What I thought was interesting about the article was that it equated the placement of a GPS device with a seizure of the vehicle since it interfered with the driver's interest in the vehicle and not a search...
Pluto has a retarded orbit (no, that's not a scientific term),
Actually, retarded is a scientific term when used correctly to mean "hindered or impeded". For instance, a mutation causing deficiency in spermidine synthase causes retarded growth of Escherichia coli.
There's a lot of speculating about the penalties, why not go right to the U.S. Code? Employees or officers can be fined and/or imprisoned for up to five years. Title 18, Part I, Chapter 83, Â 1709, 'Theft of mail matter by officer or employee':
Whoever, being a Postal Service officer or employee, embezzles any letter, postal card, package, bag, or mail, or any article or thing contained therein entrusted to him or which comes into his possession intended to be conveyed by mail, or carried or delivered by any carrier, messenger, agent, or other person employed in any department of the Postal Service, or forwarded through or delivered from any post office or station thereof established by authority of the Postmaster General or of the Postal Service; or steals, abstracts, or removes from any such letter, package, bag, or mail, any article or thing contained therein, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
So if someone installs and runs Linux on their Zune, and the screen goes bad in the warranty period, should they be able to charge 90% of the value of a new Zune to repair it?
The article did have links to some interesting topics, such as google experimenting with image orientation as a test. The premise of using how a user interacts with a page is deeply flawed though. There's not even a need for an algorithm or program to 'figure out' the captcha, just record how an actual user interacts once and you can send the same exact thing every time to pass the test. The reason this works is because the 'question' doesn't change. This would be like showing the same text captcha every time. If they ignore identical values being sent, the values can just be fudged a bit.
That's what the gyroscopes are for. You don't need the third wheel, it's safer and it gives you a better ride. That's the point the grandparent missed when they asked "Why not just get rid of the gyroscopes and put on a third wheel?"
That's amazing. However, Sen. Mark Begich would HAVE to resign for a special election to occur, wouldn't he? He was elected and I haven't heard any charges of vote tampering. It doesn't matter what happened, as long as votes were cast by actual citizens on election day and they were counted correctly. The constitution defines the terms for senators as 6 years, trying to replace a sitting senator via special election is unconstitutional.
It AMAZES me how ultra right-wing republicans cannot see the irony in their professed adoration of the constitution and the complete lack of knowledge of or disdain with which they treat it when it doesn't suit their needs.
Now every conservative loudmouth is going on about how the corrupt prosecution framed him. Don't they remember it was Bush's justice department? This wasn't a frame job by Democrats if anything since we've heard how the DOJ inappropriately made selections based on political affiliation.
Still, from what I've heard, Stevens never did pay for those renovations to his house ($80k - $250k). The only thing in dispute here was whether a friend of Stevens told the guy that paid for them to "forget about" the bill, or whether it just never came up. Either way, Stevens got a nice little gift that he never paid for and never reported, which is illegal. Correct me if I'm wrong...
Actually, the backlight for the screen on the front shines through a glass Apple logo on the back of the factory MacBooks. This would probably be a LCD. You can buy a 320x240 one for $40.
they should be hired by mac (i'm sure that's what the stunt is for)
Well, they got onto slashdot and created an Ebay auction for it (now up to $1,525 with 16 bids and over 7 days left), so I think that was probably what the stunt was for.
The obvious utility of this would be two-fold:
Displaying pure white like the normal Apple logo, then occasionally having a bug walk across it.
Displaying the iSight view re-arranged to make it look like there was an Apple logo-shaped hole in the screen.
"No one is a bigger believer in the First Amendment than I am, and I genuinely cannot understand this outpouring of anxiety and catastrophizing," said Sibbison,
I would say anyone that believes the first amendment should protect the rights of private entities to tell the truth about other private entities is a bigger believer in the first amendment than you. Maybe you should read the first amendment, Mr. Sibbison.
Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press [...]
We have effective laws against false advertising now. If battery claims cannot be verified under the same conditions, companies should be sued out of business. The same goes true for automobile manufacturers. I have yet to see a car that gets even close to published MPG figures under normal conditions.
How can these companies continue lying to us and get away with it? Even if there is some kind of special estimate that they do (I don't know, removing certain services that come with the laptop, running the test at 45 degrees Fahrenheit, driving the car down a mountain with a tailwind, etc), that shouldn't be allowed. The figures aren't "MPG under ideal conditions", they are "Estimated Highway MPG" and "Estimated Battery Life".\
Trademarks apply to branding products. If your use wouldn't cause brand confusion with his advertising company, 'Suprafone', then you wouldn't be infringing on the trademark anyway.
It is not the democrat in the white house that causes the resurgence in vampire media, but vampire media that causes a democrat to be elected. Tru Blood on HBO and the Twilight movie are two examples that have become popular recently, prior to the election. At least the twilight movie was in production and scheduled for release before the election. Maybe the increased visibility of vampires reminds people of the negative qualities of the republican party?
Then what gives purpose to our illusions and illusions to our purpose? An intersection of behavior and free will represents the purpose of free will and illusion of behavior.
Evolution. Our complex neurochemistry evolved through genetic drift and natural selection. Purpose itself is the illusion. We assign purpose to things because of what they do for us. The close button on my Firefox window has a purpose, to close the window. Behind the scenes, it's just electrons following pathways from the time I click until the window actually closes. You could make the button appear like the maximize button and have a tooltip that says "maximize this window", but if the window closes, the purpose is still to close the window.
The illusions are necessary to enable our brains to make sense of this world. A child could touch a hot burner on a stove and get burned. Free will is the mind realizing that there are choices and making them. The child could touch the burner again, but they realize that if they do so again, the pain neurons will fire again. Assigning purpose to things that go on in the world is an invaluable asset to an organism. The variables and patter recognition going on in the child's brain allow it to imagine the possible outcomes of touching the burner and to act accordingly.
The more complex our brains became, the further ahead we were able to look. Settling down from hunters and gatherers into communities that farmed the land required a leap in brainpower. Now we had to worry about storing food for the winter or a drought. Being successful at it enables us to have the free time to sit around and ponder our "purpose".
While the Core 2 DUO processor has about 291 million transistors, the human brain has about 100 billion neurons. Each neuron doesn't have a single on/off state either, but a collection of chemical and hormonal states. And each neuron is connected to hundreds of neighboring neurons instead of just a couple in the case of a CPU. The complexity is unfathomable.
It wasn't 20 years ago when we hadn't detected another planet yet and we didn't know if planets formed around other stars. Now we know they are common, but the ones we detect are large and close to the sun. There's a reason for this: the method we use to detect extrasolar planets works by detecting the gravitational tug between the planet and star by the changing of the star's luminosity over time. If there's a 72 hour cycle where the star dims and brightens, then we know there is a planet in a 3-day orbit around the star. We know how far from the star it is by using the orbital period and the mass of the star. We know the mass by how much the star's luminosity is affected.
There is noise in the observations caused by regular luminosity changes in the star, like from sunspots. The larger and closer the planet to the star, the bigger the change in luminosity and the easier it is to separate that signal from the noise. Also the closer planets give more data to work with. If the star has a 72 hour orbit, you will be able to see a complete cycle every three days. If the planet is like Jupiter, it could be 5 AU from the sun and have an orbital period of 12 years.
Their entire reasoning appears to be based on the assumption that a body the size of these 'hot Jupiters' couldn't form that close to the star because the solar wind would drive the gas away. If that were truly the case, then a star couldn't form at all because the solar wind would drive all of its gases away. If the main gas for the planet accumulates prior to solar ignition then there isn't a problem. This new survey only looked for super-Jupiters that are 5 or more times the size of Jupiter, and that are twice as far away from their star as Jupiter is from Sol. The thing is that if a planet gets to be about 13 times the size of Jupiter then it starts to fuse deuterium and becomes a star. We have found many binary stars that would meet the criteria sought, but that don't count because the mass of the "planet" was too big and it became a star.
These are great questions to ask, but I don't know why the media portrays it as such a surprise that things can be like our solar system. Is anyone really surprised that we found water on Mars? Earth has plentiful water, comets are mostly water, Cassini observed water geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. Water is simply the combination of the first and third most plentiful elements in our universe, and the second most plentiful element doesn't chemically bond. Water should be the most abundant molecule in the universe after H2.
This article is a good example. It seems to claim that a solar system would need a planet like Jupiter for there to be life. In one paragraph they say that Jupiter prevents the inner planets from being bombarded by too many space rocks, and in the very next paragraph it says Jupiter perturbs the orbit of space rocks to make them hit Earth, seeding it with water and organic molecules. We don't know enough about formation of planetary systems to say that one would need a Jupiter-like planet for life to form. It sounds like the people that claimed 20 years ago that planetary systems would be very rare before we found our first extrasolar planet (we've found hundreds now).
I'd like to see the whole paper and look at their models. I'd like to know what would cause a planet that formed over millions of years in the outer solar system to move in closer to the star. When it forms, it has an orbital velocity relative to the center of gravity of the system. In order to migrate closer to the star, some other massive object would have to slow it down, wouldn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
What I thought was interesting about the article was that it equated the placement of a GPS device with a seizure of the vehicle since it interfered with the driver's interest in the vehicle and not a search...
Actually, retarded is a scientific term when used correctly to mean "hindered or impeded". For instance, a mutation causing deficiency in spermidine synthase causes retarded growth of Escherichia coli.
There's a lot of speculating about the penalties, why not go right to the U.S. Code? Employees or officers can be fined and/or imprisoned for up to five years. Title 18, Part I, Chapter 83, Â 1709, 'Theft of mail matter by officer or employee':
People should protest outside the courthouse. It's time to go through the 42 ways to distribute DECSS again. What about a tie with the code on it?
So if someone installs and runs Linux on their Zune, and the screen goes bad in the warranty period, should they be able to charge 90% of the value of a new Zune to repair it?
The article did have links to some interesting topics, such as google experimenting with image orientation as a test. The premise of using how a user interacts with a page is deeply flawed though. There's not even a need for an algorithm or program to 'figure out' the captcha, just record how an actual user interacts once and you can send the same exact thing every time to pass the test. The reason this works is because the 'question' doesn't change. This would be like showing the same text captcha every time. If they ignore identical values being sent, the values can just be fudged a bit.
That's what the gyroscopes are for. You don't need the third wheel, it's safer and it gives you a better ride. That's the point the grandparent missed when they asked "Why not just get rid of the gyroscopes and put on a third wheel?"
That's amazing. However, Sen. Mark Begich would HAVE to resign for a special election to occur, wouldn't he? He was elected and I haven't heard any charges of vote tampering. It doesn't matter what happened, as long as votes were cast by actual citizens on election day and they were counted correctly. The constitution defines the terms for senators as 6 years, trying to replace a sitting senator via special election is unconstitutional.
It AMAZES me how ultra right-wing republicans cannot see the irony in their professed adoration of the constitution and the complete lack of knowledge of or disdain with which they treat it when it doesn't suit their needs.
Now every conservative loudmouth is going on about how the corrupt prosecution framed him. Don't they remember it was Bush's justice department? This wasn't a frame job by Democrats if anything since we've heard how the DOJ inappropriately made selections based on political affiliation.
Still, from what I've heard, Stevens never did pay for those renovations to his house ($80k - $250k). The only thing in dispute here was whether a friend of Stevens told the guy that paid for them to "forget about" the bill, or whether it just never came up. Either way, Stevens got a nice little gift that he never paid for and never reported, which is illegal. Correct me if I'm wrong...
Actually, the backlight for the screen on the front shines through a glass Apple logo on the back of the factory MacBooks. This would probably be a LCD. You can buy a 320x240 one for $40.
Well, they got onto slashdot and created an Ebay auction for it (now up to $1,525 with 16 bids and over 7 days left), so I think that was probably what the stunt was for.
The obvious utility of this would be two-fold:
I would say anyone that believes the first amendment should protect the rights of private entities to tell the truth about other private entities is a bigger believer in the first amendment than you. Maybe you should read the first amendment, Mr. Sibbison.
I'm thinking the first generation of these cars will have a shaggy coat.
We have effective laws against false advertising now. If battery claims cannot be verified under the same conditions, companies should be sued out of business. The same goes true for automobile manufacturers. I have yet to see a car that gets even close to published MPG figures under normal conditions.
How can these companies continue lying to us and get away with it? Even if there is some kind of special estimate that they do (I don't know, removing certain services that come with the laptop, running the test at 45 degrees Fahrenheit, driving the car down a mountain with a tailwind, etc), that shouldn't be allowed. The figures aren't "MPG under ideal conditions", they are "Estimated Highway MPG" and "Estimated Battery Life".\
Whine much?
I'm offended. What gives you the right to say these things?!?!
What's your source?
What I never got was how they could still be talking and moving while being transported.
I wanna see this warning label: "Smoking Cigarettes has been linked to cowboy behavior"
Magnitude 6 will not be visible by most people in cities without binoculars...
Trademarks apply to branding products. If your use wouldn't cause brand confusion with his advertising company, 'Suprafone', then you wouldn't be infringing on the trademark anyway.
So now Slashdot is running ads for Bitdefender disguised as stories? For shame...
It is not the democrat in the white house that causes the resurgence in vampire media, but vampire media that causes a democrat to be elected. Tru Blood on HBO and the Twilight movie are two examples that have become popular recently, prior to the election. At least the twilight movie was in production and scheduled for release before the election. Maybe the increased visibility of vampires reminds people of the negative qualities of the republican party?
Evolution. Our complex neurochemistry evolved through genetic drift and natural selection. Purpose itself is the illusion. We assign purpose to things because of what they do for us. The close button on my Firefox window has a purpose, to close the window. Behind the scenes, it's just electrons following pathways from the time I click until the window actually closes. You could make the button appear like the maximize button and have a tooltip that says "maximize this window", but if the window closes, the purpose is still to close the window.
The illusions are necessary to enable our brains to make sense of this world. A child could touch a hot burner on a stove and get burned. Free will is the mind realizing that there are choices and making them. The child could touch the burner again, but they realize that if they do so again, the pain neurons will fire again. Assigning purpose to things that go on in the world is an invaluable asset to an organism. The variables and patter recognition going on in the child's brain allow it to imagine the possible outcomes of touching the burner and to act accordingly.
The more complex our brains became, the further ahead we were able to look. Settling down from hunters and gatherers into communities that farmed the land required a leap in brainpower. Now we had to worry about storing food for the winter or a drought. Being successful at it enables us to have the free time to sit around and ponder our "purpose".
While the Core 2 DUO processor has about 291 million transistors, the human brain has about 100 billion neurons. Each neuron doesn't have a single on/off state either, but a collection of chemical and hormonal states. And each neuron is connected to hundreds of neighboring neurons instead of just a couple in the case of a CPU. The complexity is unfathomable.
It wasn't 20 years ago when we hadn't detected another planet yet and we didn't know if planets formed around other stars. Now we know they are common, but the ones we detect are large and close to the sun. There's a reason for this: the method we use to detect extrasolar planets works by detecting the gravitational tug between the planet and star by the changing of the star's luminosity over time. If there's a 72 hour cycle where the star dims and brightens, then we know there is a planet in a 3-day orbit around the star. We know how far from the star it is by using the orbital period and the mass of the star. We know the mass by how much the star's luminosity is affected.
There is noise in the observations caused by regular luminosity changes in the star, like from sunspots. The larger and closer the planet to the star, the bigger the change in luminosity and the easier it is to separate that signal from the noise. Also the closer planets give more data to work with. If the star has a 72 hour orbit, you will be able to see a complete cycle every three days. If the planet is like Jupiter, it could be 5 AU from the sun and have an orbital period of 12 years.
Their entire reasoning appears to be based on the assumption that a body the size of these 'hot Jupiters' couldn't form that close to the star because the solar wind would drive the gas away. If that were truly the case, then a star couldn't form at all because the solar wind would drive all of its gases away. If the main gas for the planet accumulates prior to solar ignition then there isn't a problem. This new survey only looked for super-Jupiters that are 5 or more times the size of Jupiter, and that are twice as far away from their star as Jupiter is from Sol. The thing is that if a planet gets to be about 13 times the size of Jupiter then it starts to fuse deuterium and becomes a star. We have found many binary stars that would meet the criteria sought, but that don't count because the mass of the "planet" was too big and it became a star.
These are great questions to ask, but I don't know why the media portrays it as such a surprise that things can be like our solar system. Is anyone really surprised that we found water on Mars? Earth has plentiful water, comets are mostly water, Cassini observed water geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. Water is simply the combination of the first and third most plentiful elements in our universe, and the second most plentiful element doesn't chemically bond. Water should be the most abundant molecule in the universe after H2.
This article is a good example. It seems to claim that a solar system would need a planet like Jupiter for there to be life. In one paragraph they say that Jupiter prevents the inner planets from being bombarded by too many space rocks, and in the very next paragraph it says Jupiter perturbs the orbit of space rocks to make them hit Earth, seeding it with water and organic molecules. We don't know enough about formation of planetary systems to say that one would need a Jupiter-like planet for life to form. It sounds like the people that claimed 20 years ago that planetary systems would be very rare before we found our first extrasolar planet (we've found hundreds now).
I'd like to see the whole paper and look at their models. I'd like to know what would cause a planet that formed over millions of years in the outer solar system to move in closer to the star. When it forms, it has an orbital velocity relative to the center of gravity of the system. In order to migrate closer to the star, some other massive object would have to slow it down, wouldn't it?
I don't know why they can't just teach the controversy, and let the students hear both sides of the issue.