Here is the article. I have copied it for your reading pleasure in gross violation of the DMCA.
Google, the company behind the popular Web search engine, has been playing a complicated game recently that involves the Church of Scientology and a controversial copyright law.
Legal experts say the episode highlights problems with the law that can make companies or individuals liable for linking to sites they do not control. And it has turned Google, whose business is built around a database of two billion Web pages, into a quiet campaigner for the freedom to link.
The church sent a complaint to Google last month, saying that its search results for "Scientology" included links to copyrighted church material that appears on a Web site critical of the church. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which was intended to make it easier for copyright holders to fight piracy, the complaint meant that Google was required to remove those links quickly or risk being sued for contributing to copyright infringement.
The site in question, Operation Clambake (www.xenu.net), is based in Norway, beyond the reach of the United States copyright act. The site portrays the church as a greedy cult that exploits its members and harasses critics. Andreas Heldal-Lund, the site's owner, says the posting of church materials, including some internal documents and pictures of church leaders, is allowable under the "fair use" provisions of internationally recognized copyright law.
When Google responded to the church's complaint by removing the links to the Scientology material, techies and free-speech advocates accused Google of censoring its search results. Google also briefly removed the link to Operation Clambake's home page but soon restored it, saying the removal had been a mistake.
At that point, according to Matthew Cutts, a software engineer at Google, it started developing a better way to handle such complaints. "We respond very quickly to challenges, and not just technical challenges but also these sort of interesting, delicate situations, as well," Mr. Cutts said.
Under Google's new policy, when it receives a complaint that causes it to remove links from its index, it will give a copy of the complaint to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse (chillingeffects.org). Chilling Effects is a project of a civil liberties advocacy group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation and several law schools. It it offers information about Internet rights issues.
In the new procedure, Google informs its users when a link has been removed from a set of search results and directs them to the Chilling Effects site. For example, a search for the word "helatrobus," which appears in some Scientology texts, brings up a page of results with this notice at the bottom: "In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed one result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the D.M.C.A. complaint for these removed results."
The notice includes a link to Scientology's complaint on chillingeffects.org, which lists the Web addresses of the material to which Google no longer links. The result is that a complaint could end up drawing more attention to the very pages it is trying to block.
Mr. Cutts said Google started linking to chillingeffects.org early this month but made no announcement, so it took a while for word to go around online. Meanwhile, Scientology sent Google two more complaints, citing pages within copies of the Operation Clambake site on other servers. All three complaints are now on the Chilling Effects site.
Don Marti, the technical editor of Linux Journal, first wrote about Google's move on the magazine's site. He said he had been so upset about the company's initial response to the Scientologists that he organized a small group of protesters who visited Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., where he also lives. Mr. Marti says he now applauds Google's efforts to make the process more transparent. If a letter of complaint simply makes a site more popular, "only a fool would send one," he said.
Helena Kobrin, a lawyer representing Scientology at the law firm of Moxon & Kobrin in Los Angeles, said that Google's use of the letters of complaint would not discourage the church from pursuing further complaints if necessary and that there was nothing in the letters that needed to be hidden. "I think they show very graphically to people that the only thing we're trying to do is protect copyrights," she said.
As part of its new process for handling complaints, Mr. Cutts said, Google added more information on its site explaining how site owners could have their links restored by filing a countercomplaint with Google. (The required forms can be downloaded from chillingeffects.org.) If site owners take this step, he said, they accept responsibility for the contents of their pages.
Mr. Heldal-Lund, a Norwegian citizen, said he would not file a countercomplaint because it would put him under the jurisdiction of United States law. He said that he regretted making so much trouble for Google but was glad that the incident had highlighted the church's pursuit of its critics.
The church, which has beliefs based on the idea that people need to release themselves from trauma suffered in past lives, has taken a keen interest in the Internet since 1994, when someone posted secret church teachings on an online discussion group. Critics say the church guards its teachings closely because it wants its followers to pay for access to higher levels of instruction. The church says that these payments are donations and that it is simply seeking to protect its rights online.
With its Chilling Effects partnership, Google is subtly making the point that the right to link is important to its business and to the health of the Web, said David G. Post, a law professor at Temple University who specializes in Internet issues.
"This is an example where copyright law is being used in conflict with free connectivity and free expression on the Net," he said. Dr. Post said Google's situation highlighted the need for more awareness of copyright issues, including pending legislation that is more restrictive than the 1998 law. The measure is backed by entertainment giants like Walt Disney, but technology companies like Intel have come out against it, saying it would hurt consumers and slow innovation.
Mr. Cutts said that the links to the complaints were not a political statement, just a way to "make sure our users get all of the information that they need." He said that Google had no official position on the copyright act and that so far it had not been involved in political activity or lobbying. But he said it "might take an interest in more of those issues."
The copyright controversy has had an interesting side effect for Operation Clambake. The Google software judges the importance of a page in part by looking at how many other pages link to it. Scientology's complaint set off a flurry of linking to the critics' site, pushing it up two spots to No. 2 in the search results for "Scientology" -- just below the church's official site.
Hey, loaded today, aren't we? Cars became the primary source of pollution in cities as anti-polluting laws forced filters on industries.
Anti-polluting laws have also reduced car emissions. Gasoline cars today are low emission. With things like catalytic converters car emission have dropped off quite a bit. Gasoline pollutes less than coal. That's just the way it is. If you don't believe me, burn a cup of gasoline and a lump of coal side by side. See which makes more smoke.
Which coal plants? My country doesn't have them. We use dams. Pretty clean (albeit dangerous to wildlife).
Well, here in the U.S. we get a little over half our power from coal. I have no idea what kind of power your country uses. I'm talking about the U.S. You don't need to flame me because I didn't take Zimbabwe into consideration. We only about 5% from hydro. Almost all of our rivers that have the potential for hydropower have already been tapped.
Instead of getting oil to pollute your country, go to international warmer waters and get sun/wind or hydrogen energy. It costs roughly the same to transport, but it's nearer and free.
Even if they were located at the equator, solar power would still cost a lot. Same with wind. Solar and wind power are not serious contenders to solve our energy woes. They cost too much.
Cars, in my city, are restrained from downtown (only pedestrians allowed) *and* until recently were left home one day-a-week to fight air polltuion.
That might work in Mexico City, but it wouldn't work in the U.S. There would be a lot of public backlash. I'm hazarding to guess that you live in Mexico City. Most people there don't own cars anyway.
"Hydrogen is like electricity. Neither can be mined or found by exploration. The upside is that you can make hydrogen from almost anything -- out of any material that has hydrogen in it."
Hydrogen is in all sorts of stuff. To get it out of stuff like gasoline, you reform it. You are using gasoline up in that case. To get it out of water, you need to use electricity of electrolyze it.
Getting hydrogen is just like getting electricity. The energy has to come from somewhere.
It is a fairly efficient means of storage. However, to store it well, you probably need Pallidium Hydrides. Thes store about 800 times their volume in hydrogen. For a car to run 500 miles on hydrogen, you would need to shell out about 1,000 for the hydride storage, however.
I can't stress this enough: HYDROGEN IS NOT AN ENERGY SOURCE! It is energy storage. To make hydrogen, you lose more energy than you gain. However, hydrogen fuel cells are better than electric cars.
Right now, hydrogen or electric cars are a stupid idea. They pollute more than gasoline engines. Heres why:
An electric car mostly gets it's energy from highly polluting coal and oil plants. About 50% of the energy is lost in power generation. Another 10% of that is lost in power transmission. Now you have 45% of the power you started out with. Then, it is put into batteries. You lose about 30% of your power. Now you got about 30% of what you started out with. Then you run it though the electic motor. This gives about 40% efficiency under ideal conditions. That leaves you with about 17% effiency.
So here are the energy effiencies:
Gasoline about 30%
Electric about 17%
Electric uses much more energy and pollutes much more than gasoline. Gasoline powered cars now are very low emission. The coal plants that would power electic cars are not.
Electric and hydrogen only make sense if we have a clean, very cheap form of power generation, such as hydro or nuclear. Solar and Wind wouldn't work to well to power electric cars. Electric cars need lots of electricity. Solar or wind power at 10 cents a KW hour is wayyy to expensive to power a car with. Nuclear and Hydro, each at about 3-4 cent a KW hour, would be more expensive than gasoline, but they wouldn't pollute at all.
Hybrid cars are the best solution right now. They offer substantial pollution reduction and gas mileage improvements over ordinary cars. Plus we don't have to build a whole bunch of new power plants to power them, as we would if everyone switched to electic.
Anyway, I think by far the best solution to our energy problems right now is to build more nuclear plants and use hybrid cars.
Well, it's wireless, and you may be able to daisy chain through multiple devices (e.g. repeaters) to go longer distances
Wouldn't it be easier to just have a high speed ethernet connection? This is about as expensive as 802.11B but only goes a few meters. You would have to have a lot of reapeaters.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *VSB community when recently IDC confirmed that *VSB accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *VSB has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *VSB is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *VSB's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *VSB faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *VSB because *VSB is dying. Things are looking very bad for *VSB. As many of us are already aware, *VSB continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeVSB is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenVSB leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenVSB. How many users of NetVSB are there? Let's see. The number of OpenVSB versus NetVSB posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. VSB/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetVSB posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of VSB/OS. A recent article put FreeVSB at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeVSB users. This is consistent with the number of FreeVSB Usenet posts.
All major surveys show that *Netcraft confirms the truth: *Netcraft confirms the truth: *VSB is dying Fact: *VSB is dead
May I all point you to a study done a few months ago that points to 6 hours a night being optimal.
This was a study of 1.1 million people over 6 years. It should be accurate. It showed, contrary to popular belief, that those who got 8 or more hours tended to die a little younger than those who got 6 or 7.
Also, it you get less sleep, in effect you are living longer.If you sleep 6 instead of 8, you get 2 more hours each day. That adds up to several years over your life, in effect.
I feel very refreshed with 6 hours of sleep. 8 hours makes me feel groggy.
For an animal to risk their lives by shutting down and being almost totally vulnerable for 8 or so hours a day and for sleep to have survived evolution for so long and amoung so many different species of animals means it must be pretty damn important.
Yeah. I agree. I've heard before that REM sleep is kind of the brain's daily cleaning of unwanted noise and short-term memory. Also, when food is in short supply, sleeping might still be an evolutionary advantage. If not much is going on, sleep makes sense. It conserves valuable calories because your metabolism is reduced quite a bit. That's why lions sleep 20 hours a day.
This does sound like a great drug for many people. But I think I'll stick with caffeine. For people w/o a heart condition it's perfectly safe. And it works astonishingly well. (Unless you chug down a lot of caffeine. That will cause you to be wired for a few hours and then crash)
One thing I like about caffeine is the delectible means of delivery. A hot cup of coffee or a refreshing iced tea is much more pleasurable than a pill any day.
Also, caffeine has another benefit, at least for me. It helps me control my depression. Last year, I didn't drink much caffeine, and I had a horrible depression. Caffeine seems to calm my depression somewhat. Whenever I feel depressed, I reach for the coffee or iced tea. About a half an hour later when it takes effect, my depression is reduced.
This works because caffeine manipulates dopamine production. It produces increased levels of dopamine, your body's happy neurotransmitter. It does the same thing as pot or alcohol, just to a lesser degree. This curbs my depression.
Of course when you come off of caffeine, it is horrible. When I have gone though withdrawal before, my depression comes back worse than before, I'm tired, and I'm completely pissed off, not to mention getting crushing headache. Of course that is prevented by drinking caffeine every day. I'd rather be addicted to caffeine than go though the hell of depression again.
I am one of those people who gets up early. I get up at 4:30. I get to sleep somewhere around midnight. So I get about 4 1/2 hours of sleep a night. Much less than the usual 6-9 hours recommended.
Despite getting little sleep, I function perfectly well with my pleasantly bitter friends: coffee and iced tea. I am a high school sophomore. Even though I get little sleep, this year I am still running with about a 3.9 GPA. All of this is thanks to caffeine.
In the morning, if it is wintertime, I usualy imbibe two 20 oz. cups of strong black coffee. (I like it black, like my women) In the spring or summer, I drink about two quarts of iced tea. Dammit I love iced tea. I'm drinking a glass right now. Anyway, I've got a C++ programming class first period, and there is no way in hell I would be able to code well at 7:50 A.M. without my caffeine.
Then, 3rd period, my science teacher gives out coffee. He believes it helps us focus better, which it does. I get recharged from a good 16 OZ. cup in his class.
By the end of the day, I begin to crash. But then I have toning (gym) class. The physical exercise gets me alert again. Then, I get home, and enjoy another tall glass of strong iced tea.
As for the health problems of me drinking a lot of caffeine: I don't believe it is causing a big problem. I have a resting heart rate of 58 Beats Per Minute. Most people my age group are around 70 BPM. So I don't have tachycardia or anything. My blood pressure, the last time I checked, is 95/55. I can also run a mile in 5:30, so I am somewhat physically fit. The only reason I could see for someone avoiding caffeine is if they have a heart problem. Then, the higher heart rates and blood pressure brought on by caffeine is not so good.
Now, an unhealthy way of getting your caffeine is to drink pop. Pop contains quite a few empty calories. It also has an ingredient that depletes your bone density. I stopped drinking pop 2 years ago. I have no desire to start again. Now that I have been off it for a while, I just think pop is sickeningly oversweet. It's easy to kick the pop habit. Just refrain from drinking pop for a month or so and you should have no desire for it anymore. The junk food habit is not too hard to kick either. I don't eat any junk food such as potato chips anymore like I used to.
czardonic, you are correct. I am 16, not a quite a kid, but still in the custody of my parents. When my dad gives me some money to spend on food or somthing, I spend every last cent. However, when I have my own money, I am a fscking tightwad. I need to save up money for the Geforce 4, you know.
I am morally opposed to flash animation. It is the work of the devil. Luring us into insanity with repetitious aninmations dancing obnoxiously across the screen. ARRRGGG!!!! (ok, that didn't make much sense, but it nicely sums up my feelings about flash)
Many legends you look at have some basis in truth. It's pretty easy to see how a natural disaster could get distorted over the millenia. Take the great deluge for example:
Around 8,000 years ago, the black sea was a freshwater lake about 2/3 of it's current size. It is now believed that there was a proto-civilization along it's shores. Then, water from the Mediterrainean broke through the strip of land at the Dardanelles. This caused a cataclysmic flood around the Black Sea area, inudating hundreds of square miles, including the proto-civilization.
Now the flood took about 48 hours to fill up the black sea. Everyone should have been able to escape. But over the millenia, as the story was told orally, embellishments were added on to it. You know how Granpa said he blocked the exploding grenade with his helmet, shot Heinrich Himmler, and did all that other crap during the war? Anyway, this story was told orally for 3,000 years before a distorted version of it was written down in the classic "Epic of Gilgamesh", the first great literary achievement.(read it. It's very good.)
The Flood legend was incorporated into pretty much every culture in the fetile crescent area, including the jewish culture.
Other legends: The indians of the Columbia Basin in WA st. also have a flood myth. This is from the devastating Missoula Floods. This series of floods was caused by an ice dam reapededly blocking the Clark Fork River. It formed a lake the size of Lk Eerie behind it and it was 2,000 feet deep. When the dam broke, it realesed a 2000 foot high wall of water, devastating everything and killing any indians in it's path. These floods also formed huge rock coulees all over the columbia basin.
Another one is Atlantis: This was probably the island of Thera near crete. It had a very technologically advanced Minoan city on it. Then one day, the Thera volcano exploded with a force many, many times more than the Krakatoa eruption. It sunk part of the island and also produced huge tidal waves.
Um, the glaciers receded by about 10,000 BC, give or take 2,000 years.
This city supposedly dates maybe around 5,000 years ago (~3,000 BC).
Well, the melting of glaciers was gradual. It occured over many thousands of years. It's not like, "Boom" and we were out of the ice age. There have even beem sunken cities due to sea level changes less than 2,000 years ago. Parts of Alexandria are now submerged.
From the article: Scientists now want to explore the possibility that the city was submerged following the last Ice Age.
However, you make a good point. Now I wonder if it was just built during a very cool period (as opposed to the end of the last ice age) and it has just been submerged by today's comparatively warmer climate. I don't know.
Actually, this city has sunk because the sea levels have risen since the last ice age. U see, during the last ice age, much of the ocean's water was locked up in ice. Sea level was about 300 feet lower than it is today. As the ice melted over several millenia, sea levels rose to their present levels.
Anyway, I think we would see some real evidence for a world engulfing flood that occured only 5,000 years ago. Using the bible's genealogy and stuff, scholars have pinpointed the year of Noah's flood according to the bible. It supposedly was around 2700 BC. Funny that the egyptians and the Sumerians never seemed to notice it!
But here is my understanding of black hole radiation or Hawking Radiation:
First of all, you must understand quantum tunneling. This is a principle in which particles have a certain probability that they will bypass, or "tunnel" though a barrier and reappear on the other side. Sometimes the particles tunnel at much faster than the speed of light. The thicker the barrier the less chance there is of the particle to tunnel. Tunneling doesn't only occur with microscopic distances. There have been experiments of photons tunneling up to a foot. (BTW, quantum tunneling has been observed experimentally.)
This does relate to black holes. In quantum physics, virtual particle-antiparticle pairs are produced from the Zero-Point Energy background all the time. They just annihilate eachother very quickly.
Now if a particle-antiparticle pair are created just inside the event horizon of a black hole, there is a probability that one of the particles will tunnel out of the black hole and escape into space. Since the particles can't annihilate each other, they become real. In order not to violate thermodynamics, the new matter created is balanced out by the loss of some energy of the black hole. In this way, the black hole radiates energy.
Now this effect is negligible for large black holes, such as supermassive ones at galactic centers, or ones created from a collapsed star. But for small black holes, like quantum black holes that are about the mass of an asteroid, or very tiny quantum black holes made up of only a few particles, this effect is very important. (these asteroid sized quantum black holes may have produced at the big bang. No evidence for them exists. We're pretty sure the smaller quantum sized ones are created all the time by natural processes. There is an accelerator planned that will be able to produce them.)
Smaller black holes radiate much faster than large ones. As I said earlier, particles have a greater probability of tunneling across a thin barrier. A large black hole has a slower drop-off in the amount of gravity as you go farther away from it. That means that the particle has to tunnel a long ways to be able to get away from the black hole. This means that there is almost no energy escaping. The hawking radiation of a 30 solar mass black hole is 10-32 of a watt.
Now for small black holes, this is different. The particles have a greater possibility of escaping by tunneling because they have to tunnel a shorter distance to escape. An asteriod-mass quantum black hole created at the beginning of the universe would be finally exploding right about now. For a small quantum black hole, they last only a tiny fraction of a second.
Lastly, if we can figure out how to produce largish quantum black holes, with masses at least on the order of micrograms, our energy problems would be solved. You see, when black holes explode, only pure energy, not matter, is realeased. I don't know how that would be done. The yet-to-be-built Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider should produce quantum black holes. We should be able to detect the energy produced when the explode.
Anyway, here is an excellent article on artificial black holes. Here is one on Hawking Radiation. I am giving you the Google Cache because the original page has a DoubleClick cookie on it.
Re:New Star Trek material!
on
Quark Stars
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· Score: 2
I know you're just joking. But on the subject of neutronium:
It's only found in ultra-dense neutron stars. Neutron stars are completely composed of neutrons because under the immense heat and pressur electrons and protons combine, producing neutrons.
I wouldn't try to build a spaceship. When you realease the ultra-pressure of neutronium, it inconvieniently produces a mega-explosion, with the neutrons and everything turning back into hydogen.
It would be strong though, even for it's weight. Since nuclear forces bind it, neutronium would be ultra-strong. Nuclear forces bind neutronium because it has the density of an atomic nucleus. But the outward pressure of this high density substance is even more than the atomic forces can handle, so you would have trouble keeping it countained.
Quarkonium would be even harder to contain and even stronger.
All said, I suggest you use carbon nanotubes for your next spaceship hull. Much safer and easier. Plus your ship won't weigh as much as the moon.
As light doesnt have mass, the gravity that would be required to catch it would require a mass equal to infinity.
It doesn't matter whether it has mass or not. Don't you remember Galileo's famous experiment where he proved objects of different weights drop at the same rate? If you dropped a feather and a peice of lead in a vacuum chamber, they would hit the ground at exactly the same time.
Of course photons are effected by gravity! Haven't you heard of gravitional lenses astronomers use sometimes? In addition, during solar eclipses, stars close to the sun have their light bent around the sun so they look even closer than they actually are.
Light is deflected by gravity just a tad less than a material object going.999999999 C. It is affected by gravity just as much matter. The reason why it doesn't bend very much around the sun is because it is moving so fast. Just like how a faster thrown baseball will travel farther than a slow one, light doesn't get deflected much because of it's speed.
If somehow you slowed light down to just a couple miles an hour, it would fall down to the ground(assuming a vacuum and no other interference. BTW, it is impossible to slow light down in a vacuum like that).
Anyway, gravity affects all things. Gravity is not so much a force as it is the manifestation of the fourth dimension, time. All objects, massless or not, travel in a straight line in four dimensional space-time, unless acted on by an outside force. Of course material objects distort spacetime, producing what we know as gravity.
Four dimensionally, the Earth is moving perfectly straight.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is the article. I have copied it for your reading pleasure in gross violation of the DMCA.
Google, the company behind the popular Web search engine, has been playing a complicated game recently that involves the Church of Scientology and a controversial copyright law.
Legal experts say the episode highlights problems with the law that can make companies or individuals liable for linking to sites they do not control. And it has turned Google, whose business is built around a database of two billion Web pages, into a quiet campaigner for the freedom to link.
The church sent a complaint to Google last month, saying that its search results for "Scientology" included links to copyrighted church material that appears on a Web site critical of the church. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which was intended to make it easier for copyright holders to fight piracy, the complaint meant that Google was required to remove those links quickly or risk being sued for contributing to copyright infringement.
The site in question, Operation Clambake (www.xenu.net), is based in Norway, beyond the reach of the United States copyright act. The site portrays the church as a greedy cult that exploits its members and harasses critics. Andreas Heldal-Lund, the site's owner, says the posting of church materials, including some internal documents and pictures of church leaders, is allowable under the "fair use" provisions of internationally recognized copyright law.
When Google responded to the church's complaint by removing the links to the Scientology material, techies and free-speech advocates accused Google of censoring its search results. Google also briefly removed the link to Operation Clambake's home page but soon restored it, saying the removal had been a mistake.
At that point, according to Matthew Cutts, a software engineer at Google, it started developing a better way to handle such complaints. "We respond very quickly to challenges, and not just technical challenges but also these sort of interesting, delicate situations, as well," Mr. Cutts said.
Under Google's new policy, when it receives a complaint that causes it to remove links from its index, it will give a copy of the complaint to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse (chillingeffects.org). Chilling Effects is a project of a civil liberties advocacy group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation and several law schools. It it offers information about Internet rights issues.
In the new procedure, Google informs its users when a link has been removed from a set of search results and directs them to the Chilling Effects site. For example, a search for the word "helatrobus," which appears in some Scientology texts, brings up a page of results with this notice at the bottom: "In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed one result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the D.M.C.A. complaint for these removed results."
The notice includes a link to Scientology's complaint on chillingeffects.org, which lists the Web addresses of the material to which Google no longer links. The result is that a complaint could end up drawing more attention to the very pages it is trying to block.
Mr. Cutts said Google started linking to chillingeffects.org early this month but made no announcement, so it took a while for word to go around online. Meanwhile, Scientology sent Google two more complaints, citing pages within copies of the Operation Clambake site on other servers. All three complaints are now on the Chilling Effects site.
Don Marti, the technical editor of Linux Journal, first wrote about Google's move on the magazine's site. He said he had been so upset about the company's initial response to the Scientologists that he organized a small group of protesters who visited Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., where he also lives. Mr. Marti says he now applauds Google's efforts to make the process more transparent. If a letter of complaint simply makes a site more popular, "only a fool would send one," he said.
Helena Kobrin, a lawyer representing Scientology at the law firm of Moxon & Kobrin in Los Angeles, said that Google's use of the letters of complaint would not discourage the church from pursuing further complaints if necessary and that there was nothing in the letters that needed to be hidden. "I think they show very graphically to people that the only thing we're trying to do is protect copyrights," she said.
As part of its new process for handling complaints, Mr. Cutts said, Google added more information on its site explaining how site owners could have their links restored by filing a countercomplaint with Google. (The required forms can be downloaded from chillingeffects.org.) If site owners take this step, he said, they accept responsibility for the contents of their pages.
Mr. Heldal-Lund, a Norwegian citizen, said he would not file a countercomplaint because it would put him under the jurisdiction of United States law. He said that he regretted making so much trouble for Google but was glad that the incident had highlighted the church's pursuit of its critics.
The church, which has beliefs based on the idea that people need to release themselves from trauma suffered in past lives, has taken a keen interest in the Internet since 1994, when someone posted secret church teachings on an online discussion group. Critics say the church guards its teachings closely because it wants its followers to pay for access to higher levels of instruction. The church says that these payments are donations and that it is simply seeking to protect its rights online.
With its Chilling Effects partnership, Google is subtly making the point that the right to link is important to its business and to the health of the Web, said David G. Post, a law professor at Temple University who specializes in Internet issues.
"This is an example where copyright law is being used in conflict with free connectivity and free expression on the Net," he said. Dr. Post said Google's situation highlighted the need for more awareness of copyright issues, including pending legislation that is more restrictive than the 1998 law. The measure is backed by entertainment giants like Walt Disney, but technology companies like Intel have come out against it, saying it would hurt consumers and slow innovation.
Mr. Cutts said that the links to the complaints were not a political statement, just a way to "make sure our users get all of the information that they need." He said that Google had no official position on the copyright act and that so far it had not been involved in political activity or lobbying. But he said it "might take an interest in more of those issues."
The copyright controversy has had an interesting side effect for Operation Clambake. The Google software judges the importance of a page in part by looking at how many other pages link to it. Scientology's complaint set off a flurry of linking to the critics' site, pushing it up two spots to No. 2 in the search results for "Scientology" -- just below the church's official site.
I refuse to install Real Player. What a load of crap. So fscking buggy. I spit on the Real Player developers. May they fall prey to DIVX and Winamp!!!
Gasoline powered cars now are very low emission.
Hey, loaded today, aren't we? Cars became the primary source of pollution in cities as anti-polluting laws forced filters on industries.
Anti-polluting laws have also reduced car emissions. Gasoline cars today are low emission. With things like catalytic converters car emission have dropped off quite a bit. Gasoline pollutes less than coal. That's just the way it is. If you don't believe me, burn a cup of gasoline and a lump of coal side by side. See which makes more smoke.
Which coal plants? My country doesn't have them. We use dams. Pretty clean (albeit dangerous to wildlife).
Well, here in the U.S. we get a little over half our power from coal. I have no idea what kind of power your country uses. I'm talking about the U.S. You don't need to flame me because I didn't take Zimbabwe into consideration. We only about 5% from hydro. Almost all of our rivers that have the potential for hydropower have already been tapped.
Instead of getting oil to pollute your country, go to international warmer waters and get sun/wind or hydrogen energy. It costs roughly the same to transport, but it's nearer and free.
Even if they were located at the equator, solar power would still cost a lot. Same with wind. Solar and wind power are not serious contenders to solve our energy woes. They cost too much.
Cars, in my city, are restrained from downtown (only pedestrians allowed) *and* until recently were left home one day-a-week to fight air polltuion.
That might work in Mexico City, but it wouldn't work in the U.S. There would be a lot of public backlash. I'm hazarding to guess that you live in Mexico City. Most people there don't own cars anyway.
Am I the only person who finds this hilarious?
"Hydrogen is like electricity. Neither can be mined or found by exploration. The upside is that you can make hydrogen from almost anything -- out of any material that has hydrogen in it."
Hydrogen is in all sorts of stuff. To get it out of stuff like gasoline, you reform it. You are using gasoline up in that case. To get it out of water, you need to use electricity of electrolyze it.
Getting hydrogen is just like getting electricity. The energy has to come from somewhere.
It is a fairly efficient means of storage. However, to store it well, you probably need Pallidium Hydrides. Thes store about 800 times their volume in hydrogen. For a car to run 500 miles on hydrogen, you would need to shell out about 1,000 for the hydride storage, however.
I can't stress this enough: HYDROGEN IS NOT AN ENERGY SOURCE! It is energy storage. To make hydrogen, you lose more energy than you gain. However, hydrogen fuel cells are better than electric cars.
Right now, hydrogen or electric cars are a stupid idea. They pollute more than gasoline engines. Heres why:
An electric car mostly gets it's energy from highly polluting coal and oil plants. About 50% of the energy is lost in power generation. Another 10% of that is lost in power transmission. Now you have 45% of the power you started out with. Then, it is put into batteries. You lose about 30% of your power. Now you got about 30% of what you started out with. Then you run it though the electic motor. This gives about 40% efficiency under ideal conditions. That leaves you with about 17% effiency.
So here are the energy effiencies:
Gasoline
about 30%
Electric
about 17%
Electric uses much more energy and pollutes much more than gasoline. Gasoline powered cars now are very low emission. The coal plants that would power electic cars are not.
Electric and hydrogen only make sense if we have a clean, very cheap form of power generation, such as hydro or nuclear. Solar and Wind wouldn't work to well to power electric cars. Electric cars need lots of electricity. Solar or wind power at 10 cents a KW hour is wayyy to expensive to power a car with. Nuclear and Hydro, each at about 3-4 cent a KW hour, would be more expensive than gasoline, but they wouldn't pollute at all.
Hybrid cars are the best solution right now. They offer substantial pollution reduction and gas mileage improvements over ordinary cars. Plus we don't have to build a whole bunch of new power plants to power them, as we would if everyone switched to electic.
Anyway, I think by far the best solution to our energy problems right now is to build more nuclear plants and use hybrid cars.
Well, it's wireless, and you may be able to daisy chain through multiple devices (e.g. repeaters) to go longer distances
Wouldn't it be easier to just have a high speed ethernet connection? This is about as expensive as 802.11B but only goes a few meters. You would have to have a lot of reapeaters.
Netcraft confirms the truth: *VSB is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *VSB community when recently IDC confirmed that *VSB accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *VSB has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *VSB is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *VSB's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *VSB faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *VSB because *VSB is dying. Things are looking very bad for *VSB. As many of us are already aware, *VSB continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeVSB is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenVSB leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenVSB. How many users of NetVSB are there? Let's see. The number of OpenVSB versus NetVSB posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. VSB/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetVSB posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of VSB/OS. A recent article put FreeVSB at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeVSB users. This is consistent with the number of FreeVSB Usenet posts.
All major surveys show that *Netcraft confirms the truth: *Netcraft confirms the truth: *VSB is dying
Fact: *VSB is dead
Wow! Now I can transmit 50-100 MBPS over 5 to ten meters! At only several times the cost of 100 MBPS ethernet and over a shorter distance!
May I all point you to a study done a few months ago that points to 6 hours a night being optimal.
This was a study of 1.1 million people over 6 years. It should be accurate. It showed, contrary to popular belief, that those who got 8 or more hours tended to die a little younger than those who got 6 or 7.
Also, it you get less sleep, in effect you are living longer.If you sleep 6 instead of 8, you get 2 more hours each day. That adds up to several years over your life, in effect.
I feel very refreshed with 6 hours of sleep. 8 hours makes me feel groggy.
For an animal to risk their lives by shutting down and being almost totally vulnerable for 8 or so hours a day and for sleep to have survived evolution for so long and amoung so many different species of animals means it must be pretty damn important.
Yeah. I agree. I've heard before that REM sleep is kind of the brain's daily cleaning of unwanted noise and short-term memory. Also, when food is in short supply, sleeping might still be an evolutionary advantage. If not much is going on, sleep makes sense. It conserves valuable calories because your metabolism is reduced quite a bit. That's why lions sleep 20 hours a day.
This does sound like a great drug for many people. But I think I'll stick with caffeine. For people w/o a heart condition it's perfectly safe. And it works astonishingly well. (Unless you chug down a lot of caffeine. That will cause you to be wired for a few hours and then crash)
One thing I like about caffeine is the delectible means of delivery. A hot cup of coffee or a refreshing iced tea is much more pleasurable than a pill any day.
Also, caffeine has another benefit, at least for me. It helps me control my depression. Last year, I didn't drink much caffeine, and I had a horrible depression. Caffeine seems to calm my depression somewhat. Whenever I feel depressed, I reach for the coffee or iced tea. About a half an hour later when it takes effect, my depression is reduced.
This works because caffeine manipulates dopamine production. It produces increased levels of dopamine, your body's happy neurotransmitter. It does the same thing as pot or alcohol, just to a lesser degree. This curbs my depression.
Of course when you come off of caffeine, it is horrible. When I have gone though withdrawal before, my depression comes back worse than before, I'm tired, and I'm completely pissed off, not to mention getting crushing headache. Of course that is prevented by drinking caffeine every day. I'd rather be addicted to caffeine than go though the hell of depression again.
I am one of those people who gets up early. I get up at 4:30. I get to sleep somewhere around midnight. So I get about 4 1/2 hours of sleep a night. Much less than the usual 6-9 hours recommended.
Despite getting little sleep, I function perfectly well with my pleasantly bitter friends: coffee and iced tea. I am a high school sophomore. Even though I get little sleep, this year I am still running with about a 3.9 GPA. All of this is thanks to caffeine.
In the morning, if it is wintertime, I usualy imbibe two 20 oz. cups of strong black coffee. (I like it black, like my women) In the spring or summer, I drink about two quarts of iced tea. Dammit I love iced tea. I'm drinking a glass right now. Anyway, I've got a C++ programming class first period, and there is no way in hell I would be able to code well at 7:50 A.M. without my caffeine.
Then, 3rd period, my science teacher gives out coffee. He believes it helps us focus better, which it does. I get recharged from a good 16 OZ. cup in his class.
By the end of the day, I begin to crash. But then I have toning (gym) class. The physical exercise gets me alert again. Then, I get home, and enjoy another tall glass of strong iced tea.
As for the health problems of me drinking a lot of caffeine: I don't believe it is causing a big problem. I have a resting heart rate of 58 Beats Per Minute. Most people my age group are around 70 BPM. So I don't have tachycardia or anything. My blood pressure, the last time I checked, is 95/55. I can also run a mile in 5:30, so I am somewhat physically fit. The only reason I could see for someone avoiding caffeine is if they have a heart problem. Then, the higher heart rates and blood pressure brought on by caffeine is not so good.
Now, an unhealthy way of getting your caffeine is to drink pop. Pop contains quite a few empty calories. It also has an ingredient that depletes your bone density. I stopped drinking pop 2 years ago. I have no desire to start again. Now that I have been off it for a while, I just think pop is sickeningly oversweet. It's easy to kick the pop habit. Just refrain from drinking pop for a month or so and you should have no desire for it anymore. The junk food habit is not too hard to kick either. I don't eat any junk food such as potato chips anymore like I used to.
here
(Humor)
If the student asked his father or mother?
You: Dad, I need help on my classpaths.
Dad: WTF are you talking about???
I've no doubt the goat.cx link makes you sick, yet it doesn't cause any desire in you to see more, nor to "take it to the next level."
ERRGG. I really hope nobody takes it to the next level.
czardonic, you are correct. I am 16, not a quite a kid, but still in the custody of my parents. When my dad gives me some money to spend on food or somthing, I spend every last cent. However, when I have my own money, I am a fscking tightwad. I need to save up money for the Geforce 4, you know.
I am morally opposed to flash animation. It is the work of the devil. Luring us into insanity with repetitious aninmations dancing obnoxiously across the screen. ARRRGGG!!!! (ok, that didn't make much sense, but it nicely sums up my feelings about flash)
children don't like slow downloads
Wow! Nothing escapes these genuises!
Wow!! Now not only Jafac can d/l movies in Kabul, he can set up his own streaming server!!
Many legends you look at have some basis in truth. It's pretty easy to see how a natural disaster could get distorted over the millenia. Take the great deluge for example:
Around 8,000 years ago, the black sea was a freshwater lake about 2/3 of it's current size. It is now believed that there was a proto-civilization along it's shores. Then, water from the Mediterrainean broke through the strip of land at the Dardanelles. This caused a cataclysmic flood around the Black Sea area, inudating hundreds of square miles, including the proto-civilization.
Now the flood took about 48 hours to fill up the black sea. Everyone should have been able to escape. But over the millenia, as the story was told orally, embellishments were added on to it. You know how Granpa said he blocked the exploding grenade with his helmet, shot Heinrich Himmler, and did all that other crap during the war? Anyway, this story was told orally for 3,000 years before a distorted version of it was written down in the classic "Epic of Gilgamesh", the first great literary achievement.(read it. It's very good.)
The Flood legend was incorporated into pretty much every culture in the fetile crescent area, including the jewish culture.
Other legends: The indians of the Columbia Basin in WA st. also have a flood myth. This is from the devastating Missoula Floods. This series of floods was caused by an ice dam reapededly blocking the Clark Fork River. It formed a lake the size of Lk Eerie behind it and it was 2,000 feet deep. When the dam broke, it realesed a 2000 foot high wall of water, devastating everything and killing any indians in it's path. These floods also formed huge rock coulees all over the columbia basin.
Another one is Atlantis: This was probably the island of Thera near crete. It had a very technologically advanced Minoan city on it. Then one day, the Thera volcano exploded with a force many, many times more than the Krakatoa eruption. It sunk part of the island and also produced huge tidal waves.
Um, the glaciers receded by about 10,000 BC, give or take 2,000 years.
This city supposedly dates maybe around 5,000 years ago (~3,000 BC).
Well, the melting of glaciers was gradual. It occured over many thousands of years. It's not like, "Boom" and we were out of the ice age. There have even beem sunken cities due to sea level changes less than 2,000 years ago. Parts of Alexandria are now submerged.
From the article:
Scientists now want to explore the possibility that the city was submerged following the last Ice Age.
However, you make a good point. Now I wonder if it was just built during a very cool period (as opposed to the end of the last ice age) and it has just been submerged by today's comparatively warmer climate. I don't know.
Actually, this city has sunk because the sea levels have risen since the last ice age. U see, during the last ice age, much of the ocean's water was locked up in ice. Sea level was about 300 feet lower than it is today. As the ice melted over several millenia, sea levels rose to their present levels.
Anyway, I think we would see some real evidence for a world engulfing flood that occured only 5,000 years ago. Using the bible's genealogy and stuff, scholars have pinpointed the year of Noah's flood according to the bible. It supposedly was around 2700 BC. Funny that the egyptians and the Sumerians never seemed to notice it!
Discaimer: IANAP
But here is my understanding of black hole radiation or Hawking Radiation:
First of all, you must understand quantum tunneling. This is a principle in which particles have a certain probability that they will bypass, or "tunnel" though a barrier and reappear on the other side. Sometimes the particles tunnel at much faster than the speed of light. The thicker the barrier the less chance there is of the particle to tunnel. Tunneling doesn't only occur with microscopic distances. There have been experiments of photons tunneling up to a foot. (BTW, quantum tunneling has been observed experimentally.)
This does relate to black holes. In quantum physics, virtual particle-antiparticle pairs are produced from the Zero-Point Energy background all the time. They just annihilate eachother very quickly.
Now if a particle-antiparticle pair are created just inside the event horizon of a black hole, there is a probability that one of the particles will tunnel out of the black hole and escape into space. Since the particles can't annihilate each other, they become real. In order not to violate thermodynamics, the new matter created is balanced out by the loss of some energy of the black hole. In this way, the black hole radiates energy.
Now this effect is negligible for large black holes, such as supermassive ones at galactic centers, or ones created from a collapsed star. But for small black holes, like quantum black holes that are about the mass of an asteroid, or very tiny quantum black holes made up of only a few particles, this effect is very important. (these asteroid sized quantum black holes may have produced at the big bang. No evidence for them exists. We're pretty sure the smaller quantum sized ones are created all the time by natural processes. There is an accelerator planned that will be able to produce them.)
Smaller black holes radiate much faster than large ones. As I said earlier, particles have a greater probability of tunneling across a thin barrier. A large black hole has a slower drop-off in the amount of gravity as you go farther away from it. That means that the particle has to tunnel a long ways to be able to get away from the black hole. This means that there is almost no energy escaping. The hawking radiation of a 30 solar mass black hole is 10-32 of a watt.
Now for small black holes, this is different. The particles have a greater possibility of escaping by tunneling because they have to tunnel a shorter distance to escape. An asteriod-mass quantum black hole created at the beginning of the universe would be finally exploding right about now. For a small quantum black hole, they last only a tiny fraction of a second.
Lastly, if we can figure out how to produce largish quantum black holes, with masses at least on the order of micrograms, our energy problems would be solved. You see, when black holes explode, only pure energy, not matter, is realeased. I don't know how that would be done. The yet-to-be-built Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider should produce quantum black holes. We should be able to detect the energy produced when the explode.
Anyway, here is an excellent article on artificial black holes. Here is one on Hawking Radiation. I am giving you the Google Cache because the original page has a DoubleClick cookie on it.
I know you're just joking. But on the subject of neutronium:
It's only found in ultra-dense neutron stars. Neutron stars are completely composed of neutrons because under the immense heat and pressur electrons and protons combine, producing neutrons.
I wouldn't try to build a spaceship. When you realease the ultra-pressure of neutronium, it inconvieniently produces a mega-explosion, with the neutrons and everything turning back into hydogen.
It would be strong though, even for it's weight. Since nuclear forces bind it, neutronium would be ultra-strong. Nuclear forces bind neutronium because it has the density of an atomic nucleus. But the outward pressure of this high density substance is even more than the atomic forces can handle, so you would have trouble keeping it countained.
Quarkonium would be even harder to contain and even stronger.
All said, I suggest you use carbon nanotubes for your next spaceship hull. Much safer and easier. Plus your ship won't weigh as much as the moon.
As light doesnt have mass, the gravity that would be required to catch it would require a mass equal to infinity.
.999999999 C. It is affected by gravity just as much matter. The reason why it doesn't bend very much around the sun is because it is moving so fast. Just like how a faster thrown baseball will travel farther than a slow one, light doesn't get deflected much because of it's speed.
It doesn't matter whether it has mass or not. Don't you remember Galileo's famous experiment where he proved objects of different weights drop at the same rate? If you dropped a feather and a peice of lead in a vacuum chamber, they would hit the ground at exactly the same time.
Of course photons are effected by gravity!
Haven't you heard of gravitional lenses astronomers use sometimes? In addition, during solar eclipses, stars close to the sun have their light bent around the sun so they look even closer than they actually are.
Light is deflected by gravity just a tad less than a material object going
If somehow you slowed light down to just a couple miles an hour, it would fall down to the ground(assuming a vacuum and no other interference. BTW, it is impossible to slow light down in a vacuum like that).
Anyway, gravity affects all things. Gravity is not so much a force as it is the manifestation of the fourth dimension, time. All objects, massless or not, travel in a straight line in four dimensional space-time, unless acted on by an outside force. Of course material objects distort spacetime, producing what we know as gravity.
Four dimensionally, the Earth is moving perfectly straight.
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Jeez, it's already slashdotted.