Some of these things are specific threats: numbers, weaknesses, breeding histories, especially deadly or dangerous disease strains, etc - things only profesional researchers are in a position to discover. Why should this sort of tactical information be published before the government can take action regarding it?
Unfortunately, this sort of information is not accessible only to professional researchers. Much of it is already on the internet, or published in foreign journals--or even in domestic publications that nobody noticed contained "sensitive" information. (That's actually one of the big problems with a "sensitive but unclassified" pseudocategory--nobody can be sure to what it should be applied, and different administrators will draw lines in different places.
Also, as long as this material is unclassified, scientists will continue to talk to one another. Most researchers are inherently helpful people, and they love to talk about their work. (It doesn't hurt that showing an interest strokes their egos, as well.) Having spent a large fraction of my working life in academia, this free interchange of ideas is essential, but it is also virtually impossible to secure on an informal basis. In other words, an email to most researchers would probably provide a great deal of useful information--no face to face meeting required, and forget about waiting for publication.
wouldn't the moisture from the condensation kill the board?
Well--eventually, maybe. But what they've build is essentially the back half of a water distillation system. The water that condenses out of the air will be very pure, and have a very low conductivity. (The resistance of a 1 cm path through ultrapure water is on the order of 18 meg--that's ohms, not byes--so it probably conducts no more electricity than the plastic of the board.)
Yes, the condensate will eventually pick up contaminants, and at the edges of the cooled region where liquid water is free to flow you're likely to have problems. The solution would be to keep the entire mainboard in a dry environment. Seal it in a box with only an inlet for LN2. The little bit of water in the box will condense out (on the N2 fill pipe rather than the board if you remove a bit of insulation) and as the LN2 boils off, the box will be filled with dry, inert nitrogen. As an added bonus, this will help suppress fires.
Re:How to totally screw up Win2k in less than 1 mi
on
Gnarly Error Messages
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· Score: 2
The latest versions of Windows are supposed to be exclusively GUIs. You should be able to do anything and everything to adjust configurations without leaving the Windows environment. (Whether MS actually accomplishes this is another matter, but still...)
Quite frankly, if people are going to be investigating (and changing) settings under Administrative Tools inside the Control Panel then they should realize that their actions might have consequences. (I'm stretching the analogy a bit, but do we say computer hardware is badly designed because any idiot with a screwdriver can open the case and impale his or her CPU?)
Re:Good God, are you Clueless?
on
WiFi Triangulation
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It takes me all of 30 seconds to program my VCR, but most non-techies can't do it.
This may an important consideration for home wireless networks, but no excuse for corporate networks. Any business that has a "non-techie" building their network is inviting a whole lot of trouble--most of which probably won't be coming to them through their wireless AP.
Besides, the real problem with spam tends to lie overseas, out of the reach of the US justice system. Most of the spam I receive day in, day out seems to originate from the Orient--China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, etc.
Exactly correct--the spam you receive seems to originate overseas. Actually, much of it is coming from hucksters in North America. They're just bouncing their pitches off open relays overseas.
Re:How to totally screw up Win2k in less than 1 mi
on
Gnarly Error Messages
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, and disable all services.
...You gotta love MS's monolithic integration...
Yep. You gotta love people who either a) mess with things they don't understand or b) deliberately try to break things...and then find that they're broken.
Granted, there exists an argument that even when apparently working correctly most MS products are badly broken, but that's for another post...
What is the advantage of using a microwave beam over a CO2 laser?
There are a number of advantages. First is price--you can use off-the-shelf microwave oven pieces for most of a microwave drill. Granted, carbon dioxide cutting lasers are also available essentially off the shelf from a limited number of suppliers, but they tend to run in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Durability. Laser tubes don't tend to be happy about being moved about a lot. They contain optics that are very sensitive to misalignment.
Size. Microwave sources for this application would be quite a bit smaller than a carbon dioxide laser, especially when you add in all the ancillary equipment in my next point. In addition, combining size and durability makes a much more portable tool.
Limited complexity. No delicate optics. No vacuum system. No water cooling system. No mixed lasing gas to deal with.
Safety. Lasers can remain well collimated for significant distances--you can make holes in your coworkers from across the room if you're not careful. A microwave drill as described isn't acutely dangerous beyond an inch or two from the end of the drill bit. (There might be heating effects beyond that distance, but reflex action--Ow! It's hot! I'm moving my hand now!--would likely be sufficient to protect you. You need the same level of common sense that it takes to operate a band saw--don't put your fingers near the business end!)
So, that's why microwaves would be advantageous. That said, CO2 lasers can perform extremely well, as long as you don't have to move them to the field. Manufacturers already exist for the lasers, and it's a proven technology.
Or, you could do what Canada also does, provide some immigrants with all the benefits of citizenship and support of Canadian society with little of the responsibility or even the requirement to work for what they get, taking money from existing citizens through high taxes to feed those fleeing far less supportive cultures. There is nothing wrong with welcoming immigrants, but there is definitely a lot wrong with giving anyone a free ride on the backs of hardworking Canadians, immigrants or not. That isn't promoting equality. Forcing an existing citizen to finance the training of a newcomer so the newcomer can compete for the same job is wrong.
Damn straight! Only natural-born Canadians should be able to be lazy and live parasitically off the rest of us. Is it wrong to force an existing citizen to finance the education and training of another citizen through taxes? Socialists! We're all socialists! Next thing you know, we'll start getting crazy ideas about universal health care.
Come off it. First of all, there are lazy people among fresh immigrants and among longtime Canadian citizens. Similarly, both groups contain con artists, scammers, and criminals who will make every effort to work the system. (Not all welfare fraud is committed by immigrants, you know.) In all cases, the government makes an effort to weed out the bad apples, but there are limited resources available for screening. At a certain point (and different people will draw the line in different places) you have to accept a failure rate.
Second, the top of this thread discusses skilled workers. In Canada, we make an effort to import these people only when we have a domestic shortage. I have recently done medical research in a couple of Ontario hospitals, and I can tell you that if you need radiation therapy in Ontario, there's pretty good odds that your treatment will be overseen by an imported radiation therapist. The Ontario government has been underfunding radiation oncology programs at medical schools for a number of years, and we just don't have the people here--so we steal them from other countries (the UK, South Africa, New Zealand, etc.), where they probably received an education subsidized by their own governments. As for other skilled workers for which we have no shortage--why shouldn't they be allowed to compete with Canadians? It's good for the country to bring in the best people. With luck, they'll stay. If you can't compete, maybe you're in the wrong field.
Lastly, almost all Canadians are immigrants. Some of us arrived before others--I can trace some branches of my family back to before Confederation--but almost all of us are recent arrivals compared to occupants of some long-established European nations. How many generations should someone's family be in this country before we extend them all the rights and privileges of "real" Canadians?
Yes, you're right--immigrants should not be encouraged to take advantage of our welfare system, any more than fully-fledged citizens should. And, of course, it is fortunate that there are no landlords or employers who would ever consider taking advantage of immigrants because they might be less familiar with our labour and tenancy laws.
would have to say that "integration" is not the hallmark of Canadian immigration policy. It never has been. We're not the melting pot, we're the mosaic.
Canada is a mosaic, and I'm proud of it. Remember that integration is not assimilation. I sound like a badly-written social studies textbook, but I have to say: immigrants can form a healthy part of a cohesive and functional nation without abandoning their unique cultural identity. And I've ranted long enough. I'm pretty sure this will be the longest post I've ever made to/..
One time where I used to work, our supplier accidentally shipped us a whole box of them (About 20 drives). We decided to keep them and sell them for profit. About two months later (After we had built and sold about 10 machines with those drives), they quickly started to come back to the shop. So with the 10 we had left, we replaced them all.
So, what you're saying is this: you (or your employer) in essence stole twenty hard drives, and got burned.
Please, everyone--read the article before you post.
This isn't about some jackass engineer at Bombardier strapping a jet engine onto a flatcar to make it go faster. Bombardier is proposing the use of a turbine in the same way they are used in natural-gas fired power plants. Presumably, the turbine will drive a generator whose electricity output will drive electric motors as in a conventional diesel locomotive.
I'm all for it if it will bring high-speed rail service to North America. Electrifying the existing rail system will take decades if it happens at all--Canada and the U.S. just aren't densely packed enough to support the infrastructure investment seen in Europe. If we can get high-speed non-electric locomotives, we might see high-speed rail service to more cities, offering a viable alternative to the inconveniences of air travel.
Congratulations! You've located the single dumbest remark I've yet made on Slashdot. I blame lack of sleep for the error. Consider the phrasing suitably amended.
Too bad the moderators are probably finished with this topic; I probably could have snagged a +1 Funny.
Isn't cancer caused by cells multiplying too rapidly?
It's a little bit of both. Cancer is the result of uncontrolled cellular replication due to genetic damage to cellular regulatory machinery. Apoptosis is supposed to kill off cells that have problems with their internal structure (for example, a genetic error causing a fault in the systems that regulate growth and proliferation) as well as cells at the end of their useful lifespan.
If we could make periodic adjustments to the way cells replicate perhaps this would work?
And you've just hit on the holy grail of oncology. Unfortunately, we can't just tell all the body's cells to commit suicide. Cures cancer--but results in unsatisfied customers. And some quickly replicating cells are supposed to be that way (bone marrow, gut lining, hair, etc.) so we can't even just mow down fast-growing cells. Actually, that's sort of what chemo and radiation therapies do in a very ham-fisted way--toast all the fast-growing cells, and hope that the cancer dies faster than the rest of the body. It's why chemo makes your hair fall out, and causes anemia and nausea.
Rest assured, however, that your tax dollars are hard at work on a solution.
I've also heard that hair/nails can still grow for some time after death? I suppose those cells keep on going. Creepy
This one is mostly an urban legend. Mostly, it's due to the slight dessication/dehydration the body underdoes after death. There's a bit of evaporation, and shrinkage. Contraction of surrounding tissue can force hair and nails to protrude further than before death, giving a perception of growth. Also, there were cases up until the last century or so that involved patients in deep coma states--still alive, but apparently dead. Yes, hair and nails grew on those 'dead' people. And they got pissed off when they got buried.
Its simple: if there are no links to DeCSS, then there is no way to reach it.
Not true--there is one other way. Fortunately, efforts are underway to extend U.S. law to cover European Kazaa servers that might provide a link to the only other existing copies of DeCSS.
I doubt that News.com encourages their writers to break laws, even stupid ones like the DMCA. No company wants a writer who is a liability.
Except that you're assuming that breaking laws conspicuously makes the writer a liability. In some cases--this may or may not be one--polite but firm disobedience could garner a great deal of positive press. (The only bad press is an obituary, afer all...)
Even very "serious" news publications usually like to carry at least one controversial author--it makes them look more "cutting edge", more willing to take risks to stay in tune with the people. Whatever that means.
Nevertheless, even settling a lawsuit may be worth the cost if it generates enough buzz.
Kazaa is 99% copyrighted material trading, don't kid yourself...
So you say we must remove all tools that can distribute illegal material, so all software that in any way uses HTTP, FTP, IRC, MSN, ICQ or AOL protocols must be removed; all of them are/can be used to share copyrighted material.
Whoa, hang on a minute. I don't think that was what was said. The original poster suggested that the Kazaa network should be shut down because a majority (a very significant majority--the 99% figure may be low) use it to inappropriately distribute copyrighted works.
Whether I agree with that position or not is something I will save for another post. But it's embarrassing to yourself and insulting to the rest of us to set up a straw man like that ("So you say we must remove all tools...") and pretend you're making a reasoned reply. All you're doing is making the same kneejerk "If they shut down x which is used almost exclusively to further illegal activities, they'll have to shut down w, y, and z, and the rest of the internet because they can also be used for illegal purposes" argument.
Thanks, we've heard it. Please find a new topic on which to whore karma.
Like most people you are forgetting that insurance is one of the few industries run entirely on logic and mathematics -- their actuaries calculate the risk and the cost and multiple it out to get your premium.
Of course, there is a little bit of black magic involved in predicting just what fraction of commercial spaceflights will blow up on the pad, and how many of them will land in major cities and kill thousands of people. I don't actually think that the latter is a particularly probably event, but deciding just how improbable is a decidedly nontrivial task. Blithely saying that actuaries "calculate the risk" glosses over quite a bit of guesswork. I imagine that they just try to guess high, but really...
On the other hand, rockets are in many ways safer than airliners. During launch, they're in the middle of nowhere-failures cost money, but only the replacement cost of rocket and pad. No multi-billion-dollar class action suits. Rockets carry range safety charges to allow safe detonation of the craft if it goes anywhere near anyplace it oughtn't go. By the time a rocket reaches a populated area, it probably has also staged at least once, and is carry quite a bit less highly explosive fuel.
Worst case scenario: An uncontrolled commercial rocket hits a heavily-populated area shortly after launch. Net result: lots of people die. But it's not any worse than what happens when a commercial airliner crashes shortly after takeoff in an urban centre--do you know how much fuel is aboard a fully-loaded 747 at takeoff? Know how much one weighs? At least a rocket doesn't have hundreds of passengers to kill.
The 9,000 mph figure you're quoting is the escape velocity - an instantaneous velocity at the surface of the earth which, without any external acceleration save that of gravity, should theoretically get you into orbit.
9,000 mph is actually a pretty conservative ground speed for an orbiting vehicle. Probably right for geostationary orbit (I haven't checked the math) but low for low earth orbit. The space shuttle, for instance, orbits at a velocity of about 28,000 km/h--just shy of 20,000 mph.
Plus, you get a whole pile of potential energy back when you descend from orbit. That said, a big piece of hardware like the shuttle (typical landing weight eighty to one hundred tons) will gouge out a big crater if it crashes from orbit, but not as big as you would expect.
If it makes an uncontrolled reentry, there will also be uncontrolled heating, and all we'll get hit with on the ground will be little tiny shuttle bits. Some of them will be pretty hefty, but not that bad. If a shuttle goes through a normal reentry, quite a bit of speed is bled off before it hits the ground--it's no worse than an airliner crash as far as damage on the ground. There's no eighty-ton block of metal hitting the ground at 20,000 mph (six miles per second)--just an airliner-sized block moving at less than the speed of sound. (Bad, but not unimaginably scarily bad.) Also, it's costly to put weight in orbit--so there won't be many tons of flammable aviation fuel waiting to ignite when a crash occurs.
You can bet your ass the FAA (among other agencies--probably the military will be interested) will sit up and take notice of commercial space flights. Anything that looks like it has applications as a weapon will never make it anywhere near a launch pad.
Actually, the FAA will regulate this sort of thing anyway--they're responsible for the air that any commercial space flight has to pass through to get away from earth.
One thing we want to do is to try and get people to standardise. It will be a *real* pain if one piece of software used a gesture for minimise and another for quit.
But Microsoft would never embrace, extend, and corrupt a standard. I'm sure that if IE ever includes gestures, then Opera gestures will work perfectly.
Damn it, I love classical music, and you can pry my Opera from my cold, dead hands.
The point is, the tidal forces that they exert on each other must be tremendous. I think the internal friction caused by the tidal forces might be enough to create some liquid water somewhere, perhaps near the rocks that constitute 70% of it's mass (the balance is water ice and trace methane and nitrogen.)
Well, not quite--at least, not any more. Pluto and Charon each show each other the same face at all times, and have for a long while. Any stretching has long since reached a relatively stable equilibrium. Those tremendous tidal forced you allude to did exist when the binary system was first established would have generated heat, but a related consequence would have been a bleed-off of rotational speed. It's the same reason as why the Moon only presents one face to Earth. (Earth's rotation is also slowing, but since the Moon is so much less massive, it is a very time-consuming process.)
It's probably true that Pluto was a warmer place in the early solar system--or whenever those two chunks of rock first captured one another. And based on Earth's history, it seems that unicellular life can potentially develop quite quickly on a geological time scale.
But relying on tidal heating to produce liquid water now is a nonstarter.
...I have noticed that the same CD's for sale in my native Canada selling for $18.95 are priced at about the same dollar amount south of the border.
This would at first blush seem perfectly reasonable, until one notices that one United States dollar buys about $1.58 Canadian. That's right--CD's are typically about 50% more costly as soon as you go from Windsor to Detroit.
Granted, I've noted a similar pricing trend with some other goods--groceries come to mind. But for non-perishables, the price disjoint is quite stunning.
Is it price fixing? Or plain old-fashioned gouging? All I know is that for a ten-cent piece of plastic, that's quite a markup. Charge what the market will bear, and hope nobody notices that the neighbours are getting a 30+% discount. Does anybody know if there are any retailers taking advantage of this price difference? Buy Canadian, sell American, pocket the difference. (Whatever you do, don't write a post containing the phrase "3. Profit!!!")
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, this sort of information is not accessible only to professional researchers. Much of it is already on the internet, or published in foreign journals--or even in domestic publications that nobody noticed contained "sensitive" information. (That's actually one of the big problems with a "sensitive but unclassified" pseudocategory--nobody can be sure to what it should be applied, and different administrators will draw lines in different places.
Also, as long as this material is unclassified, scientists will continue to talk to one another. Most researchers are inherently helpful people, and they love to talk about their work. (It doesn't hurt that showing an interest strokes their egos, as well.) Having spent a large fraction of my working life in academia, this free interchange of ideas is essential, but it is also virtually impossible to secure on an informal basis. In other words, an email to most researchers would probably provide a great deal of useful information--no face to face meeting required, and forget about waiting for publication.
Well--eventually, maybe. But what they've build is essentially the back half of a water distillation system. The water that condenses out of the air will be very pure, and have a very low conductivity. (The resistance of a 1 cm path through ultrapure water is on the order of 18 meg--that's ohms, not byes--so it probably conducts no more electricity than the plastic of the board.)
Yes, the condensate will eventually pick up contaminants, and at the edges of the cooled region where liquid water is free to flow you're likely to have problems. The solution would be to keep the entire mainboard in a dry environment. Seal it in a box with only an inlet for LN2. The little bit of water in the box will condense out (on the N2 fill pipe rather than the board if you remove a bit of insulation) and as the LN2 boils off, the box will be filled with dry, inert nitrogen. As an added bonus, this will help suppress fires.
Quite frankly, if people are going to be investigating (and changing) settings under Administrative Tools inside the Control Panel then they should realize that their actions might have consequences. (I'm stretching the analogy a bit, but do we say computer hardware is badly designed because any idiot with a screwdriver can open the case and impale his or her CPU?)
This may an important consideration for home wireless networks, but no excuse for corporate networks. Any business that has a "non-techie" building their network is inviting a whole lot of trouble--most of which probably won't be coming to them through their wireless AP.
Exactly correct--the spam you receive seems to originate overseas. Actually, much of it is coming from hucksters in North America. They're just bouncing their pitches off open relays overseas.
Yes, but is that "between 0 and 1.2" inclusive?
Yep. You gotta love people who either a) mess with things they don't understand or b) deliberately try to break things...and then find that they're broken.
Granted, there exists an argument that even when apparently working correctly most MS products are badly broken, but that's for another post...
Not only that, but the grammar is defective too.
Thus perpetuating the unfair stereotype that Apple users are better-looking than the rest of us.
Oh. Wait...
There are a number of advantages. First is price--you can use off-the-shelf microwave oven pieces for most of a microwave drill. Granted, carbon dioxide cutting lasers are also available essentially off the shelf from a limited number of suppliers, but they tend to run in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Durability. Laser tubes don't tend to be happy about being moved about a lot. They contain optics that are very sensitive to misalignment.
Size. Microwave sources for this application would be quite a bit smaller than a carbon dioxide laser, especially when you add in all the ancillary equipment in my next point. In addition, combining size and durability makes a much more portable tool.
Limited complexity. No delicate optics. No vacuum system. No water cooling system. No mixed lasing gas to deal with.
Safety. Lasers can remain well collimated for significant distances--you can make holes in your coworkers from across the room if you're not careful. A microwave drill as described isn't acutely dangerous beyond an inch or two from the end of the drill bit. (There might be heating effects beyond that distance, but reflex action--Ow! It's hot! I'm moving my hand now!--would likely be sufficient to protect you. You need the same level of common sense that it takes to operate a band saw--don't put your fingers near the business end!)
So, that's why microwaves would be advantageous. That said, CO2 lasers can perform extremely well, as long as you don't have to move them to the field. Manufacturers already exist for the lasers, and it's a proven technology.
Damn straight! Only natural-born Canadians should be able to be lazy and live parasitically off the rest of us. Is it wrong to force an existing citizen to finance the education and training of another citizen through taxes? Socialists! We're all socialists! Next thing you know, we'll start getting crazy ideas about universal health care.
Come off it. First of all, there are lazy people among fresh immigrants and among longtime Canadian citizens. Similarly, both groups contain con artists, scammers, and criminals who will make every effort to work the system. (Not all welfare fraud is committed by immigrants, you know.) In all cases, the government makes an effort to weed out the bad apples, but there are limited resources available for screening. At a certain point (and different people will draw the line in different places) you have to accept a failure rate.
Second, the top of this thread discusses skilled workers. In Canada, we make an effort to import these people only when we have a domestic shortage. I have recently done medical research in a couple of Ontario hospitals, and I can tell you that if you need radiation therapy in Ontario, there's pretty good odds that your treatment will be overseen by an imported radiation therapist. The Ontario government has been underfunding radiation oncology programs at medical schools for a number of years, and we just don't have the people here--so we steal them from other countries (the UK, South Africa, New Zealand, etc.), where they probably received an education subsidized by their own governments. As for other skilled workers for which we have no shortage--why shouldn't they be allowed to compete with Canadians? It's good for the country to bring in the best people. With luck, they'll stay. If you can't compete, maybe you're in the wrong field.
Lastly, almost all Canadians are immigrants. Some of us arrived before others--I can trace some branches of my family back to before Confederation--but almost all of us are recent arrivals compared to occupants of some long-established European nations. How many generations should someone's family be in this country before we extend them all the rights and privileges of "real" Canadians?
Yes, you're right--immigrants should not be encouraged to take advantage of our welfare system, any more than fully-fledged citizens should. And, of course, it is fortunate that there are no landlords or employers who would ever consider taking advantage of immigrants because they might be less familiar with our labour and tenancy laws.
would have to say that "integration" is not the hallmark of Canadian immigration policy. It never has been. We're not the melting pot, we're the mosaic.
Canada is a mosaic, and I'm proud of it. Remember that integration is not assimilation. I sound like a badly-written social studies textbook, but I have to say: immigrants can form a healthy part of a cohesive and functional nation without abandoning their unique cultural identity. And I've ranted long enough. I'm pretty sure this will be the longest post I've ever made to /..
So, what you're saying is this: you (or your employer) in essence stole twenty hard drives, and got burned.
Um, serves you right.
This isn't about some jackass engineer at Bombardier strapping a jet engine onto a flatcar to make it go faster. Bombardier is proposing the use of a turbine in the same way they are used in natural-gas fired power plants. Presumably, the turbine will drive a generator whose electricity output will drive electric motors as in a conventional diesel locomotive.
I'm all for it if it will bring high-speed rail service to North America. Electrifying the existing rail system will take decades if it happens at all--Canada and the U.S. just aren't densely packed enough to support the infrastructure investment seen in Europe. If we can get high-speed non-electric locomotives, we might see high-speed rail service to more cities, offering a viable alternative to the inconveniences of air travel.
Save some for the people who mention 3. Profit!!!
Congratulations! You've located the single dumbest remark I've yet made on Slashdot. I blame lack of sleep for the error. Consider the phrasing suitably amended.
Too bad the moderators are probably finished with this topic; I probably could have snagged a +1 Funny.
It's a little bit of both. Cancer is the result of uncontrolled cellular replication due to genetic damage to cellular regulatory machinery. Apoptosis is supposed to kill off cells that have problems with their internal structure (for example, a genetic error causing a fault in the systems that regulate growth and proliferation) as well as cells at the end of their useful lifespan.
If we could make periodic adjustments to the way cells replicate perhaps this would work?
And you've just hit on the holy grail of oncology. Unfortunately, we can't just tell all the body's cells to commit suicide. Cures cancer--but results in unsatisfied customers. And some quickly replicating cells are supposed to be that way (bone marrow, gut lining, hair, etc.) so we can't even just mow down fast-growing cells. Actually, that's sort of what chemo and radiation therapies do in a very ham-fisted way--toast all the fast-growing cells, and hope that the cancer dies faster than the rest of the body. It's why chemo makes your hair fall out, and causes anemia and nausea.
Rest assured, however, that your tax dollars are hard at work on a solution.
I've also heard that hair/nails can still grow for some time after death? I suppose those cells keep on going. Creepy
This one is mostly an urban legend. Mostly, it's due to the slight dessication/dehydration the body underdoes after death. There's a bit of evaporation, and shrinkage. Contraction of surrounding tissue can force hair and nails to protrude further than before death, giving a perception of growth. Also, there were cases up until the last century or so that involved patients in deep coma states--still alive, but apparently dead. Yes, hair and nails grew on those 'dead' people. And they got pissed off when they got buried.
Sure. It happens naturally.
Usually, we call it cancer.
Not true--there is one other way. Fortunately, efforts are underway to extend U.S. law to cover European Kazaa servers that might provide a link to the only other existing copies of DeCSS.
Except that you're assuming that breaking laws conspicuously makes the writer a liability. In some cases--this may or may not be one--polite but firm disobedience could garner a great deal of positive press. (The only bad press is an obituary, afer all...)
Even very "serious" news publications usually like to carry at least one controversial author--it makes them look more "cutting edge", more willing to take risks to stay in tune with the people. Whatever that means.
Nevertheless, even settling a lawsuit may be worth the cost if it generates enough buzz.
So you say we must remove all tools that can distribute illegal material, so all software that in any way uses HTTP, FTP, IRC, MSN, ICQ or AOL protocols must be removed; all of them are/can be used to share copyrighted material.
Whoa, hang on a minute. I don't think that was what was said. The original poster suggested that the Kazaa network should be shut down because a majority (a very significant majority--the 99% figure may be low) use it to inappropriately distribute copyrighted works.
Whether I agree with that position or not is something I will save for another post. But it's embarrassing to yourself and insulting to the rest of us to set up a straw man like that ("So you say we must remove all tools...") and pretend you're making a reasoned reply. All you're doing is making the same kneejerk "If they shut down x which is used almost exclusively to further illegal activities, they'll have to shut down w, y, and z, and the rest of the internet because they can also be used for illegal purposes" argument.
Thanks, we've heard it. Please find a new topic on which to whore karma.
Of course, there is a little bit of black magic involved in predicting just what fraction of commercial spaceflights will blow up on the pad, and how many of them will land in major cities and kill thousands of people. I don't actually think that the latter is a particularly probably event, but deciding just how improbable is a decidedly nontrivial task. Blithely saying that actuaries "calculate the risk" glosses over quite a bit of guesswork. I imagine that they just try to guess high, but really...
On the other hand, rockets are in many ways safer than airliners. During launch, they're in the middle of nowhere-failures cost money, but only the replacement cost of rocket and pad. No multi-billion-dollar class action suits. Rockets carry range safety charges to allow safe detonation of the craft if it goes anywhere near anyplace it oughtn't go. By the time a rocket reaches a populated area, it probably has also staged at least once, and is carry quite a bit less highly explosive fuel.
Worst case scenario: An uncontrolled commercial rocket hits a heavily-populated area shortly after launch. Net result: lots of people die. But it's not any worse than what happens when a commercial airliner crashes shortly after takeoff in an urban centre--do you know how much fuel is aboard a fully-loaded 747 at takeoff? Know how much one weighs? At least a rocket doesn't have hundreds of passengers to kill.
9,000 mph is actually a pretty conservative ground speed for an orbiting vehicle. Probably right for geostationary orbit (I haven't checked the math) but low for low earth orbit. The space shuttle, for instance, orbits at a velocity of about 28,000 km/h--just shy of 20,000 mph.
Plus, you get a whole pile of potential energy back when you descend from orbit. That said, a big piece of hardware like the shuttle (typical landing weight eighty to one hundred tons) will gouge out a big crater if it crashes from orbit, but not as big as you would expect.
If it makes an uncontrolled reentry, there will also be uncontrolled heating, and all we'll get hit with on the ground will be little tiny shuttle bits. Some of them will be pretty hefty, but not that bad. If a shuttle goes through a normal reentry, quite a bit of speed is bled off before it hits the ground--it's no worse than an airliner crash as far as damage on the ground. There's no eighty-ton block of metal hitting the ground at 20,000 mph (six miles per second)--just an airliner-sized block moving at less than the speed of sound. (Bad, but not unimaginably scarily bad.) Also, it's costly to put weight in orbit--so there won't be many tons of flammable aviation fuel waiting to ignite when a crash occurs.
You can bet your ass the FAA (among other agencies--probably the military will be interested) will sit up and take notice of commercial space flights. Anything that looks like it has applications as a weapon will never make it anywhere near a launch pad.
Actually, the FAA will regulate this sort of thing anyway--they're responsible for the air that any commercial space flight has to pass through to get away from earth.
But Microsoft would never embrace, extend, and corrupt a standard. I'm sure that if IE ever includes gestures, then Opera gestures will work perfectly.
Damn it, I love classical music, and you can pry my Opera from my cold, dead hands.
Well, not quite--at least, not any more. Pluto and Charon each show each other the same face at all times, and have for a long while. Any stretching has long since reached a relatively stable equilibrium. Those tremendous tidal forced you allude to did exist when the binary system was first established would have generated heat, but a related consequence would have been a bleed-off of rotational speed. It's the same reason as why the Moon only presents one face to Earth. (Earth's rotation is also slowing, but since the Moon is so much less massive, it is a very time-consuming process.)
It's probably true that Pluto was a warmer place in the early solar system--or whenever those two chunks of rock first captured one another. And based on Earth's history, it seems that unicellular life can potentially develop quite quickly on a geological time scale.
But relying on tidal heating to produce liquid water now is a nonstarter.
This would at first blush seem perfectly reasonable, until one notices that one United States dollar buys about $1.58 Canadian. That's right--CD's are typically about 50% more costly as soon as you go from Windsor to Detroit.
Granted, I've noted a similar pricing trend with some other goods--groceries come to mind. But for non-perishables, the price disjoint is quite stunning.
Is it price fixing? Or plain old-fashioned gouging? All I know is that for a ten-cent piece of plastic, that's quite a markup. Charge what the market will bear, and hope nobody notices that the neighbours are getting a 30+% discount. Does anybody know if there are any retailers taking advantage of this price difference? Buy Canadian, sell American, pocket the difference. (Whatever you do, don't write a post containing the phrase "3. Profit!!!")