When I first read this I was still in monday morning mode and thought it meant that the Beagle2 mars ship was found at the bottom of some ocean and then I started to think about some weirdo time travel thing that had gone on.
You're confusing real life with Michael Crichton's book, Sphere. Have some coffee and don't stay up so late reading next time. You'll be okay.
Re:The decay bateria are hungry!
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Space Burial
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· Score: 1
A quick amendment to the comments on stellar evolution. It's the stars ending their lives as supernovas that produce all the heavy elements (heavier than iron), not as novas. (Not all stars reach the supernova stage, and some stars may undergo more than one nova during their lifetime--it's more of a dramatic stellar sneeze.)
Regarding carbon--it's actually not that hard to find even in moderately sized stars. Even our sun--which, though heavier than the average star, is not heavy enough to go supernova--will generate appreciable quantities of the stuff. It is generated in older stars with higher core temperatures and significant helium content, through the triple alpha process.
Meanwhile, benzene is a very interesting molecule, and kudos to Kekule for discovering the structure of the stuff--but it's not likely that it was particularly important in the development of life. It's too stable--it's tough to do anything really bioligically useful with it.
I hope the participants realize that their technology is going to be used to blow the limbs off of children in the third world. I guess that's OK -- they are savages after all.
I see a picture of a child missing a limb. Though emotionally charged, there's very little useful information.
The parent poster may be making an honest claim, and he may not. I note it was posted by an Anonymous Coward, which doesn't help. Could have been an unmanned vehicle that did it. Could have been a landmine, too. Might have been a US vehicle, might have been Chinese. Was this a grisly industrial accident? Horrifying though the thought may be--was the child armed?
Context, please? It seems to be an awfully tenuous link to autonomous vehicles...
All we have here is a picture that suggests that military conflicts are bloody, grisly, destructive things, with wretched consequences. Well, duh. We knew that.
Thought experiment: Can the use of unmanned vehicles reduce this type of civilian casualty? Expendible vehicles might be less likely to be used to shoot innocent civilians, because they're not going to be frightened, or have an itchy trigger finger. Just a thought.
One possible alternate perspective: this sort of technology will further the perspective that war is a sort of video game--one that can be entered into more readily if there are no (ahem) friendly lives at risk. Just a thought.
Curious... I thought humans only came up with the telephone a mere century ago. How ever did we survive for all those millenia before then? No doubt a mystery for the archaeologists.
Hm. Case 1: The old geezer in the apartment next door always listens to his television with the volume turned way up--hard of hearing, dontcha know. I got sick of it, so I 'jammed' his electricity by pulling the circuit breaker for his rooms.
Case 2: My neighbour's car is an aged wreck. It burns oil, and great greasy clouds of blue smoke settle in my yard and annoy my guests. The prevailing winds are such that I only get smoked if the car is in his driveway, so I built a small wall of soil to block him out while he was at work.
People survived pefectly happily for centuries before electricity and automobiles, why would we need them now? It could be argued that they're a luxury, and there is some truth to that. Most people would agree, however, that in the situations I described my actions would not be warranted or appropriate.
So--can I arbitrarily deprive someone else of the use of electricity? The use of their cars? Cellular telephone usage? I find the sound of laptop keyboards annoying--can I pull the plug on the guy at Starbucks? These are all modern luxuries. Where should the line be drawn?
I agree completely that some people who use cellular telephones are utter and absolute jerks. They're the same ones who in times past would be talking to people actually in the theatre during a movie, or knitting to pass time while driving (my uncle has seen this done.)
I fear that active personal jamming is not going to be a solution to this issue. I can see some institutions doing so--in theatres and medical facilities, for instance, with appropriate signage. For the rest of the time, encouraging the purchase of personal jamming devices will just lead to an unpleasant 'arms race' between increasingly hostile cell phone users and self-appointed vigilantes.
Like all technological advancements, it will take some time (probably a generation or so--sorry) for people to adapt to it and develop an appropriate etiquette around it. People probably had no clue what to say on the telephone when it first appeared. Standards of decency, mores, and good old-fashioned peer pressure will eventually suppress most of the boors. In the meantime, we're mostly stuck.
...but I applaud the use of small slingshots to injure (but not kill) cell phone users in movie theatres.
Re:Keep away from doctors and hospitals
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Cyberchondria
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· Score: 1
I'll bet hypochondriacs do get ill more often than normal. When anyone gets sick, catches a disease or even thinks they have, they go and see their doctor or go to their hospital. That makes doctors waiting rooms and hospitals ideal exchange points for many many communicable diseases.
Yes, but since the waiting rooms are full of other hypochondriacs, they shouldn't be able to catch anything.
The average West End musical is a form of business. The main art involved is that of making a profit.
Shakespeare wrote plays to put bread on the table. He actually wanted to be remembered for his sonnets. Mozart composed to keep from starving--and had a rough time of it, sometimes.
You can bet that their actors and musicians were getting paid for their work.
Where did this attitude come from--that it can't be 'art' if people like it enough to pay money to see it?
Well, no--not quite. Burning ethanol, in combination with gasoline, in some automobiles, may result in increased emissions. Newer vehicles are designed to better cope with the slightly different combustion techniques required to burn ethanol cleanly.
The question becomes a complete non-issue when discussing fuel cells. No ethanol-air combustion takes place under those circumstances, so no aldehydes are generated.
Not to be flip, but the reason why the smog is so bad in Los Angeles is because there's too damn many people driving oversized single-occupant vehicles. (It's also a consequence partly of geography--the city's location is well-suited for trapping contaminated air.)
Last time I checked C02 was a greenhouse gas. It doesn't add to CO2 levels if (big if) the sources for ethanol production extract the CO2 from the atmosphere at the same rate. Keep in mind it isn't just the raw materials, but energy needed to process and create the ethanol, which may cause pollution in the process.
The carbon in question goes through a cycle. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is taken up by plants through photosynthesis. Depending on which type of plant the bioethanol is prepared from, this carbon will be incorporated in varying degrees into (mostly) cellulose, starches, and sugars.
These carbon compounds are converted (with varying degrees of efficiency) into ethanol through the action of enzymes and/or yeast.
This ethanol is 'burned' conventionally or in a fuel cell. The carbon is oxidized, and forms carbon dioxide, completing the cycle. No new carbon is introduced into the atmosphere. Some may take a shortcut during the cycle--e.g. by being composted or burned during one of the processing stages. Though that would decrease the efficiency of the ethanol production, it would not introduce any new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Ultimately, the chemical energy stored in the ethanol comes from the sun--it's photosynthesis that drives the whole process. No new carbon is added to the atmosphere--the original stuff is just borrowed temporarily and returned. Similarly, the ethanol provides a convenient method to transport and temporarily store solar energy.
Carbon may be added to the atmosphere through the use of fossil fuels for the harvesting, transportation, or processing of bioethanol. Once a significant amount of ethanol is being produced, it would be possible to fuel all of the vehicles and equipment involved using bioethanol--essentially, the entire process becomes carbon neutral and entirely solar powered.
Who thinks this could have been any better with Open Source and why?
It probably wouldn't have been noticed anyway. First, this just isn't a sexy application. Q. Random Hacker is going to be looking at something 'cool', like Firefox, The GIMP, or the Linux kernel--electricity transmission monitoring software won't even be on his radar. You might get a brief surge in interest after the lights go out, but not before.
Second, the individuals with expertise in these systems are probably already working for the companies that sell this software. I expect one would have to devote a significant amount of time to learning about how the transmission grid and all of its pieces work together before one could appreciate the operation of code like this. Consequently, the most qualified programmers to understand and troubleshoot this codebase already have access to it, because they are paid and trained to know.
Third, this isn't like authoring a web browser--you can't test it at home in your basement. Very few of us have access to any sort of mockup on which to test modifications to the code or verify that perceived errors actually are problems. Would it be helpful if GE were inundated with thousands of messages from freelance troubleshooters who misidentify functioning code as problematic?
If he's a horrible enough teacher that he warrants consistent bad comments then perhaps tenure shouldn't even be what his superiors are considering
What if a professor receives consistent poor evaluations repeatedly from the same individual under different aliases? I'm sure that anyone who's read a few -1, Flamebait posts on Slashdot could come up with thirty or forty nastily defamatory remarks without breaking a sweat.
Even more insidious would be thirty or forty more subtle negative remarks and moderately poor evaluations. For a young professor without tenure or firm reputation, such a campaign of libel could be quite damaging. The anonymity that the site provides allows one to spam the rankings if you are so inclined. At least the instructor evaluations administered by the schools only allow one vote per student.
The difference is the professor is (potentially) providing a service that I am paying for. It is not the reverse with the students.
True enough. On the other hand, if a restaurant critic asserts in his column that "in addition to the poor service, my waiter was clearly mentally ill, and also talked about his sexual escapades with various farm animals" the critic is going to be on the hook for libel*. We have the right to evaluate products and services, but our speech is not protected when it ventures into the realm of unsubstantiated defamation.
In other words, you can say that a professor has lousy blackboard technique or that he doesn't seem well-prepared for his classes, or even opine that he has a short temper. You cannot say that he is a paranoid delusional who boosts the grades of students who sleep with him--if you're only saying it because you don't like the grade you received.
*Assuming, of course, that the statement is untrue. If the waiter did have sex with farm animals, then the statement will stand--truth is an absolute defense against defamation.
Does said professor seriously think that opinions about him don't get discussed between students in private discussions? Does he think he's immune to that? Does he think that his status makes him immune to being judged? Who the fuck does he think he is?
...
I'm not putting it very well, but if he has someone critizing him in such a way as to damage his public reputation (if he *really* thinks those accusations are unwarranted) then the recourse is *not* suing the website (could just as well have been a magazine, or newspaper article) but to retaliate against them *publicly* in speech, not against a website that is simply offering another form of free speech.
If I were to create posters that claimed a certain professor traded sexual favours for grades and posted them on campus, the proper recourse for the professor would not be simply to deny the claims in class while leaving the posters on the wall.
It is my understanding that if unproven, unfounded, and malicious statements are made about an individual in a magazine or newspaper article, the individual is well within his rights to sue for defamation. It is also legitimate to file suit if someone makes slanderous remarks--e.g. in an offline discussion between students. The threshold for what is considered defamatory versus free expression of opinion under the First Amendment varies depending on whether the individual is considered a public figure, and upon jurisdiction.
Fair comment, opinion, and statements of fact are permissible. Outright malicious statements are not (if untrue). Generally the courts have allowed significantly more latitude when discussing 'public' figures like politicians and entertainers. I suspect that unless the professor in question made regular media appearances, he would not be held to be a public figure.
Can students discuss their professors' teaching technique, habits, and whatnot? Yes.
Should the results of evaluations of professors be made available to students? Yes.
Should people be able to anonymously defame an individual without any consequence to themselves? Nope.
Are you sure that the person defaming the professor is giving a reliable opinion? Is the anonymous student claiming that the professor is mentally ill because he received a poor grade? Is he necessarily even a student of the professor? Perhaps the individual in question is a jilted lover, or a jealous colleague. There is no way to assess the reliability of the reports, and anonymous statements have no accountability--but if left up, they could have negative repercussions for the professor. He asked the website to remove the defamatory comment before he sued, which seems reasonable.
I agree wholeheartedly that evaluation of professors is necessary and important, and that students should have access to those evaluations. Nevertheless, this is not the way to go about it. Universities should make public the results of their internal evaluations, including synopses of the written in student comments on the instructor evaluations. Remarks can be anonymized (to protect the students who made them) but this process would at least ensure that comments were only made by the professors' students, and truly defamatory statements (as opposed to fair comments) would be screened out.
Tell me I'm more secure now. Evidence fakery has been around since mankind learned to lie. The digital age just makes it more convenient.
Oy! The parent poster has described a delightfully paranoid scenario--that the system is already designed to guard against. It's already supposed to be difficult to tamper with physical evidence. Chain of custody must always be carefully maintained. Checking out and then replacing a CD full of evidence? Nonsense. You can't just sneak a CD into a storage locker and expect it to be allowed anywhere near a jury. If you could do that, you might as well just plant a hair from the suspect on an old piece of clothing, or something similar--except you can't do that either, because the evidence bag is signed and sealed.
The CD would be harder to tamper with, because there would likely be multiple copies in secure locations. You can't do that with physical evidence. Further, there would be no reason for anyone to be allowed to take the CD with them--any investigator who wanted to look at the evidence could have a copy burned for their use, leaving the original safely stored away.
Yes, some sort of evidence tampering could in principle take place before the CD was burned, but tampering after the fact is going to be more difficult than with 'conventional' evidence.
Known fact: Electrical equipment operating in air may produce ozone if there are electrical discharges. Most Slashdotters have probably smelled ozone in the vicinity of electrical arcs. (This may also be accompanied by the release of magic smoke.)
Known fact: Ozone is toxic at high concentrations. It is an irritant to the lungs, and it has been identified as a serious ground level pollutant in many cities.
Known fact: Those negative ion air fresheners contain high voltage components exposed to the ambient air. The negative ions they generate are electrostatically 'sticky' and can be quite good at pulling particulates out of the air. In operation, most also generate some quantity of ozone as an unwanted side product.
This experiment placed rats in close proximity to an electrical source at high potential relative to ground, purportedly similar to what might be found in one of those ion generators. Something (presumably corona discharge) generated ozone in its vicinity. In the cage, a toxic (or at least greater-than-acceptable) level of ozone accumulated.
The only feature of note is that the ozone accumulation only occurred when rats or a pan of grounded water were present. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that of course these things increased the ozone generation rate. They provided a path to ground, and they increased the humidity (and consequently the conductivity) of the air in the cage, which should lead to a more intense corona discharge.
Does this translate to a danger from outdoor power transmission lines? Well, it's tenuous at best. First, the outdoors is a very well-ventilated space; any ozone that was created would not accumulated. Most homes aren't too bad, either--even if they're well sealed, they've got a pretty substantial air volume to dilute ozone produced around you.
The researchers looked at very extreme conditions: referring to their abstract, they placed the rats 1 cm from a 10 kV source. Power line electric fields of that magnitude are never seen in a residence. The authors note in their paper that the electric fields they used were an order of magnitude or more greater than those seen even for individuals standing directly beneath a transmission line. The authors also acknowledge that recent studies have tended to support the notion that moderate electromagnetic fields pose little or no risk. If someone went out and measured the ozone levels in homes near power lines, then I might find the power line theory more convincing.
Ah yes--the classic caricature: Democrats/Liberals/the Left believe in tax and spend government.
Observation of recent Republican governments reveals an interesting financial model: don't tax--and spend. The largest U.S. federal deficits were under Reagan, and now Bush is out to set some new records of his own. Spending more while taxing less doesn't work--it just generates debt. Even a Democrat can figure that out. You can only spend money that you don't have for so long before it catches up to you.
These guys have seriously been had. Anyone that knows anything about atmospheric physics can tell you that most atmospheric models neglect sound waves, and for a very good reason--because they are insignificant when compared with other phenomena present in the atmosphere, such as...surprise...wind.
Well...it may be counterintuitive, but it probably isn't safe to write it off without a test. Perhaps the shock waves generated are tuned somehow to be particularly effective at disrupting hail.
My area of expertise is optical phenomena, not sound, so I'll take an example from my field. A thirty watt incandescent lamp is pretty weak--you can read by it, but it's pretty dim. Staring at a thirty watt argon laser will rapidly blind you, while the beam from a thirty watt carbon dioxide laser will easily ignite wood.
I agree with the parent poster that any sound energy generated by this device will be absolutely infinitesimal compared to the total energy available in even a moderate thunderstorm. Nevertheless, I think we would need to know about the possible coherence of the sound and its frequency spectrum before we can say if it might or might not be effective. Also of note, the goal is not the complete disruption of the thunderstorm. All Nissan seeks to do is reduce the size of the hailstones produced to the point where they won't damage their cars. It may be that it is (relatively) easy to disrupt the process of large hailstone formation. Rain, snow, sleet, or millimeter-size hailstones won't hurt their inventory.
The question of hailstones carried significant distances to the site is an interesting one. Perhaps the device causes the storm to drop the stones beyond the perimeter of the parking lot...or perhaps Nissan is following a strategy of reducing their risk. They acknowledge there will still be hail damage; they're just hoping for less.
Presumably, Nissan management is not populated entirely by idiots who get off on public humiliation--wouldn't you expect there to have been some testing of this device before installation?
So if Joe blogs makes a copy (reproduction) of a Program/ISO/Audio track, then that copy is no longer a copyrightable work ?
The parent poster is either trying to be clever, or not paying attention to the thread. We're talking about making copies of works that are in the public domain already. In Bridgeman v. Corel, the key question was whether or not digital duplicates of classic paintings were copyrightable. The court held that they were not, because
"There is little doubt that many photographs, probably the overwhelming majority, reflect at least the modest amount of originality required for copyright protection. . . But 'slavish copying,' although doubtless requiring technical skill and effort, does not qualify."
Note that the ruling applies only to the paintings on which the original copyright has lapsed. Paintings not significantly older than Mickey Mouse have not yet entered the public domain, so duplication of those paintings would still infringe copyright. Duplication of other recent works (like the ISOs you speak of) would run afoul of the same problem. Unless you have audio tracks from the nineteenth century you would like to copy...
They make it a point to be sure that correct grammar and spelling is utilised...
This is a pet peeve of mine: the use (utilisation?) of the word utilise/utilize where the word 'use' would do. Though not technically incorrect, it is usually a byproduct either of a misguided desire to appear educated or of too much exposure to management-speak...or both.
Normally I'm not picky about this sort of thing on Slashdot, but in the context of this thread and this particular comment I think it appropriate to observe that grammar and spelling are (not is) utilised. Subject-verb agreement is a very important concept, and should be taught as a very early part of any grammar curriculum.
If I were* a genuinely cruel copy editor, I would also note that the last sentence of the parent post is egregiously comma spliced.
I fear now that I've racked up sufficient bad karma from this little rant to ensure a spelling or grammar error will creep into this post....
*Kudos to you for studying German. I learned more about English grammer through my studies in French, Spanish, and German than I ever did in my English classes. The starred phrase above represents a correct use of the subjunctive--a concept I first saw clearly defined in Spanish 101.
I'm just waiting for the new lead-free solder which will be mandatory in the EU from 2005 on... It's already known to cause cold solder spots more likely to happen.
Yep, and it's absolutely terrible that a government would ban the use of a product that has known ill effects. I'm pleased that my plumber will enjoy a reduced occupational exposure to lead, and will be less likely to suffer crippling neurological disorders. I'm willing to tolerate a slightly increased risk of a leaky pipe now and again to protect both workers and the environment.
Yes, I also appreciate that the word 'plumber' comes from the Latin plumbum, meaning lead.
Mercury makes dandy barometers; asbestos is a fabulous fire retardant; and Halon (a CFC) performs admirably in fire extinguishers--but sometimes it is necessary for reasons of health, safety, or environmental protection to choose substitutes.
Looks like someone's in for a very rude awakening if he googles cointelpro...
I'm confused. What does a program to spy on, harass, and incriminate domestic individuals suspected of Communist leanings that ended thirty years ago have to do with the FBI's current work?
And why does that imply that the FBI would get involved in the abuse of an academic computer by a dumb script kiddie that incurred essentially miniscule costs and did didn't damage any data? If the kid had been in the States, there's a slim chance that the FBI would have gotten involved, but since he's in the UK--and has already been tried and punished--it's just not worth their while.
A government agency that did something stupid, deceptive, and unconstitutional thirty years ago. Film at eleven.
But he obviously broke USA law. I wonder if the FBI can arrest him and force his export.
I do not understand the culture of people thinking that they own everything. What gave this guy the right to steal bandwith from someone else? What gave him the right to steal the storage space? What gave him the right to break into someone elses pc?
He's a script kiddie who stored some mp3s and movies on a poorly-secured machine in an unclassified lab.
He used some bandwidth and storage space for his personal convenience. He didn't delete anyone's files, set up a spam relay, break into (or try to break into) more sensitive systems, or do any real harm. At worst, he should be on the hook for bandwidth costs and a nominal charge for the use of storage space; he also owes some apologies.
He's a not-particularly-bright college kid who didn't cause any lasting harm, nor physical injury.
So--would it be appropriate to take from this kid the years of his life that extradition, an American trial, and the American prison system would take...for downloading some mp3s? Is it worth the cost of transporting him, housing him, and trying him?
Don't you think the FBI should have better things to do? They won't generally get involved even in the United States unless a million dollars or a kidnapping are involved.
It's MUCH harder to change your bank than to patch your browser.
Sometimes you don't need to change banks--sometimes you can change your bank. One of mine worked just fine out of the box with Opera. (It's a Canadian subsidiary of a large European bank, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.)
My other bank didn't initially permit any logins from Opera--some sort of perversity in their Javascript, I think. I sent them a polite but irked email. A few months later I found that I could use Opera as long as it lied about its identity (Mozilla or IE would work.) I just checked a few minutes ago, and I now don't even have to do that.
Perhaps they received enough complaints, or maybe they just developed a clue. Other banks might, too. Try sending a polite email. I might even send my own bank a little electronic pat on the back for doing the right thing.
I can't tell you where to buy more screws--besides, others on this thread have already done so--but when you do find some, get some of these.
Watchmaker's cases are a godsend for anybody who has a hobby that involves lots of little bits. The little containers have glass lids so you can see what you've got inside, and the ones I've linked come in a nice aluminum carrying case. I've got a couple trays of them for all my electronic bits.
Slashdot Mirror
You're confusing real life with Michael Crichton's book, Sphere. Have some coffee and don't stay up so late reading next time. You'll be okay.
Regarding carbon--it's actually not that hard to find even in moderately sized stars. Even our sun--which, though heavier than the average star, is not heavy enough to go supernova--will generate appreciable quantities of the stuff. It is generated in older stars with higher core temperatures and significant helium content, through the triple alpha process.
Meanwhile, benzene is a very interesting molecule, and kudos to Kekule for discovering the structure of the stuff--but it's not likely that it was particularly important in the development of life. It's too stable--it's tough to do anything really bioligically useful with it.
I see a picture of a child missing a limb. Though emotionally charged, there's very little useful information.
The parent poster may be making an honest claim, and he may not. I note it was posted by an Anonymous Coward, which doesn't help. Could have been an unmanned vehicle that did it. Could have been a landmine, too. Might have been a US vehicle, might have been Chinese. Was this a grisly industrial accident? Horrifying though the thought may be--was the child armed?
Context, please? It seems to be an awfully tenuous link to autonomous vehicles...
All we have here is a picture that suggests that military conflicts are bloody, grisly, destructive things, with wretched consequences. Well, duh. We knew that.
Thought experiment: Can the use of unmanned vehicles reduce this type of civilian casualty? Expendible vehicles might be less likely to be used to shoot innocent civilians, because they're not going to be frightened, or have an itchy trigger finger. Just a thought.
One possible alternate perspective: this sort of technology will further the perspective that war is a sort of video game--one that can be entered into more readily if there are no (ahem) friendly lives at risk. Just a thought.
Hm. Case 1: The old geezer in the apartment next door always listens to his television with the volume turned way up--hard of hearing, dontcha know. I got sick of it, so I 'jammed' his electricity by pulling the circuit breaker for his rooms.
Case 2: My neighbour's car is an aged wreck. It burns oil, and great greasy clouds of blue smoke settle in my yard and annoy my guests. The prevailing winds are such that I only get smoked if the car is in his driveway, so I built a small wall of soil to block him out while he was at work.
People survived pefectly happily for centuries before electricity and automobiles, why would we need them now? It could be argued that they're a luxury, and there is some truth to that. Most people would agree, however, that in the situations I described my actions would not be warranted or appropriate.
So--can I arbitrarily deprive someone else of the use of electricity? The use of their cars? Cellular telephone usage? I find the sound of laptop keyboards annoying--can I pull the plug on the guy at Starbucks? These are all modern luxuries. Where should the line be drawn?
I agree completely that some people who use cellular telephones are utter and absolute jerks. They're the same ones who in times past would be talking to people actually in the theatre during a movie, or knitting to pass time while driving (my uncle has seen this done.)
I fear that active personal jamming is not going to be a solution to this issue. I can see some institutions doing so--in theatres and medical facilities, for instance, with appropriate signage. For the rest of the time, encouraging the purchase of personal jamming devices will just lead to an unpleasant 'arms race' between increasingly hostile cell phone users and self-appointed vigilantes.
Like all technological advancements, it will take some time (probably a generation or so--sorry) for people to adapt to it and develop an appropriate etiquette around it. People probably had no clue what to say on the telephone when it first appeared. Standards of decency, mores, and good old-fashioned peer pressure will eventually suppress most of the boors. In the meantime, we're mostly stuck.
Yes, but since the waiting rooms are full of other hypochondriacs, they shouldn't be able to catch anything.
Shakespeare wrote plays to put bread on the table. He actually wanted to be remembered for his sonnets. Mozart composed to keep from starving--and had a rough time of it, sometimes.
You can bet that their actors and musicians were getting paid for their work.
Where did this attitude come from--that it can't be 'art' if people like it enough to pay money to see it?
Well, no--not quite. Burning ethanol, in combination with gasoline, in some automobiles, may result in increased emissions. Newer vehicles are designed to better cope with the slightly different combustion techniques required to burn ethanol cleanly.
The question becomes a complete non-issue when discussing fuel cells. No ethanol-air combustion takes place under those circumstances, so no aldehydes are generated.
Not to be flip, but the reason why the smog is so bad in Los Angeles is because there's too damn many people driving oversized single-occupant vehicles. (It's also a consequence partly of geography--the city's location is well-suited for trapping contaminated air.)
The carbon in question goes through a cycle. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is taken up by plants through photosynthesis. Depending on which type of plant the bioethanol is prepared from, this carbon will be incorporated in varying degrees into (mostly) cellulose, starches, and sugars.
These carbon compounds are converted (with varying degrees of efficiency) into ethanol through the action of enzymes and/or yeast.
This ethanol is 'burned' conventionally or in a fuel cell. The carbon is oxidized, and forms carbon dioxide, completing the cycle. No new carbon is introduced into the atmosphere. Some may take a shortcut during the cycle--e.g. by being composted or burned during one of the processing stages. Though that would decrease the efficiency of the ethanol production, it would not introduce any new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Ultimately, the chemical energy stored in the ethanol comes from the sun--it's photosynthesis that drives the whole process. No new carbon is added to the atmosphere--the original stuff is just borrowed temporarily and returned. Similarly, the ethanol provides a convenient method to transport and temporarily store solar energy.
Carbon may be added to the atmosphere through the use of fossil fuels for the harvesting, transportation, or processing of bioethanol. Once a significant amount of ethanol is being produced, it would be possible to fuel all of the vehicles and equipment involved using bioethanol--essentially, the entire process becomes carbon neutral and entirely solar powered.
It probably wouldn't have been noticed anyway. First, this just isn't a sexy application. Q. Random Hacker is going to be looking at something 'cool', like Firefox, The GIMP, or the Linux kernel--electricity transmission monitoring software won't even be on his radar. You might get a brief surge in interest after the lights go out, but not before.
Second, the individuals with expertise in these systems are probably already working for the companies that sell this software. I expect one would have to devote a significant amount of time to learning about how the transmission grid and all of its pieces work together before one could appreciate the operation of code like this. Consequently, the most qualified programmers to understand and troubleshoot this codebase already have access to it, because they are paid and trained to know.
Third, this isn't like authoring a web browser--you can't test it at home in your basement. Very few of us have access to any sort of mockup on which to test modifications to the code or verify that perceived errors actually are problems. Would it be helpful if GE were inundated with thousands of messages from freelance troubleshooters who misidentify functioning code as problematic?
What if a professor receives consistent poor evaluations repeatedly from the same individual under different aliases? I'm sure that anyone who's read a few -1, Flamebait posts on Slashdot could come up with thirty or forty nastily defamatory remarks without breaking a sweat.
Even more insidious would be thirty or forty more subtle negative remarks and moderately poor evaluations. For a young professor without tenure or firm reputation, such a campaign of libel could be quite damaging. The anonymity that the site provides allows one to spam the rankings if you are so inclined. At least the instructor evaluations administered by the schools only allow one vote per student.
True enough. On the other hand, if a restaurant critic asserts in his column that "in addition to the poor service, my waiter was clearly mentally ill, and also talked about his sexual escapades with various farm animals" the critic is going to be on the hook for libel*. We have the right to evaluate products and services, but our speech is not protected when it ventures into the realm of unsubstantiated defamation.
In other words, you can say that a professor has lousy blackboard technique or that he doesn't seem well-prepared for his classes, or even opine that he has a short temper. You cannot say that he is a paranoid delusional who boosts the grades of students who sleep with him--if you're only saying it because you don't like the grade you received.
*Assuming, of course, that the statement is untrue. If the waiter did have sex with farm animals, then the statement will stand--truth is an absolute defense against defamation.
I'm not putting it very well, but if he has someone critizing him in such a way as to damage his public reputation (if he *really* thinks those accusations are unwarranted) then the recourse is *not* suing the website (could just as well have been a magazine, or newspaper article) but to retaliate against them *publicly* in speech, not against a website that is simply offering another form of free speech.
If I were to create posters that claimed a certain professor traded sexual favours for grades and posted them on campus, the proper recourse for the professor would not be simply to deny the claims in class while leaving the posters on the wall.
It is my understanding that if unproven, unfounded, and malicious statements are made about an individual in a magazine or newspaper article, the individual is well within his rights to sue for defamation. It is also legitimate to file suit if someone makes slanderous remarks--e.g. in an offline discussion between students. The threshold for what is considered defamatory versus free expression of opinion under the First Amendment varies depending on whether the individual is considered a public figure, and upon jurisdiction.
Fair comment, opinion, and statements of fact are permissible. Outright malicious statements are not (if untrue). Generally the courts have allowed significantly more latitude when discussing 'public' figures like politicians and entertainers. I suspect that unless the professor in question made regular media appearances, he would not be held to be a public figure.
Can students discuss their professors' teaching technique, habits, and whatnot? Yes.
Should the results of evaluations of professors be made available to students? Yes.
Should people be able to anonymously defame an individual without any consequence to themselves? Nope.
Are you sure that the person defaming the professor is giving a reliable opinion? Is the anonymous student claiming that the professor is mentally ill because he received a poor grade? Is he necessarily even a student of the professor? Perhaps the individual in question is a jilted lover, or a jealous colleague. There is no way to assess the reliability of the reports, and anonymous statements have no accountability--but if left up, they could have negative repercussions for the professor. He asked the website to remove the defamatory comment before he sued, which seems reasonable.
I agree wholeheartedly that evaluation of professors is necessary and important, and that students should have access to those evaluations. Nevertheless, this is not the way to go about it. Universities should make public the results of their internal evaluations, including synopses of the written in student comments on the instructor evaluations. Remarks can be anonymized (to protect the students who made them) but this process would at least ensure that comments were only made by the professors' students, and truly defamatory statements (as opposed to fair comments) would be screened out.
Oy! The parent poster has described a delightfully paranoid scenario--that the system is already designed to guard against. It's already supposed to be difficult to tamper with physical evidence. Chain of custody must always be carefully maintained. Checking out and then replacing a CD full of evidence? Nonsense. You can't just sneak a CD into a storage locker and expect it to be allowed anywhere near a jury. If you could do that, you might as well just plant a hair from the suspect on an old piece of clothing, or something similar--except you can't do that either, because the evidence bag is signed and sealed.
The CD would be harder to tamper with, because there would likely be multiple copies in secure locations. You can't do that with physical evidence. Further, there would be no reason for anyone to be allowed to take the CD with them--any investigator who wanted to look at the evidence could have a copy burned for their use, leaving the original safely stored away.
Yes, some sort of evidence tampering could in principle take place before the CD was burned, but tampering after the fact is going to be more difficult than with 'conventional' evidence.
Known fact: Electrical equipment operating in air may produce ozone if there are electrical discharges. Most Slashdotters have probably smelled ozone in the vicinity of electrical arcs. (This may also be accompanied by the release of magic smoke.)
Known fact: Ozone is toxic at high concentrations. It is an irritant to the lungs, and it has been identified as a serious ground level pollutant in many cities.
Known fact: Those negative ion air fresheners contain high voltage components exposed to the ambient air. The negative ions they generate are electrostatically 'sticky' and can be quite good at pulling particulates out of the air. In operation, most also generate some quantity of ozone as an unwanted side product.
This experiment placed rats in close proximity to an electrical source at high potential relative to ground, purportedly similar to what might be found in one of those ion generators. Something (presumably corona discharge) generated ozone in its vicinity. In the cage, a toxic (or at least greater-than-acceptable) level of ozone accumulated.
The only feature of note is that the ozone accumulation only occurred when rats or a pan of grounded water were present. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that of course these things increased the ozone generation rate. They provided a path to ground, and they increased the humidity (and consequently the conductivity) of the air in the cage, which should lead to a more intense corona discharge.
Does this translate to a danger from outdoor power transmission lines? Well, it's tenuous at best. First, the outdoors is a very well-ventilated space; any ozone that was created would not accumulated. Most homes aren't too bad, either--even if they're well sealed, they've got a pretty substantial air volume to dilute ozone produced around you.
The researchers looked at very extreme conditions: referring to their abstract, they placed the rats 1 cm from a 10 kV source. Power line electric fields of that magnitude are never seen in a residence. The authors note in their paper that the electric fields they used were an order of magnitude or more greater than those seen even for individuals standing directly beneath a transmission line. The authors also acknowledge that recent studies have tended to support the notion that moderate electromagnetic fields pose little or no risk. If someone went out and measured the ozone levels in homes near power lines, then I might find the power line theory more convincing.
Raise Taxes.
Ah yes--the classic caricature: Democrats/Liberals/the Left believe in tax and spend government.
Observation of recent Republican governments reveals an interesting financial model: don't tax--and spend. The largest U.S. federal deficits were under Reagan, and now Bush is out to set some new records of his own. Spending more while taxing less doesn't work--it just generates debt. Even a Democrat can figure that out. You can only spend money that you don't have for so long before it catches up to you.
Well...it may be counterintuitive, but it probably isn't safe to write it off without a test. Perhaps the shock waves generated are tuned somehow to be particularly effective at disrupting hail.
My area of expertise is optical phenomena, not sound, so I'll take an example from my field. A thirty watt incandescent lamp is pretty weak--you can read by it, but it's pretty dim. Staring at a thirty watt argon laser will rapidly blind you, while the beam from a thirty watt carbon dioxide laser will easily ignite wood.
I agree with the parent poster that any sound energy generated by this device will be absolutely infinitesimal compared to the total energy available in even a moderate thunderstorm. Nevertheless, I think we would need to know about the possible coherence of the sound and its frequency spectrum before we can say if it might or might not be effective. Also of note, the goal is not the complete disruption of the thunderstorm. All Nissan seeks to do is reduce the size of the hailstones produced to the point where they won't damage their cars. It may be that it is (relatively) easy to disrupt the process of large hailstone formation. Rain, snow, sleet, or millimeter-size hailstones won't hurt their inventory.
The question of hailstones carried significant distances to the site is an interesting one. Perhaps the device causes the storm to drop the stones beyond the perimeter of the parking lot...or perhaps Nissan is following a strategy of reducing their risk. They acknowledge there will still be hail damage; they're just hoping for less.
Presumably, Nissan management is not populated entirely by idiots who get off on public humiliation--wouldn't you expect there to have been some testing of this device before installation?
The parent poster is either trying to be clever, or not paying attention to the thread. We're talking about making copies of works that are in the public domain already. In Bridgeman v. Corel, the key question was whether or not digital duplicates of classic paintings were copyrightable. The court held that they were not, because
Note that the ruling applies only to the paintings on which the original copyright has lapsed. Paintings not significantly older than Mickey Mouse have not yet entered the public domain, so duplication of those paintings would still infringe copyright. Duplication of other recent works (like the ISOs you speak of) would run afoul of the same problem. Unless you have audio tracks from the nineteenth century you would like to copy...This is a pet peeve of mine: the use (utilisation?) of the word utilise/utilize where the word 'use' would do. Though not technically incorrect, it is usually a byproduct either of a misguided desire to appear educated or of too much exposure to management-speak...or both.
Normally I'm not picky about this sort of thing on Slashdot, but in the context of this thread and this particular comment I think it appropriate to observe that grammar and spelling are (not is) utilised. Subject-verb agreement is a very important concept, and should be taught as a very early part of any grammar curriculum. If I were* a genuinely cruel copy editor, I would also note that the last sentence of the parent post is egregiously comma spliced.
I fear now that I've racked up sufficient bad karma from this little rant to ensure a spelling or grammar error will creep into this post....
*Kudos to you for studying German. I learned more about English grammer through my studies in French, Spanish, and German than I ever did in my English classes. The starred phrase above represents a correct use of the subjunctive--a concept I first saw clearly defined in Spanish 101.
Yep, and it's absolutely terrible that a government would ban the use of a product that has known ill effects. I'm pleased that my plumber will enjoy a reduced occupational exposure to lead, and will be less likely to suffer crippling neurological disorders. I'm willing to tolerate a slightly increased risk of a leaky pipe now and again to protect both workers and the environment.
Yes, I also appreciate that the word 'plumber' comes from the Latin plumbum, meaning lead.
Mercury makes dandy barometers; asbestos is a fabulous fire retardant; and Halon (a CFC) performs admirably in fire extinguishers--but sometimes it is necessary for reasons of health, safety, or environmental protection to choose substitutes.
I'm confused. What does a program to spy on, harass, and incriminate domestic individuals suspected of Communist leanings that ended thirty years ago have to do with the FBI's current work?
And why does that imply that the FBI would get involved in the abuse of an academic computer by a dumb script kiddie that incurred essentially miniscule costs and did didn't damage any data? If the kid had been in the States, there's a slim chance that the FBI would have gotten involved, but since he's in the UK--and has already been tried and punished--it's just not worth their while.
A government agency that did something stupid, deceptive, and unconstitutional thirty years ago. Film at eleven.
This is where your new picture phone is essential! Use sign language. :)
I do not understand the culture of people thinking that they own everything. What gave this guy the right to steal bandwith from someone else? What gave him the right to steal the storage space? What gave him the right to break into someone elses pc?
He's a script kiddie who stored some mp3s and movies on a poorly-secured machine in an unclassified lab.
He used some bandwidth and storage space for his personal convenience. He didn't delete anyone's files, set up a spam relay, break into (or try to break into) more sensitive systems, or do any real harm. At worst, he should be on the hook for bandwidth costs and a nominal charge for the use of storage space; he also owes some apologies.
He's a not-particularly-bright college kid who didn't cause any lasting harm, nor physical injury.
So--would it be appropriate to take from this kid the years of his life that extradition, an American trial, and the American prison system would take...for downloading some mp3s? Is it worth the cost of transporting him, housing him, and trying him?
Don't you think the FBI should have better things to do? They won't generally get involved even in the United States unless a million dollars or a kidnapping are involved.
Sometimes you don't need to change banks--sometimes you can change your bank. One of mine worked just fine out of the box with Opera. (It's a Canadian subsidiary of a large European bank, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.)
My other bank didn't initially permit any logins from Opera--some sort of perversity in their Javascript, I think. I sent them a polite but irked email. A few months later I found that I could use Opera as long as it lied about its identity (Mozilla or IE would work.) I just checked a few minutes ago, and I now don't even have to do that.
Perhaps they received enough complaints, or maybe they just developed a clue. Other banks might, too. Try sending a polite email. I might even send my own bank a little electronic pat on the back for doing the right thing.
Watchmaker's cases are a godsend for anybody who has a hobby that involves lots of little bits. The little containers have glass lids so you can see what you've got inside, and the ones I've linked come in a nice aluminum carrying case. I've got a couple trays of them for all my electronic bits.
No. Overclocking leads to read errors from the keyboard buffer.