A First Amendment challenge will (most likely) fail. There's already been several cases that have ruled commercial speech not protected under the First Amendment.
Don't be so sure -- a quick Google search on "commercial free speech amendment" gives a number of articles suggesting commercial speech is protected:
An interesting idea to preserve an endandgered species: make it into a commercial product! Having just the one grove makes this jurassic pine's survival tenuous at best, but when you can pick them up $10 apiece in IKEA their survival is assured.
What's next? Siberian tigers at the pet store? Blue whales for the home aquarium? Rainforest makeovers for your backyard? Y'know, it just might work!
Thus, you could make a fairly reasonable guess as to which one it should go in.
But that's just the point! It would be a guess and, more importantly, the hapless user doesn't know what would happen if the wrong guess was made. Maybe the PC would explode -- they have no idea. So from the user's point of view checking first is exactly the right thing to do.
That's why it's important to take ALL guesswork out of user instructions. The "press any key" scenario is the perfect example -- "press the space bar" would be a far better instruction.
One of Kim Stanley Robinson's books -- Red Mars, I think it was -- had a scene where separatist Mars colonists sabotaged a space elevator by disconnecting the tethering asteroid at the far end. The cable wrapped several times around the circumference of Mars, demolishing several settlements in the process.
The cable in that scenario was several meters thick rather than paper-thin, but you get the idea.
Anotehr reason why they ask you to turn off electronic devices during the takeoff and landing phases is for personal safety -- so that your attention is on the flight, not the gameboy. If the pilot issues a "brace" instruction over the PA it's not going to help you much if you can't hear it over the gameboy headphones.
Discovering extraterrestrial life would be one of the most revolutionary scientific discoveries, ever.
And I'm not talking about little green men, either. Even just the discovery of the tiniest microbe or virus has the potential of completely changing the way we think about biology. Right now, we have a sample size of 1 for fundamental variety in life -- all organisms on Earth are based around the same principle of DNA. But is that the only way life can emerge? We know for example that a mirror-image of all the molecules in DNA could produce life identical, but fundamentally incompatible with ours. Why hasn't this happened? Maybe it has on Mars. Maybe it's something more exotic -- perhaps not as extreme as silicon-based life, but even a different library of base-pairs would change our thinking dramatically, and could have huge impact on our understanding of our own biochemistry.
So no, I don't think this counts as being obsessive.
Is it just me, or are these international diamond cartels very, very nefarious organizations?
Yes, they are. Or rather, it is: De Beers is the only one of any significance. This article about the "Diamond Invention" has been posted to Slashdot before, and despite being written in 1982 is just as true today. The myth that diamonds are valuable was created by De Beers early last century, and they have been able to maintain that myth through the virtue of being a thuggish monopoly.
Don't buy diamonds. For our wedding bands, we chose unadorned titanium.:)
This is because the exposure of the picture is set to bring in the detail of the planets, and isn't long enough to see the stars.
This issue is sometimes raised in support of the claim that the Apollo moon photographs are an elaborate hoax. You can read a good debunking of this at Phil Plait's excellent Bad Astronomy site.
Think of [casinos] as a public service which keeps the terminally stupid off the streets.
This is pretty offensive to the large number of people who go to casinos. I count myself among that number: I'm a bloody statistician, and I know perfectly well that I expect (in a probabilistic sense) to lose. But I also see $50 (my expected loss laying, say, $1000 worth of bets) pretty good value for a night's entertainment. The drinks are cheap, too!
Uhh, the article says nothing about the location of the observer. The could have been observing from behind, especially since it's a BBC article and the reporter could've been standing in Dover.:)
If you check a map, his track is ESE, so a spotter plane following behind would indeed see him silhouetted in the morning sun.
The real cost to us (as a mid-size company with retail clients) isn't dealing with the spam itself, although our IT department spends a lot of time maintaining the filters (and when the spam filtering went offline last week, we really understood how much they were needed).
The actual problem is the opportunity cost of the loss of legitimate email, both inbound and outbound. Files we send to customers often bounce back because attachments aren't allowed anymore (more of a virus thing than a spam thing, I suppose), requiring time to find alternatives (FTP or mail a CD?). Even emails without attachments are trapped by customer spam lists. Our mailserver has been unfairly blacklisted once or twice (some zealots put you on the list for sending an email circular to paying customers!) and as a result there are several customers we can't email at all. Emails customers send to us sometimes bounce back to them as spam -- this is the worst one, because we never even realise there's a problem unless they call us and complain (in which case it's always ourfault).
The real problem is that email is no longer a reliable means of communication. What is the value of a communication channel that loses many of its messages?
Perhaps the definitions of "skilled worker" and "menial worker" will change in the future. I'd guess the latter will soon encompass "programmer".
Consider: do you consider your average grease monkey changing the oil in your car to be skilled or menial? Once upon a time, when cars were new-fangled technology, you had to be a pretty skilled worker to be involved with them. Not so now.
Now replace "car" with "computer" and extrapolate a couple of decades. Then replace "computer" with "robot" and extrapolate further.
Carpool lanes have been shown to carry more passenger-miles than non-HOV lanes. Even though the traffic density is lower, each car carries more people, and gets more people to the places they want to be. So measured by that statistic, carpool lanes do work.
As I understand it, the point here isn't to open the carpool lane to single drivers.
The point here is to use a free marketplace -- Ebay -- to determine the value of access to the carpool lane to single drivers. This is valuable information, cheaply derived, which can be used to direct transportation policy in the future. Seems like a good idea to me.
No wonder that company failed. When they have a policy of keeping all the critical data on one laptop, without backups, you gotta worry. Let alone being fired, what would have happend if your laptop was stolen or died?
I think part of the problem with the patent system is that there's no redress for filing an obviously frivolous patent. You file your patent, and if the off chance someone sues, the patent is invalidated. The legal fees are hardly a deterrent if you were willing to gamble the $15K in legal and filing fees in the first place. Or is there some civil or criminal penalty for wilfully abusing the patent system that I'm not aware of?
If we find life on Mars or Europa or Titan or elsewhere inside our own universe, then the should bolster the theory that "since we find life here, it has to be the same in the rest of the universe".
But what do you mean by "same"? It would be astounding if extraterrestrial life we descovered was fundamentally different than our own. What if it uses a different set of base pairs than our DNA? Or mirror-images of them. What if it's not based on DNA at all? A discovery like this would revolutionize the biological sciences, by demonstrating that there are other (and by probable extension, innumerable) chemical bases of life. It would also throw the "contamination" argument right out of the water.
I actually LIKED starbucks because it included tax in the prices, so what you saw was what you paid
Starbucks doesn't do that in their home state, Washington. Here in Seattle the tax gets added on to the list price as usual.
Probably wherever you were, coffee isn't taxed. In Washington, food is not taxed, but for some reason Velveeta counts as food, but a Grande Latte does not.
Get rid of the pennies
on
Making Change
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Or you can just take advantage of the "give a penny, take a penny" method to avoid dealing with units under five cents.
Several countries have dispensed with small-denomination coins (the copper ones) entirely to save costs and hassle. For example, in Australia the smallest denomination cash unit is the five-cent piece. Goods are still priced to the cent (or sometimes to a fraction of a cent, e.g. gasoline), but the price for the total basket of goods is rounded down to the nearest five cents. Non-cash transactions (cheques, cards) and bank accounts are still maintained to the cent.
It's a popular scheme, as it doesn't really cost anyone any significant money, bit it saves a lot of pfutzing with small change.
Urban legend. See www.snopes.com for the details. Having conductive lead dust (or broken pencil tips) floating around all those electronics in zero-G isn't a great idea.
There's no danger from using a cell phone near a gas pump, diesel or otherwise. Most gas stations have rescinded the stupid policy of demanding you turn off your cell phone while on the forecourt. There are plenty of references to this: Snopes.com even lists it as an urban legend.
Aggregating data from artfully-chosen original research and running it through a 'statistical' analysis provides insufficient basis to conclude anything about anything other than the bias of the 'researchers'
Wrong. Meta-analysis is, in fact, a highly respected form of statistical anaysis, and has been in routine use (particularly within the epidemiology and medical statistics communities) for more than twenty years. The whole point of meta-analysis is, in fact, to average out the systematic biases of individual studies to ascertain if, overall, the effect described does in fact exist. The statistical methods for doing so are quite well-founded.
Meta-analysis does have one flaw though: publication bias. Generally, only those articles that show a positive result tend to get published, which means that meta-analysis studies tend to confirm known theories (but often give a much more accurate estimate of the size of the effect). When a meta-analysis shows an effect does not exist (or is smaller than supposed), you should take notice.
This was looked into during the police investigation and enquiry, but no connection was found. It was just some observant schmuck, writing down the numbers trying to predict them. (Shouldn't have worked, but there ya go.)
BTW, I meant to say: "the programmer had reset the RANDOM SEED WITHIN THE "FOR day IN..." loop...
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be so sure -- a quick Google search on "commercial free speech amendment" gives a number of articles suggesting commercial speech is protected:
On the pro side: Over the past few decades the courts have taken a different view, granting free speech rights to commercial interests
On the con side: the US Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by the athletic apparel giant of a California Supreme Court decision last year that shocked the corporate world by saying basically that "commercial speech" is not entitled to the same degree of protection as "free speech"
I don't think it's as clear-cut as you suggest.
What's next? Siberian tigers at the pet store? Blue whales for the home aquarium? Rainforest makeovers for your backyard? Y'know, it just might work!
But that's just the point! It would be a guess and, more importantly, the hapless user doesn't know what would happen if the wrong guess was made. Maybe the PC would explode -- they have no idea. So from the user's point of view checking first is exactly the right thing to do.
That's why it's important to take ALL guesswork out of user instructions. The "press any key" scenario is the perfect example -- "press the space bar" would be a far better instruction.
The cable in that scenario was several meters thick rather than paper-thin, but you get the idea.
Anotehr reason why they ask you to turn off electronic devices during the takeoff and landing phases is for personal safety -- so that your attention is on the flight, not the gameboy. If the pilot issues a "brace" instruction over the PA it's not going to help you much if you can't hear it over the gameboy headphones.
And I'm not talking about little green men, either. Even just the discovery of the tiniest microbe or virus has the potential of completely changing the way we think about biology. Right now, we have a sample size of 1 for fundamental variety in life -- all organisms on Earth are based around the same principle of DNA. But is that the only way life can emerge? We know for example that a mirror-image of all the molecules in DNA could produce life identical, but fundamentally incompatible with ours. Why hasn't this happened? Maybe it has on Mars. Maybe it's something more exotic -- perhaps not as extreme as silicon-based life, but even a different library of base-pairs would change our thinking dramatically, and could have huge impact on our understanding of our own biochemistry.
So no, I don't think this counts as being obsessive.
Yes, they are. Or rather, it is: De Beers is the only one of any significance. This article about the "Diamond Invention" has been posted to Slashdot before, and despite being written in 1982 is just as true today. The myth that diamonds are valuable was created by De Beers early last century, and they have been able to maintain that myth through the virtue of being a thuggish monopoly.
Don't buy diamonds. For our wedding bands, we chose unadorned titanium. :)
This issue is sometimes raised in support of the claim that the Apollo moon photographs are an elaborate hoax. You can read a good debunking of this at Phil Plait's excellent Bad Astronomy site.
This is pretty offensive to the large number of people who go to casinos. I count myself among that number: I'm a bloody statistician, and I know perfectly well that I expect (in a probabilistic sense) to lose. But I also see $50 (my expected loss laying, say, $1000 worth of bets) pretty good value for a night's entertainment. The drinks are cheap, too!
If you check a map, his track is ESE, so a spotter plane following behind would indeed see him silhouetted in the morning sun.
The actual problem is the opportunity cost of the loss of legitimate email, both inbound and outbound. Files we send to customers often bounce back because attachments aren't allowed anymore (more of a virus thing than a spam thing, I suppose), requiring time to find alternatives (FTP or mail a CD?). Even emails without attachments are trapped by customer spam lists. Our mailserver has been unfairly blacklisted once or twice (some zealots put you on the list for sending an email circular to paying customers!) and as a result there are several customers we can't email at all. Emails customers send to us sometimes bounce back to them as spam -- this is the worst one, because we never even realise there's a problem unless they call us and complain (in which case it's always ourfault).
The real problem is that email is no longer a reliable means of communication. What is the value of a communication channel that loses many of its messages?
Consider: do you consider your average grease monkey changing the oil in your car to be skilled or menial? Once upon a time, when cars were new-fangled technology, you had to be a pretty skilled worker to be involved with them. Not so now. Now replace "car" with "computer" and extrapolate a couple of decades. Then replace "computer" with "robot" and extrapolate further.
Carpool lanes have been shown to carry more passenger-miles than non-HOV lanes. Even though the traffic density is lower, each car carries more people, and gets more people to the places they want to be. So measured by that statistic, carpool lanes do work.
The point here is to use a free marketplace -- Ebay -- to determine the value of access to the carpool lane to single drivers. This is valuable information, cheaply derived, which can be used to direct transportation policy in the future. Seems like a good idea to me.
No wonder that company failed. When they have a policy of keeping all the critical data on one laptop, without backups, you gotta worry. Let alone being fired, what would have happend if your laptop was stolen or died?
I think part of the problem with the patent system is that there's no redress for filing an obviously frivolous patent. You file your patent, and if the off chance someone sues, the patent is invalidated. The legal fees are hardly a deterrent if you were willing to gamble the $15K in legal and filing fees in the first place. Or is there some civil or criminal penalty for wilfully abusing the patent system that I'm not aware of?
But what do you mean by "same"? It would be astounding if extraterrestrial life we descovered was fundamentally different than our own. What if it uses a different set of base pairs than our DNA? Or mirror-images of them. What if it's not based on DNA at all? A discovery like this would revolutionize the biological sciences, by demonstrating that there are other (and by probable extension, innumerable) chemical bases of life. It would also throw the "contamination" argument right out of the water.
Starbucks doesn't do that in their home state, Washington. Here in Seattle the tax gets added on to the list price as usual.
Probably wherever you were, coffee isn't taxed. In Washington, food is not taxed, but for some reason Velveeta counts as food, but a Grande Latte does not.
Several countries have dispensed with small-denomination coins (the copper ones) entirely to save costs and hassle. For example, in Australia the smallest denomination cash unit is the five-cent piece. Goods are still priced to the cent (or sometimes to a fraction of a cent, e.g. gasoline), but the price for the total basket of goods is rounded down to the nearest five cents. Non-cash transactions (cheques, cards) and bank accounts are still maintained to the cent.
It's a popular scheme, as it doesn't really cost anyone any significant money, bit it saves a lot of pfutzing with small change.
Urban legend. See www.snopes.com for the details. Having conductive lead dust (or broken pencil tips) floating around all those electronics in zero-G isn't a great idea.
There's no danger from using a cell phone near a gas pump, diesel or otherwise. Most gas stations have rescinded the stupid policy of demanding you turn off your cell phone while on the forecourt. There are plenty of references to this: Snopes.com even lists it as an urban legend.
Why not? Those that live on 50% of the Earth's surface seem to cope with Winter in July just fine!
Pet peeve: software companies that announce their next product will be launched in the Spring. Now, within 6 months, when is that please?
Of the 152 office workers surveyed many explained the origin of their passwords.
Although it would be nice if they'd mentioned this up front.
Wrong. Meta-analysis is, in fact, a highly respected form of statistical anaysis, and has been in routine use (particularly within the epidemiology and medical statistics communities) for more than twenty years. The whole point of meta-analysis is, in fact, to average out the systematic biases of individual studies to ascertain if, overall, the effect described does in fact exist. The statistical methods for doing so are quite well-founded.
Meta-analysis does have one flaw though: publication bias. Generally, only those articles that show a positive result tend to get published, which means that meta-analysis studies tend to confirm known theories (but often give a much more accurate estimate of the size of the effect). When a meta-analysis shows an effect does not exist (or is smaller than supposed), you should take notice.
BTW, I meant to say: "the programmer had reset the RANDOM SEED WITHIN THE "FOR day IN ..." loop ...