Having done that, should they not be liable for SCO's debts?
The[y] are no more responsible for the debts of the corporation than any of the other owners.... Novel can suck whatever assets remain out of the dried husk of SCO until it crumbles into dust,...
In fact, by taking stock instead of much of the money for their fees, the lawyers actually did a good thing for Novel and the creditors - leaving more value in SCOX to be recovered and distributed.
Think of it as the corporate version of taking a case on contingency fee basis. Lose, they get squat. Win, they take a big chunk - possibly much bigger than they'd have gotten in fees - but still leaving far more with the client than if they'd lost.
You do what you do with all news: skim it to glean soft, chewy nougats of wisdom, and discard the cheap almonds and chocolate coating.
But why waste your money and time on candy bars that are just peanuts and shaved coconut when you can switch brands and get something that's mostly nougat? B-)
Regardless: "'An thou harm none, do what thou wilt.' shall be the whole of the law."
The effect of the Electoral College is that smaller jurisdictions MUST be considered when campaigning. Otherwise, a candidate would just hit a dozen major metro areas and they'd have the numerical advantage sewed up.
And that's its primary purpose.
It's part of the deal that got little states to join up in the first place, rather than swatting down the Federalist coup and sticking with the Continental Congress or going their own way. (The Bill of Rights was another part of that deal.) Changing it would require a constitutional amendment, ratified by 3/4s of the states (i.e. lots of little ones which would lose power as a result) or a constitutional convention (also ratified by 3/4s of the states). So nobody should hold their breath waiting for it to get "fixed". B-)
But it has an additional advantage: It serves as a firewall against election corruption by big-city political machines.
If the president were elected by popular vote, a political machine in one of the largest urban areas could fake enough votes to swing even a not-very-close election. With the electoral college they can swing no more than all their state's electors (which they'd probably have gotten anyhow).
From what I understand (from across the Atlantic) Paul is not a big contender anyway.
And I presume that, as someone across the Atlantic, you got that understanding primarily from his coverage (mainly, his lack of coverage) on old-media outlets, right?
In case you hadn't noticed, Ron Paul has a very large following among those who have actually HEARD his political positions and voting record. And it is growing, doubling about every two months.
His meet-up groups alone - people actively getting together to plan and execute activities to promote him - now number over 1,500 with members totaling over 108,000 members (about 9% waiting for a group to form), more than 2/3 the US troop strength in Iraq.
In the fourth quarter he raised nearly twenty million dollars. Volunteers unconnected with the campaign staged two "money bomb" donation days, with the first breaking the previous one-day fundraising record for a Republican candidate with over four million, the second shattering that (and the Democrats' record, too) with over six million. And all this from hundreds of thousands of individual contributors and an average donation of about $100 - no PACs, corporate contributions, etc.
Meanwhile, separately, his fans raised about another half-million to rent a blimp and fly it around the US. His signs are hung and posted all over - many handmade. Banners on overpasses. Signs in yards. Clusters of people on streetcorners waving them. And so on. He wins most straw polls. He dominates online call-in polls (such as the "who won the debate" polls - which, counter to claims, allow one vote per cell phone number.) Make a post critical of him and see how many people respond to defend him. B-)
The problem, though, is that virtually all this support comes from people whose primary news source is the Internet. On the old media his name is virtually never mentioned - to the point that people have been cracking jokes about "He who Must Not be Named". The popularity of both Ron Paul and his message crosses party, age, education, race, and income distinctions. So if he got anywhere near as much exposure as the "annointed" candidates get, one could expect him to be a leader in the nomination process and the probable landslide winner in the election if he got the nomination.
But his programs, if adopted, would amount to a major defeat for both major factions currently in power. So he gets major opposition from them.
As for the US (old)media, you need to understand that they are partisans as well. "Freedom of the Press" doesn't mean that the press is unbiased. It means the government must keep hands off while the operators can bias it any way they want. The hope is that all significant opinions will be represented. In current practice not all of them are.
To oversimplify: The (formerly) mainstream media (MSM) are in virtual lockstep, carrying the "progressive" (big-government left-wing) viewpoint while talk radio carries conservative stuff but mainly the Neocon (big-government interventionist) faction. Newscorp (especially Fox News) was thought to cover the conservative side of things but has come out of the closet as being strictly Neocon and blatantly partisan. The other conservative factions (such as the libertarian and paleoconservative, to name two) are still under the cone of silence when they aren't being directly attacked or ridiculed.
Ron Paul is primarily a libertarian with paleoconservative leanings. His candadacy, and the progressively more blatant attempts of the media to squash it, is what shone the spotlight on Fox News' partisanship - especially during the debates. (Turning off his monitor earphone, and the way he exposed that, was particularly ludicrous. See the link in my current sigline for where they cut one of his best comebacks from the west-coast delayed version of last Friday's debate.) But Fox News is not alone in this unintentional humor. For instance: The New York Times real-time election result page had the othe
Oh, and I support Ron Paul, so arstechnica has called me loopy because of my political beliefs. Looks like there is one more location I won't be going for any kind of news in the future!
Yeah, you can't be too careful; you might hear a contrary opinion.
The name calling on the part of the Ars Technica article's author casts doubts about how informed, objective, rational, or intelligent he is when considering the subject under question - with the implication that he might have similar problems with other issues as well. This reduces his value as a source. The "birds of a feather" principle implies that other authors published in the same outlet may have similar problems, even if the problematic signs are not a reflection of the publication's policy.
As to "hearing contrary opinions", supporters of Ron Paul have no shortage of outlets where they can hear themselves called "loopy" or worse.
Their time for collecting information is limited. Why should they waste it on an outlet that is self-evidently warping the information on the subjects of interest to them (intentionally or otherwise), when it might be better spent reading other sources.
And an electric arc can easily exceed the temperature of the surface of the sun.
The Hindenberg was coming to its mooring during the leading edge of an electrical storm. As a very large flying object it would have accumulated a considerable charge on its surface, which would discharge through the mooring line. The surface was largely non-conductive, so when one point was grounded the charge on the rest would have to discharge by arcing. Such arcs would be fractal, with the initial strike of each segment concentrating the progressive expansion of the discharge tips, much as the trunk and branches of a tree concentrate the strength supporting the weight of the growth beyond. So these arcs could be very hot and persist for a significant time. If one of them happened to pass through particles of iron oxide and aluminum, in a local concentration of such particles, you have the condition for ignition. And an arc would prefer to pass through such particles if the ends happened to be exposed rather than covered by insulation.
And I seriously don't think the US government has held back research on stem cells. They just don't pay for it.
Unfortunately, they also consider that, if they ever spent any money on the construction or operation of the facility, they've "paid for it" sufficiently that no stem cell research can be done there. That eliminates virtually all medical research facilities - certainly all of 'em that are attached to universites and medical schools.
(Now if it were up to me the enforcement of that would consist of charging a higher overhead rate - calculated to replace the federal contribution to facility construction and operation under normal accounting principles - to any project that came under the federal ban. But it's not up to me. And the obvious intent of congress was to do their best to ban the research, rather than just pull federal funds.)
In a process called whole organ decellularization, they grew functioning heart tissue by using dead rat and pig hearts as a sort of flesh matrix, and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells. The goal is to grow replacement parts, using their own stem cells, for people born with defective tickers or experiencing heart failure.
Given that another project also underway is "writing" synthetic organs using a rapid prototyping system (3D plotter) loaded with live cells, structural proteins, and growth factors, the salvaged-and-decellularlized organ should be rendered unnecessary in short order.
The fact that a substrate with the right chemical markers can be repopulated into a working organ means the process can proceed in two steps. This may make it easier to accomplish - especially by reducing the need for functioning blood-supply plumbing to provide nutrition and oxygenation in the eary stages of construction.
I intend to live just long enough (naturally) that I can live forever (engineered).
If you're a boomer, forget it.
(At the age of about 11, back in the late 1950s, I was expecting medical technology to be able to stimulate the growth of a "third set" of replacement teeth - tooth-by-tooth as necessary, by the time my adult teeth might be worn out or destroyed by decay or misadventure. More than half a century later where's THAT flying car?)
The FDA approval process takes long enough (currently a minimum of 10 years) that even if a treatment useful for your program is perfected TODAY it won't be available in time to be of use. If it's not in the pipe now, it won't be out of the pipe while you're around to benefit.
And since aging is "a natural process" rather than a "disease", don't expect treatments to reduce it to be considered at all - except piecemeal for parts of aging that can be construed as a specific pathology.
Interestingly, the congressional debates that led to the creation of the FDA considered the issue - and declared that if the new agency delayed the introduction of a useful drug by more tha 6 months it was counterproductive. How things have evolved...
For instance, decades ago the FDA (no doubt traumatized by the worldwide problems with Thalidomide babies, which the US had missed due to their foot-dragging), refused to accept tests done in other countries and delayed the approval of beta blockers for years - to the tune of 100,000 extra deaths from preventable secondary heart attacks.
Unfortunately the lesson was not learned. Delaying a drug that saves lives doesn't affect the carreer of the bureaucrat, while approving one that causes damage can destroy it.
And (short of electing Ron Paul and a congressful of people like) him don't expect the FDA to be streamlined, dismantled, or their approval process to be reduced from a roadblock to an advisory status.
Then why do they have an obliviously, incredibly uneducated idiot as president? This man can not possibly have a college education if he can not discern the definition of the words.
If you're referring to George W. Bush you should take that up with the faculty and administrators of Yale.
(Interestingly, "dubbya" scored much higher on IQ tests than Kerry.)
Don't be confused by differences in regional dialects. Or by the posturing a President has to go through as a part of the job. (Example: Looking crazy enough to launch a massive retaliatory nuclear strike - but sane enough to be negiotiated with - in order to make the MAD doctrine of nuclear deterrence work.)
1) Right before the equipment is put in the box it should have its memory reset to factory condition AND have the firmware compared to what it should be.
This will offer some protection against factory sabatoge.
No it won't - if the "factory sabotage" consisted of (deliberately or accidentally) having malware as part of "what [the firmware] should be".
2) Any time a unit is returned it should be reset to factory condition.
This will take care of shoppers who buy, infect, and return merchandise.
And how is a reailer supposed to do this? Do you know of ANY product that comes with a (true) "reflash to factory status" utility that doesn't depend on what's in the device itself - let alone a cross-industry standard for this? (And you can't trust the media returned with the device, either. If it's writable it also needs "resetting" - and if it's read-only it needs replacing with a fresh copy.)
Does anyone else have a problem with the word "smashing" to describe the contact of two bits of not-quite-vacuum passing through each other?
I don't. (At least not until I find out the relative masses and densities of the gas cloud vs. both the sections of the Milky Way it's about to encounter and the interstellar-gas components of them.)
The cloud may be a very hard vacuum - only slightly softer than the intergalactic space around it. But at galactic scales it still amounts to something quite dense and massive, which will not pass through the interstellar gas and solar winds of our galaxy without interacting repeatedly - let alone through the magnetic fields of the galaxy and the stars and planets that compose it.
I'd expect it to coalesce with the galaxy. That much mass at that much relative velocity will dump enormous amounts of energy into compression and heat at the shock front (similar to the graduation of "falling pebble" to something akin to a bomb when the pebble is falling at cometary speed, or a nuclear bomb when the "pebble" is also a couple miles in diameter). The energy density might be small, but over half the sky the radiant temperature can add up. Over that much matter, even at near-vacuum densities, even fusion events could be non-trivial - especially since magnetic effects could produce concentrations.
In gas clouds I'd expect it, at a minimum, to kick off a round of star formation. Also to sweep the gas and dust out from between existing stars and their planetary systems (and fractionate it), as dense accumulations are accellerated little while gas and dust encounter something of comparable density.
Even if the density is so low that the above effects aren't significant for planetary systems like ours, the passage of the cloud (especially the shock front) would wreak non-trivial havoc on the solar wind and magnetosphere - and thus planetary radiation shielding. Because the solar wind -> radiation shielding -> water condensation nucleation -> cloud cover -> solar heat reflection connection seems to be a major contributor to (geologically) short-term planetary temperature changes, the arrival and passage of the gas cloud could have a major effect on climate. (Even if its impact on the magnetosphere doesn't "stir up" some change in activity on the solar surface or modify the sunspot cycle.)
Which brings up the questions:
- Have similar events occurred in the geologically "recent" past?
- If so, do they have any relation to ice ages and interglacial periods or to mass extinction events?
There's nothing about changing heat into electricity that violates the laws of thermodynamics.
But some of the hype in TFA DOES violate the laws of thermodynamics - exceeding the carnot cycle limit, sometimes by several orders of magnitude.
One of the other responses, for instance, calculates the power available from skin heat to a normal-sized cellphone at 10 mW. And the whole POINT of "waste heat" in a power plant is to dump it to ambient without restrictions that would raise the dump temperature and thus reduce the plant efficiency.
Is this effect reversible? Could it be turned into a super-efficient Peltier module?
It ought to be.
The problem with Peltier cells is the conduction of heat across the cell by means other than the charge carriers that perform the heat pumping/thermoelectric generation. This breakthrough is a drastic reduction in heat conduction. So it ought to be applicable to both heat pumping and generation. In fact the efficient thermogenerator ought to be an efficient heat pump as well.
Hitler was more of a bankroll for the project than inspiration.
Actually he used it first for a political "chicken in every pot" promise (promising a "people's car" within financial reach of even the lower-income fraction of the depression-ravaged population), then to fund the war effort (applying the deposits people paid for the cars to building military vehicles).
As for the misapplication of Godwin's Law to (shut down) this discussion: Letting that happen blocks the transmission of historical lore. People who lost the chance to learn history are more likely to end up repeating it (or at least rhyming with it). Very convenient for neo-NAZIs and other totalitarian wannabes.
Anyone who's seen an SUV/compact car accident can tell you that the compact car usually looks completely destroyed, but the cabin looks intact, while the SUV is upside down with its roof collapsed in a ditch.
Compact cars are intended and designed to carry people and a small amount of incidental cargo in city and highway driving, especially in dense traffic.
Trucks are intended and designed for hauling freight, which involves tradeoffs that make them more prone to rollover/knockdown than a low-slung carrier of reclining people.
SUVs are intended and were originally designed for other purposes - primarily travel on bad and roads and trails. That means high clearance to avoid getting stuck on boulders or when the wheels drop into holes, and a narrow body to go through narrow cracks in mountains. This makes them narrow-footed and top-heavy, making them more prone to rollover in driving and collisions on highways (which is a secondary use) and requiring a different driving style to avoid this.
The SUV-as-passenger-car phenomenon is an unintended consequence of the Greens' attempt to reduce fuel consumption. The fleet average mileage requirements killed the station wagon. So people with large families or lots of groceries to haul had to switch to the next vehicle up - either a van or an SUV (which were both "trucks" for the mileage requirement). The SUV is the smaller and more fuel efficient of the two.
(Then, with such a high fraction of the SUVs being used as "mall terrain vehicles", some of the manufacturers began modifying them for that service. This trashed the suspensions for off-road use to achieve comfy highway performance. But they couldn't change the high/narrow form factor that results in the rollover risk without leaving the SUV category.)
19 and 32, especially, point to the conclusion that the "older guy on a Harley" is most definitely not more likely to suffer an accident. Younger riders are much more likely to be involved in accidents, as are less experienced riders of any age.
One thing the stats won't tell you, though, is how much of the greater safety of those older riders is that they have more experience, training, skills, and other things that can be taught, vs. how much is because some people are better at it than others and those with worse reflexes, vision, midnsets, attention spans, etc. were eliminated early through accidents.
Motorcycle accidents are common enough to be a significant chunk of "evolution in action".
Sorry, AC. I won't make any decisions based on a ball of mud slung in the last few days leading up to an election, let alone ON THE ELECTION DAY ITSELF, when there is no chance to check its veracity.
Instead I'll stick with my decision based on his decades-long impeccable voting record.
Ron Paul is a Libertarian running as a Republican.
Which seems appropriate, since the Libertarian Party started largely as a splinter off the Republican Party. B-)
That was back during the Vietnam Era, another time when the R party structure abandoned constitutional limits in favor of big-government meddling with the citizens.
Ron Paul's response is that the newsletters, which went out for over two decades under his name...
You (and/or the mudslingers you're parroting) are (deliberately?) conflating two times: The length of time Ron Paul has had newsletters under his name and the length of time the obnoxious ghostwriter put poisonous words into his newsletter before Paul noticed and fired the bum.
Wyoming popped up with a western state early, but seemed mostly ignored...
In Wyoming the delegates are picked by the party functionaries and office holders, not the general population. So it's a test of popularity with the party's political machine, not for "viability" when most of the rest of the delegates are picked by general election or open caucuses.
Ignoring it - except to mention in passing which candidate got how many delegates - seems appropriate.
California being winner take all (IIRC from 4 years ago).
On the Republican side at least California changed from winner-take-all to precinct-winner-take-precinct as of this cycle. Also they have three delegates per precinct regardless of the number of Republican voters, plus a few at-large delegates that go to the winner of the most precincts. (Not sure if there are also some others that go to functionaries rather than being elected.)
This has changed the dynamic for candidates significantly: Now all precincts need to be paid attention to, rather than just the ones with a bunch of R voters.
(Ron Paul's army of volunteers is the main campaign operation to figure this out early and campaign in all precincts, rather than ignoring all but the ones with a lot of Rs as candidates had done in the past.)
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Having done that, should they not be liable for SCO's debts?
... Novel can suck whatever assets remain out of the dried husk of SCO until it crumbles into dust, ...
The[y] are no more responsible for the debts of the corporation than any of the other owners.
In fact, by taking stock instead of much of the money for their fees, the lawyers actually did a good thing for Novel and the creditors - leaving more value in SCOX to be recovered and distributed.
Think of it as the corporate version of taking a case on contingency fee basis. Lose, they get squat. Win, they take a big chunk - possibly much bigger than they'd have gotten in fees - but still leaving far more with the client than if they'd lost.
You do what you do with all news: skim it to glean soft, chewy nougats of wisdom, and discard the cheap almonds and chocolate coating.
But why waste your money and time on candy bars that are just peanuts and shaved coconut when you can switch brands and get something that's mostly nougat? B-)
Regardless: "'An thou harm none, do what thou wilt.' shall be the whole of the law."
The effect of the Electoral College is that smaller jurisdictions MUST be considered when campaigning. Otherwise, a candidate would just hit a dozen major metro areas and they'd have the numerical advantage sewed up.
And that's its primary purpose.
It's part of the deal that got little states to join up in the first place, rather than swatting down the Federalist coup and sticking with the Continental Congress or going their own way. (The Bill of Rights was another part of that deal.) Changing it would require a constitutional amendment, ratified by 3/4s of the states (i.e. lots of little ones which would lose power as a result) or a constitutional convention (also ratified by 3/4s of the states). So nobody should hold their breath waiting for it to get "fixed". B-)
But it has an additional advantage: It serves as a firewall against election corruption by big-city political machines.
If the president were elected by popular vote, a political machine in one of the largest urban areas could fake enough votes to swing even a not-very-close election. With the electoral college they can swing no more than all their state's electors (which they'd probably have gotten anyhow).
From what I understand (from across the Atlantic) Paul is not a big contender anyway.
And I presume that, as someone across the Atlantic, you got that understanding primarily from his coverage (mainly, his lack of coverage) on old-media outlets, right?
In case you hadn't noticed, Ron Paul has a very large following among those who have actually HEARD his political positions and voting record. And it is growing, doubling about every two months.
His meet-up groups alone - people actively getting together to plan and execute activities to promote him - now number over 1,500 with members totaling over 108,000 members (about 9% waiting for a group to form), more than 2/3 the US troop strength in Iraq.
In the fourth quarter he raised nearly twenty million dollars. Volunteers unconnected with the campaign staged two "money bomb" donation days, with the first breaking the previous one-day fundraising record for a Republican candidate with over four million, the second shattering that (and the Democrats' record, too) with over six million. And all this from hundreds of thousands of individual contributors and an average donation of about $100 - no PACs, corporate contributions, etc.
Meanwhile, separately, his fans raised about another half-million to rent a blimp and fly it around the US. His signs are hung and posted all over - many handmade. Banners on overpasses. Signs in yards. Clusters of people on streetcorners waving them. And so on. He wins most straw polls. He dominates online call-in polls (such as the "who won the debate" polls - which, counter to claims, allow one vote per cell phone number.) Make a post critical of him and see how many people respond to defend him. B-)
The problem, though, is that virtually all this support comes from people whose primary news source is the Internet. On the old media his name is virtually never mentioned - to the point that people have been cracking jokes about "He who Must Not be Named". The popularity of both Ron Paul and his message crosses party, age, education, race, and income distinctions. So if he got anywhere near as much exposure as the "annointed" candidates get, one could expect him to be a leader in the nomination process and the probable landslide winner in the election if he got the nomination.
But his programs, if adopted, would amount to a major defeat for both major factions currently in power. So he gets major opposition from them.
As for the US (old)media, you need to understand that they are partisans as well. "Freedom of the Press" doesn't mean that the press is unbiased. It means the government must keep hands off while the operators can bias it any way they want. The hope is that all significant opinions will be represented. In current practice not all of them are.
To oversimplify: The (formerly) mainstream media (MSM) are in virtual lockstep, carrying the "progressive" (big-government left-wing) viewpoint while talk radio carries conservative stuff but mainly the Neocon (big-government interventionist) faction. Newscorp (especially Fox News) was thought to cover the conservative side of things but has come out of the closet as being strictly Neocon and blatantly partisan. The other conservative factions (such as the libertarian and paleoconservative, to name two) are still under the cone of silence when they aren't being directly attacked or ridiculed.
Ron Paul is primarily a libertarian with paleoconservative leanings. His candadacy, and the progressively more blatant attempts of the media to squash it, is what shone the spotlight on Fox News' partisanship - especially during the debates. (Turning off his monitor earphone, and the way he exposed that, was particularly ludicrous. See the link in my current sigline for where they cut one of his best comebacks from the west-coast delayed version of last Friday's debate.) But Fox News is not alone in this unintentional humor. For instance: The New York Times real-time election result page had the othe
Oh, and I support Ron Paul, so arstechnica has called me loopy because of my political beliefs. Looks like there is one more location I won't be going for any kind of news in the future!
Yeah, you can't be too careful; you might hear a contrary opinion.
The name calling on the part of the Ars Technica article's author casts doubts about how informed, objective, rational, or intelligent he is when considering the subject under question - with the implication that he might have similar problems with other issues as well. This reduces his value as a source. The "birds of a feather" principle implies that other authors published in the same outlet may have similar problems, even if the problematic signs are not a reflection of the publication's policy.
As to "hearing contrary opinions", supporters of Ron Paul have no shortage of outlets where they can hear themselves called "loopy" or worse.
Their time for collecting information is limited. Why should they waste it on an outlet that is self-evidently warping the information on the subjects of interest to them (intentionally or otherwise), when it might be better spent reading other sources.
VMS has been Y10K-compliant for over a decade.
As have Amdahl's UTS operating systems (SVR3 and SVR4 for mainframes).
Thermite had a VERY high ignition temperature
Yep.
And an electric arc can easily exceed the temperature of the surface of the sun.
The Hindenberg was coming to its mooring during the leading edge of an electrical storm. As a very large flying object it would have accumulated a considerable charge on its surface, which would discharge through the mooring line. The surface was largely non-conductive, so when one point was grounded the charge on the rest would have to discharge by arcing. Such arcs would be fractal, with the initial strike of each segment concentrating the progressive expansion of the discharge tips, much as the trunk and branches of a tree concentrate the strength supporting the weight of the growth beyond. So these arcs could be very hot and persist for a significant time. If one of them happened to pass through particles of iron oxide and aluminum, in a local concentration of such particles, you have the condition for ignition. And an arc would prefer to pass through such particles if the ends happened to be exposed rather than covered by insulation.
And I seriously don't think the US government has held back research on stem cells. They just don't pay for it.
Unfortunately, they also consider that, if they ever spent any money on the construction or operation of the facility, they've "paid for it" sufficiently that no stem cell research can be done there. That eliminates virtually all medical research facilities - certainly all of 'em that are attached to universites and medical schools.
(Now if it were up to me the enforcement of that would consist of charging a higher overhead rate - calculated to replace the federal contribution to facility construction and operation under normal accounting principles - to any project that came under the federal ban. But it's not up to me. And the obvious intent of congress was to do their best to ban the research, rather than just pull federal funds.)
In a process called whole organ decellularization, they grew functioning heart tissue by using dead rat and pig hearts as a sort of flesh matrix, and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells. The goal is to grow replacement parts, using their own stem cells, for people born with defective tickers or experiencing heart failure.
Given that another project also underway is "writing" synthetic organs using a rapid prototyping system (3D plotter) loaded with live cells, structural proteins, and growth factors, the salvaged-and-decellularlized organ should be rendered unnecessary in short order.
The fact that a substrate with the right chemical markers can be repopulated into a working organ means the process can proceed in two steps. This may make it easier to accomplish - especially by reducing the need for functioning blood-supply plumbing to provide nutrition and oxygenation in the eary stages of construction.
I intend to live just long enough (naturally) that I can live forever (engineered).
If you're a boomer, forget it.
(At the age of about 11, back in the late 1950s, I was expecting medical technology to be able to stimulate the growth of a "third set" of replacement teeth - tooth-by-tooth as necessary, by the time my adult teeth might be worn out or destroyed by decay or misadventure. More than half a century later where's THAT flying car?)
The FDA approval process takes long enough (currently a minimum of 10 years) that even if a treatment useful for your program is perfected TODAY it won't be available in time to be of use. If it's not in the pipe now, it won't be out of the pipe while you're around to benefit.
And since aging is "a natural process" rather than a "disease", don't expect treatments to reduce it to be considered at all - except piecemeal for parts of aging that can be construed as a specific pathology.
Interestingly, the congressional debates that led to the creation of the FDA considered the issue - and declared that if the new agency delayed the introduction of a useful drug by more tha 6 months it was counterproductive. How things have evolved...
For instance, decades ago the FDA (no doubt traumatized by the worldwide problems with Thalidomide babies, which the US had missed due to their foot-dragging), refused to accept tests done in other countries and delayed the approval of beta blockers for years - to the tune of 100,000 extra deaths from preventable secondary heart attacks.
Unfortunately the lesson was not learned. Delaying a drug that saves lives doesn't affect the carreer of the bureaucrat, while approving one that causes damage can destroy it.
And (short of electing Ron Paul and a congressful of people like) him don't expect the FDA to be streamlined, dismantled, or their approval process to be reduced from a roadblock to an advisory status.
Then why do they have an obliviously, incredibly uneducated idiot as president? This man can not possibly have a college education if he can not discern the definition of the words.
If you're referring to George W. Bush you should take that up with the faculty and administrators of Yale.
(Interestingly, "dubbya" scored much higher on IQ tests than Kerry.)
Don't be confused by differences in regional dialects. Or by the posturing a President has to go through as a part of the job. (Example: Looking crazy enough to launch a massive retaliatory nuclear strike - but sane enough to be negiotiated with - in order to make the MAD doctrine of nuclear deterrence work.)
1) Right before the equipment is put in the box it should have its memory reset to factory condition AND have the firmware compared to what it should be.
This will offer some protection against factory sabatoge.
No it won't - if the "factory sabotage" consisted of (deliberately or accidentally) having malware as part of "what [the firmware] should be".
2) Any time a unit is returned it should be reset to factory condition.
This will take care of shoppers who buy, infect, and return merchandise.
And how is a reailer supposed to do this? Do you know of ANY product that comes with a (true) "reflash to factory status" utility that doesn't depend on what's in the device itself - let alone a cross-industry standard for this? (And you can't trust the media returned with the device, either. If it's writable it also needs "resetting" - and if it's read-only it needs replacing with a fresh copy.)
Does anyone else have a problem with the word "smashing" to describe the contact of two bits of not-quite-vacuum passing through each other?
I don't. (At least not until I find out the relative masses and densities of the gas cloud vs. both the sections of the Milky Way it's about to encounter and the interstellar-gas components of them.)
The cloud may be a very hard vacuum - only slightly softer than the intergalactic space around it. But at galactic scales it still amounts to something quite dense and massive, which will not pass through the interstellar gas and solar winds of our galaxy without interacting repeatedly - let alone through the magnetic fields of the galaxy and the stars and planets that compose it.
I'd expect it to coalesce with the galaxy. That much mass at that much relative velocity will dump enormous amounts of energy into compression and heat at the shock front (similar to the graduation of "falling pebble" to something akin to a bomb when the pebble is falling at cometary speed, or a nuclear bomb when the "pebble" is also a couple miles in diameter). The energy density might be small, but over half the sky the radiant temperature can add up. Over that much matter, even at near-vacuum densities, even fusion events could be non-trivial - especially since magnetic effects could produce concentrations.
In gas clouds I'd expect it, at a minimum, to kick off a round of star formation. Also to sweep the gas and dust out from between existing stars and their planetary systems (and fractionate it), as dense accumulations are accellerated little while gas and dust encounter something of comparable density.
Even if the density is so low that the above effects aren't significant for planetary systems like ours, the passage of the cloud (especially the shock front) would wreak non-trivial havoc on the solar wind and magnetosphere - and thus planetary radiation shielding. Because the solar wind -> radiation shielding -> water condensation nucleation -> cloud cover -> solar heat reflection connection seems to be a major contributor to (geologically) short-term planetary temperature changes, the arrival and passage of the gas cloud could have a major effect on climate. (Even if its impact on the magnetosphere doesn't "stir up" some change in activity on the solar surface or modify the sunspot cycle.)
Which brings up the questions:
- Have similar events occurred in the geologically "recent" past?
- If so, do they have any relation to ice ages and interglacial periods or to mass extinction events?
There's nothing about changing heat into electricity that violates the laws of thermodynamics.
But some of the hype in TFA DOES violate the laws of thermodynamics - exceeding the carnot cycle limit, sometimes by several orders of magnitude.
One of the other responses, for instance, calculates the power available from skin heat to a normal-sized cellphone at 10 mW. And the whole POINT of "waste heat" in a power plant is to dump it to ambient without restrictions that would raise the dump temperature and thus reduce the plant efficiency.
Is this effect reversible? Could it be turned into a super-efficient Peltier module?
It ought to be.
The problem with Peltier cells is the conduction of heat across the cell by means other than the charge carriers that perform the heat pumping/thermoelectric generation. This breakthrough is a drastic reduction in heat conduction. So it ought to be applicable to both heat pumping and generation. In fact the efficient thermogenerator ought to be an efficient heat pump as well.
... presuming you apply it to cutting price rather than increasing performance.
Crazy Eddie is supposed to fail.
But in a way that drags others along - for instance, after a period of apparent success.
And that's exactly what happened with this one.
Given the location and timing, I wonder if this "Crazy Eddie" actually was the inspiration for the one in the Motie story.
Is Jerry P. active on slashdot these days? Maybe he can tell us. (Ditto Larry N. But I know Jerry P. is active in hacker circles.)
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Reminds me of "Crazy Jim's" hamburger stand in Ann Arbor back in the '60s. Greasy but cheap.
Hitler was more of a bankroll for the project than inspiration.
Actually he used it first for a political "chicken in every pot" promise (promising a "people's car" within financial reach of even the lower-income fraction of the depression-ravaged population), then to fund the war effort (applying the deposits people paid for the cars to building military vehicles).
As for the misapplication of Godwin's Law to (shut down) this discussion: Letting that happen blocks the transmission of historical lore. People who lost the chance to learn history are more likely to end up repeating it (or at least rhyming with it). Very convenient for neo-NAZIs and other totalitarian wannabes.
Anyone who's seen an SUV/compact car accident can tell you that the compact car usually looks completely destroyed, but the cabin looks intact, while the SUV is upside down with its roof collapsed in a ditch.
Compact cars are intended and designed to carry people and a small amount of incidental cargo in city and highway driving, especially in dense traffic.
Trucks are intended and designed for hauling freight, which involves tradeoffs that make them more prone to rollover/knockdown than a low-slung carrier of reclining people.
SUVs are intended and were originally designed for other purposes - primarily travel on bad and roads and trails. That means high clearance to avoid getting stuck on boulders or when the wheels drop into holes, and a narrow body to go through narrow cracks in mountains. This makes them narrow-footed and top-heavy, making them more prone to rollover in driving and collisions on highways (which is a secondary use) and requiring a different driving style to avoid this.
The SUV-as-passenger-car phenomenon is an unintended consequence of the Greens' attempt to reduce fuel consumption. The fleet average mileage requirements killed the station wagon. So people with large families or lots of groceries to haul had to switch to the next vehicle up - either a van or an SUV (which were both "trucks" for the mileage requirement). The SUV is the smaller and more fuel efficient of the two.
(Then, with such a high fraction of the SUVs being used as "mall terrain vehicles", some of the manufacturers began modifying them for that service. This trashed the suspensions for off-road use to achieve comfy highway performance. But they couldn't change the high/narrow form factor that results in the rollover risk without leaving the SUV category.)
19 and 32, especially, point to the conclusion that the "older guy on a Harley" is most definitely not more likely to suffer an accident. Younger riders are much more likely to be involved in accidents, as are less experienced riders of any age.
One thing the stats won't tell you, though, is how much of the greater safety of those older riders is that they have more experience, training, skills, and other things that can be taught, vs. how much is because some people are better at it than others and those with worse reflexes, vision, midnsets, attention spans, etc. were eliminated early through accidents.
Motorcycle accidents are common enough to be a significant chunk of "evolution in action".
The New Republic just released a story ...
Sorry, AC. I won't make any decisions based on a ball of mud slung in the last few days leading up to an election, let alone ON THE ELECTION DAY ITSELF, when there is no chance to check its veracity.
Instead I'll stick with my decision based on his decades-long impeccable voting record.
Ron Paul is a Libertarian running as a Republican.
Which seems appropriate, since the Libertarian Party started largely as a splinter off the Republican Party. B-)
That was back during the Vietnam Era, another time when the R party structure abandoned constitutional limits in favor of big-government meddling with the citizens.
Ron Paul's response is that the newsletters, which went out for over two decades under his name ...
You (and/or the mudslingers you're parroting) are (deliberately?) conflating two times: The length of time Ron Paul has had newsletters under his name and the length of time the obnoxious ghostwriter put poisonous words into his newsletter before Paul noticed and fired the bum.
Wyoming popped up with a western state early, but seemed mostly ignored...
In Wyoming the delegates are picked by the party functionaries and office holders, not the general population. So it's a test of popularity with the party's political machine, not for "viability" when most of the rest of the delegates are picked by general election or open caucuses.
Ignoring it - except to mention in passing which candidate got how many delegates - seems appropriate.
California being winner take all (IIRC from 4 years ago).
On the Republican side at least California changed from winner-take-all to precinct-winner-take-precinct as of this cycle. Also they have three delegates per precinct regardless of the number of Republican voters, plus a few at-large delegates that go to the winner of the most precincts. (Not sure if there are also some others that go to functionaries rather than being elected.)
This has changed the dynamic for candidates significantly: Now all precincts need to be paid attention to, rather than just the ones with a bunch of R voters.
(Ron Paul's army of volunteers is the main campaign operation to figure this out early and campaign in all precincts, rather than ignoring all but the ones with a lot of Rs as candidates had done in the past.)