGI model is being drawn in, you probably have no idea how gullible you already are.
As long as the product itself isn't being photoshopped or a fake scale comparison (like that pool we saw recently where they'd pasted in kids of pics at about 50% normal size to make the pool appear larger) then I'm ok with it.
This is like complaining that the store has the clothes on mannequins instead of live models. Actually, I wonder if there was a similar ruckus back when stores started using more realistic mannequins?
There's a lot more to jamming than that. Unless your transmitter is absurdly more powerful than the one you're trying to jam out, spread spectrum transmissions can be extremely difficult to jam. The receiver is looking for (simplified here) modulation in a signal pattern. If you know the exact pattern you are looking for, you can very effectively filter out the noise. Then you just demodulate the signal to get your information out clean.
So when brute force isn't going to cut it, you have to really know what you're trying to jam, and more than likely you are going to have to be able to adapt, because critical control systems like this will have multiple fail-over procedures in place to automatically hop to a different band, modulation, whatever they care to mix up to render your jamming ineffective.
Providing a very simple example of why brute force doesn't work: get a whistle, and some really loud speakers and stereo. Have a friend stand by the speaker, occasionally blowing the whistle (maybe in a coded pattern that provides you with information), while the stereo cranks out the sound at ear-splitting levels. Standing 300 feet away, can you hear when the whistle blows? No you can't, the music is jamming you. Now get out a little handheld mic with headphones, and $15 in radio shack hardware for making a notch filter, tuned to the frequency of the whistle. Listen to that. You may hear a very faint trace of the music, but the whistle will be loud and clear every time its blown. Jamming is overcome. Doesn't really matter if you crank up the volume on the music either. Now what if the music happens to hit the note of the whistle and plays a solid or repeating tone at that frequency? So you start hearing that and can't tell when its the whistle or the music. Now your friend can see you waving your arms around indicating you can't hear him, so he puts that whistle in his pocket and takes out a different whistle. You flip a switch on your gear to switch the notch frequency for the next whistle. Now you're back in business. That's how jamming works, brute force often is ineffective.
to the evolving low end consumer electronics market. You can try to sell these at a good margin and turn enough volume to make a fair profit, or you can go the walmart route and make a cheap product, and set your margins very low and make up the same bottom line in volume. Or maybe a smaller bottom line, but profit is profit. At the end of the year, if you clear a thousand or clear a few million, you're still ahead either way, and your effort was worth your while. Obviously it's better to clear millions, but any profit is profit.
Considering the amount of publicity alone they've gotten off this, HP may not have come out nearly as bad with their "tablet fire sale" as a lot of people are thinking they did.
And consider the post-sale baggage on most products - phone support, warranties, etc. By this being a fire-sale, they may escape a lot of the usual post-sale expenses of the other more normal product cycles. So we can't even really tell what the final outcome of this was for a few years to come. It may continue looking better months from now long after all the touchpads are sold.
At what point does this become "criminal negligence"?
And you'd expect there would be some sort of periodic audit process in place for anyone that manages a root certificate? hippa-style something or other? Or will they just set up any idiots with a CA that have good credit?
There's a lot of energy in a canonball due to its high mass and usual velocity. (and they tend to be round and rather smooth also) It takes quite a lot to stop one. They're designed to smash through stuff, and they do a pretty good job of it.
Even smaller canon shots would typically go in one side of a ship and out the other unless they hit something really substantial. They also had special twin balls that were chained together and fired out a single barrel, that would be aimed at sail masts. If the shot was on and luck was good, a ball would go past both sides of the mast, and the chain would slice right through the mast and take down some of the sails, allowing the pursuing ship to catch up. Some serious energy there.
What I find most interesting about tsunami is their ability to move energy so efficiently, with next to no loss. It's a wave traveling in a medium that has very little internal friction. This allows it to travel a tremendous distance without losing a lot of its energy.
The other thing is how it moves the energy when it's out in the ocean. Think of the tsunami when it's out in the middle of the ocean, and is generating a swell of say an inch. It's lifting a two mile column of water an inch up. That's a huge amount of energy.
When that wave approaches land, the distance from sea floor to sea level is much smaller, but the energy is mostly still there. So instead of raising it an inch, you get several meters. They refer to this as "coastal amplification" or something like that, but it's quite the nasty thing to pull when it hits landfall. If you were in a little skiff a few miles off the coast you may not even notice your boat rock, but if you were in that same boat a few hundred feet from the beach you'd be surfing in on a 25 meter high wave. What an amazing difference! It's no wonder Japan got yachts parked on streets a mile in from the coast.
Ocean floor topography plays a role in this too. And then you get effects like waves reflecting off entire continents and other large land masses, and opposite cases where little pockets here and there are sheltered from the effects due random luck involving coastal features. Tsunami are easily just as interesting a study as tornadoes or typhoons in their subtlety and power.
So who's to say she's not the one giving the paybacks as of lately?
Very short article, but very interesting reading, thank you.
You find me an intelligent ("politically-educated anyway) majority of voters somewhere on the planet, you tell me where. I'll move.
I've gotten over blaming the politicians and congresscritters - it's the voters that have flushed us down the toilet. The politicians do it, but the voters allow it to continue.
It's interesting to see how times have changed and not changed - we have an electoral college because back in 'th day, the average citizen didn't know what was going on in the country or have a good opinion of what was the best overall things to do. Sadly, times apparently haven't changed much. Legislation still occurs without the best interest of the country or the public as the highest priority. Politicians don't listen to popular opinion when it happens to be working on a collectively intelligent plan (DRM), and then does listen when the voting majority is being a selfish, short-sighted bunch of idiots. (tax cuts) Only thing for the average citizen to do is stock up on antacid.
Preview works very well for reading, but Acrobat Pro is currently the best Mac solution for authoring PDFs. Unfortunately. But there you have it. Open a 5mb PDF in word. Edit. Save. Wow, look at that, did you notice, now it's 45mb? It seems that acrobat pro is one of the few editors that recompresses. Now watch the secretary fill out that PDF form in Word and try to email it back to you.
PDF - Portable Document Format. It does a good job at being universally supported, for reading anyway. Do you want that, or maybe something else proprietary like DOC? (or even better, DOCX) You may hate the reader but the format is very good. It's just insanely bloated with features that are neigh impossible to secure. (it's about as good an idea as when MS added auto running macros to their DOC and XLS spec) So you can count on there being a new exploit almost constantly, and as we're seeing here, a critical exploit every quarter or so.
I personally do as much as possible in RTF format. It's fairly well supported, and doesn't have security-undermining features in the standard. On the mac, the bundled TextEdit does a marvelous job with RTF, reads and authors in it, and has very similar functionality to PDF. I just wish clicking on an RTF document on a web page would display it inline instead of downloading the bloddy thing to the desktop.