Of course it's true that these things shouldn't have been reported without some further investigation, but then, who says the BBC didn't do that? Suppose that a blog actually *is* shut down by the Chinese government - do you think that if the local BBC correspondent phones them, they'll say "oh, yes, right, we closed that one in the latest crackdown because it contained words like "democracy" and "falun gong", and the author has been sent to a labour camp for the next ten years"?
If the Chinese government isn't helpful to your investigation, you can't just make up stories about them. Thats fabricating a story and is the worst thing a journalist can do. The BBC reporter made assumptions that sounded true but he shouldn't of written the article without valid facts, and there is no justifying that. Often when a journalist is writing a story he needs on additional fact or another quote to write a perfect article. If he doesn't have it though he can't just make it up even if its to be true, and if he doesn't have it he should consider abandoning the story.
When the Chinese government eventually DOES shut them down, I hope they don't expect much coverage in the Western media.
They didn't cry wolf. According to the article, the web page only said
"Due to unavoidable reasons with which everyone is familiar, this blog is temporarily closed."
Crying wolf would be for them to post a message saying the Chinese government shut them down. According to the article, it was the BBC who did a bad job of journalism of blaming the Chinese government without actually asking anyone of the circumstances of the shutdown. He had a very good point in that "They are not just supposed to report based on their own perceptions". They should be reporting based on facts. The BBC had a knee jerk reaction just as the blogger suspected they would.
Would be more than a bit annoying if you had to wait a whole day to get into your house because you got stuck in traffic.
Different people have different needs, and obviously you wouldn't need a lock that only opens at certain times on your house. It is common to have locks that only open during business house on bank vaults and in some other businesses. This way it makes it harder to break into at night when nobody should be in there anyway.
the phone relies on a wristwatch. The "eWatch" looks like a big geeky digital watch. But it also has sensors. One measures light, to see if you're in a dark room or watching TV. A motion sensor can tell if you are typing on a keyboard, and a microphone listens in to see if you're in a conversation.
It doesn't use a sensor on your phone, its in a watch because of the very reason you stated.
For example, I recall reading (a year or two ago) that if you remove preventable deaths (ie: from smoking) then on average men live 6 months longer than women.
The President has explicit authority by the US Constitution to do what is necessary to protect this country from foreign nationals
People often say the US constitution says many things that are not in it. The main problem is that most people have never read it, or at least they haven't read it since being forced to in high school. There is nothing explicit in the constitution about the president protecting the country from foreign nationals. The closest thing it does mention is that in part of his oath he must swear to "defend the Constitution of the United States." It doesn't say anything about the president ignoring laws or other parts of the constitution if he deems it necessary.
The only reasonably good news is that such patents should expire, and when they do they can't be re-patented again. But given the dismal record of extending copyrights well beyond the time of anyone living today, can patents be far behind?
Yes patents can be far behind because they are very different from copyrights.
From a political perspective, copyrights have been extended because big corporations like disney have lobbied to keep their copyrights. There aren't any major corporations that stand to gain anything by fighting them. The only people that lose out are little companies and individuals. With patents its completely different. If the patent is needed by another company they have to pay licensing fees which they will do their best to avoid. If someone tries to extend the patent then this company will fight the legislation to extend it. Also if the patent is on something really useful, many different companies in the industry will need it. In the end you will have many corporations who won't want patents extended because its not to their advantage and a few who will want it extended. The result will end up being that nothing will happen.
They might be just hiring additional developers for their UK website. The whole story of them renting dvds in the US seems to be only because they are hiring. They can and do hire developers in the US for their overseas operation. Everyone is jumping to the conclusion that they are hiring for a US DVD rental website, which is possible but not necessarily true. Amazon has indicated that they probably will set up a US dvd rental system in the past but they still haven't said publicly that they are going to.
We could just make light bulbs better so that they last longer. Some of the light bulbs that Edison made still work today after 100 years, but they aren't made like the bulbs today. If we just created them like this we wouldn't need LEDs.
I think alot of these lists are really to subjective to be useful, since most of the top schools are pretty much the same. I remember when I while I was attending college one year my school was not in the top 50. The next year it was in the top 10 in the same publication. The thing that is strange about this is that the university was exactly the same as it was the year before, but somehow it was vaulted into being one of the top schools. The only thing that changed was the listmakers criteria which is totally subjective. Clearly the list was faulty and this really made me loose any faith in these type lists.
I had a professor tell me she would not allow me to post a PDF file to my portfolio because she was worried about getting a virus when she read it?!
And this class is part of a CS degree?
In the past there have been virus's that have been transmitted by pdf files such as the peachy virus. If the professor is not completely familiar with her univerisities virus scanning software it wouldn't be totally unreasonable to limit submitted files to certain formats.
Retailers would not always round upwards because of competition in the market. If someone else offers a lower price others will compete be forced to compete.
Also realize that there are examples today where we charge fractional cents. Look at gasoline prices, they are always in fractions but nobody ever complains there.
Retailers would also probably not round until they get the sum of an entire purchase, just as with gasoline (doing otherwise might force them to replace all their cash registers). The rounding at the end would be insiginificant and not any different than the fractional ammounts that are lost because of sales tax percentages which also often don't work out to even dollar amounts.
If you want to avoid the waiting lists I've always found that to rent a movie in high demand it helps it you rent it on the day it comes out. You can almost always get the movie no matter what it is if you have a movie returned on the day (or day before) it is officially released. You have to always keep track of whats coming out, and try to manage to get a movie returned on the correct day, but it saves alot of frustration.
this still doesn't seem fair. For people who have long lists of movies I'll still get a movie, but its not the movie I really want to see. I get a movie so it would still count according to the article. Then the cycle continues, I get another movie, still not seeing the movie that I really want to see. In the end I may have to wait months before I see a movie that could of been available a long time ago.
I could just not have the list, but then I might end up waiting a long time anyway and I have no way of knowing how long.
Why the hell would you take the time and bother to do this?
Intel does this mainly because in the past there have been retailers sell a slower chip that has been overclocked as a faster chip. This gives some consumers a lower quality chip than they paid for. It can give alot of bad PR for the company if when someone's processor has problems (which may not be very obvious). A few problems can cause alot of people to be skeptical about buying intel or not (whether or not their fears are justified). The solution is just lock everything into the speed that they are actually advertising. Like it or not, overclocker's are a very small portion of their market and so they can allow a small portion of people to be angry while most of their customers are happy.
However, there is a huge problem with it: If you hate someone all you do is make some fake ads with their phone numbers on and leave them for the Chinese authorities to find and then spam.
My thoughts exactly. The only other question I have is, Are there any slashdotters in china who will post something for me?
While I think it could work to help stop spam (if a reliable system could be set up), I don't trust companies to not raise the price of each email in the future. Just like with anything else, once somebody finds out that they can make a profit they will raise the prices up and soon email prices will compare with the prices of regular mail.
From the article: Other scientists said that while the prints appear well-preserved, they add little to knowledge about human evolution, since footprints of far older human ancestors have been found.
Now that slashdot has linked to the site, I expect that their site will now experience alot of hits. As a result of a spike in hits, they will assume that their has been another earthquake (since alot of page hits=earthquake!). Panic will result since they will know there is an earthquake but nobody locate it. I name this effect the slashquake effect.
In the article he gives an analogy of using the light through a pinpoint of a camera to show why there is no interference. That made me think of the Young's double slit experiment (which shows light interference) and makes me wonder how this is to be explained if there is no interference. Doing a quick search on google, I found a list of light interference experiments and I don't see how any of these could be explained off, and so all of this should work just like radio interference.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it's true that these things shouldn't have been reported without some further investigation, but then, who says the BBC didn't do that? Suppose that a blog actually *is* shut down by the Chinese government - do you think that if the local BBC correspondent phones them, they'll say "oh, yes, right, we closed that one in the latest crackdown because it contained words like "democracy" and "falun gong", and the author has been sent to a labour camp for the next ten years"?
If the Chinese government isn't helpful to your investigation, you can't just make up stories about them. Thats fabricating a story and is the worst thing a journalist can do. The BBC reporter made assumptions that sounded true but he shouldn't of written the article without valid facts, and there is no justifying that. Often when a journalist is writing a story he needs on additional fact or another quote to write a perfect article. If he doesn't have it though he can't just make it up even if its to be true, and if he doesn't have it he should consider abandoning the story.
When the Chinese government eventually DOES shut them down, I hope they don't expect much coverage in the Western media.
They didn't cry wolf. According to the article, the web page only said
"Due to unavoidable reasons with which everyone is familiar, this blog is temporarily closed."
Crying wolf would be for them to post a message saying the Chinese government shut them down. According to the article, it was the BBC who did a bad job of journalism of blaming the Chinese government without actually asking anyone of the circumstances of the shutdown. He had a very good point in that "They are not just supposed to report based on their own perceptions". They should be reporting based on facts. The BBC had a knee jerk reaction just as the blogger suspected they would.
Would be more than a bit annoying if you had to wait a whole day to get into your house because you got stuck in traffic.
Different people have different needs, and obviously you wouldn't need a lock that only opens at certain times on your house. It is common to have locks that only open during business house on bank vaults and in some other businesses. This way it makes it harder to break into at night when nobody should be in there anyway.
From the article
the phone relies on a wristwatch. The "eWatch" looks like a big geeky digital watch. But it also has sensors. One measures light, to see if you're in a dark room or watching TV. A motion sensor can tell if you are typing on a keyboard, and a microphone listens in to see if you're in a conversation.
It doesn't use a sensor on your phone, its in a watch because of the very reason you stated.
For example, I recall reading (a year or two ago) that if you remove preventable deaths (ie: from smoking) then on average men live 6 months longer than women.
Maybe you read about it here:
Women Live Longer Because Men Are Dumb
The original link doesn't work anymore, but you can get most of the details from the discussion.
The President has explicit authority by the US Constitution to do what is necessary to protect this country from foreign nationals
People often say the US constitution says many things that are not in it. The main problem is that most people have never read it, or at least they haven't read it since being forced to in high school. There is nothing explicit in the constitution about the president protecting the country from foreign nationals. The closest thing it does mention is that in part of his oath he must swear to "defend the Constitution of the United States." It doesn't say anything about the president ignoring laws or other parts of the constitution if he deems it necessary.
The only reasonably good news is that such patents should expire, and when they do they can't be re-patented again. But given the dismal record of extending copyrights well beyond the time of anyone living today, can patents be far behind?
Yes patents can be far behind because they are very different from copyrights.
From a political perspective, copyrights have been extended because big corporations like disney have lobbied to keep their copyrights. There aren't any major corporations that stand to gain anything by fighting them. The only people that lose out are little companies and individuals. With patents its completely different. If the patent is needed by another company they have to pay licensing fees which they will do their best to avoid. If someone tries to extend the patent then this company will fight the legislation to extend it. Also if the patent is on something really useful, many different companies in the industry will need it. In the end you will have many corporations who won't want patents extended because its not to their advantage and a few who will want it extended. The result will end up being that nothing will happen.
Also patents help small organizations from having their ideas stolen from larger more funded organizations. Longer patents make this harder for them to do this. This is a partial reason for why microsoft came out saying a few days ago that it was against some patents
This is an urban legend. http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/arbys.asp
They might be just hiring additional developers for their UK website. The whole story of them renting dvds in the US seems to be only because they are hiring. They can and do hire developers in the US for their overseas operation. Everyone is jumping to the conclusion that they are hiring for a US DVD rental website, which is possible but not necessarily true. Amazon has indicated that they probably will set up a US dvd rental system in the past but they still haven't said publicly that they are going to.
We could just make light bulbs better so that they last longer. Some of the light bulbs that Edison made still work today after 100 years, but they aren't made like the bulbs today. If we just created them like this we wouldn't need LEDs.
Example 1
Example 2
I think alot of these lists are really to subjective to be useful, since most of the top schools are pretty much the same. I remember when I while I was attending college one year my school was not in the top 50. The next year it was in the top 10 in the same publication. The thing that is strange about this is that the university was exactly the same as it was the year before, but somehow it was vaulted into being one of the top schools. The only thing that changed was the listmakers criteria which is totally subjective. Clearly the list was faulty and this really made me loose any faith in these type lists.
Rectal imaging...
So thats what the anal probes are for.....the aliens are just identifing us!
I had a professor tell me she would not allow me to post a PDF file to my portfolio because she was worried about getting a virus when she read it?!
And this class is part of a CS degree?
In the past there have been virus's that have been transmitted by pdf files such as the peachy virus. If the professor is not completely familiar with her univerisities virus scanning software it wouldn't be totally unreasonable to limit submitted files to certain formats.
to all they stars. were they removed from the photo ?
:)
Well obviously nasa must of used the same techniques as they did when the created that moon landed hoax a few years back. hehe
Because retailers would round _upwards_.
Retailers would not always round upwards because of competition in the market. If someone else offers a lower price others will compete be forced to compete.
Also realize that there are examples today where we charge fractional cents. Look at gasoline prices, they are always in fractions but nobody ever complains there.
Retailers would also probably not round until they get the sum of an entire purchase, just as with gasoline (doing otherwise might force them to replace all their cash registers). The rounding at the end would be insiginificant and not any different than the fractional ammounts that are lost because of sales tax percentages which also often don't work out to even dollar amounts.
I just wonder what the Lunar embassy has to say in all this. :)
If you want to avoid the waiting lists I've always found that to rent a movie in high demand it helps it you rent it on the day it comes out. You can almost always get the movie no matter what it is if you have a movie returned on the day (or day before) it is officially released. You have to always keep track of whats coming out, and try to manage to get a movie returned on the correct day, but it saves alot of frustration.
this still doesn't seem fair. For people who have long lists of movies I'll still get a movie, but its not the movie I really want to see. I get a movie so it would still count according to the article. Then the cycle continues, I get another movie, still not seeing the movie that I really want to see. In the end I may have to wait months before I see a movie that could of been available a long time ago. I could just not have the list, but then I might end up waiting a long time anyway and I have no way of knowing how long.
Why the hell would you take the time and bother to do this?
Intel does this mainly because in the past there have been retailers sell a slower chip that has been overclocked as a faster chip. This gives some consumers a lower quality chip than they paid for. It can give alot of bad PR for the company if when someone's processor has problems (which may not be very obvious). A few problems can cause alot of people to be skeptical about buying intel or not (whether or not their fears are justified). The solution is just lock everything into the speed that they are actually advertising. Like it or not, overclocker's are a very small portion of their market and so they can allow a small portion of people to be angry while most of their customers are happy.
However, there is a huge problem with it: If you hate someone all you do is make some fake ads with their phone numbers on and leave them for the Chinese authorities to find and then spam.
My thoughts exactly. The only other question I have is, Are there any slashdotters in china who will post something for me?
Check's in the mail.
No, the checks in the email!!
Yeah I know, that was lame but I couldn't resist.
While I think it could work to help stop spam (if a reliable system could be set up), I don't trust companies to not raise the price of each email in the future. Just like with anything else, once somebody finds out that they can make a profit they will raise the prices up and soon email prices will compare with the prices of regular mail.
Slashdot title:
World's Oldest Human Footprints
From the article:
Other scientists said that while the prints appear well-preserved, they add little to knowledge about human evolution, since footprints of far older human ancestors have been found.
Seems like a contradiction to me.
Now that slashdot has linked to the site, I expect that their site will now experience alot of hits. As a result of a spike in hits, they will assume that their has been another earthquake (since alot of page hits=earthquake!). Panic will result since they will know there is an earthquake but nobody locate it. I name this effect the slashquake effect.
In the article he gives an analogy of using the light through a pinpoint of a camera to show why there is no interference. That made me think of the Young's double slit experiment (which shows light interference) and makes me wonder how this is to be explained if there is no interference. Doing a quick search on google, I found a list of light interference experiments and I don't see how any of these could be explained off, and so all of this should work just like radio interference.