Also: What they usually end up fighting is "assault weapons" bans.
An "assault rifle" is a military designation for a short-barreled select-fire (i.e. can be switched to fire bursts or continuously) gun designed for use in restricted areas - such a popping up through a hatch in a tank. (They usually fire such a low-powered bullet that the semi-auto (one-shot-per-trigger-pull-only) civilian plowshare versions are banned as hunting weapons. Too cruel: The prey is wounded and escapes to suffer, rather than dying quickly.)
An "assault weapon" is a legal term invented by gun banners to ban civilian guns. It refers to semi-auto guns with any of several scary-looking but irrelevant accessory features, and is used to whittle away at the right to keep and bear arms.
Also: Much of what the second amendment is about is the ability to resist a runaway government - foreign or domestic. It functions as an insurance policy against a runaway government just ignoring the constitution and doing whatever it pleases to the population: The population CAN fight back, and the threat has retarded this tendency of government for over two centuries. (Example: Nixon was rumored to have asked a think tank what would happen if he postponed the elections. Think tank told him over half the population was armed and such an event would be a trigger for an uprising.)
Also: NRA is one of the wimpiest of the pro-gun organizations. For instance: They actually opposed bringing D.C. v Heller to court. Others with more guts: Second Amendment Foundation, Gun Owners of America, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO: putting teeth in "Never Again!"), and a number of others.
I take it you've never lived in Northern Michigan. When 'Cosmos' was broadcast locally absolutely **NO ONE** that I worked with (car parts factory) watched it.
I grew up in Southern Michigan and worked in the auto industry - including parts factories - for much of my professional career. I can assure you that both white and blue collar auto workers have some very smart people among them, many quite interested in science.
The Henry Ford Museum / Greenfield Village is one of the premier museums of science and technology - including such things as Edison's lab, lovingly disassembled in Menlo Park and reassembled on the grounds. (Henry and Edison were friends and colleagues.) It's a two-day minimum to even skim the place. It's always well attended, and a significant fraction of those attendees are auto workers.
How would slashdotters feel if *real* lawyers came here and started laying the smack down on some of the "IANAL, but I play one on Slashdot!" types here?
That would be AWESOME, how can we convince them to do it?
We already have a few. (New York Country Lawyer comes to mind.)
Interestingly, they seem to be more interested in educating the IANALs when they're in error than in smacking them down.
This seems appropriate: The law is SUPPOSED to be understandable to those who are required to obey it. B-) Also to those who serve on the juries that apply it.
Of course, with lawyers, being able to explain an issue of law convincingly - to clients, jurors, and judges - is part of the skill set. So perhaps they can be expected to have a higher than typical fraction of potential popularizers than most specialized professions.
No, they don't want them to dumb things down. One problem that the RA mentions is the scientists treating the public as idiots which, on the whole, they're not.
The problem is not that lay readers are dumber. On the average they're not. The problem is that they don't have the specialized vocabulary and training of someone who made a career in the field.
So the trick to writing for lay readers is to keep the level high, explain the jargon and concepts as you go (but not TOO redundantly or to TOO basic a level), and be VERY CAREFUL to avoid "simplifying" a concept into something that's WRONG.
This is hard. And it takes more text to explain a given amount of science - while avoiding dragging it out into something so slooooooow that the readers get bored and give up. But people like Sagan and Asimov (and Clarke and and and...) did just fine with it - and made careers doing so.
It's tempting to view failure to understand the specialist literature as a sign that the "failed" reader was dumb. If he had tried to build his own career in the field, been through decades of education on the specialized subject, and STILL didn't understand some dense clot of jargon, the view might be fair. But making a choice to apply his mind and education time to some OTHER field is NOT a sign of a lack of processing power - or wisdom.
One obvious behavior is sharing surplus food with their social group. Each cat tends to have some specialty in hunting, being particularly good at one or a few types of prey. When they have surplus beyond what they want for themselves, they bring the extra back to the others of their group and present it as a gift. (Thus the gifts of mice, moles, etc. they give to people: As with most domestic animals they behave toward humans as they would toward other cats. We give them our "surplus hunting results", they give us theirs.)
Another, though less obvious, behavior is "cheering up" - a display of empathy, in TFA's language. They react to extreme depression of one of their "friends" - human or cat - by cuddling, rubbing, vocalizations, showoff acrobatics, etc. It's fascinating to watch.
(They'll also selectively feed those of their group who are sick or otherwise weak, hunting more than they normally would if necessary.)
In the US, Christians are about 80% of the population, but over 90% of convicted criminals.
That's because everyone seems to find Jesus in prison. (ergo, he must be in there too.)
It's because an alleged religious conversion is one thing that is accepted by authorities as possibly leading to a change of behavior that could make them less dangerous and less in need of incarceration or additional restraint.
Claiming a religious conversion is a way to improve a con's chances of getting out of solitary / "administrative detention", getting a trustee post, or getting parole or other early release.
In some cases it's real - and even a psychopath can "compensate" by learning a set of rules to keep him out of trouble (and adhering to them - the "rule-bound compensation"). It can also connect the convert with a support network to help him stay true to his adopted principles.
In many other cases (perhaps more of them), of course, it's just another confidence game.
Either way, the only way to count Christians is by asking people if they are Christian. Both the honest jailhouse conversions and the confidence men will bump the numbers.
= = = =
By the way: The "religion" that was most effective in keeping its jailhouse converts out of trouble, in at least one (Canadian) study, was Objectivism. B-) It is a consistent philosophy that gives a psychopath a set of logical, understandable, and convincing reasons why respecting private property and not starting fights is better for him than the alternatives. (Objectivists may think they know the One True Way to be free - but their rules include keeping their hands off others who also don't steal and start battles, even if their other behaviors are not according to Objectivist principles.)
I hear some Islamic organizations also do pretty well at assisting their jailhouse converts with staying on the straight-and-narrow.
A Faraday cage does not need to be grounded in order to block out RF. The reason for grounding is entirely unrelated: it is a large conductor and it poses an electrocution hazard if a hot conductor should happen to short to it.
Actually, it's for low frequencies, like with wavelengths large compared to the cage, when the cage isn't a total surround or has conductors penetrating it. The whole cage will swing in voltage with the incoming signal and you'll get a E-field inside the cage between the cage and the earth (or whatever) under the floor, whatever is outside any opening, or the "grounded" utilities inside the cage. Then you're not very well shielded. Grounding the cage (and/or tying it to the conductors that penetrate it) holds it at essentially the same voltage as its neighborhood and minimizes that stray E-field.
A couple of days ago, I was using my microwave oven while watching a MythTV stream over the Wi-Fi network from a laptop three feet away. Not even a hiccup.
And the radio linked security cam on my front porch, transmitting to my TV viewing area near the back porch, is intermittently jammed by leakage from the (new) microwave oven in our kitchen and by those of the neighboring houses on either side.
Microwave ovens DO leak a bit. Some unlicensed radios (i.e. analog video - FM I think...) are more sensitive to it than others (i.e. the forward-error-corrected digital spread-spectrum scheme of WiFi).
The whole point of the design of a microwave is that the holes in its Faraday cage are much smaller than the wavelength of the signal generator within. If your microwave is wrecking your Wi-Fi connection, don't grumble about it. Get a newer microwave oven.
That works for the walls and window. It doesn't work for the door joint. And making a tight metallic seal every time you closed the door would be an engineering nightmare - with nasty arcing when it got dirty.
So instead they use a "choke joint", like the flanges on waveguides. The front wall of the oven is metallic (under the paint) and flat. The mating back wall of the door, under the plastic cover, is also metallic and flat - but has a quarter-wavelength-deep slot in it, in a squared-off "ring" around the door. The plastic keeps food out of the slot and is thick enough to insulate the two flat plates from each other despite the voltage from the microwaves. The slot acts as a half-wavelength shorted stub. The microwave energy propagating out through the crack between the door and the oven treats the slot as a quarter-wave stub. It's shorted at the bottom, so the half-wave phase reversal of the wave that goes up it and bounces makes it cancel the outward-moving wave. (Alternatively, the shorted stub looks impedance inverted and 1/0 ohms is an open circuit for waves trying to go farther.) Result: The energy goes out as far as the slot, then bounces back into the oven rather than continuing into the room.
Except it's not perfect. You get SOME leakage. And if the door doesn't fit just right you get more. And if there's some food on the area where the slot is you get a LOT more. Not enough to cook your eyeballs or genetalia, or even warm your fingers detectably (especially in contrast to the warm air from the vent in back). But a tiny fraction of the half-kilowatt or so in the oven that gets by is still enough to interfere with radio services on that frequency (which is why they're ALL on the same, licensed, frequency). Or to drive back-biased junctions into conduction on a portable radio held near the door crack. (Try it: Hold one there for several seconds, so the diffuser "fan" will go through a whole cycle and you'll get a hot-spot over any given leak. Then move a couple inches and try again. Bet you'll get a buzz-out somewhere around the door.)
Caveat: IBM customer engineer involved -> my tech-ish brother -> me. Take with requisite amount of salt.
Was shortly after the "foreign attachments" decision in an IBM antitrust case, which required IBM to post specs and allow other companies to build and plug in peripherals. During that period a bunch of multivendor projects got started - and many were the rounds of finger-pointing when it came time to integrate the products of a half-dozen or so vendors into a delivered system. This was one of 'em.
The system was being integrated at the install site - a building at an airport. Every piece had worked just fine in the vendors' labs. Nothing played well at all on the final site. Was a madhouse of vendor engineers trying to get things to play together.
At one point one of the engineers got sufficiently bugged by a flickering fluorescent light that he decided to do something about it. He got a ladder and turned off the lights preparatory to doing the fix - but the tube kept flickering. "Hey, guys. Look at this!"
Turned out the airport's search radar was right next door to this wooden building. Anyone familiar with transistor circuits and the number of volts-per-inch of signal strength needed to light an unpowered fluorescent lamp knows what that means.
They paneled the wall with aluminum. Everything started working. All shook hands and went home.
Seriously, using a 5 percent error margin for something that contradicts a fundamental law of physics is just ridiculous.
An experiment indicating a violation of a fundamental law with a 95% confidence level, in a situation were deviations between the formulation of the "law" and the real physics of the universe might come to light, is certainly worth reporting.
It says "There's a chance that the formulation is wrong and we can detect it with THIS experiment. So let's spend some more expensive accelerator time checking on this (and related stuff), to see if it goes away or is repeatable with more confidence. And meanwhile let's start cranking out alternative theories that would correspond to these unexpected results."
Would using a slightly larger pipe to slide down over the existing stuff, then running it all the way to the surface for collection be of any benefit?
Isn't that essentially what they're doing with the "cap"? (Except that they can get SOME sealing between it and the wellhead so the pressure will speed the flow of oil up the pipe, reducing the amount escaping around the joint.)
The President also has the power to suspend the Constitution, something that has never happened though several wars.
The President does NOT have the power to suspend the Constitution. The Constitution is the license to operate a government. If the President (or Congress, the Courts, or the Military) claims to suspend it, all they have suspended is their own claim to legitimacy. They are then no longer the government - just another pack of crooks with armed thugs on their payroll.
The President DOES have certain exceptional powers that are only available in wartime or certain emergency situations. Presidents have often (especially in wartime or during crises) claimed and used unauthorized powers - generally with those claims eventually struck down by courts (though this might take decades). Example: The internment of US citizens of Japanese ancestry during WWII.
Note that when a law or other claim to power is struck it is NOT like a repeal, with the law or doctrine active up to the decision to strike it. It is declared to NEVER HAVE been active. All actions taken only under its claimed authority are, and always were, void.
The folks at the obfuscated C contest would like to point out that just because you see the source doesn't mean you'll easily be able to figure out what it's doing.
True.
But it's a lot easier than with a closed source program with the code owned by the crooks.
[Planned obsolescence] has been happening for generations, where have you been?
It's not always ENTIRELY shenanigans.
For instance: The "design lifetime" in the auto industry is not just about selling another car. It's also about not spending a lot of extra money making, say, the transmission good for 750,000 miles when several other major systems are going to go out at a small fraction of that time. (When you're making several million units a year, saving a nickel each adds up to enough to hire two more full-time engineers to figure out how to do it.)
Making mechanical parts that last can be tough and costly. (And half a century ago it was a lot tougher, without the major advances in materials science since then.) If you design all the parts to last for at least some design lifetime and not much longer you can accumulate a lot of savings. If some major system was going to unavoidably fail shortly after that design lifetime anyhow, having the rest not good for much longer doesn't appreciably affect the utility of the vehicle for the consumer. But the cost savings can be used to lower the price (and grab market share, for a net profit increase) - which DOES help him out significantly.
The ideal in the limit is the "Preacher's marvelous one-horse shay, which lasted a hundred years and all fell apart on the very same day."
This is one of those "Of course!" moments, where something is obvious after the fact.
Of COURSE the wind of charged particles, containing high-speed electrons, produces X-rays when it encounters enough matter in the vacuum to stop it. One such sudden density increase is just above the magnetopause, where new neutral atoms drift out of the shield into the hard vacuum which is swept clean by the solar wind bombardment - and get hit as the first step of being swept away in turn.
Others:
How do mountains explode? Film of Mount St. Helens going up explained it. (It was taken(by a geologist caught in the eruption and killed by it, who snapped a series of shots and then wrapped his camera in his clothes and backpack.):
- Gas pressure builds under the mountain as it grows.
- Eventually a landslide occurs, with one side of the mountain sliding off.
- This greatly reduces the weight holding down the pressure.
- The gas blasts its way through the remaining layers above it, pulverizing them and throwing the dust up into the stratosphere.
How do you keep dry cells (which have a caustic goo eating away the zinc can) from leaking and eating the flashlight? After years of research one depressed engineer told his wife what his team were working on and getting nowhere, and she asked "Why don't you seal it in a steel can?". (The patent battle when Union Carbide (Eveready) tried to claim it was obvious - when they'd also worked for years trying unsuccessfully to solve the problem - is the major precedent in patent law showing that obvious AFTER the fact doesn't cut it.)
And one of mine:
Some time before the first Voyager flyby I heard the explanation for the Cassini Division in Saturn's rings. (Orbits there are destabilized by their period's 2-1 resonance with the moon Mimas, so the perturbations accumulate and move 'em out or in a bit.) At the time I thought "Why isn't there a gap or a resonance-stabilized thickening at EVERY location where an orbital period would have a rational-number ratio to that of one or another moon? There are LOTS of ratios of small integers, which should have strong effects, so that should make the rings look like a phonograph record."
Turns out it DOES look like a phonograph record, largely because of that phenomenon. But Earth-based telescopes, blurred by the atmosphere, just didn't have the resolution to show it. DARN I wished I'd published that speculation (BEFORE the flyby). B-)
All well true, but I wonder why you think (pre-conviction) rapists and murderers aren't voters too?:-)
Some are. (Even post-conviction some are, given the lax enforcement of voting laws.)
But "The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior." works both ways: The typical rapist or murderer has a long rap sheet of previous violent crimes by the time they get around to murder or even their first prosecuted rape. So one can expect a much lower likelihood of current registration and active voting among those accused of rape or murder than those accused of "pirating music".
Also: Rapists and murderers make up a rather small percentage of the population and going after them is likely to gain a prosecutor enough votes from the rest to make up for any move by the felons to vote him out of office. B-) Spending prosecutorial resources going after unauthorized music downloaders, on the other hand, is likely to lose quite a few votes - if only from people concerned about letting some violent criminals go due to the distraction.
I use WPA on my wifi, so they can't sniff. I do it because there are a lot of people out there who feel that a non-protected wifi link is theirs for the using.
Members of the computer culture have long considered the permissions settings of things like file protection to be, not just a mechanical wall, but also an expression of the intent of the user. (This has been true essentially since permissions mechanisms with sufficient granularity to EXPRESS intent were deployed.)
In general they have honored the intent (or in some cases deliberately circumvented it - knowing they were doing so). Treating world-readable as "it's OK to look" group-readable as "it's OK to look if you're in this group", and so on (even if you COULD trivially "break the wall down"), means you don't have to spend time looking up the owner and asking every time you want to look at a file, use a service, and so on. Instead you only have to do it if the permission mechanism is locking you out (and thus you need to ask if it was an error and/or if it's OK to use it anyhow).
WiFi has such a mechanism built right in: Encryption for links you don't want to be used by the world. It's currently trivial to break, so it's the cybernetic equivalent of the hook on a screen door on a building in a public place: Yes, anybody could punch through the screen and unhook it in seconds. But the door being "locked" says the owner's intent (despite the welcome mat) is that nobody comes in without asking.
Running an open WiFi access point is a normal thing to do. And WiFi has no OTHER generally-recognized way to express whether the owner intends the particular access point to be open to the public or private.
Unfortunately, the manufacturers have chosen to distribute WiFi access points with the encryption turned off - to reduce service calls when people plug them in, try to connect, and hit the "locked screen door". And a lot of users buy them and have NO IDEA that there is a "door" that could be "latched" (and SHOULD be latched if they don't intend the public to wander through their living rooms).
As a result, many people are running open WiFi access points without intending to do so. And it's tempting for the legal system to "solve" this by treating any use of an open access point as an attempt to break into a private space, rather than expecting people to "latch their screen doors" if they didn't intend them to be used.
At lease IMHO. (IANAL and am not sure what ins-and-outs of possibly setting a bad precedent might be involved.)
But assume they're after using the legal system to cause as much pain as possible for those they're after, as an example to others who might consider using file sharing services to download music, and it makes a lot of sense.
That would be using the horrendous costs of the civil system to create the same incentive structure as the criminal justice system, but without the latter's higher standard of proof or the necessity of passing laws to actually criminalize the behavior or convincing the prosecutors to spend time going after music fans (who might just be voters) rather than rapists and murderers.
Unlike the fuel cell guys, which are constantly promising consumer products shipping in "just a few months",...
Huh? They're shipping NOW - in power-an-office-building sizes.
There's no inherent reason they can't be scaled down to power-a-laptop-off-a-butane-tank size in reasonably short order (assuming you don't mind your laptop putting out several times the heat it does now...).
... all the technologies that are supposedly "just around the corner"... Ain't happened yet.
Part of the problem is the ongoing storm of breakthroughs. Not only do they have to turn out to be practical in a real, manufacturable product, they have to remain the cutting edge long enough to make back the cost of tooling up once they come to market. Lots of this stuff gets displaced within months by something better.
Fortunately enough of the breakthroughs meet this criterion and make it into production for the products to advance - quite rapidly. It may not be as visible as Moore's Law in semiconductors. But the race IS on.
The comparison to a gas tank is somewhat inadequate as these batteries are far heavier than gasoline; if you have a serious accident that compromises the frame of the car you really can't guarantee that the battery container is going to be unperturbed. There needs to be two or more dedicated safety measures to contain or divert the energy from the batteries away from the occupants in the event of damage.
Also: They can release their energy much more quickly (and thus more hotly) than gasoline. Gasoline requires oxygen from the air (or wherever) to burn and this limits its thermal power. Lithium cells are self-contained and have all the pieces of the reaction ready to go. (That's why they're heavier than an equivalent amount of gas.) They're only limited by the physics of the propagation of the catastrophic energy release mechanism.
This has been considered. (Pumping water OUT helps temporarily lock the fault against quakes, too, though not against stress buildup.)
There was a plan under consideration to relieve the stress on the San Andreas by drilling a bunch of wells, then working down the fault locking pairs of sections and jacking the section between them, to ease off the tension in a set of minor (under 4.5) quakes.
Among the downsides:
- Would have to be repeated every 6 months or so.
- Appreciable fraction of a $billion to drill the necessary wells.
- No guarantee that the quakes would be limited to = 4.5 and might set off something much larger that was just waiting to happen.
- Possible liability issues for damage, injury, and deaths from the artificially-triggered quakes.
- Not clear that the program, even if successful, would do less total damage than just letting things be and having a few big ones or whatever the faults would normally produce.
So "More Study Needed" to nail down the science and engineering before such a program will be attempted.
Federally funded Nevada geothermal plant sponsored by Harry Reid triggers... earthquakes...
Not completely a joke.
High pressure injection of liquids into faults makes them act as hydraulic jacks with piston cross-sections measurable in square miles, pushing the faults open. If the faults are under even slight crosswise stress that cause earthquakes. (This was first discovered in Denver when the Rocky Mountain Arsenal used a deep injection well to attempt disposing of chemical warfare waste, later researched and documented.)
Doing it with a liquid that can boil when the rocks are hot means you have less control over the process once the liquid is in place and being expanded by the heat. (IMHO there's also a possibility of activating a volcano.)
While setting off quakes in northwestern Nevada probably won't bother the faults in San Francisco or Yosemite, it wouldn't be all that friendly to the people within a few tens of miles of the site.
Slashdot Mirror
Also: What they usually end up fighting is "assault weapons" bans.
An "assault rifle" is a military designation for a short-barreled select-fire (i.e. can be switched to fire bursts or continuously) gun designed for use in restricted areas - such a popping up through a hatch in a tank. (They usually fire such a low-powered bullet that the semi-auto (one-shot-per-trigger-pull-only) civilian plowshare versions are banned as hunting weapons. Too cruel: The prey is wounded and escapes to suffer, rather than dying quickly.)
An "assault weapon" is a legal term invented by gun banners to ban civilian guns. It refers to semi-auto guns with any of several scary-looking but irrelevant accessory features, and is used to whittle away at the right to keep and bear arms.
Also: Much of what the second amendment is about is the ability to resist a runaway government - foreign or domestic. It functions as an insurance policy against a runaway government just ignoring the constitution and doing whatever it pleases to the population: The population CAN fight back, and the threat has retarded this tendency of government for over two centuries. (Example: Nixon was rumored to have asked a think tank what would happen if he postponed the elections. Think tank told him over half the population was armed and such an event would be a trigger for an uprising.)
Also: NRA is one of the wimpiest of the pro-gun organizations. For instance: They actually opposed bringing D.C. v Heller to court. Others with more guts: Second Amendment Foundation, Gun Owners of America, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO: putting teeth in "Never Again!"), and a number of others.
I take it you've never lived in Northern Michigan. When 'Cosmos' was broadcast locally absolutely **NO ONE** that I worked with (car parts factory) watched it.
I grew up in Southern Michigan and worked in the auto industry - including parts factories - for much of my professional career. I can assure you that both white and blue collar auto workers have some very smart people among them, many quite interested in science.
The Henry Ford Museum / Greenfield Village is one of the premier museums of science and technology - including such things as Edison's lab, lovingly disassembled in Menlo Park and reassembled on the grounds. (Henry and Edison were friends and colleagues.) It's a two-day minimum to even skim the place. It's always well attended, and a significant fraction of those attendees are auto workers.
How would slashdotters feel if *real* lawyers came here and started laying the smack down on some of the "IANAL, but I play one on Slashdot!" types here?
That would be AWESOME, how can we convince them to do it?
We already have a few. (New York Country Lawyer comes to mind.)
Interestingly, they seem to be more interested in educating the IANALs when they're in error than in smacking them down.
This seems appropriate: The law is SUPPOSED to be understandable to those who are required to obey it. B-) Also to those who serve on the juries that apply it.
Of course, with lawyers, being able to explain an issue of law convincingly - to clients, jurors, and judges - is part of the skill set. So perhaps they can be expected to have a higher than typical fraction of potential popularizers than most specialized professions.
No, they don't want them to dumb things down. One problem that the RA mentions is the scientists treating the public as idiots which, on the whole, they're not.
The problem is not that lay readers are dumber. On the average they're not. The problem is that they don't have the specialized vocabulary and training of someone who made a career in the field.
So the trick to writing for lay readers is to keep the level high, explain the jargon and concepts as you go (but not TOO redundantly or to TOO basic a level), and be VERY CAREFUL to avoid "simplifying" a concept into something that's WRONG.
This is hard. And it takes more text to explain a given amount of science - while avoiding dragging it out into something so slooooooow that the readers get bored and give up. But people like Sagan and Asimov (and Clarke and and and ...) did just fine with it - and made careers doing so.
It's tempting to view failure to understand the specialist literature as a sign that the "failed" reader was dumb. If he had tried to build his own career in the field, been through decades of education on the specialized subject, and STILL didn't understand some dense clot of jargon, the view might be fair. But making a choice to apply his mind and education time to some OTHER field is NOT a sign of a lack of processing power - or wisdom.
Housecats are social to a considerable extent.
One obvious behavior is sharing surplus food with their social group. Each cat tends to have some specialty in hunting, being particularly good at one or a few types of prey. When they have surplus beyond what they want for themselves, they bring the extra back to the others of their group and present it as a gift. (Thus the gifts of mice, moles, etc. they give to people: As with most domestic animals they behave toward humans as they would toward other cats. We give them our "surplus hunting results", they give us theirs.)
Another, though less obvious, behavior is "cheering up" - a display of empathy, in TFA's language. They react to extreme depression of one of their "friends" - human or cat - by cuddling, rubbing, vocalizations, showoff acrobatics, etc. It's fascinating to watch.
(They'll also selectively feed those of their group who are sick or otherwise weak, hunting more than they normally would if necessary.)
In the US, Christians are about 80% of the population, but over 90% of convicted criminals.
That's because everyone seems to find Jesus in prison. (ergo, he must be in there too.)
It's because an alleged religious conversion is one thing that is accepted by authorities as possibly leading to a change of behavior that could make them less dangerous and less in need of incarceration or additional restraint.
Claiming a religious conversion is a way to improve a con's chances of getting out of solitary / "administrative detention", getting a trustee post, or getting parole or other early release.
In some cases it's real - and even a psychopath can "compensate" by learning a set of rules to keep him out of trouble (and adhering to them - the "rule-bound compensation"). It can also connect the convert with a support network to help him stay true to his adopted principles.
In many other cases (perhaps more of them), of course, it's just another confidence game.
Either way, the only way to count Christians is by asking people if they are Christian. Both the honest jailhouse conversions and the confidence men will bump the numbers.
= = = =
By the way: The "religion" that was most effective in keeping its jailhouse converts out of trouble, in at least one (Canadian) study, was Objectivism. B-) It is a consistent philosophy that gives a psychopath a set of logical, understandable, and convincing reasons why respecting private property and not starting fights is better for him than the alternatives. (Objectivists may think they know the One True Way to be free - but their rules include keeping their hands off others who also don't steal and start battles, even if their other behaviors are not according to Objectivist principles.)
I hear some Islamic organizations also do pretty well at assisting their jailhouse converts with staying on the straight-and-narrow.
A Faraday cage does not need to be grounded in order to block out RF. The reason for grounding is entirely unrelated: it is a large conductor and it poses an electrocution hazard if a hot conductor should happen to short to it.
Actually, it's for low frequencies, like with wavelengths large compared to the cage, when the cage isn't a total surround or has conductors penetrating it. The whole cage will swing in voltage with the incoming signal and you'll get a E-field inside the cage between the cage and the earth (or whatever) under the floor, whatever is outside any opening, or the "grounded" utilities inside the cage. Then you're not very well shielded. Grounding the cage (and/or tying it to the conductors that penetrate it) holds it at essentially the same voltage as its neighborhood and minimizes that stray E-field.
Both happened, actually.
One of the very early satellites - with a "hi, i made it" beacon - happened to match an early garage door opener receiver.
A couple of days ago, I was using my microwave oven while watching a MythTV stream over the Wi-Fi network from a laptop three feet away. Not even a hiccup.
And the radio linked security cam on my front porch, transmitting to my TV viewing area near the back porch, is intermittently jammed by leakage from the (new) microwave oven in our kitchen and by those of the neighboring houses on either side.
Microwave ovens DO leak a bit. Some unlicensed radios (i.e. analog video - FM I think...) are more sensitive to it than others (i.e. the forward-error-corrected digital spread-spectrum scheme of WiFi).
The whole point of the design of a microwave is that the holes in its Faraday cage are much smaller than the wavelength of the signal generator within. If your microwave is wrecking your Wi-Fi connection, don't grumble about it. Get a newer microwave oven.
That works for the walls and window. It doesn't work for the door joint. And making a tight metallic seal every time you closed the door would be an engineering nightmare - with nasty arcing when it got dirty.
So instead they use a "choke joint", like the flanges on waveguides. The front wall of the oven is metallic (under the paint) and flat. The mating back wall of the door, under the plastic cover, is also metallic and flat - but has a quarter-wavelength-deep slot in it, in a squared-off "ring" around the door. The plastic keeps food out of the slot and is thick enough to insulate the two flat plates from each other despite the voltage from the microwaves. The slot acts as a half-wavelength shorted stub. The microwave energy propagating out through the crack between the door and the oven treats the slot as a quarter-wave stub. It's shorted at the bottom, so the half-wave phase reversal of the wave that goes up it and bounces makes it cancel the outward-moving wave. (Alternatively, the shorted stub looks impedance inverted and 1/0 ohms is an open circuit for waves trying to go farther.) Result: The energy goes out as far as the slot, then bounces back into the oven rather than continuing into the room.
Except it's not perfect. You get SOME leakage. And if the door doesn't fit just right you get more. And if there's some food on the area where the slot is you get a LOT more. Not enough to cook your eyeballs or genetalia, or even warm your fingers detectably (especially in contrast to the warm air from the vent in back). But a tiny fraction of the half-kilowatt or so in the oven that gets by is still enough to interfere with radio services on that frequency (which is why they're ALL on the same, licensed, frequency). Or to drive back-biased junctions into conduction on a portable radio held near the door crack. (Try it: Hold one there for several seconds, so the diffuser "fan" will go through a whole cycle and you'll get a hot-spot over any given leak. Then move a couple inches and try again. Bet you'll get a buzz-out somewhere around the door.)
Caveat: IBM customer engineer involved -> my tech-ish brother -> me. Take with requisite amount of salt.
Was shortly after the "foreign attachments" decision in an IBM antitrust case, which required IBM to post specs and allow other companies to build and plug in peripherals. During that period a bunch of multivendor projects got started - and many were the rounds of finger-pointing when it came time to integrate the products of a half-dozen or so vendors into a delivered system. This was one of 'em.
The system was being integrated at the install site - a building at an airport. Every piece had worked just fine in the vendors' labs. Nothing played well at all on the final site. Was a madhouse of vendor engineers trying to get things to play together.
At one point one of the engineers got sufficiently bugged by a flickering fluorescent light that he decided to do something about it. He got a ladder and turned off the lights preparatory to doing the fix - but the tube kept flickering. "Hey, guys. Look at this!"
Turned out the airport's search radar was right next door to this wooden building. Anyone familiar with transistor circuits and the number of volts-per-inch of signal strength needed to light an unpowered fluorescent lamp knows what that means.
They paneled the wall with aluminum. Everything started working. All shook hands and went home.
Seriously, using a 5 percent error margin for something that contradicts a fundamental law of physics is just ridiculous.
An experiment indicating a violation of a fundamental law with a 95% confidence level, in a situation were deviations between the formulation of the "law" and the real physics of the universe might come to light, is certainly worth reporting.
It says "There's a chance that the formulation is wrong and we can detect it with THIS experiment. So let's spend some more expensive accelerator time checking on this (and related stuff), to see if it goes away or is repeatable with more confidence. And meanwhile let's start cranking out alternative theories that would correspond to these unexpected results."
Would using a slightly larger pipe to slide down over the existing stuff, then running it all the way to the surface for collection be of any benefit?
Isn't that essentially what they're doing with the "cap"? (Except that they can get SOME sealing between it and the wellhead so the pressure will speed the flow of oil up the pipe, reducing the amount escaping around the joint.)
The President also has the power to suspend the Constitution, something that has never happened though several wars.
The President does NOT have the power to suspend the Constitution. The Constitution is the license to operate a government. If the President (or Congress, the Courts, or the Military) claims to suspend it, all they have suspended is their own claim to legitimacy. They are then no longer the government - just another pack of crooks with armed thugs on their payroll.
The President DOES have certain exceptional powers that are only available in wartime or certain emergency situations. Presidents have often (especially in wartime or during crises) claimed and used unauthorized powers - generally with those claims eventually struck down by courts (though this might take decades). Example: The internment of US citizens of Japanese ancestry during WWII.
Note that when a law or other claim to power is struck it is NOT like a repeal, with the law or doctrine active up to the decision to strike it. It is declared to NEVER HAVE been active. All actions taken only under its claimed authority are, and always were, void.
The folks at the obfuscated C contest would like to point out that just because you see the source doesn't mean you'll easily be able to figure out what it's doing.
True.
But it's a lot easier than with a closed source program with the code owned by the crooks.
(Subject line says it all.)
[Planned obsolescence] has been happening for generations, where have you been?
It's not always ENTIRELY shenanigans.
For instance: The "design lifetime" in the auto industry is not just about selling another car. It's also about not spending a lot of extra money making, say, the transmission good for 750,000 miles when several other major systems are going to go out at a small fraction of that time. (When you're making several million units a year, saving a nickel each adds up to enough to hire two more full-time engineers to figure out how to do it.)
Making mechanical parts that last can be tough and costly. (And half a century ago it was a lot tougher, without the major advances in materials science since then.) If you design all the parts to last for at least some design lifetime and not much longer you can accumulate a lot of savings. If some major system was going to unavoidably fail shortly after that design lifetime anyhow, having the rest not good for much longer doesn't appreciably affect the utility of the vehicle for the consumer. But the cost savings can be used to lower the price (and grab market share, for a net profit increase) - which DOES help him out significantly.
The ideal in the limit is the "Preacher's marvelous one-horse shay, which lasted a hundred years and all fell apart on the very same day."
This is one of those "Of course!" moments, where something is obvious after the fact.
Of COURSE the wind of charged particles, containing high-speed electrons, produces X-rays when it encounters enough matter in the vacuum to stop it. One such sudden density increase is just above the magnetopause, where new neutral atoms drift out of the shield into the hard vacuum which is swept clean by the solar wind bombardment - and get hit as the first step of being swept away in turn.
Others:
How do mountains explode? Film of Mount St. Helens going up explained it. (It was taken(by a geologist caught in the eruption and killed by it, who snapped a series of shots and then wrapped his camera in his clothes and backpack.):
- Gas pressure builds under the mountain as it grows.
- Eventually a landslide occurs, with one side of the mountain sliding off.
- This greatly reduces the weight holding down the pressure.
- The gas blasts its way through the remaining layers above it, pulverizing them and throwing the dust up into the stratosphere.
How do you keep dry cells (which have a caustic goo eating away the zinc can) from leaking and eating the flashlight? After years of research one depressed engineer told his wife what his team were working on and getting nowhere, and she asked "Why don't you seal it in a steel can?". (The patent battle when Union Carbide (Eveready) tried to claim it was obvious - when they'd also worked for years trying unsuccessfully to solve the problem - is the major precedent in patent law showing that obvious AFTER the fact doesn't cut it.)
And one of mine:
Some time before the first Voyager flyby I heard the explanation for the Cassini Division in Saturn's rings. (Orbits there are destabilized by their period's 2-1 resonance with the moon Mimas, so the perturbations accumulate and move 'em out or in a bit.) At the time I thought "Why isn't there a gap or a resonance-stabilized thickening at EVERY location where an orbital period would have a rational-number ratio to that of one or another moon? There are LOTS of ratios of small integers, which should have strong effects, so that should make the rings look like a phonograph record."
Turns out it DOES look like a phonograph record, largely because of that phenomenon. But Earth-based telescopes, blurred by the atmosphere, just didn't have the resolution to show it. DARN I wished I'd published that speculation (BEFORE the flyby). B-)
All well true, but I wonder why you think (pre-conviction) rapists and murderers aren't voters too? :-)
Some are. (Even post-conviction some are, given the lax enforcement of voting laws.)
But "The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior." works both ways: The typical rapist or murderer has a long rap sheet of previous violent crimes by the time they get around to murder or even their first prosecuted rape. So one can expect a much lower likelihood of current registration and active voting among those accused of rape or murder than those accused of "pirating music".
Also: Rapists and murderers make up a rather small percentage of the population and going after them is likely to gain a prosecutor enough votes from the rest to make up for any move by the felons to vote him out of office. B-) Spending prosecutorial resources going after unauthorized music downloaders, on the other hand, is likely to lose quite a few votes - if only from people concerned about letting some violent criminals go due to the distraction.
I use WPA on my wifi, so they can't sniff. I do it because there are a lot of people out there who feel that a non-protected wifi link is theirs for the using.
Members of the computer culture have long considered the permissions settings of things like file protection to be, not just a mechanical wall, but also an expression of the intent of the user. (This has been true essentially since permissions mechanisms with sufficient granularity to EXPRESS intent were deployed.)
In general they have honored the intent (or in some cases deliberately circumvented it - knowing they were doing so). Treating world-readable as "it's OK to look" group-readable as "it's OK to look if you're in this group", and so on (even if you COULD trivially "break the wall down"), means you don't have to spend time looking up the owner and asking every time you want to look at a file, use a service, and so on. Instead you only have to do it if the permission mechanism is locking you out (and thus you need to ask if it was an error and/or if it's OK to use it anyhow).
WiFi has such a mechanism built right in: Encryption for links you don't want to be used by the world. It's currently trivial to break, so it's the cybernetic equivalent of the hook on a screen door on a building in a public place: Yes, anybody could punch through the screen and unhook it in seconds. But the door being "locked" says the owner's intent (despite the welcome mat) is that nobody comes in without asking.
Running an open WiFi access point is a normal thing to do. And WiFi has no OTHER generally-recognized way to express whether the owner intends the particular access point to be open to the public or private.
Unfortunately, the manufacturers have chosen to distribute WiFi access points with the encryption turned off - to reduce service calls when people plug them in, try to connect, and hit the "locked screen door". And a lot of users buy them and have NO IDEA that there is a "door" that could be "latched" (and SHOULD be latched if they don't intend the public to wander through their living rooms).
As a result, many people are running open WiFi access points without intending to do so. And it's tempting for the legal system to "solve" this by treating any use of an open access point as an attempt to break into a private space, rather than expecting people to "latch their screen doors" if they didn't intend them to be used.
At lease IMHO. (IANAL and am not sure what ins-and-outs of possibly setting a bad precedent might be involved.)
But assume they're after using the legal system to cause as much pain as possible for those they're after, as an example to others who might consider using file sharing services to download music, and it makes a lot of sense.
That would be using the horrendous costs of the civil system to create the same incentive structure as the criminal justice system, but without the latter's higher standard of proof or the necessity of passing laws to actually criminalize the behavior or convincing the prosecutors to spend time going after music fans (who might just be voters) rather than rapists and murderers.
Unlike the fuel cell guys, which are constantly promising consumer products shipping in "just a few months", ...
Huh? They're shipping NOW - in power-an-office-building sizes.
There's no inherent reason they can't be scaled down to power-a-laptop-off-a-butane-tank size in reasonably short order (assuming you don't mind your laptop putting out several times the heat it does now...).
... all the technologies that are supposedly "just around the corner" ... Ain't happened yet.
Part of the problem is the ongoing storm of breakthroughs. Not only do they have to turn out to be practical in a real, manufacturable product, they have to remain the cutting edge long enough to make back the cost of tooling up once they come to market. Lots of this stuff gets displaced within months by something better.
Fortunately enough of the breakthroughs meet this criterion and make it into production for the products to advance - quite rapidly. It may not be as visible as Moore's Law in semiconductors. But the race IS on.
The comparison to a gas tank is somewhat inadequate as these batteries are far heavier than gasoline; if you have a serious accident that compromises the frame of the car you really can't guarantee that the battery container is going to be unperturbed. There needs to be two or more dedicated safety measures to contain or divert the energy from the batteries away from the occupants in the event of damage.
Also: They can release their energy much more quickly (and thus more hotly) than gasoline. Gasoline requires oxygen from the air (or wherever) to burn and this limits its thermal power. Lithium cells are self-contained and have all the pieces of the reaction ready to go. (That's why they're heavier than an equivalent amount of gas.) They're only limited by the physics of the propagation of the catastrophic energy release mechanism.
This has been considered. (Pumping water OUT helps temporarily lock the fault against quakes, too, though not against stress buildup.)
There was a plan under consideration to relieve the stress on the San Andreas by drilling a bunch of wells, then working down the fault locking pairs of sections and jacking the section between them, to ease off the tension in a set of minor (under 4.5) quakes.
Among the downsides:
- Would have to be repeated every 6 months or so.
- Appreciable fraction of a $billion to drill the necessary wells.
- No guarantee that the quakes would be limited to = 4.5 and might set off something much larger that was just waiting to happen.
- Possible liability issues for damage, injury, and deaths from the artificially-triggered quakes.
- Not clear that the program, even if successful, would do less total damage than just letting things be and having a few big ones or whatever the faults would normally produce.
So "More Study Needed" to nail down the science and engineering before such a program will be attempted.
Federally funded Nevada geothermal plant sponsored by Harry Reid triggers ... earthquakes ...
Not completely a joke.
High pressure injection of liquids into faults makes them act as hydraulic jacks with piston cross-sections measurable in square miles, pushing the faults open. If the faults are under even slight crosswise stress that cause earthquakes. (This was first discovered in Denver when the Rocky Mountain Arsenal used a deep injection well to attempt disposing of chemical warfare waste, later researched and documented.)
Doing it with a liquid that can boil when the rocks are hot means you have less control over the process once the liquid is in place and being expanded by the heat. (IMHO there's also a possibility of activating a volcano.)
While setting off quakes in northwestern Nevada probably won't bother the faults in San Francisco or Yosemite, it wouldn't be all that friendly to the people within a few tens of miles of the site.