I think that would be kind of cool. simple and elegant.
It would be cool, simple, and elegant to have to pay a five-dollar premium on every doctor or hospital visit to ensure that existing laws regarding privacy are enforced?
Having to pay extra for privacy that should already be guaranteed is both a perversion of medical ethics and a misuse of the free market. How about this for a solution: federal regulators are going to fine your ass ten thousand dollars for each file that is handled by someone who shouldn't. Plus a little bit of: the feds are going to arrest and detain company officials if gross negligence is demonstrated.
Since the table is laid out in numerical order, with groupings that do not allow betting on wheel sectors, you have to quickly spread chips across the numbers that this system selects.
Well, not quite. Even if you only bet on one number in the sector you expect to win, you're still ahead, and by the same amount over the long term.
Most casinos would indeed be suspicious of an individual placing nine unique bets at the last possible moment. An individual placing single bets at the last minute would be unremarkable.
Granted, only some of them will look remotely like english, STILL... 2^81920 is quite enough to come up with many plaintext documents per hash.
Peachy. Where were you going to put the lookup table for that? 2^81920 is on the order of 10^25000. If you could store one of those documents on an atom (attach it with a little dab of glue, okay?) you'd have enough plaintext documents for every atom in this universe...and for every atom to have its own universe of attached atoms...and still have enough documents to be short several orders of magnitude of storage space. Generating the table is left as an exercise for the reader. Cheers.
All your back-of-envelope math is based on that figure, which means its irrelevant. The value we currently get from extracting the electricity from pound of uranium is less than $10.
It's relevant to the question of space disposal of the nuclear waste. I was observing that that technique was completely impractical for purely economic reasons. Also, the waste must be stored or eliminated somehow now that we've got it. Whether it was cost-effective to fission it in the first place is moot.
Back of the envelope and assuming significant inefficiencies in generation, I'd say fissioning a pound of unenriched uranium will generate at least a thousand dollars worth of electricity, actually. The price to buy that uranium is around ten or fifteen dollars a pound, but you get a lot more out of it.
Who are powerless to stop a single hijacked airliner.
Unless your storage area is underground. True, the power plants are vulnerable, but that's an existing problem. Again, we still need to store the current waste.
Well, that the truth isn't it? For every slashdot headline about some school, college or course teaching some 'other' Office suite, there's hundreds teaching MS Office. Even if they had no training at all, Microsoft Office is what most people have had prior expeirence of, so some readjustment will be required.
How young are you? My first word processor was EasyScript running on a Commodore 64. My mother taught me that one.
My second word processor was Microsoft Works, running under DOS.
My third word processor was WordPerfect 5.1 running under DOS. Ten years or so ago, this was the standard in any professional establishment that had to produce and exchange documents.
For the last five or six years, I've been using my fourth word processor--Word 97 running under Windows 98 and 2000. Even though the last few years of training have been with Microsoft's office suite, it doesn't mean that the rest of us have no prior experience with anything else. People could--and did--learn WP51. They survived the transition to Word. When the order comes from on high to transition to the next word processor, they will do that, too.
The people who will need to use the advanced features of any word processor have probably already been through at least one major upheaval, going from WordPerfect to Word. The people who don't need the advanced features (most everyone else) can be trained very quickly to do basic tasks.
Remember, it is much easier to send up our nuclear waste and shoot it into the Sun. Nobody is doing that now, simply because it is too risky and too damn expensive.
I was thinking that 'too risky and too damn expensive' were pretty good reasons not to do it, actually.
Right now we're looking at (best case) about $1000 per pound just to low earth orbit. That's two million dollars per ton--even if we assume that the waste doesn't require any sort of heavy shielding. (What if the launch vehicle fails?) Let's say we can put fifty tons into orbit on each launch; that's a hundred million dollars to play with.
For that same hundred million dollars, you could:
Buy a plot of land in the desert a couple of mile on a side. ($1 million)
Construct a solid concrete building within a building. Heck, build it underground. Put it smack in the middle of the plot of land. The storage room for the waste has to be only about two meters (six feet) cubed to hold fifty tons. ($30 million)
Invest the rest very conservatively. Earn 6% on that $69 million. That's $4.14 million per year in perpetuity. Use that to hire three shifts of fifteen guards (45 times $70K per year is $3.15 million); buy them a new patrol truck every year ($75K); and pay for utilities, air filters, and maitenance ($500K).
That still leaves $400K per year as a contingency fund, and lets you monitor the waste continuously. No leaking into groundwater, no risk of exploding rockets. No problem.
It's okay. Opera lets you suppress those annoying automated audio clips. Hit F12 (opens the Quick Preferences menu) and uncheck 'Enable embedded audio'.
The same menu also contains all the popup killing settings ('Open requested popups only' works quite well) and cripple some other annoyances of the web (uncheck 'Enable plugins' and possibly 'Enable Javascript'.)
I thought peer reviewed journals were where you published crap that had already been peer reviewed.
Nope. Peer review is a formal process carried out by the journal itself. Each publication has slightly different practices, but the basic process is pretty much consistent. A journal will send copies of your submitted manuscript off to one or more referees--people who are acknowledged to have expertise in the same area. These referees will evaluate whether or not the manuscript is suitable for publication, and possibly suggest changes or additions. For some journals, the referees' identities are concealed from the prospective author.
In some cases, there may be several iterations of review and resubmission before a paper is accepted by the journal for publication. The journal editors have the final say in whether or not the paper is published, but their decision is based heavily on the recommendations of the referees.
Consulting with qualified scientists prior to submitting a manuscript to a journal doesn't count as peer review, but it's certainly a good idea if you reach controversial conclusions or use unusual methods. (Properly, those scientists with whom you consult should be acknowleged in the paper.) In the case of the results NASA has presented here, they have probably had access to virtually all of the most qualified individuals in geology and so forth, so I have little doubt that when these results are published they will have no trouble passing the peer review process. I'm sure that NASA's internal researchers and external collaborators wouldn't be issuing press releases if they didn't believe very strongly that they had a bulletproof conclusion--but technically these data have not been peer reviewed.
That was the single most gobsmacking business statistic that I heard until the one a couple of years ago about how Microsoft could purchase the airline industry out of its cash reserves -- twice.
That's not that surprising. I suspect that without regular government bailouts the net worth of most of the U.S. airline industry is less than zero...I suppose it's impressive that Microsoft could probably afford to assume that much new debt.
There is quite simply a certain, undeniable, inescapable inevitability to OSS. Its growth is slow, steady, and seemingly unstoppable.
"Hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of
inevitability. That is the sound of your death. Goodbye, Mr. Anderson."
I've never been much of one for inevitability. One more quote, this one from Martin Luther King Jr.
"Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that
no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."
Electrocution actually isn't much of a risk with many HV devices - most will destroy themselves (or run up against current limiters) far before they output anywhere near the 200-250 mA needed to stop the human heart. While a shock from a tesla coil or other HV device will hurt terribly and pose a risk of burns, it probably won't kill you.
It is true that you won't get a lethal shock directly from the high voltage side of a Tesla coil.
One thing you have to watch is the shielding on the 'low' voltage side of homemade equipment. You're going to have components running off 120 V or 240 V line current. If the high voltage side arcs to a low voltage component, suddenly you've got a conducting path through the air (technically, a plasma) attached to potentially several amps of line current. It is possible to deliver a a deadly current this way.
Aside--an arc back to the line can wreak all manner of havoc on other electrical equipment on the same circuit. Your computer won't like it, that's for sure. Please, have properly grounded metal shielding around all line conductors in your experimental area!
Maybe it's ugly, but "fayervoll" is far easier to understand than "inter-network screen of defense," which makes you think of something uttered on Star Trek.:)
Fair enough--but credit where credit is due. The Russian version is a much more precise definition of what the software does. 'Firewall' is very metaphorical. Even if the Russians were to shorten their version to 'screen', it would still be bang on. After all, a screen keeps the bugs out.:)
I was an assitant systems inspector. We had problems as well, but they were not as bad as the article describes.
True. They were much, much worse. Reread your post, please!
I started poking around the root filesystem looking for a link to the executable. What are they thinking giving every clerk everywhere root?
I finally found the actual location of the executable--it seemed to be on a datacard of some sort--and started it for them. Other posters have noted that you have no way of verifying that this is the correct excutable. What if it was a testing version, or something else uncertified by the state?
We had one voting maching give a blank page to someone when it was in large print high contrast mode, but we just hit next and it was fine. And this is the sort of thing that can be horribly troublesome. People with poor eyesight are mostly (though not exclusively) the elderly--a group that are not known for their comfort (in general) with computers. And here they are with a blank screen.
One of our machines failed to print -- it just cut off in the middle and wouldn't reprint (some paper trail, eh?).
How many people voted at that machine? A hundred? Five hundred? How many votes are now either irretrievable at worst or highly suspect at best? Even though it couldn't print the totals, you expect it to submit electronically the correct tally?
The worst part was that the voting stations give a total number of votes cast onscreen and a total on the printed tape, and on all of our machines but one, these did not match. They were all off by one vote. How is this problem not very, very serious? First, you lose whatever thin reassurance the total provided. The system now is without an effective check on number of ballots cast. Second, if there was an error--if it was randomly distributed then it's unlikely (though not impossible) for it to affect an election. If it was systematic (deliberately, or just a programming error that inadvertantly doesn't count the first vote for the first candidate, or something like that) then this could be very serious. If five hundred people use each machine, and you lose one of every five hundred votes for a candidate, that's an error of 2000 votes per million ballots. That's appalling--and larger than the margins in a number of states in the last Presidential election.
To be potentially unreachable by family in the case of emergency is not a condition I would tolerate.
Would you refuse a job because there's poor cellular reception in part of the building? Did you test for this ("Can you hear me now?") before you accepted your job? Will you quit if your cube is moved closer to the middle of the building where you can't get a signal?
It's called "Fair Use" and it's allowed by law. You should look it up.
So should you.
Let's say I want to check a book out of the library. Regrettably, all their copies are in use by other readers, but my friend did snag a copy. It's not fair use to photocopy the entire volume so me and my buddy can both have one.
Just because it's inconvenient that a site is slashdotted, it is not necessarily fair use to reproduce the content in its entirety elsewhere without the permission of the copyright holder. Slashdot's own FAQ addresses some other problems with mirroring.
But then, I'm replying to an AC. Must not feed the trolls! *smacks forehead*
Of course, it would be so much nicer for everyone if browsers sent a Connection-Speed header.
Well, it would make it nicer for advertisers, I suppose. What if I have a fat pipe but I still don't want to waste bandwidth? Why can't everyone get low-bandwidth ads? Why do I have to pay more overhead for the same content on the page?
Speaking of wasted bandwidth, what happens when everyone's browser starts sending out a Connection-Speed header to millions of sites that don't need know? And you have to figure that the good browsers (Opera, Firefox, etc.) would allow you to adjust your header to cut off the worst of the ads.
ok, lets try this again. you take an oxygen tank, just some goold old 2O2, you open that sumabich up and stike a match, some flint, whatever, you touch a 9volt to some steal wool, you put it close to that escaping gas, the little fire starts. next, you remove this match, spark, or whatever. Does the fire go out? Come on, dont do a 'thought experiment', go try it.
I'd recommend strongly against doing this experiment. A lit match (or just about anything else hot) will burn explosively in one atmosphere of pure oxygen. Metals will burn in an oxygen atmosphere. You'll be lucky to get your hand back if you try what the parent post suggests.
That said, if you do manage to remove the fuel (match, whatever) from the oxygen jet, you'll find that the match will continue to burn but there will be no flame from the oxygen.
Oxygen doesn't burn. It is the oxidizer which when combined with a fuel allows combustion to take place.
Is there anybody in our audience who does oxy-acetylene welding, or is a professional glassblower? In both professions, you supply a torch with both a fuel gas and oxygen. Turn on both gas valves; spark to ignite. You get a nice hot flame. You can cut metal and melt glass.
If you turn off the fuel gas, the flame goes out. No burning takes place. You get a nice, cool jet of oxygen. End of story. Energy doesn't come from nowhere--if the parent post can tell me what material in air the oxygen gas is supposed to be reacting with to generate heat and flame, I'll be pleased to retract my statement.
By the way, IIAC (I Am A Chemist).
Its funny to me that if you replaced all the Oxygens in this statement with another gas, say Hydrogen, and preformed the same experiment, you wouldn't have seen the complaints.
That's because hydrogen burns. If you had made the same claims about helium, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or argon, we'd still be arguing with you.
It's kind of sad that a statement like this is even necessary. It's an interesting statement regarding what kind of qualifications are often necessary just to get a typical reader to give you credit for not being an idiot.
I don't know--I think it's appropriate for for the author of a review of a book on computer security to discuss his credentials with respect to computer security.
If I were to write this review, I'd probably say something like, "The material was far too detailed and complex. The author expects the casual reader to be intimately acquainted with Perl and assembler. Basic concepts were not explained. Stay away from this book unless you're a masochist."
But that's because my formal training is in physics, chemistry, and biology. Why shouldn't we expect a book to be reviewed by someone competent?
A short blurb about the author of a review (or other article where we would expect the author to be a specialist) is not uncommon in other media--though it is generally added by the editor, not the review author. Something like, "Bob Smith is a professor of Elvisology at Podunk University. He has studied techniques to clone dead rock stars from their hair for many years, and he is a regular contributor to the pages of Weekly World News."
It would not cost much more than what is there now and would be far more useful, for all.
It would cost automakers a fortune, actually. First of all, they already cut every corner possible to save a dollar or two on manufacturing costs. Do you think they'd want to put ten or twenty dollars per car into an extra set of wiring and a dispay, as well as redesigning the dash so there would be someplace to put it? I remember reading about ten years ago how pleased one of the major U.S. automakers was that they were saving seventy-nine cents per car by not painting the inside of the ashtrays.
More important than the materials cost is the lost business at the dealership. If you repair the car yourself using the helpful diagnostics display and a $12 part from Wal-Mart, then you're not paying the dealership $75 for the diagnosis, $25 for the part, or $150 for labour to install it. No automaker wants to forego that revenue.
this works by typing google [searchtopic] in the address bar and hitting enter
You can save yourself some time. In Firefox and in Opera, you can type just the letter 'g' followed by keywords. It's really slick--probably the most useful feature of Opera for me.
On a related note, I have a friend who got into prenatal sound therapy for her two kids during gestation. They are way more hyperactive and brighter than their peers.
What would be useful would be if she tried the therapy with one child and not the other. Your experiment needs a control. How do you know that their intelligence and behaviour are the consequence of the sound therapy and not genetics, your friend's parenting, or random chance?
It is EA's privilege to have you as its customer. It is Square/Enix's privilege to have you as a customer. Etc. It is not a privilege for you to play their game(s).
Eh? Privilege? When did this enter into the matter at all?
The operation of these online games is governed by straight contract law. Each party has rights and obligations under the law. Each party gets something of presumed value out of the transaction. I get to play the game for entertainment, Square gets some of my real-world money. Neither side enjoys some sort of special privilege; we're both individuals entering a contract.
For example, go to any popular MMOG forum and take note of the excessive complaining about all manner of game dynamics and routines. Most of the time, the people complaining would just like the game to be changed in some way, and these feelings are usually shared by the majority. Nevertheless, the most popular retort to any such complaint is something akin to "well it is Square's game, and if you don't like it than you don't have to play!". The extremely sad thing is, is that as customers you should expect a company to improve its product to the majority's wishes, and to fix bugs in a timely fashion, etc.
And rightly so--it is Square's game. They're providing a service which I, as an individual, can choose whether or not to purchase. It may be bad business sense to alienate customers...but if their cash flow is still good, why not squeeze as much out of us as possible? If people are still paying for it, then how bad could it be? From Square's perspective, maybe they feel that their chief responsibilities are to keep up with providing fresh content and keep the servers running, and that some people have inflated expectations.
Note also that for every user who complains on the forums, there are likely hundreds of users who didn't complain--is that because a) they're too lazy, b) they like the way things work, or c) they're afraid they're going to get flamed abusively and excessively if they tell someone to quit griping. Short of doing a proper random survey (not "all my friends agree with me on this"), I daresay nobody can answer that question.
They offer a product. If the majority wants something different, someone else will come along to serve that market niche. For physical products, some companies compete on the basis of price, others on customer service, others on quality--most on some combination. If one product doesn't meet your expectations, find another one.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be cool, simple, and elegant to have to pay a five-dollar premium on every doctor or hospital visit to ensure that existing laws regarding privacy are enforced?
Having to pay extra for privacy that should already be guaranteed is both a perversion of medical ethics and a misuse of the free market. How about this for a solution: federal regulators are going to fine your ass ten thousand dollars for each file that is handled by someone who shouldn't. Plus a little bit of: the feds are going to arrest and detain company officials if gross negligence is demonstrated.
Well, not quite. Even if you only bet on one number in the sector you expect to win, you're still ahead, and by the same amount over the long term.
Most casinos would indeed be suspicious of an individual placing nine unique bets at the last possible moment. An individual placing single bets at the last minute would be unremarkable.
Peachy. Where were you going to put the lookup table for that? 2^81920 is on the order of 10^25000. If you could store one of those documents on an atom (attach it with a little dab of glue, okay?) you'd have enough plaintext documents for every atom in this universe...and for every atom to have its own universe of attached atoms...and still have enough documents to be short several orders of magnitude of storage space. Generating the table is left as an exercise for the reader. Cheers.
It's relevant to the question of space disposal of the nuclear waste. I was observing that that technique was completely impractical for purely economic reasons. Also, the waste must be stored or eliminated somehow now that we've got it. Whether it was cost-effective to fission it in the first place is moot.
Back of the envelope and assuming significant inefficiencies in generation, I'd say fissioning a pound of unenriched uranium will generate at least a thousand dollars worth of electricity, actually. The price to buy that uranium is around ten or fifteen dollars a pound, but you get a lot more out of it.
Who are powerless to stop a single hijacked airliner.
Unless your storage area is underground. True, the power plants are vulnerable, but that's an existing problem. Again, we still need to store the current waste.
How young are you? My first word processor was EasyScript running on a Commodore 64. My mother taught me that one.
My second word processor was Microsoft Works, running under DOS.
My third word processor was WordPerfect 5.1 running under DOS. Ten years or so ago, this was the standard in any professional establishment that had to produce and exchange documents.
For the last five or six years, I've been using my fourth word processor--Word 97 running under Windows 98 and 2000. Even though the last few years of training have been with Microsoft's office suite, it doesn't mean that the rest of us have no prior experience with anything else. People could--and did--learn WP51. They survived the transition to Word. When the order comes from on high to transition to the next word processor, they will do that, too.
The people who will need to use the advanced features of any word processor have probably already been through at least one major upheaval, going from WordPerfect to Word. The people who don't need the advanced features (most everyone else) can be trained very quickly to do basic tasks.
I was thinking that 'too risky and too damn expensive' were pretty good reasons not to do it, actually.
Right now we're looking at (best case) about $1000 per pound just to low earth orbit. That's two million dollars per ton--even if we assume that the waste doesn't require any sort of heavy shielding. (What if the launch vehicle fails?) Let's say we can put fifty tons into orbit on each launch; that's a hundred million dollars to play with.
For that same hundred million dollars, you could:
Buy a plot of land in the desert a couple of mile on a side. ($1 million)
Construct a solid concrete building within a building. Heck, build it underground. Put it smack in the middle of the plot of land. The storage room for the waste has to be only about two meters (six feet) cubed to hold fifty tons. ($30 million)
Invest the rest very conservatively. Earn 6% on that $69 million. That's $4.14 million per year in perpetuity. Use that to hire three shifts of fifteen guards (45 times $70K per year is $3.15 million); buy them a new patrol truck every year ($75K); and pay for utilities, air filters, and maitenance ($500K).
That still leaves $400K per year as a contingency fund, and lets you monitor the waste continuously. No leaking into groundwater, no risk of exploding rockets. No problem.
It's okay. Opera lets you suppress those annoying automated audio clips. Hit F12 (opens the Quick Preferences menu) and uncheck 'Enable embedded audio'.
The same menu also contains all the popup killing settings ('Open requested popups only' works quite well) and cripple some other annoyances of the web (uncheck 'Enable plugins' and possibly 'Enable Javascript'.)
Cheers.
Nope. Peer review is a formal process carried out by the journal itself. Each publication has slightly different practices, but the basic process is pretty much consistent. A journal will send copies of your submitted manuscript off to one or more referees--people who are acknowledged to have expertise in the same area. These referees will evaluate whether or not the manuscript is suitable for publication, and possibly suggest changes or additions. For some journals, the referees' identities are concealed from the prospective author.
In some cases, there may be several iterations of review and resubmission before a paper is accepted by the journal for publication. The journal editors have the final say in whether or not the paper is published, but their decision is based heavily on the recommendations of the referees.
Consulting with qualified scientists prior to submitting a manuscript to a journal doesn't count as peer review, but it's certainly a good idea if you reach controversial conclusions or use unusual methods. (Properly, those scientists with whom you consult should be acknowleged in the paper.) In the case of the results NASA has presented here, they have probably had access to virtually all of the most qualified individuals in geology and so forth, so I have little doubt that when these results are published they will have no trouble passing the peer review process. I'm sure that NASA's internal researchers and external collaborators wouldn't be issuing press releases if they didn't believe very strongly that they had a bulletproof conclusion--but technically these data have not been peer reviewed.
That's not that surprising. I suspect that without regular government bailouts the net worth of most of the U.S. airline industry is less than zero...I suppose it's impressive that Microsoft could probably afford to assume that much new debt.
It is true that you won't get a lethal shock directly from the high voltage side of a Tesla coil.
One thing you have to watch is the shielding on the 'low' voltage side of homemade equipment. You're going to have components running off 120 V or 240 V line current. If the high voltage side arcs to a low voltage component, suddenly you've got a conducting path through the air (technically, a plasma) attached to potentially several amps of line current. It is possible to deliver a a deadly current this way.
Aside--an arc back to the line can wreak all manner of havoc on other electrical equipment on the same circuit. Your computer won't like it, that's for sure. Please, have properly grounded metal shielding around all line conductors in your experimental area!
Fair enough--but credit where credit is due. The Russian version is a much more precise definition of what the software does. 'Firewall' is very metaphorical. Even if the Russians were to shorten their version to 'screen', it would still be bang on. After all, a screen keeps the bugs out. :)
That's not ROT13; that's the Welsh localization.
And everyone knows there are two ells in 'gllcr'. :D
nt
True. They were much, much worse. Reread your post, please!
I started poking around the root filesystem looking for a link to the executable.
What are they thinking giving every clerk everywhere root?
I finally found the actual location of the executable--it seemed to be on a datacard of some sort--and started it for them.
Other posters have noted that you have no way of verifying that this is the correct excutable. What if it was a testing version, or something else uncertified by the state?
We had one voting maching give a blank page to someone when it was in large print high contrast mode, but we just hit next and it was fine.
And this is the sort of thing that can be horribly troublesome. People with poor eyesight are mostly (though not exclusively) the elderly--a group that are not known for their comfort (in general) with computers. And here they are with a blank screen.
One of our machines failed to print -- it just cut off in the middle and wouldn't reprint (some paper trail, eh?).
How many people voted at that machine? A hundred? Five hundred? How many votes are now either irretrievable at worst or highly suspect at best? Even though it couldn't print the totals, you expect it to submit electronically the correct tally?
The worst part was that the voting stations give a total number of votes cast onscreen and a total on the printed tape, and on all of our machines but one, these did not match. They were all off by one vote.
How is this problem not very, very serious? First, you lose whatever thin reassurance the total provided. The system now is without an effective check on number of ballots cast. Second, if there was an error--if it was randomly distributed then it's unlikely (though not impossible) for it to affect an election. If it was systematic (deliberately, or just a programming error that inadvertantly doesn't count the first vote for the first candidate, or something like that) then this could be very serious. If five hundred people use each machine, and you lose one of every five hundred votes for a candidate, that's an error of 2000 votes per million ballots. That's appalling--and larger than the margins in a number of states in the last Presidential election.
Would you refuse a job because there's poor cellular reception in part of the building? Did you test for this ("Can you hear me now?") before you accepted your job? Will you quit if your cube is moved closer to the middle of the building where you can't get a signal?
So should you.
Let's say I want to check a book out of the library. Regrettably, all their copies are in use by other readers, but my friend did snag a copy. It's not fair use to photocopy the entire volume so me and my buddy can both have one.
Just because it's inconvenient that a site is slashdotted, it is not necessarily fair use to reproduce the content in its entirety elsewhere without the permission of the copyright holder. Slashdot's own FAQ addresses some other problems with mirroring.
But then, I'm replying to an AC. Must not feed the trolls! *smacks forehead*
Well, it would make it nicer for advertisers, I suppose. What if I have a fat pipe but I still don't want to waste bandwidth? Why can't everyone get low-bandwidth ads? Why do I have to pay more overhead for the same content on the page?
Speaking of wasted bandwidth, what happens when everyone's browser starts sending out a Connection-Speed header to millions of sites that don't need know? And you have to figure that the good browsers (Opera, Firefox, etc.) would allow you to adjust your header to cut off the worst of the ads.
I'd recommend strongly against doing this experiment. A lit match (or just about anything else hot) will burn explosively in one atmosphere of pure oxygen. Metals will burn in an oxygen atmosphere. You'll be lucky to get your hand back if you try what the parent post suggests.
That said, if you do manage to remove the fuel (match, whatever) from the oxygen jet, you'll find that the match will continue to burn but there will be no flame from the oxygen.
Oxygen doesn't burn. It is the oxidizer which when combined with a fuel allows combustion to take place.
Is there anybody in our audience who does oxy-acetylene welding, or is a professional glassblower? In both professions, you supply a torch with both a fuel gas and oxygen. Turn on both gas valves; spark to ignite. You get a nice hot flame. You can cut metal and melt glass.
If you turn off the fuel gas, the flame goes out. No burning takes place. You get a nice, cool jet of oxygen. End of story. Energy doesn't come from nowhere--if the parent post can tell me what material in air the oxygen gas is supposed to be reacting with to generate heat and flame, I'll be pleased to retract my statement.
By the way, IIAC (I Am A Chemist).
Its funny to me that if you replaced all the Oxygens in this statement with another gas, say Hydrogen, and preformed the same experiment, you wouldn't have seen the complaints.
That's because hydrogen burns. If you had made the same claims about helium, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or argon, we'd still be arguing with you.
I don't know--I think it's appropriate for for the author of a review of a book on computer security to discuss his credentials with respect to computer security.
If I were to write this review, I'd probably say something like, "The material was far too detailed and complex. The author expects the casual reader to be intimately acquainted with Perl and assembler. Basic concepts were not explained. Stay away from this book unless you're a masochist."
But that's because my formal training is in physics, chemistry, and biology. Why shouldn't we expect a book to be reviewed by someone competent?
A short blurb about the author of a review (or other article where we would expect the author to be a specialist) is not uncommon in other media--though it is generally added by the editor, not the review author. Something like, "Bob Smith is a professor of Elvisology at Podunk University. He has studied techniques to clone dead rock stars from their hair for many years, and he is a regular contributor to the pages of Weekly World News."
It would cost automakers a fortune, actually. First of all, they already cut every corner possible to save a dollar or two on manufacturing costs. Do you think they'd want to put ten or twenty dollars per car into an extra set of wiring and a dispay, as well as redesigning the dash so there would be someplace to put it? I remember reading about ten years ago how pleased one of the major U.S. automakers was that they were saving seventy-nine cents per car by not painting the inside of the ashtrays.
More important than the materials cost is the lost business at the dealership. If you repair the car yourself using the helpful diagnostics display and a $12 part from Wal-Mart, then you're not paying the dealership $75 for the diagnosis, $25 for the part, or $150 for labour to install it. No automaker wants to forego that revenue.
You can save yourself some time. In Firefox and in Opera, you can type just the letter 'g' followed by keywords. It's really slick--probably the most useful feature of Opera for me.
What would be useful would be if she tried the therapy with one child and not the other. Your experiment needs a control. How do you know that their intelligence and behaviour are the consequence of the sound therapy and not genetics, your friend's parenting, or random chance?
Eh? Privilege? When did this enter into the matter at all?
The operation of these online games is governed by straight contract law. Each party has rights and obligations under the law. Each party gets something of presumed value out of the transaction. I get to play the game for entertainment, Square gets some of my real-world money. Neither side enjoys some sort of special privilege; we're both individuals entering a contract.
And rightly so--it is Square's game. They're providing a service which I, as an individual, can choose whether or not to purchase. It may be bad business sense to alienate customers...but if their cash flow is still good, why not squeeze as much out of us as possible? If people are still paying for it, then how bad could it be? From Square's perspective, maybe they feel that their chief responsibilities are to keep up with providing fresh content and keep the servers running, and that some people have inflated expectations.Note also that for every user who complains on the forums, there are likely hundreds of users who didn't complain--is that because a) they're too lazy, b) they like the way things work, or c) they're afraid they're going to get flamed abusively and excessively if they tell someone to quit griping. Short of doing a proper random survey (not "all my friends agree with me on this"), I daresay nobody can answer that question.
They offer a product. If the majority wants something different, someone else will come along to serve that market niche. For physical products, some companies compete on the basis of price, others on customer service, others on quality--most on some combination. If one product doesn't meet your expectations, find another one.
Really, that's the heart of the problem right there.