and a particularly sad one. Exactly what is the point? That a girl denied herself gratification in anticipation of your sorry ass? I say 'girl' intentionally as that is the group this attitude is most often foisted upon.
How does nursing a puritanical viewpoint on a natural enjoyable experience constitute purity? I can respect a woman's choice to not have sex in sense that it is her choice and none of my damn business, but I pity that it is probably indicative of maturity problems and early indoctrination.
The whole preoccupation is disgusting and demeaning to women in general. Your ideas are a hold over from regarding women and their bodies as property of their fathers and husbands.
You could, at least in over half the states in the U.S., get yourself in heaps of trouble if you were caught giving your children alcohol, therein lies the problem.
That is the problem! This bill is a step in the direction of censorship, and, as all educated people should have hammered into their skulls, censorship is the tool of tyranny.
Your post would be valid if it were correct, but people with children have to be responsible for them themselves, and as things stand even now they are not in many respects.
The models of how the sun works predict a certain output of neutrinos that we should be able to measure on Earth, but the measurements have been much lower than expected. This at first suggested something was wrong with the models, but no problems could be found. Instead it was suggested that the problem was particle physics and our understanding of how neutrinos behave.
The results shown in this article are important because the evidence means new areas to study.
lawful aligned people give me the heebie-jeebies, the sort of people that agree with what the greek intent of the play Antigone was. I see it as an example of the tragedy of people who blindly follow rules for no reason, as opposed to "that bitch got what she deserved"
/me shivers.
But to get back on topic, no, schools aren't for learning. My highschool went to great lengths to PREVENT people from learning. College isn't much better now, to some extent because I'm stuck in hell (TN) where the state budget situation is such that the two reasons they haven't shut down all the schools in the entire state is because the feds might step in, and sports, which the legislature fears would bother the rabble. And i'm being dead serious.
But I have a creeping suspicion that College would be quite similar anywhere. I was quite shattered when I discovered that college wasn't the chance to be surrounded by great learned people and gulp at the cup of human knowledge until I could drink no more; no college is a conveyor belt for producing tools for corporate america. Mostly in the form of money sucking middle management, people who put absolutely nothing into the system while diluting the flow.
Why do Christian invariably fall into anthropomorphic and other rediculous arguments?
And you confuse cause and effect continuously, "The universe is just right for people to exist, therefore it must have been created for us."
Is it not far more logical to say, "We exist in this universe because it is the one that has the correct conditions for our existence."
And that bloody argument about the "vertebrate eye is too complex to have come about by evolution, therefore evolution is wrong." How do people persist in using this absurd statement? Despite the fact that there are organisms possessed of every gradiation from a simple light sensitive nerve on some worms, on up to the vertebrate eye. If you study biology you can see all the stages of the evolution of biological optics. And yet just last week I saw the "vertebrate eye" argument quoted in a newspaper as proof of intelligent-design.
there really is a lot to be said for this argument. Text based e-mail clients are much more streamlined, and thereby allow much easier, faster access to e-mail. By avoiding bloated interfaces that take up to much space and brain processing power, you get a better communication interface.
true that science is not about solid truths, at all times, but it can be. Especially since once you reach a high enough level of technology, things that you infer in previous centuries from experimental data, (such as the earth, in fact, orbiting the sun) can eventually be directly observed.
It would be trivial to send a probe perpendicular to the plane of the solar system and then have it look "down" and send back movies of the earth orbiting the sun. It would be more difficult, but still possible, to send a human being to do the same. This experiment would clearly be solid irrefutable proof of the Copernican solar system, equivalent to saying "the sky is blue, because I can see that it is." People could still argue, but they would have no argument unless they start denying the soundness of human perception.
1. Laws passed by Congress are limited amendments to the Constitution, therefore rights granted to the people by Congress to the Citizens of the United States explicitly in laws are de facto Constitutional Rights.
2. Article X. of the Constitution of the United States
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
3. If you are so conservative as to beleive in following the letter of the law, as opposed to following its intent, I present this:
Clause 8 of Article 1:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Clearly if you go by the letter, Congress does not have the power to grant copyright protection to recordings of music, video, etc, at all. The only things that can be protected are scripts and sheet music. Therefore, fair use is a moot point for anything other than books, papers, poetry, and other PRINTED media, because that is all that is explicitly stated.
4. For my last point I refer you againg to Article 1, Clause 8 above. The intent of this clause is to encourage innovation, and art, by granting LIMITED monopolies to allow artists to charge for their works, the keys being "limited times," and "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The intent of this clause is clearly spelled out, how can you possibly deny its explicit intent? Congress' power is to allow artists some recompense as a means of encouraging innovation and additional artistic endeavors. As fair use, in many of its applications, such as reviewing a work, further this goal, fair use is therefore a ligitimate extension of Congress' power.
What exactly do you think is going to happen as China's population approaches 2 Billion? the people are just going to lay down and die? Same for India as it grows. And if you think those nations have their populations under control, just go check the UN's page on population growth. BTW Most of Africa's population is still growing quite rapidly.
http://www.unfpa.org/
I conjecture the obvious answer that has been observed in history when populations get desperate. They go to war, Invade other nations in a grab for resources. (Ex. Germany, Japan in WWII, although that WAS different, they needed industrial resources mostly)
What exactly DO you think should be done about China? Wait and see? Or should we cross our fingers and launch a pre-emptive strike?
I do not find either solution even remotely satisfactory.
It is your kind of attitude that is going to lead to WWIII, which is, by the way, A BAD THING.
(in the oops we just turned the Earth into a copy of Venus sense)
SDI does not, and cannot work, and here's why:
The change in the cost for an SDI system to increase its effectiveness is exponential, while the change in cost to defeat an SDI system is linear. Therefore, delta C (of SDI) is larger order than delta C (to defeat SDI). What this means is that the cost of an SDI system approaches infinity much faster than the cost of building nukes.
But how do I get these functions from you ask? simple.
Any ballistic missle counter measure is very expensive, because its technology (primarily guidance, but everything must be of much higher quality, you just can't afford failures) must be much much better than that of a ballistic missle. Therefore in order to reach, oh say 50% effectiveness (that is 50% of deployed countermeasures successfully neutralize their targets) you must spend far, far more on your countermeasures to defeat the enemies attack, than the attacker has to spend on his missles. Think about it in terms of computers, the guidance chip in a nuke can be equivelant to about a 386 and still be able to perform quite well, while an anti-ballistic missle unit needs at least an Athlon. Now consider the difference in cost between the two: the 386 costs maybe $5 now, while the Althon is over $200, thats exponential change in cost for you.
An attacker though, has only to launch more missles to neutralize your countermeasures.
So before you get all riled up to get into a nuke tossing war with someone, you need to think damn long and hard about what you consider acceptable losses, because anyway you slice it, if the US gets into a Nuke war, because we are going to lose several major cities, SDI or no.
You people need to realize that the only real hope to avoid such a situation is for the US to stop acting like a swaggering unilateral bull, and to start acting like a responsible citizen of the world. We must start solving the very real issues that face the world today or WWIII will happen. The primary issues are Overpopulation, coupled with the problem of food and water supply, and the substantial damage being done to the environment.
The earth is already pretty badly overpopulated (according to UN), currently that means that the amount of population over the sustainable population is causing immense damage to the ecosphere. It is eventually going to get so bad that we will see food riots, widespread cannabalism and all the Malthusian horrors. This is a path that leads invariably to war, probably the last war that will ever be fought on earth.
The US, and all the other major nations need to be acting now to counteract population growth and environmental damage, not wasting resources setting up a worthless missle defense system.
"Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed."
"Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something."
"Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let's play that over again, too. Who decides?"
of course these all lead to the next issue:
Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure "good" government; it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare - most people want to run things but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the "backseat-driver syndrome.""
The Notesbooks of Lazarus Long are better than any religious text ever written, the signal to noise ratio is phenomenal.
The potential benefits of such a mission should not be measured merely in the scientific knowledge we would gain (although that would be profoundly valauble moreso, than the lives of the kids IMO, and yes I'm a cold pragmatic bastard about such things, I would be perfectly willing to support my opinion that 99.99% of those children would never have accomplished anything anyway.) The true value is the sum of that knowledge plus the technology and science we would develop for the trip, which would doubtless be of incalculable financial wealth.
Earthbound is ok, and it IS a real RPG. It was just targeted at kids.
The problem with the square school of rpg's is that they haven't evolved at all from the SNES days. They've improved the graphics to be sure, going from pixelated 2D to quite impressive 3D, but graphics alone do not a Great RPG make. Depth, and in the case of Chronotrigger, multiple endings are what make games and RPG's are no exception. Square's game were comparitively great in the past because they had greater depth and story than the competition, but that is far from true anymore.
That was one of the major points of relativity. There's no true state of rest either, incidentally. Flow of time and rates of motion are both relative. You can say two objects are stationary relative to each other, but that doesn't mean they both aren't moving. Time works similarly, since the difference in the rate of time flow on two objects is dependent on their relative velocities.
Like the author of the article said, the most important part about copyright, and I would extend this to IP law in general, is not about making sure people get paid. IP is supposed to be about limiting how long people can own things!
It's all about the old saying "you can't take it with you" except everyone now is trying their damnedest anyway.
Artists and innovators produced art and innovation prior to copyright and patent law, and they would continue to do so if it was abolish. In fact, it would drastically increase quality in all likelyhood, as pop garbage would stop.
The US needs to take a hint from Parliment, who had this figured out centuries ago. Ownership lasts for existing life + 20 years, and stops, no extension.
An awful lot of America's woes can be blamed squarely on the puritans (bloody conservatives) who came up with the rediculous idea that anything you earn or own in your lifetime belongs to you to do with as you choose until the end of time, utter complete hogwash. Now as a direct decendant of their idiocy we have the travesty of modern IP, and whiny brats squaling about death taxes and other limitations on ownership.
Natural Selection offers an immense amount of prediction if you have the sense to see it. It predicts that you should observe gradual changes in species through the fossil record for one.
Another big point that you are missing is that birds could quite obviously have evolved from already flying reptiles. Ever heard of a Pterodactyl? Pterodactyls were a family of species that looked roughly like giant bats. They didn't have feathers, but they were definately capable of gliding and at the very least limited flight. Feathers could have evolved from scales over time as they changed to be both better for flight control, and for insulation in flight.
The problem with this is, that America has never decided what constitutes "artistic in nature," or "pornography." The best definition ever given was Hugh Hefner's (Erotica is what turns ME on, Pornography is what turns YOU on), which unfortunatly doesn't work as a legal definition.
American really needs to grow up, suck it up and get over it. Sex is real, natural, its not going away, and demonizing it just results in generations of completely fsck'ed up people. Erotica and porn are just extensions of people's inherent sexuality.
I'm suspending my disbelief for a moment and accepting that they have acheived limited nuclear fusion for the sake of argument (whether they have or haven't will have to be decided from later evidence)
This observation doesn't seem to be especially useful, at least for power generation. The article doesn't give any numbers, but I'm guessing that they number of hydrogen atoms they are claiming reacted is quite small, like hundreds. In that case the energy generated would be quite small, just a few joules, on the close order of 1-10.
I think it would be foolish to assert that hydrogen fusion NEVER occurs at low energies, thats just ridiculous, random hydrogen atoms must bump into each other occasionally and undergo fusion, its just very unlikely to occur frequently at low temperatures.
BUT, this discovery, if it checks out, will probably just be a scientific curiosity, it's almost certain that this reaction would be unable to scale up to levels required for practical power generation of any kind. On the upside for the scientists, they'll probably get a footnote in the history books as the first people to observe and produce proof of nuclear fusion at low energies. Which is worth something, if not the nobel prize.
DCS (Department of Children's Services) is equivalent to the secret police. They can go anywhere, do anything, and accuse anyone of anything. Mostly because no one has the cojones to argue in court that children aren't as important as civil liberties and freedom (which they aren't).
If you have children, you're basically screwed if you piss someone in DCS off, even if you have money. Why? Standard practice is, they take the kids first, if you want them back they make the mother or father confess to abuse, usually sexual. Then they go file an indictment. And the victim goes to jail.
IANAL, but these are things which I have been told have happened by lawyers.
And it keeps getting better. DCS buddies up with local sheriff's depts. on drug stuff. So what happens? Officer calls DCS, "I think there's drugs in this house, but I can't prove. They have children." DCS employee goes to house, along with police officer to "protect" him/her. And they enter the house, THIS IS NOT A SEARCH, legally, and this has been tested in court. The police officer can take note of anything and the 4th amendment does not apply. You cannot refuse the DCS employee and police officer entry, if you do they take your children.
Basically it boils down to this, if DCS takes an interest in you, and you have kids, you go to jail for 20 years, end up on the sex offender list for life, and thereby have your life ruined.
The DMCA, SSCA, all the other garbage, as terrifying as they are, are nothing compared to horror that is child welfare.
DVD's came at a bad time really, They were an enhancement of the red laser technology to get the highest data capacity possible. The change was so you could shrink a laserdisc down to CD size. The problem is, at about the same time HDTV started getting pushed, and DVD's just don't have the capacity to store higher resolutions with sufficient play time. The industry really needs to decide to have Blu-ray or its equivalent have players that are backwards compatible with DVDs, and make High Definition DVDs just a higher capacity and higher-bitrate extension of DVD.
The result of such a decision would be great for consumers, eg only slightly confusing. You have standard DVD, which can be played in all DVD players and Blu-ray/HD-DVD players, and is low-res; and you have Blu-ray/HD-DVD that works only in Blu-ray/HD-DVD players, but is high-res.
Unfortunately, this would probably break down so that HD-DVD would be the laserdisc to DVD's VHS, which means studios would rape those of us who want the HD releases. Instead of a reasonable premium (+$5 to $10), they would probably charge 2 to 3 times the DVD price for HD titles. Which would drastically slow the market penetration of both. More people would be afraid to get DVD players lest it be discontinued, while very few HD-Players get sold due to higher cost. Generally resulting in lower revenues for the media industry.
It would be nice to beleive the media industry would get a clue and start working on economies of scale based on actual cost of production + reasonable profit, but I don't really believe it would happen.
they can, that is, a blue laser CD system would be able to read old skool red lasers with almost no trouble at all. The only difficulty is adding the firmware to read the older data format.
The original Japanese Dreamcast was. The American Dreamcast just had a fan. It still negates the point of this article though. Water cooling for consumer electronics has already happened and is, in fact, Old News.
1. Market penetration of HDTV equipment is inconsequential at best
2. HDTV Programming while becoming a bit more common, is still few and far between by comparison.
3. Who actually watches that much TV anyway? (Sorry, but really) The only things I watch on TV anymore are low-res, low-quality by nature. (Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, and I only watch them when i happen to be bored and they are on)
As I remember it, there's some kind of loopwhole where providers can use the HDTV space to provide more low res channels and thats about all I see happening in the forseeable future. I regard HD as dead in the water.
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How does nursing a puritanical viewpoint on a natural enjoyable experience constitute purity? I can respect a woman's choice to not have sex in sense that it is her choice and none of my damn business, but I pity that it is probably indicative of maturity problems and early indoctrination.
The whole preoccupation is disgusting and demeaning to women in general. Your ideas are a hold over from regarding women and their bodies as property of their fathers and husbands.
That is the problem! This bill is a step in the direction of censorship, and, as all educated people should have hammered into their skulls, censorship is the tool of tyranny.
Your post would be valid if it were correct, but people with children have to be responsible for them themselves, and as things stand even now they are not in many respects.
The results shown in this article are important because the evidence means new areas to study.
But to get back on topic, no, schools aren't for learning. My highschool went to great lengths to PREVENT people from learning. College isn't much better now, to some extent because I'm stuck in hell (TN) where the state budget situation is such that the two reasons they haven't shut down all the schools in the entire state is because the feds might step in, and sports, which the legislature fears would bother the rabble. And i'm being dead serious.
But I have a creeping suspicion that College would be quite similar anywhere. I was quite shattered when I discovered that college wasn't the chance to be surrounded by great learned people and gulp at the cup of human knowledge until I could drink no more; no college is a conveyor belt for producing tools for corporate america. Mostly in the form of money sucking middle management, people who put absolutely nothing into the system while diluting the flow.
Is it not far more logical to say, "We exist in this universe because it is the one that has the correct conditions for our existence."
And that bloody argument about the "vertebrate eye is too complex to have come about by evolution, therefore evolution is wrong." How do people persist in using this absurd statement? Despite the fact that there are organisms possessed of every gradiation from a simple light sensitive nerve on some worms, on up to the vertebrate eye. If you study biology you can see all the stages of the evolution of biological optics. And yet just last week I saw the "vertebrate eye" argument quoted in a newspaper as proof of intelligent-design.
Ye gods, what fools these mortals be.
there really is a lot to be said for this argument. Text based e-mail clients are much more streamlined, and thereby allow much easier, faster access to e-mail. By avoiding bloated interfaces that take up to much space and brain processing power, you get a better communication interface.
It would be trivial to send a probe perpendicular to the plane of the solar system and then have it look "down" and send back movies of the earth orbiting the sun. It would be more difficult, but still possible, to send a human being to do the same. This experiment would clearly be solid irrefutable proof of the Copernican solar system, equivalent to saying "the sky is blue, because I can see that it is." People could still argue, but they would have no argument unless they start denying the soundness of human perception.
1. Laws passed by Congress are limited amendments to the Constitution, therefore rights granted to the people by Congress to the Citizens of the United States explicitly in laws are de facto Constitutional Rights.
2. Article X. of the Constitution of the United States
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
3. If you are so conservative as to beleive in following the letter of the law, as opposed to following its intent, I present this:
Clause 8 of Article 1: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Clearly if you go by the letter, Congress does not have the power to grant copyright protection to recordings of music, video, etc, at all. The only things that can be protected are scripts and sheet music. Therefore, fair use is a moot point for anything other than books, papers, poetry, and other PRINTED media, because that is all that is explicitly stated.
4. For my last point I refer you againg to Article 1, Clause 8 above. The intent of this clause is to encourage innovation, and art, by granting LIMITED monopolies to allow artists to charge for their works, the keys being "limited times," and "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The intent of this clause is clearly spelled out, how can you possibly deny its explicit intent? Congress' power is to allow artists some recompense as a means of encouraging innovation and additional artistic endeavors. As fair use, in many of its applications, such as reviewing a work, further this goal, fair use is therefore a ligitimate extension of Congress' power.
What exactly do you think is going to happen as China's population approaches 2 Billion? the people are just going to lay down and die? Same for India as it grows. And if you think those nations have their populations under control, just go check the UN's page on population growth. BTW Most of Africa's population is still growing quite rapidly.
http://www.unfpa.org/
I conjecture the obvious answer that has been observed in history when populations get desperate. They go to war, Invade other nations in a grab for resources. (Ex. Germany, Japan in WWII, although that WAS different, they needed industrial resources mostly)
What exactly DO you think should be done about China? Wait and see? Or should we cross our fingers and launch a pre-emptive strike?
I do not find either solution even remotely satisfactory.
(in the oops we just turned the Earth into a copy of Venus sense)
SDI does not, and cannot work, and here's why:
The change in the cost for an SDI system to increase its effectiveness is exponential, while the change in cost to defeat an SDI system is linear. Therefore, delta C (of SDI) is larger order than delta C (to defeat SDI). What this means is that the cost of an SDI system approaches infinity much faster than the cost of building nukes.
But how do I get these functions from you ask? simple.
Any ballistic missle counter measure is very expensive, because its technology (primarily guidance, but everything must be of much higher quality, you just can't afford failures) must be much much better than that of a ballistic missle. Therefore in order to reach, oh say 50% effectiveness (that is 50% of deployed countermeasures successfully neutralize their targets) you must spend far, far more on your countermeasures to defeat the enemies attack, than the attacker has to spend on his missles. Think about it in terms of computers, the guidance chip in a nuke can be equivelant to about a 386 and still be able to perform quite well, while an anti-ballistic missle unit needs at least an Athlon. Now consider the difference in cost between the two: the 386 costs maybe $5 now, while the Althon is over $200, thats exponential change in cost for you.
An attacker though, has only to launch more missles to neutralize your countermeasures.
So before you get all riled up to get into a nuke tossing war with someone, you need to think damn long and hard about what you consider acceptable losses, because anyway you slice it, if the US gets into a Nuke war, because we are going to lose several major cities, SDI or no.
You people need to realize that the only real hope to avoid such a situation is for the US to stop acting like a swaggering unilateral bull, and to start acting like a responsible citizen of the world. We must start solving the very real issues that face the world today or WWIII will happen. The primary issues are Overpopulation, coupled with the problem of food and water supply, and the substantial damage being done to the environment.
The earth is already pretty badly overpopulated (according to UN), currently that means that the amount of population over the sustainable population is causing immense damage to the ecosphere. It is eventually going to get so bad that we will see food riots, widespread cannabalism and all the Malthusian horrors. This is a path that leads invariably to war, probably the last war that will ever be fought on earth.
The US, and all the other major nations need to be acting now to counteract population growth and environmental damage, not wasting resources setting up a worthless missle defense system.
three quotes are quite relevent here:
"Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed."
"Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something."
"Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let's play that over again, too. Who decides?"
of course these all lead to the next issue:
Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure "good" government; it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare - most people want to run things but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the "backseat-driver syndrome.""
The Notesbooks of Lazarus Long are better than any religious text ever written, the signal to noise ratio is phenomenal.
The potential benefits of such a mission should not be measured merely in the scientific knowledge we would gain (although that would be profoundly valauble moreso, than the lives of the kids IMO, and yes I'm a cold pragmatic bastard about such things, I would be perfectly willing to support my opinion that 99.99% of those children would never have accomplished anything anyway.) The true value is the sum of that knowledge plus the technology and science we would develop for the trip, which would doubtless be of incalculable financial wealth.
The problem with the square school of rpg's is that they haven't evolved at all from the SNES days. They've improved the graphics to be sure, going from pixelated 2D to quite impressive 3D, but graphics alone do not a Great RPG make. Depth, and in the case of Chronotrigger, multiple endings are what make games and RPG's are no exception. Square's game were comparitively great in the past because they had greater depth and story than the competition, but that is far from true anymore.
10% is approx. 620,000,000
That was one of the major points of relativity. There's no true state of rest either, incidentally. Flow of time and rates of motion are both relative. You can say two objects are stationary relative to each other, but that doesn't mean they both aren't moving. Time works similarly, since the difference in the rate of time flow on two objects is dependent on their relative velocities.
It's all about the old saying "you can't take it with you" except everyone now is trying their damnedest anyway.
Artists and innovators produced art and innovation prior to copyright and patent law, and they would continue to do so if it was abolish. In fact, it would drastically increase quality in all likelyhood, as pop garbage would stop.
The US needs to take a hint from Parliment, who had this figured out centuries ago. Ownership lasts for existing life + 20 years, and stops, no extension.
An awful lot of America's woes can be blamed squarely on the puritans (bloody conservatives) who came up with the rediculous idea that anything you earn or own in your lifetime belongs to you to do with as you choose until the end of time, utter complete hogwash. Now as a direct decendant of their idiocy we have the travesty of modern IP, and whiny brats squaling about death taxes and other limitations on ownership.
Another big point that you are missing is that birds could quite obviously have evolved from already flying reptiles. Ever heard of a Pterodactyl? Pterodactyls were a family of species that looked roughly like giant bats. They didn't have feathers, but they were definately capable of gliding and at the very least limited flight. Feathers could have evolved from scales over time as they changed to be both better for flight control, and for insulation in flight.
American really needs to grow up, suck it up and get over it. Sex is real, natural, its not going away, and demonizing it just results in generations of completely fsck'ed up people. Erotica and porn are just extensions of people's inherent sexuality.
This observation doesn't seem to be especially useful, at least for power generation. The article doesn't give any numbers, but I'm guessing that they number of hydrogen atoms they are claiming reacted is quite small, like hundreds. In that case the energy generated would be quite small, just a few joules, on the close order of 1-10.
I think it would be foolish to assert that hydrogen fusion NEVER occurs at low energies, thats just ridiculous, random hydrogen atoms must bump into each other occasionally and undergo fusion, its just very unlikely to occur frequently at low temperatures.
BUT, this discovery, if it checks out, will probably just be a scientific curiosity, it's almost certain that this reaction would be unable to scale up to levels required for practical power generation of any kind. On the upside for the scientists, they'll probably get a footnote in the history books as the first people to observe and produce proof of nuclear fusion at low energies. Which is worth something, if not the nobel prize.
you're exactly right.
If you have children, you're basically screwed if you piss someone in DCS off, even if you have money. Why? Standard practice is, they take the kids first, if you want them back they make the mother or father confess to abuse, usually sexual. Then they go file an indictment. And the victim goes to jail.
IANAL, but these are things which I have been told have happened by lawyers.
And it keeps getting better. DCS buddies up with local sheriff's depts. on drug stuff. So what happens? Officer calls DCS, "I think there's drugs in this house, but I can't prove. They have children." DCS employee goes to house, along with police officer to "protect" him/her. And they enter the house, THIS IS NOT A SEARCH, legally, and this has been tested in court. The police officer can take note of anything and the 4th amendment does not apply. You cannot refuse the DCS employee and police officer entry, if you do they take your children.
Basically it boils down to this, if DCS takes an interest in you, and you have kids, you go to jail for 20 years, end up on the sex offender list for life, and thereby have your life ruined.
The DMCA, SSCA, all the other garbage, as terrifying as they are, are nothing compared to horror that is child welfare.
The result of such a decision would be great for consumers, eg only slightly confusing. You have standard DVD, which can be played in all DVD players and Blu-ray/HD-DVD players, and is low-res; and you have Blu-ray/HD-DVD that works only in Blu-ray/HD-DVD players, but is high-res.
Unfortunately, this would probably break down so that HD-DVD would be the laserdisc to DVD's VHS, which means studios would rape those of us who want the HD releases. Instead of a reasonable premium (+$5 to $10), they would probably charge 2 to 3 times the DVD price for HD titles. Which would drastically slow the market penetration of both. More people would be afraid to get DVD players lest it be discontinued, while very few HD-Players get sold due to higher cost. Generally resulting in lower revenues for the media industry.
It would be nice to beleive the media industry would get a clue and start working on economies of scale based on actual cost of production + reasonable profit, but I don't really believe it would happen.
they can, that is, a blue laser CD system would be able to read old skool red lasers with almost no trouble at all. The only difficulty is adding the firmware to read the older data format.
The original Japanese Dreamcast was. The American Dreamcast just had a fan. It still negates the point of this article though. Water cooling for consumer electronics has already happened and is, in fact, Old News.
2. HDTV Programming while becoming a bit more common, is still few and far between by comparison.
3. Who actually watches that much TV anyway? (Sorry, but really) The only things I watch on TV anymore are low-res, low-quality by nature. (Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, and I only watch them when i happen to be bored and they are on)
As I remember it, there's some kind of loopwhole where providers can use the HDTV space to provide more low res channels and thats about all I see happening in the forseeable future. I regard HD as dead in the water.