Not that any car needs it, but when I tried to push it down the Jamaica Way, it didn't kick like a Mini Cooper even would have
Not the fairest comparison ever. A Cooper is pretty quick. And a Cooper S - which I gather most sold in America are - is ridiculously quick. You're comparing an ecomobile to a turbocharged hot hatch.
speaking of that, you know how big of a bomb someone can fit in "their own keyboard and mouse"?
About the same size of bomb they can fit into a laptop. They'd better open up every one of those on its way in, and I mean with a screwdriver. One terrorist in a nice suit with a business class ticket and a rigged laptop = boom.
This is the same State Department and ITAR that banned exportation of strong encryption as being "dangerous to National Security". As a result, the US could not compete in the international marketing of effective encryption, while everybody else could.
Interestingly enough, that kind of behaviour was a common symptom of the decline of the previous world superpower. Who invented computers, the jet engine, public-key encryption? Not Americans. But who made a fortune mass-marketing them, and who sat on them as vital defence secrets?
Fair point, but I think you are forgetting something - you are comparing the prices based on if you are an American trying to buy a product in the UK, in which case the exchange rate would be against you.
The exchange rate that ought to be of interest here is that against the yen, Sony being a Japanese firm. If the dollar is unusually strong against the yen at a time while the pound is weak, then we should expect Americans to get a good deal and Britons to get a poor one. But the contrary is true: at present the dollar is weak and the pound is very strong. If anything, the PS3 should be substantially cheaper in Britain.
The truth is that Sony will charge whatever the market will pay, and the market in Britain is well-known for its tolerance for blatant rip-offs.
Bruce Schneier posted this a few days back. Consensus is that it's not that good an analysis, but that the attacker was even worse. Some discussion also of whether it is better to take the machine offline immediately (and risk alerting the attacker that he has been rumbled) or to begin your analysis with the machine still live and operational. I for one side with the 'shut that thing down NOW' faction.
I read as much of that as I could bear, which wasn't even to the end of the amount available to sample. I think that may in fact be the worst book I have ever read in my life. Are you sure Amazon didn't just drop it because it was crap and nobody wanted to buy it?
The unfortunate flaw in your comment, is that with a universe that started from a simple point (like ours) then all locations in the universe are at the centre, no matter how far things have spread out.
Screwy to understand, but it's true. However, I never quite liked the 'dots on a balloon' description, because that's what gives people the idea that the Universe should have a big central void. Neither did I like the 'plum pudding' description, because the pudding has a surface beyond which there is no pudding.
I like to use the analogy of Clockland: it's basically the balloon analogy with one fewer dimension, but makes it more explicit that the central void isn't actually part of the space of the Universe.
This is *bad* news for the GPL. The GPL exists because of copyright law. Thanks to this ruling, any corporation (read, Microsoft) is free to move an office to Antigua, steal our code, and ship it back to the US.
At best Antigua would only get the go-ahead to ignore US copyright law. Violating most GPL projects would involve infringing copyrights owned by Europeans, Japanese, Australians, Indians... Hence, illegal even in the Antiguan data haven.
And if Microsoft ship the code back to the US, then distribution is governed by US law, not Antiguan law - and so copyright comes back into force.
many of those fairy tales arguably have sexual undertones
No 'arguably' about it. Certainly in older versions, the witch only caught on to what Rapunzel had been up to once the naive young girl asked something along the lines of 'why don't my clothes fit right any more?' Oops.
Do these ratings have any legal weight? Surely PC gamers can just pay for and download the games that they want. Do people still go to shops and buy a shiny disc in a plastic case?
I remember a while back when the Hot Coffee thing first came up, I suggested taking the Carmageddon option. When the British censors insisted that Carmageddon was unacceptable, what with the graphic running-over of pedestrians for fun, the makers replaced the pedestrians with zombies and turned the blood green. Result, a pass with an 18 certificate.
Then the makers put a patch on the net which would put the pedestrians and the red blood right back. Of course every PC games magazine in the country promptly put that patch on every cover disc for months, since back then nowhere near as many people were online.
Why not do the same now? Release the cut-down bowdlerised version that's OK for 17-year-olds and over, and then make the patch available online to put back the content that's only acceptable for 18 and over. If you make it clear that what's being downloaded is an adults-only add-on, you ought to be OK.
That's because the Ipod has it's very own hardware MP3 player. Faster, more efficient, less flexible.
Does it? I thought it just had a really low-power CPU and highly optimised - as in assembler - software. If the iPod was based on hardwired chips that did MP3 and only MP3, Rockbox would never have worked on it.
The Golden Record is a publicity stunt. Nothing more. Do you really think anyone at NASA did that because they really believed they could contact someone that way?
If the Voyager record ever gets played, the best bet is that it's by our own descendants. Given ten thousand years it's not beyond the realms of possibility that someone will go out and grab the thing and bring it home. Think of it as a really long-term time capsule.
New Horizons just passed Jupiter, and is on its way to study the dwarf planets of the Kuiper Belt; it will zip past them at a ridiculously high speed and then head out to deep space just as the Voyager and Pioneer probes did..
Air conditioning is a comfort not a necessity and anyway Europe is losing its population - isnt it time the Europeans went back to places suited to their genetic makeup?
One heat-to-mechanical cycle is limited by the Carnot cycle, but the waste heat can still be used for other purposes even driving other heat-to-mechanical cycles working at lower tempertaures.
If you have a lower-temperature heatsink somewhere, why not just run your first heat engine on that in the first place? All you'll have is three temperatures X > Y > Z, heat engine 1 running from source at temperature X and sink at temperature Y, heat engine 2 running from source at temperature Y and sink at temperature Z, and the whole thing guaranteed to be no more efficient than a Carnot engine running from a source at temperature X and a sink at temperature Z.
I have news, in the UK (I can't speak for other parts of Europe) many ISPs have been throttling P2P traffic for a couple of years.
But not effectively. I'm on Tiscali; BitTorrent on default ports is throttled into uselessness, but change port and it's plain sailing. From what I hear it's a similar deal with most ISPs. Throttling the default ports has been enough to keep the masses under control, so the few of us who bother to edit our settings don't have such a large impact.
Macro-evolutionary theory: The creation of new genetic traits in a species due to the addition of 1 or more telomeres. example: radiation from a nuklear explosion warps the genetic code of a dog. In 10 generations, it's decendants sprout wings.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone apart from the writers of the X-Men comics actually think evolution works that way?
What do you mean random mutations can't be falsified? Either they occur in a genome or they don't. The fact is that they are observed in genomes, so they do happen.
But are they random, or are they being subtly rigged by an invisible trickster wizard?
Accountant: 'And here is our random number generator.'
Random Generator: 'Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine.'
Dilbert: 'Are you sure that's really random?'
Accountant: 'That's the trouble with randomness, you never can be quite certain.'
Nuclear decay can, theoretically, be traced back to the Big Bang if you had perfect knowledge, for instance- it's just a matter of radical electrons hitting nuclei after all
Actually, no it isn't. That's not considered a decay so much as a reaction. A nuclear decay is a wholly internal process, whose timing is wholly governed by quantum uncertainty. And at any rate there is no such thing as perfect knowledge; a perfect knowledge of the position of an incoming particle precludes any knowledge at all of its velocity, and so we cannot ever reliably predict the timing of any decay it may trigger.
Not that any of this affects a hypothetical god, mind; he can presumably do as he pleases, Heisenberg or no.
(His theory was that of Natural Selection, which there is a ton of evidence for, and which was used to derive Evolution.)
Close, but not quite. Darwin's theory was of Natural Selection, which was used to explain evolution. The fact of evolution had long been observed; the changes in species from place to place and from time to time were known from comparative zoology and from palaeontology already. Natural selection provided the mechanism for this change and a theory underlying the observed facts.
Slashdot Mirror
Doubt it. Oh, by the way, got a light?
Not the fairest comparison ever. A Cooper is pretty quick. And a Cooper S - which I gather most sold in America are - is ridiculously quick. You're comparing an ecomobile to a turbocharged hot hatch.
No, because you're a waster, what a fucking waster...
I suppose they must live somewhere uncomfortably cold?
They did indeed, but they weren't the first. Public-key encryption was invented at GCHQ, and then kept secret until 1997.
About the same size of bomb they can fit into a laptop. They'd better open up every one of those on its way in, and I mean with a screwdriver. One terrorist in a nice suit with a business class ticket and a rigged laptop = boom.
Interestingly enough, that kind of behaviour was a common symptom of the decline of the previous world superpower. Who invented computers, the jet engine, public-key encryption? Not Americans. But who made a fortune mass-marketing them, and who sat on them as vital defence secrets?
The exchange rate that ought to be of interest here is that against the yen, Sony being a Japanese firm. If the dollar is unusually strong against the yen at a time while the pound is weak, then we should expect Americans to get a good deal and Britons to get a poor one. But the contrary is true: at present the dollar is weak and the pound is very strong. If anything, the PS3 should be substantially cheaper in Britain.
The truth is that Sony will charge whatever the market will pay, and the market in Britain is well-known for its tolerance for blatant rip-offs.
I wish you the very best of luck next time you attempt to board a plane. You'll need it.
Bruce Schneier posted this a few days back. Consensus is that it's not that good an analysis, but that the attacker was even worse. Some discussion also of whether it is better to take the machine offline immediately (and risk alerting the attacker that he has been rumbled) or to begin your analysis with the machine still live and operational. I for one side with the 'shut that thing down NOW' faction.
I read as much of that as I could bear, which wasn't even to the end of the amount available to sample. I think that may in fact be the worst book I have ever read in my life. Are you sure Amazon didn't just drop it because it was crap and nobody wanted to buy it?
Screwy to understand, but it's true. However, I never quite liked the 'dots on a balloon' description, because that's what gives people the idea that the Universe should have a big central void. Neither did I like the 'plum pudding' description, because the pudding has a surface beyond which there is no pudding.
I like to use the analogy of Clockland: it's basically the balloon analogy with one fewer dimension, but makes it more explicit that the central void isn't actually part of the space of the Universe.
At best Antigua would only get the go-ahead to ignore US copyright law. Violating most GPL projects would involve infringing copyrights owned by Europeans, Japanese, Australians, Indians... Hence, illegal even in the Antiguan data haven.
And if Microsoft ship the code back to the US, then distribution is governed by US law, not Antiguan law - and so copyright comes back into force.
No 'arguably' about it. Certainly in older versions, the witch only caught on to what Rapunzel had been up to once the naive young girl asked something along the lines of 'why don't my clothes fit right any more?' Oops.
I remember a while back when the Hot Coffee thing first came up, I suggested taking the Carmageddon option. When the British censors insisted that Carmageddon was unacceptable, what with the graphic running-over of pedestrians for fun, the makers replaced the pedestrians with zombies and turned the blood green. Result, a pass with an 18 certificate.
Then the makers put a patch on the net which would put the pedestrians and the red blood right back. Of course every PC games magazine in the country promptly put that patch on every cover disc for months, since back then nowhere near as many people were online.
Why not do the same now? Release the cut-down bowdlerised version that's OK for 17-year-olds and over, and then make the patch available online to put back the content that's only acceptable for 18 and over. If you make it clear that what's being downloaded is an adults-only add-on, you ought to be OK.
Does it? I thought it just had a really low-power CPU and highly optimised - as in assembler - software. If the iPod was based on hardwired chips that did MP3 and only MP3, Rockbox would never have worked on it.
If the Voyager record ever gets played, the best bet is that it's by our own descendants. Given ten thousand years it's not beyond the realms of possibility that someone will go out and grab the thing and bring it home. Think of it as a really long-term time capsule.
New Horizons just passed Jupiter, and is on its way to study the dwarf planets of the Kuiper Belt; it will zip past them at a ridiculously high speed and then head out to deep space just as the Voyager and Pioneer probes did..
Americans?
From the Deep South?
Coming back here?
God forbid!
If you have a lower-temperature heatsink somewhere, why not just run your first heat engine on that in the first place? All you'll have is three temperatures X > Y > Z, heat engine 1 running from source at temperature X and sink at temperature Y, heat engine 2 running from source at temperature Y and sink at temperature Z, and the whole thing guaranteed to be no more efficient than a Carnot engine running from a source at temperature X and a sink at temperature Z.
But not effectively. I'm on Tiscali; BitTorrent on default ports is throttled into uselessness, but change port and it's plain sailing. From what I hear it's a similar deal with most ISPs. Throttling the default ports has been enough to keep the masses under control, so the few of us who bother to edit our settings don't have such a large impact.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone apart from the writers of the X-Men comics actually think evolution works that way?
But are they random, or are they being subtly rigged by an invisible trickster wizard?
Accountant: 'And here is our random number generator.'
Random Generator: 'Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine.'
Dilbert: 'Are you sure that's really random?'
Accountant: 'That's the trouble with randomness, you never can be quite certain.'
Actually, no it isn't. That's not considered a decay so much as a reaction. A nuclear decay is a wholly internal process, whose timing is wholly governed by quantum uncertainty. And at any rate there is no such thing as perfect knowledge; a perfect knowledge of the position of an incoming particle precludes any knowledge at all of its velocity, and so we cannot ever reliably predict the timing of any decay it may trigger.
Not that any of this affects a hypothetical god, mind; he can presumably do as he pleases, Heisenberg or no.
Close, but not quite. Darwin's theory was of Natural Selection, which was used to explain evolution. The fact of evolution had long been observed; the changes in species from place to place and from time to time were known from comparative zoology and from palaeontology already. Natural selection provided the mechanism for this change and a theory underlying the observed facts.