But all of these comments on the legitimacy of global warming/cooling/climate change all ignore one very simple, inescapable fact: Most "carbon-neutral" energy forms can be generated locally. Windmills use the wind in your area.
Was a still day today. Damn, no electricity for me. (well,if it weren't for the nuke to the north and the coal plant to the south)
Solar panels use the sunlight from your roof.
Good thing it wasn't cloudy. Still, those few square feet wouldn't even run the blower for my A/C, never mind the compressor. Guess I'm sticking with the nuke.
This is also true for geothermal, ocean-wave, and bio-fueled energy. All can be generated locally, with local resources.
Ain't seen any geysers around here. And there's a whole state between me and the ocean. Bio-fuels... well, most of the stuff people grow around here, they grow for food. I don't think the little bit of miracle-fuel-plant-of-the-week I could plant on my front lawn would power my heat for the season it takes to grow it, either.
But if we were to generate our energy locally, with renewable resources, not only would we leave a nicer place for our kids, grandkids, and their offspring, we'd also improve our national sovereignty.
Or, we'd shiver in the dark and/or swelter in the heat. Because if it was that easy, it would be done already. We had locally-generated renewable energy for a long time. But even then, we burned wood faster than we could renew it; there's a reason there were essentially no trees in my area at the end of the 19th century, and there are many now. With the far greater power demands of today, local renewable energy just isn't an option.
Digital sampling causes information to be lost, which results in poorer sound quality than the source. When audio is captured digitally, it cannot be captured in one continuous stream, instead it is sampled 44,100 times per second. That's just kind of how it works. Although 44,100 samples sounds pretty impressive, whatever is in between those samples is lost in the final recording and can make a noticeable difference to the human hear (especially in fast-paced music).
You're trolling, right? Please tell me you're trolling. You do understand that the only information lost at 44,100 samples per second is well above 20kHz, the conventional limit of human hearing. And that most speakers aren't going to be reproducing those frequencies accurately in any case. And that the pace of the music has nothing to do with it.
I'm pretty sure you're trolling... but you could be one of those audiophiles who believes in the sound-enhancing power of pure silver power cables...
OK, here's a CD. Think it has a bright future? Let's find out. Hmm... just pop it in, close the door... TIME-0-0-3-START... POW! Hey, it really did have a bright future. Short, but bright.
First, if you're going to write someone and try to argue a point them might respect, talking like snotty teenager isn't going to work. I'd toss your letter in the trash right at that point. Way waste time with sarcastic jerks?
I thought perhaps by being a sarcastic jerk, the argument would resonate with Scalia, who is a more accomplished sarcastic jerk than I could ever dream of being.... Seriously, though, the chance of any of the robed 9 seeing this post on Slashdot is damn near zero, and the chance of them paying attention to anything I sent them (regardless of how kind or sarcastic) is even closer to zero.
As for the punishment/not punishment aspect, if I were to actually make a serious case for it, I'd have to research the various punishment/not-punishment cases which have gone down the pike, and likely have to rely heavily on dissents. I'm aware that current case law doesn't support me; current case law allows for indefinite imprisonment in a mental institution as a non-punishment, which makes it pretty fucked up. But since I'm never going to get the chance to make the argument to anyone who matters, I'm not going to do the research.
According to Stanford's website, Ibrahim was a doctoral candidate in construction engineering
Well, there's your problem. The Ibrahim is a Muslim involved in construction. Osama bin Laden is a Muslim involved in construction. Therefore Ibrahim is Osama bin laden. Perfect government logic.
And also Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Alito... oh yeah, and Stevens, wake up, naptime is over.
Let me call your attention to Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 3, of the United States Constitution. "No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed". Now, what is a bill of attainder? Why, it is a law declaring a person or group of persons guilty of a crime and imposing penalties on them without going through the aggravation of a trial. Sound familiar? With this "no-fly" list, we have a law which allows the executive to declare certain persons "terrorists" and impose upon them the penalty of not being permitted to travel by air.
Justice Scalia, stop flipping through the law books for that old excuse about how preventing people from flying is a measure necessary for public safety and not a punishment; that excuse was old when Justice Stevens was young, and it's crap. Even putting criminals in prison is also a measure necessary for public safety, it remains a punishment.
Justice Ginsburg, forget that nonsense about the contents of the list being determined by the executive and not the legislature. The executive isn't granted any power to declare a "no fly" list by the Constitution, so the only power it has in that area is that delegated by the legislature. The legislature is explicitly denied that power, so it doesn't have it to delegate.
Justice Kennedy, forget that stuff about flying not being a right. For one thing, you're treading close to the Ninth Amendment prohibition against disparaging rights not specifically listed. For another, even if flying isn't a right doesn't mean the executive or the legislature has arbitrary powers concerning it.
Look, everyone knows these gymnasts are under 16. China knows it, the IOC knows it. Even that paragon of ignorance, NBC, knows it and their commentators commented on it. Clearly, nobody cares, and they deliberately turn a blind eye to it. Seems to me that if there's going to be a restriction, it should be enforced. Otherwise, you're simply rewarding cheaters. So, since apparently the governing bodies have no interest in enforcing the rule, it should be repealed. If that's not the case, then every country should do what China has done -- issue passports with the wrong age on them to any world-class underaged gymnasts they have. It's the only fair thing to do.
First of all, it's blanket schemes like this which have allowed the existence and/or assured the continuation of the various music mafia groups -- RIAA (particularly in its SoundSource guise), ASCAP, and BMI to name three.
Second, these blanket schemes often seem to somehow get manipulated to benefit not those who are better, or even more popular, but those who are best connected
Third, where they do benefit those who are more popular, they do not do so proportionally; the superstar gets an even greater portion of the spoils than his superstardom should indicate, and the little guy gets not the little bit he should but nothing at all.
Fourth, they ain't called the music mafia for nothing -- they're known for their shakedown tactics. With this, in addition to shaking down small restaurant owners with the temerity to host a band, or anyone with an IP address, they'll shake down ISPs as well.
And finally, why the hell should I, as a person who does not listen to music, pay for you music-addicted freaks who can't put your iPod (oh, excuse me, Ogg Vorbis compatible music player) down for 10 seconds without withdrawal pains? You want music, pay for it yourself; you've got no legitimate claim on my money.
Alcohol I'm not certain about. I've drank enough to know that it doesn't produce any kind of physical addiction the way that drugs like heroin do. I think alcoholism is a mental/functional disease, not a physical/chemical disease, but I obviously can't speak with any kind of authority.
Alcohol most definitely produces physical addiction in some drinkers; they become tolerant to it (that is, they need an increased dose to get the same effect) and they experience withdrawal symptoms. But most drinkers aren't physically addicted to it, by those criteria.
If you basically don't go along with the concept of creating shareholder value, then you don't belong in the private sector, where employees must remain committed to contributing to the formation of a better and ultimately more valuable company, which ultimately provides more benefits for the employees that support the company.
A pretty story, but not really true. The executives get more benefits for building shareholder value. But the regular employees are more or less a commodity to the company, and are paid commodity rates. If the company does really well... the regular employees get paid the same, and perhaps the company expands and hires some more. If the company does really poorly... the regular employees get paid the same, except for those who get laid off. Unless you have some sort of explicit profit-sharing plan, there's nothing in it for you for "being committed" over and above your regular job duties; that's just giving away work for free.
The result of this is a lone-wolf inventor can conceive and document, then wait years for a company like yours to receive a patent then yank the rug out from under you in court.
No, they can't; they have a year after conception to file for the patent, and after that year if they don't disclose before the other guy files, they can be locked out of using their own invention even if they did invent it first.
1. Batman is more or less responsible for a big chunk of the kernel, e.g. the scheduler.
No fair using a counterfactual which is actually factual. That incident certainly shows that the process is broken. Just how many years do you have to work on a major kernel section and have your code out there being run by actual users in favor of the mainline before you're trusted?
I find it hard to believe that they would screw up the impedance match. Impedance matching is the most basic precept in RF design. And if they did screw it up, wouldn't that be a design flaw?
Not necessarily. I'm not an RF engineer but I've worked on some RF products, and what the engineers told me is that you can calculate a close match for a given board design, but you still have to do some trial and error, changing the value of passive components and measuring until the match is right. It's easy to imagine either a component substitution or an apparently inconsequential change at manufacturing time which would screw up the match. But the only reason I'm guessing the match is that Ny Teknik says there's a problem between the antenna and the amplifier, and what else would be in there besides matching and maybe another filter?
As long as there's fairly few data sources, you could get the butterfly effect writ small -- a butterfly smashing into my windshield causes me to activate my wipers, resulting in a prediction of a thunderstorm in Philadelphia.
We've got one _securities_ (not engineering) analyst speculating that it's a problem with the chipset, and that it's unfixable. Yeah. Then we've got Businessweek echoing that claim, citing two unnamed sources (one of which is probably the securities analyst, the other of which is likely someone repeating the securities analyst). No technical data whatsoever on those claims.
Then we've got Ny Teknik, which cites a problem between the antenna and the amplifier (I would speculate they are referring to antenna impedence matching). They again cite unnamed sources, but they at least claim there was actual testing done. If this is the case, it would not be fixable in firmware, but it's at least not a design flaw.
On top of that, there's the nature of the problems. Poor signal strength and low speeds both could be caused by the problems of the nature Ny Teknik suggests, but dropping calls when switching from 3G to Edge argues for some sort of firmware problem, dropping calls during the handoff. Of course, it's also possible there are multiple problems; low signal strength exposes a problem with the handoff.
Finally there's the question of how Apple missed it during testing. It seems widespread enough that it would have been noticed, which argues for a manufacturing problem or perhaps a last minute software change.
This is simply a consequence of the fact that if the universe is deterministic at the lowest level, then people are too. That's hardly a surprising thing. The only thing surprising to me is that there were physicists who believed there could be free will at higher levels of abstraction but determinism at the low levels, as if free will could somehow be an emergent behavior.
Fortunately for free will, nobody has managed to find a hidden variable theory which works.
There's another explanation, which is that a lot of symbols surrounding the Olympics are trademarked. And, in the US, trademark law requires that you take steps to protect your trademark, or you risk losing some or all of your rights to it.
No, no, no, no, no. The Olympic symbol used in the video are protected by treaty and by statute. Unlike ordinary trademarks, its status cannot be lost that way. So the IOC does not have that excuse. Even if they did, in order to use the DMCA they had to commit perjury and say that they owned the copyright to the video; that's not reasonable enforcement of trademark.
Or, don't. Many of these photographer-versus-security-guard altercations appear to involve photographers immediately acting up with shrill "I KNOW MY RIGHTS!!!!1" tirades against said guards. Okay, you may well be correct, but you're only going to escalate the situation.
You can escalate, or you can surrender. Which is worse? I suppose it depends whether or not you already have the shot.
Is this all fallout from 9/11? If so, did OBL ever think in his wildest dreams he'd be able to fuck us up this seriously?
Some of it is, but a lot of it isn't. Security guards have always been officious twits, and they (and their masters) have often had a bug up their butt about photography.
They ran the numbers and I got it back after they did ballistics tests on it for some reason.
Probably the ballistics tests were done because it's not unlikely a stolen gun might have been used in a crime between the time it was stolen and the time it was pawned. I'm surprised you got it back at all... in some places it would have been held as "evidence" until it vanished.
It'll just become another freak show competition. WE don't want a bunch of "The hulks" competing with each other to see which company has the better steroids mix.
Have you SEEN the swimmers? I know they're taking all sorts of tests to show they aren't doping, but perhaps they've just found another way. I'm wondering if some of them have an extra cloned lung or two, or a surgically expanded chest cavity, or somehting like that.
What difference does it make when "using" the software entails making a copy to your hard drive, and then another copy into ram, and then another copy into cache? Using it entails copying it.
If I have no license to use it, I can't make those copies.
So you can't use it without a license.
In the United States, you can. 17 USC 117(a). Which is why EULAs are unnecessary, and why this ruling does not necessarily mean that violating an EULA is violation of copyright.
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Was a still day today. Damn, no electricity for me. (well,if it weren't for the nuke to the north and the coal plant to the south)
Good thing it wasn't cloudy. Still, those few square feet wouldn't even run the blower for my A/C, never mind the compressor. Guess I'm sticking with the nuke.
Ain't seen any geysers around here. And there's a whole state between me and the ocean. Bio-fuels... well, most of the stuff people grow around here, they grow for food. I don't think the little bit of miracle-fuel-plant-of-the-week I could plant on my front lawn would power my heat for the season it takes to grow it, either.
Or, we'd shiver in the dark and/or swelter in the heat. Because if it was that easy, it would be done already. We had locally-generated renewable energy for a long time. But even then, we burned wood faster than we could renew it; there's a reason there were essentially no trees in my area at the end of the 19th century, and there are many now. With the far greater power demands of today, local renewable energy just isn't an option.
You're trolling, right? Please tell me you're trolling. You do understand that the only information lost at 44,100 samples per second is well above 20kHz, the conventional limit of human hearing. And that most speakers aren't going to be reproducing those frequencies accurately in any case. And that the pace of the music has nothing to do with it.
I'm pretty sure you're trolling... but you could be one of those audiophiles who believes in the sound-enhancing power of pure silver power cables...
OK, here's a CD. Think it has a bright future? Let's find out. Hmm... just pop it in, close the door... TIME-0-0-3-START... POW! Hey, it really did have a bright future. Short, but bright.
I thought perhaps by being a sarcastic jerk, the argument would resonate with Scalia, who is a more accomplished sarcastic jerk than I could ever dream of being.... Seriously, though, the chance of any of the robed 9 seeing this post on Slashdot is damn near zero, and the chance of them paying attention to anything I sent them (regardless of how kind or sarcastic) is even closer to zero.
As for the punishment/not punishment aspect, if I were to actually make a serious case for it, I'd have to research the various punishment/not-punishment cases which have gone down the pike, and likely have to rely heavily on dissents. I'm aware that current case law doesn't support me; current case law allows for indefinite imprisonment in a mental institution as a non-punishment, which makes it pretty fucked up. But since I'm never going to get the chance to make the argument to anyone who matters, I'm not going to do the research.
Well, there's your problem. The Ibrahim is a Muslim involved in construction. Osama bin Laden is a Muslim involved in construction. Therefore Ibrahim is Osama bin laden. Perfect government logic.
And also Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Alito... oh yeah, and Stevens, wake up, naptime is over.
Let me call your attention to Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 3, of the United States Constitution. "No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed". Now, what is a bill of attainder? Why, it is a law declaring a person or group of persons guilty of a crime and imposing penalties on them without going through the aggravation of a trial. Sound familiar? With this "no-fly" list, we have a law which allows the executive to declare certain persons "terrorists" and impose upon them the penalty of not being permitted to travel by air.
Justice Scalia, stop flipping through the law books for that old excuse about how preventing people from flying is a measure necessary for public safety and not a punishment; that excuse was old when Justice Stevens was young, and it's crap. Even putting criminals in prison is also a measure necessary for public safety, it remains a punishment.
Justice Ginsburg, forget that nonsense about the contents of the list being determined by the executive and not the legislature. The executive isn't granted any power to declare a "no fly" list by the Constitution, so the only power it has in that area is that delegated by the legislature. The legislature is explicitly denied that power, so it doesn't have it to delegate.
Justice Kennedy, forget that stuff about flying not being a right. For one thing, you're treading close to the Ninth Amendment prohibition against disparaging rights not specifically listed. For another, even if flying isn't a right doesn't mean the executive or the legislature has arbitrary powers concerning it.
Look, everyone knows these gymnasts are under 16. China knows it, the IOC knows it. Even that paragon of ignorance, NBC, knows it and their commentators commented on it. Clearly, nobody cares, and they deliberately turn a blind eye to it. Seems to me that if there's going to be a restriction, it should be enforced. Otherwise, you're simply rewarding cheaters. So, since apparently the governing bodies have no interest in enforcing the rule, it should be repealed. If that's not the case, then every country should do what China has done -- issue passports with the wrong age on them to any world-class underaged gymnasts they have. It's the only fair thing to do.
First of all, it's blanket schemes like this which have allowed the existence and/or assured the continuation of the various music mafia groups -- RIAA (particularly in its SoundSource guise), ASCAP, and BMI to name three.
Second, these blanket schemes often seem to somehow get manipulated to benefit not those who are better, or even more popular, but those who are best connected
Third, where they do benefit those who are more popular, they do not do so proportionally; the superstar gets an even greater portion of the spoils than his superstardom should indicate, and the little guy gets not the little bit he should but nothing at all.
Fourth, they ain't called the music mafia for nothing -- they're known for their shakedown tactics. With this, in addition to shaking down small restaurant owners with the temerity to host a band, or anyone with an IP address, they'll shake down ISPs as well.
And finally, why the hell should I, as a person who does not listen to music, pay for you music-addicted freaks who can't put your iPod (oh, excuse me, Ogg Vorbis compatible music player) down for 10 seconds without withdrawal pains? You want music, pay for it yourself; you've got no legitimate claim on my money.
Alcohol most definitely produces physical addiction in some drinkers; they become tolerant to it (that is, they need an increased dose to get the same effect) and they experience withdrawal symptoms. But most drinkers aren't physically addicted to it, by those criteria.
A pretty story, but not really true. The executives get more benefits for building shareholder value. But the regular employees are more or less a commodity to the company, and are paid commodity rates. If the company does really well... the regular employees get paid the same, and perhaps the company expands and hires some more. If the company does really poorly... the regular employees get paid the same, except for those who get laid off. Unless you have some sort of explicit profit-sharing plan, there's nothing in it for you for "being committed" over and above your regular job duties; that's just giving away work for free.
It doesn't matter what you sign; your signature is binding even if it's not a representation of your name.
No, they can't; they have a year after conception to file for the patent, and after that year if they don't disclose before the other guy files, they can be locked out of using their own invention even if they did invent it first.
No fair using a counterfactual which is actually factual. That incident certainly shows that the process is broken. Just how many years do you have to work on a major kernel section and have your code out there being run by actual users in favor of the mainline before you're trusted?
Not necessarily. I'm not an RF engineer but I've worked on some RF products, and what the engineers told me is that you can calculate a close match for a given board design, but you still have to do some trial and error, changing the value of passive components and measuring until the match is right. It's easy to imagine either a component substitution or an apparently inconsequential change at manufacturing time which would screw up the match. But the only reason I'm guessing the match is that Ny Teknik says there's a problem between the antenna and the amplifier, and what else would be in there besides matching and maybe another filter?
As long as there's fairly few data sources, you could get the butterfly effect writ small -- a butterfly smashing into my windshield causes me to activate my wipers, resulting in a prediction of a thunderstorm in Philadelphia.
We've got one _securities_ (not engineering) analyst speculating that it's a problem with the chipset, and that it's unfixable. Yeah. Then we've got Businessweek echoing that claim, citing two unnamed sources (one of which is probably the securities analyst, the other of which is likely someone repeating the securities analyst). No technical data whatsoever on those claims.
Then we've got Ny Teknik, which cites a problem between the antenna and the amplifier (I would speculate they are referring to antenna impedence matching). They again cite unnamed sources, but they at least claim there was actual testing done. If this is the case, it would not be fixable in firmware, but it's at least not a design flaw.
On top of that, there's the nature of the problems. Poor signal strength and low speeds both could be caused by the problems of the nature Ny Teknik suggests, but dropping calls when switching from 3G to Edge argues for some sort of firmware problem, dropping calls during the handoff. Of course, it's also possible there are multiple problems; low signal strength exposes a problem with the handoff.
Finally there's the question of how Apple missed it during testing. It seems widespread enough that it would have been noticed, which argues for a manufacturing problem or perhaps a last minute software change.
This is simply a consequence of the fact that if the universe is deterministic at the lowest level, then people are too. That's hardly a surprising thing. The only thing surprising to me is that there were physicists who believed there could be free will at higher levels of abstraction but determinism at the low levels, as if free will could somehow be an emergent behavior.
Fortunately for free will, nobody has managed to find a hidden variable theory which works.
No, no, no, no, no. The Olympic symbol used in the video are protected by treaty and by statute. Unlike ordinary trademarks, its status cannot be lost that way. So the IOC does not have that excuse. Even if they did, in order to use the DMCA they had to commit perjury and say that they owned the copyright to the video; that's not reasonable enforcement of trademark.
Not a problem. Just wear an orange vest; they'll think you're a surveyor. (yeah, _you_ know a transit from a view camera, but do you think THEY do?)
You can escalate, or you can surrender. Which is worse? I suppose it depends whether or not you already have the shot.
Some of it is, but a lot of it isn't. Security guards have always been officious twits, and they (and their masters) have often had a bug up their butt about photography.
Probably the ballistics tests were done because it's not unlikely a stolen gun might have been used in a crime between the time it was stolen and the time it was pawned. I'm surprised you got it back at all... in some places it would have been held as "evidence" until it vanished.
Why would that be? Real-time tracking (via cell phone) is perfectly feasible now.
Have you SEEN the swimmers? I know they're taking all sorts of tests to show they aren't doping, but perhaps they've just found another way. I'm wondering if some of them have an extra cloned lung or two, or a surgically expanded chest cavity, or somehting like that.
In the United States, you can. 17 USC 117(a). Which is why EULAs are unnecessary, and why this ruling does not necessarily mean that violating an EULA is violation of copyright.