>>had Nader not been there, Gore likely would have won.
The "spoiler" phenomenon isn't ironclad logic to me.
Living in a heavily republican state (guaranteed for Bush), I voted for Ralph Nader, hoping to get the guy the 5% of the popular vote or whatever it is that a party needs to get the matching federal funds, etc, next time around. Otherwise, I would have voted for Bush too.
I know 3 other people who did the exact same thing, and we didn't discuss it beforehand. (One I'd never even met yet.) We can't be the only ones. I'm willing to bet it is a statistically significant subtraction from the "lost votes" of the mainstream candidate.
I personally think it'd be interesting to go back to the original system... Whoever wins is president, whoever comes in second is vice president. Tumultuous? I'm sure, initially. But if the polarization endemic currently subsided, they'd have to cooperate and compromise to get anything done. Ideally (and ostensibly, impractically) we'd be better for it.
I was under the impression that the plasma tweeters use helium, a noble gas, because they would produce dangerous levels of ozone if use with air.
Noble gasses are much easier to break down into plasmas due to the full electron shells. And they don't chemically react as much with everything else for the same reason.
Use burned natural gas (CO2); this is much cheaper than helium, and has the added advantage of preheating the gas without using more electricity (the gas/air must be preheated for reasons detailed in Hill's patent).
The big advantage of Helium is that you can get breakdown at much lower voltages than anything else and at comparatively higher pressures. Not sure about use in speakers, but I've operated & done experiments on several atmospheric plasma devices with a variety of gasses.
You just showed that no matter how inherently safe the reactor is, there will always be stupid people making mistakes.
As someone else pointed out, Chernobyl was a positive-feedback reactor. Inherantly unsafe, basically. Here in the US, all commercial reactors are negative-feedback reactors. Screw something up and...the reaction peters out. In fact, without operator intervention, the damn thing will shut off during normal operation. Always err on the side of safety.
Nuclear reactors tend to be very safe on the whole. Coal plants barf out literally tons more radioactive particles than nuclear plants. Not to mention, nuclear plants generally operate at extremely high efficiencies.
For those unaware, FLAC is an open source codec which stands for "Free Lossless Audio Codec". It's like WAVs in that it's lossless but the files are much smaller since they're compressed:).
Eh, not much smaller. About 1/3 to 1/2 the size of the wave. Still, that's 2-3x the number of losslessly ripped albums you can store. I rip FLAC for my favorite albums, and Ogg for everything else. And yes, I do hear the difference over by 24/96 sound card, nice HK receiver, & good speakers*.
*my friend had me do a blind listening test & I picked out the FLAC over the [256kbps nominal] ogg 5/6 times.
Here's hoping they don't [sue], though. If they're smart they'll realize that, while it's a clear case of copyright infringement, there's no way this is going to cut into their actual product sales at all.
Sure. 'Cause the RIAA feels the same way about P2P filesharing, I'm sure. I'll buy that piracy - real piracy - in Asia & Eastern Europe is cutting into their [hugely inflated] profit margin, but not P2P, remixes. etc.
Ok, I'm curious. a: Why would someone hide in a closet, and b: Do you really care that someone is hiding in a closet, and c: What would you do about someone in a closet anyway?
a) It being a Methodist-affiliated university, women weren't allowed in mens' rooms after midnight, et vice versa. b) See a). No, I personally don't care and only ever wrote people up for it if they were being completely obnoxious. It's just university policy. c) Just tell them to leave, generally. If it was someone I'd talked to before, I was supposed to refer them to the head resident or write them up. Happened occasionally.
Unless of course you're talking about people being 'in the closet' in which case getting Security to help them 'come out of the closet' raises a whole new set of mental images..
Lol. Wouldn't suprise me in the least, actually. They university was always looking for more minority/ethnic/etc groups. I wonder if either of the gay students on campus got aid because of their lifestyle...:-P
No, really.
Welcome to the rural mid-west. Student body: 97% white. 51% female, 49% male. Where the "Latino Student Organization" had 12 members, 3 of which were actually hispanic.
As an RA who but recently graduated from a small, private university, I did indeed carry a master key when I went on rounds. Residents are notified in their houseing contracts and on move-in what specific powers the RAs have. We _are_ designated as university employees as associated with security in our contracts. "Security" was a regulated law enforcement body with commissioned officers.
Your "reasonable" expectation of privacy is just that. It doesn't extend past the four walls of your room. If you behave yourself, are quiet, etc, it will never come into question. --
If there was a minor disturbance, I knocked and asked politely for the resident to simmer down.
If I had reason to believe they were smoking pot or unconscious and dying or something - and they didn't answer the door after knocking - I could declare my intent to enter and key-in to the room.
If I suspected they were violent, roaring drunk, etc, then I called campus security to back me up before I did anything. They, in turn, were in contact with the city police. But our security force was unexpectedly competent for a campus unit.
--
No, you are absoultely right that _we_ can't _search_ their rooms. But anything that is in plain sight is game. And if we have reason to believe someone is, say, hiding in a closet, we can ask the resident to open the closet. If they do not comply, yes, then we have security do it.
Generally, people weren't too obstinate about it. For example, if you're drinking under age (on private property), you'd rather have the us & the university deal with it than the legal system.
If they argued with us, we called security. If they argued with security, well... You'd get anything from a few hours community service to suspension (automatic, any drug offense) to expulsion (any second drug offense), and possibly criminal charges, if it were serious enough.
I was reading what "the other side" had to say, and this sentence made me choke with disbelief:
The Department of Defense is fully aware of its responsibility for the safe use of depleted uranium SAFE?!
Um...huh? Depleted uranium is basically harmless. Oddly enough, it becomes dangerous when you use it to kill people. I wouldn't ram a carrot into my eye either.
In any case, you've totally missed my point: in the US, if you do not have private health coverage, you have nothing. Operable brain tumour? If your job doesn't come with health coverage (and for blue collar workers, increasingly few do), and you can't afford the operation using your savings, then you're going to die. Period.
Um, not so much. Public hospitals are required by law to treat you for an emergency visit and are required to keep treating you while you are there. They can't just say, "Oh, now his liver has failed. Too bad he can't afford a new one."
Obviously, this doesn't help you for chronic/long term conditions before they become an emergency, but it is hardly the draconian state you claim.
Me? I'm for more governmental control and regulation of the medical industry (and just as, if not more importantly, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Malpractice suits especially need limits.), but not abject European socialism. When industries get too big for individuals or states to handle, the federal government has an obligation to step in and keep them honest. What bothers me is that people are too apethetic to keep the Fed honest.
It never states that only those *in* the militia should have the right to bear arms. It just says that the reason for the right is to prepare people to be in a militia (army) if necessary. This was before the time of standing armies; they needed people who were familiar with weapons in case of war.
Oh lord. Not quite; you're only partly correct. The "militia" the founding fathers were speaking about was enitre body of young men able to fight, if the need ever arose. George Mason defined the militia as "the whole people." James Madison even wrote in the Federalist Papers that an abusing standing army would be opposed, "...by a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands." (which amounted to the number of able bodied men contemporarily thought to be living in the country.)
So we are the militia they were talking about. I wouldn't exactly consider us "well regulated*" anymore, but that's our own fault. I think it is perfectly fair to consider state militias the only "real" militias that exist today, since they are the ones who have the professional training. If we were ever invaded, there would still be plenty of willing, if less capable, volunteers.
Ultimately, the milita issue doesn't have much to do with the right to keep and bear arms, however. Firstly, the amendments exist to specifically enumerate rights we already have, as per the tenth amendment, not to revoke rights (which is the judicial branch's job, basically.) If the gun control people aren't won over to the Founder's intent by the inital wording of the amendment,
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated
militia being the best security of a free country."
then there is still one amendment to conveniently overlook; the 9th.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
and nowhere in the entire Constitution or Bill of Rights does it specifically say that people can not own weapons.
Now, penalties for misusing firearms should be harsh because they are dangerous. What people also seem to always forget is that equal rights and privileges = equal responsibilities and accountability.
*(meaning well-trained, not regulated by the federal government; that would go against the concept of a militia which might be needed to oppose an oppresive government.)
What happens to a photon upon impacting a solar sail? I would assume that the photon would lose the amount of energy it imparts onto the sail, but what does that mean for the photon?
It pops out of existence*. All of its energy is deposited** in the solar sail. Photons carry energy in discrete packets - quanta - so you can tell a lot about a material by how much, if any, energy a photon has apon leaving a material, if it isn't completely absorbed too.
*a photon is an abstract concept, really.
**depending on the energy of the photon, a number of different things can happen. It can be absorbed, absorbed and re-emitted, not interact at all, cause pair-production... Lots of interesting things. We'll just talk about the specific energy band the sail is designed for.
So what if I use something else like a gel pen? I do use those to sign check, you know.
I've always hated ballpoint pens and have used fountain pens for years. Ballpoints take too much pressure, have to be held at a weird angle for me, etc.
Being currently unemployed, one of the things I've been trying out in my copious free time is calligraphy. I always thought it'd be fun to learn the old-style Spencerian Script. I abandoned cursive about a year after I learned it (2nd grade), so my signature is god-awful. (On the other hand, my printing looks practically like old Germanic script
Other than wedding/birthday cards, there isn't any place to use handwriting. So for the last 6 months or so, all of the checks I write for bills, etc, have been rather...fancy.:-)
Dang it. I fence strictly foil, although I'd like to try epee. On the bright side, I think half the people who fence sabre are certifiably insane, so an olympic sabre match may prove quite entertaining:-)
Here here. I fence and want to see the fencing matches. If they even show them on American TV, it will probably be a half hour's worth at 3:30 in the morning.
And you're right on target about the Winter Skatelimpics.
Rock on caterpillar drive, I say. I'm thinking Hunt for Red October here.
Lol. As a former nuclear/plasma physics graduate student, it makes me laugh even more. Do you know how that caterpiller drive actually works? The field of study is called magnetohydrodynamics and is one of the most @*#%$!* involved things I've studied...
Basically, you have an electric field of some sort or readily available ions (think, salts in the ocean water), apply some strong magnetic fields of differing strength, and cause a forceful ion drift in the direction perpendicular. I just call it Evil Fluid Dynamics With 50 Other Variables.
As an aside, since there are relatively fewer dissolved salts, the Red October's caterpiller drive wouldn't work in fresh water. Neat eh? Not that there are terribly many huge bodies of fresh water where you'd worry about silent submaries.:-)
At any rate, there are dissolved salts in blood, aren't there? So you could theoretically do this for a heart pump. But who knows what the heck it'd do to the patient and I'm guessing you'd need a whole lot of auxiliary equipment.
>>how come the UN didn't condemn Saddam for his dictatorial and
genocidal rule?
>are you aware of how many countries are dictatorial?
So? Exactly how many are genocidal? What really pissed me off was that the UN has lambasted the US for not stepping in in Rwanda. The US isn't the only one that can be accused of a double standard. (And yes, we damn well ought to have stepped in in Rwanda. Just like we finally did something about Iraq. Violence isn't good or pretty, but genocide must be verboden.)
using the words "perpetual motion" in the description disqualifies a patent, but apparently not much else
An engineer that graduated from my university, oh, five or six years ago, got hired at the USPO. Guess what he first job they gave her was? Disproving perpetual motion machines:-D
Seriously. She'd go though those patents, write out the equations, etc, why they wouldn't work, and send a nice letter back to the person telling them why their patent application was denied. And she always had plenty of work to do.
this is like saying "volunteer work is causing unemployment for people who wish to do the same work for pay"
Sad as it is, some unions do use that argument. There is a nearby state park that has unionized maintenance workers. It is a several thousand acre park, which, due to budget cuts, only has two full time maintenance employees. Both guys work hard (maintaining roads grass, trash, buildings, etc,) but there is only so much two guys can do, and the parks trails are in terrible shape. Not just in need of mulch or stone, but washed out or nearly impassible due to overgrowth, downed trees, etc.
Some local businesses offered to donate tools and materials and some local Sierra Club (et al) members offered to volunteer their time to get the trials back into shape. Since it is a public park and is currently not useable for hiking by the public, I thought that was a great gesture from the community. Can you guess what heppened?
The state union told them to go stick it somewhere. Despite the fact that the two employees couldn't and wouldn't work on the trails - which is part of their job description - they wouldn't let anyone else do a "union job."
So the trails are still crap, now two years later.
I would like to know where this perception came from. People love free things, even if they are completely worthless people will still try them. Why doesn't that extend into the software arena?
It is because people tend to be suspicious of free things too. I remember reading an article in some science magazine a while back about the perception of "free" things.
The testers put food, lemonade, and bottles of water on a table on a busy street corner on a hot day and put a free sign on it. Relatively few people came by and took anything. But when they put up a sign that said, "Cookies, Water, and Lemonade, $0.25 each" up, they sold everything within a matter of minutes. (It was one-to-a-customer in the both the "free" and "$0.25" case.)
As a more humorous example, a guy I know from Germany was telling me about some of the difficulties Walmart had getting established over there. You know how they have Greeters and such here in the USA? Apparently, over there, people distrusted Walmart because the employees were always smiling too much and hence must be either cheating them or ridiculing them! Apparently, Walmart had to give their employees "de-sensivity training" to learn not to bother customers.
I think the previous poster meant that IE lacks support for PNG-24's 8 bit alpha. See, PNG supports 256 levels of transparency. Gradients. Oh, the joy of no jagged edges.
The problem is, yes, a 24 bit PNG with 8 bits of alpha can get rather large, especially when they are used for what they weren't intended for; replacing JPGs.
Open up this link in anything but IE (I tested it with Mozilla and Opera) to see some 8-bit alpha. And a cool little demo to boot.
Slashdot Mirror
>>had Nader not been there, Gore likely would have won.
The "spoiler" phenomenon isn't ironclad logic to me.
Living in a heavily republican state (guaranteed for Bush), I voted for Ralph Nader, hoping to get the guy the 5% of the popular vote or whatever it is that a party needs to get the matching federal funds, etc, next time around. Otherwise, I would have voted for Bush too.
I know 3 other people who did the exact same thing, and we didn't discuss it beforehand. (One I'd never even met yet.) We can't be the only ones. I'm willing to bet it is a statistically significant subtraction from the "lost votes" of the mainstream candidate.
I personally think it'd be interesting to go back to the original system... Whoever wins is president, whoever comes in second is vice president. Tumultuous? I'm sure, initially. But if the polarization endemic currently subsided, they'd have to cooperate and compromise to get anything done. Ideally (and ostensibly, impractically) we'd be better for it.
I was under the impression that the plasma tweeters use helium, a noble gas, because they would produce dangerous levels of ozone if use with air.
Noble gasses are much easier to break down into plasmas due to the full electron shells. And they don't chemically react as much with everything else for the same reason.
Use burned natural gas (CO2); this is much cheaper than helium, and has the added advantage of preheating the gas without using more electricity (the gas/air must be preheated for reasons detailed in Hill's patent).
The big advantage of Helium is that you can get breakdown at much lower voltages than anything else and at comparatively higher pressures. Not sure about use in speakers, but I've operated & done experiments on several atmospheric plasma devices with a variety of gasses.
You just showed that no matter how inherently safe the reactor is, there will always be stupid people making mistakes.
As someone else pointed out, Chernobyl was a positive-feedback reactor. Inherantly unsafe, basically. Here in the US, all commercial reactors are negative-feedback reactors. Screw something up and...the reaction peters out. In fact, without operator intervention, the damn thing will shut off during normal operation. Always err on the side of safety.
Nuclear reactors tend to be very safe on the whole. Coal plants barf out literally tons more radioactive particles than nuclear plants. Not to mention, nuclear plants generally operate at extremely high efficiencies.
*my friend had me do a blind listening test & I picked out the FLAC over the [256kbps nominal] ogg 5/6 times.
Sure. 'Cause the RIAA feels the same way about P2P filesharing, I'm sure. I'll buy that piracy - real piracy - in Asia & Eastern Europe is cutting into their [hugely inflated] profit margin, but not P2P, remixes. etc.
a) It being a Methodist-affiliated university, women weren't allowed in mens' rooms after midnight, et vice versa.
b) See a). No, I personally don't care and only ever wrote people up for it if they were being completely obnoxious. It's just university policy.
c) Just tell them to leave, generally. If it was someone I'd talked to before, I was supposed to refer them to the head resident or write them up. Happened occasionally.
Lol. Wouldn't suprise me in the least, actually. They university was always looking for more minority/ethnic/etc groups. I wonder if either of the gay students on campus got aid because of their lifestyle...
No, really.
Welcome to the rural mid-west. Student body: 97% white. 51% female, 49% male. Where the "Latino Student Organization" had 12 members, 3 of which were actually hispanic.
As an RA who but recently graduated from a small, private university, I did indeed carry a master key when I went on rounds. Residents are notified in their houseing contracts and on move-in what specific powers the RAs have. We _are_ designated as university employees as associated with security in our contracts. "Security" was a regulated law enforcement body with commissioned officers.
Your "reasonable" expectation of privacy is just that. It doesn't extend past the four walls of your room. If you behave yourself, are quiet, etc, it will never come into question.
--
If there was a minor disturbance, I knocked and asked politely for the resident to simmer down.
If I had reason to believe they were smoking pot or unconscious and dying or something - and they didn't answer the door after knocking - I could declare my intent to enter and key-in to the room.
If I suspected they were violent, roaring drunk, etc, then I called campus security to back me up before I did anything. They, in turn, were in contact with the city police. But our security force was unexpectedly competent for a campus unit.
--
No, you are absoultely right that _we_ can't _search_ their rooms. But anything that is in plain sight is game. And if we have reason to believe someone is, say, hiding in a closet, we can ask the resident to open the closet. If they do not comply, yes, then we have security do it.
Generally, people weren't too obstinate about it.
For example, if you're drinking under age (on private property), you'd rather have the us & the university deal with it than the legal system.
If they argued with us, we called security. If they argued with security, well... You'd get anything from a few hours community service to suspension (automatic, any drug offense) to expulsion (any second drug offense), and possibly criminal charges, if it were serious enough.
Oddly enough, it becomes dangerous when you use it to kill people. I wouldn't ram a carrot into my eye either.
Obviously, this doesn't help you for chronic/long term conditions before they become an emergency, but it is hardly the draconian state you claim.
Me? I'm for more governmental control and regulation of the medical industry (and just as, if not more importantly, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Malpractice suits especially need limits.), but not abject European socialism. When industries get too big for individuals or states to handle, the federal government has an obligation to step in and keep them honest. What bothers me is that people are too apethetic to keep the Fed honest.
James Madison even wrote in the Federalist Papers that an abusing standing army would be opposed, "
So we are the militia they were talking about. I wouldn't exactly consider us "well regulated*" anymore, but that's our own fault. I think it is perfectly fair to consider state militias the only "real" militias that exist today, since they are the ones who have the professional training. If we were ever invaded, there would still be plenty of willing, if less capable, volunteers.
Ultimately, the milita issue doesn't have much to do with the right to keep and bear arms, however.
Firstly, the amendments exist to specifically enumerate rights we already have, as per the tenth amendment, not to revoke rights (which is the judicial branch's job, basically.) If the gun control people aren't won over to the Founder's intent by the inital wording of the amendment, then there is still one amendment to conveniently overlook; the 9th. and nowhere in the entire Constitution or Bill of Rights does it specifically say that people can not own weapons.
Now, penalties for misusing firearms should be harsh because they are dangerous. What people also seem to always forget is that equal rights and privileges = equal responsibilities and accountability.
*(meaning well-trained, not regulated by the federal government; that would go against the concept of a militia which might be needed to oppose an oppresive government.)
It pops out of existence*. All of its energy is deposited** in the solar sail. Photons carry energy in discrete packets - quanta - so you can tell a lot about a material by how much, if any, energy a photon has apon leaving a material, if it isn't completely absorbed too.
*a photon is an abstract concept, really.
**depending on the energy of the photon, a number of different things can happen. It can be absorbed, absorbed and re-emitted, not interact at all, cause pair-production... Lots of interesting things. We'll just talk about the specific energy band the sail is designed for.
Being currently unemployed, one of the things I've been trying out in my copious free time is calligraphy. I always thought it'd be fun to learn the old-style Spencerian Script. I abandoned cursive about a year after I learned it (2nd grade), so my signature is god-awful. (On the other hand, my printing looks practically like old Germanic script
Other than wedding/birthday cards, there isn't any place to use handwriting. So for the last 6 months or so, all of the checks I write for bills, etc, have been rather...fancy.
Dang it. I fence strictly foil, although I'd like to try epee. On the bright side, I think half the people who fence sabre are certifiably insane, so an olympic sabre match may prove quite entertaining :-)
Here here. I fence and want to see the fencing matches. If they even show them on American TV, it will probably be a half hour's worth at 3:30 in the morning.
And you're right on target about the Winter Skatelimpics.
Lol. As a former nuclear/plasma physics graduate student, it makes me laugh even more. Do you know how that caterpiller drive actually works? The field of study is called magnetohydrodynamics and is one of the most @*#%$!* involved things I've studied...
Basically, you have an electric field of some sort or readily available ions (think, salts in the ocean water), apply some strong magnetic fields of differing strength, and cause a forceful ion drift in the direction perpendicular. I just call it Evil Fluid Dynamics With 50 Other Variables.
As an aside, since there are relatively fewer dissolved salts, the Red October's caterpiller drive wouldn't work in fresh water. Neat eh? Not that there are terribly many huge bodies of fresh water where you'd worry about silent submaries.
At any rate, there are dissolved salts in blood, aren't there? So you could theoretically do this for a heart pump. But who knows what the heck it'd do to the patient and I'm guessing you'd need a whole lot of auxiliary equipment.
Oh lord. Leave it to you to turn a PDA into a weapon ^_^
That only applies if you are a corpus linguist. We grammarians shall yet rule the earth!
Just goes to show that fingers and the mind aren't always on the same page. The funnier admission is that I actually read Helenistic Greek... :-()
So? Exactly how many are genocidal?
What really pissed me off was that the UN has lambasted the US for not stepping in in Rwanda. The US isn't the only one that can be accused of a double standard. (And yes, we damn well ought to have stepped in in Rwanda. Just like we finally did something about Iraq. Violence isn't good or pretty, but genocide must be verboden.)
An engineer that graduated from my university, oh, five or six years ago, got hired at the USPO. Guess what he first job they gave her was? Disproving perpetual motion machines
Seriously. She'd go though those patents, write out the equations, etc, why they wouldn't work, and send a nice letter back to the person telling them why their patent application was denied. And she always had plenty of work to do.
Sad as it is, some unions do use that argument. There is a nearby state park that has unionized maintenance workers. It is a several thousand acre park, which, due to budget cuts, only has two full time maintenance employees. Both guys work hard (maintaining roads grass, trash, buildings, etc,) but there is only so much two guys can do, and the parks trails are in terrible shape. Not just in need of mulch or stone, but washed out or nearly impassible due to overgrowth, downed trees, etc.
Some local businesses offered to donate tools and materials and some local Sierra Club (et al) members offered to volunteer their time to get the trials back into shape. Since it is a public park and is currently not useable for hiking by the public, I thought that was a great gesture from the community. Can you guess what heppened?
The state union told them to go stick it somewhere. Despite the fact that the two employees couldn't and wouldn't work on the trails - which is part of their job description - they wouldn't let anyone else do a "union job."
So the trails are still crap, now two years later.
It is because people tend to be suspicious of free things too. I remember reading an article in some science magazine a while back about the perception of "free" things.
The testers put food, lemonade, and bottles of water on a table on a busy street corner on a hot day and put a free sign on it. Relatively few people came by and took anything. But when they put up a sign that said, "Cookies, Water, and Lemonade, $0.25 each" up, they sold everything within a matter of minutes. (It was one-to-a-customer in the both the "free" and "$0.25" case.)
As a more humorous example, a guy I know from Germany was telling me about some of the difficulties Walmart had getting established over there. You know how they have Greeters and such here in the USA? Apparently, over there, people distrusted Walmart because the employees were always smiling too much and hence must be either cheating them or ridiculing them! Apparently, Walmart had to give their employees "de-sensivity training" to learn not to bother customers.
I think the previous poster meant that IE lacks support for PNG-24's 8 bit alpha.
See, PNG supports 256 levels of transparency. Gradients. Oh, the joy of no jagged edges.
The problem is, yes, a 24 bit PNG with 8 bits of alpha can get rather large, especially when they are used for what they weren't intended for; replacing JPGs.
Open up this link in anything but IE (I tested it with Mozilla and Opera) to see some 8-bit alpha. And a cool little demo to boot.