It's a ridiculously tiny jump from freedom of speech to freedom of information. The only reason it seems like a big jump to having no copyrights is that, although we're far better off than some parts of the world, we don't REALLY have free speech.
The US constitution, while protecting speech, explicitly authorized (even mandates) the protection of innovation by granting monopolies on copying.
In the case of literature and the like this is intended to keep publishers from printing copies without paying the authors, for a limited time.
In the case of inventions to encourage invention by protecting against reverse-engineered copies for a limited time in return for publication of complete descriptions of how to "practice the invention" after the time expires.
Over two centuries of legal hacking have worked around the original intent of the provision. But the provision is still there. And the Constitution is the SOLE authorizing document for the government - the "kernel code", so to speak.
If you want to make such a change, you need to amend the consititution. That's a really tough road to hoe.
No. Unless Linus or Posix makes a change.
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· Score: 4, Informative
Linux deviates from Posix in several ways, and at least one of them is deliberate - because Linus is convinced that his way is better. Posix can't change because that would break all the existing and past unixes. IMHO Linus is unlikely to change because he believes in the advantages of his way.
(I don't recall what the particular difference was but as I recall Linus had a very good point. Security? Robustness? Anyhow it should be trivial to look it up - which I'd do if I had the time just now.)
And I don't see that it really matters, since they can continue as two operating systems and virtually anything will operate well on both, and some things break even crossing between Posix-compatible systems. Linux is doing quite well as is and may end up dominating. The rumors of the demise of the BSDs seem overblown. And who knows what will come next.
Does anyone besides the/. reader base really care though?
Yes.
The main tool of propagandists is not the big lie, but bias:
- Distort qualitative opinions and cost-benefit analyses by giving rare occurrences of one sort lots of articles, common occurrences of the other little or none.
- Give one side front-page billing, hide the other on back pages.
- Give one side the first position in the article, the other one sentence near the end.
- Use loaded terms. (Example: If you live in a "home", on "grounds", in a "church camp", or even a "mansion" you're innocent, a "compound" and you're a demon.)
The establishment media have been doing this for years, and the cost of entry (and for some, government licensing requirements and regulations) have kept other voices from being heard. Their propaganda and viewpoints have converged into lockstep - by their herd-mentality following of the "Paper of Record"'s call on what events deserve coverage if nothing else.
The internet now makes it impossible for the establishment media to bury a story, and to keep other viewpoints marginalized by consistent biased characterization. Yet they still try. So when people discover that they can find more of what they're looking for on the net they switch their news sources. This has been a disaster for the establishment media.
A news search engine biases placement of their own content first (and possibly other like-minded content second, random content third, and different-minded last), rather than giving placement solely on the search match, enables them to pull the same class of stunt on their engine's users. To people who are searching the web to escape biased news coverage this matters very greatly. Once they understand MSNBC has done this (even at a subconscious level) they are likely to avoid it in favor of other resources.
But the presence of the biased engine means many people new to the web, who latch onto that engine first, will be long delayed in their appreciation of and access to unbiased search engines and unbiased or other-biased news sources.
Imagine a volunteer adhoc city/country/world-wide wifi network with spare net bandwidth donated by thousends of people from homes [...]
Imagine the bills to and/or disconnects of the home "donors" for violations of their Terms of Service agreements.
If you wanna do this you need to do your interconnect by peering with a backbone provider - which means paying a fee for their long-haul if you don't have long-haul facilities of your own (like among three or more well-separated major cities) to contribute to the backbone.
The EFF letter makes a serious policitical oopsie by using the term "collective license".
The word "collective" is an instant turnoff for Republicans (as well as Libertarians), and that's over half of congress at the moment. Say "collective" and from your own mouth you have labeled yourself as a socialist crypto-commie trying to steal everything that isn't nailed down, keep most of it for yourselves and your cronies, and use the rest to buy votes from illegal immigrtants and welfare cheats.
It's also not the correct term-of-law, which is "mandatory license".
Making something "mandatory" goes over well with most Republicans who got as far as congress, all Democrats, and the whole left-wing wacko squad. (The Libertarians will scream - but how much power do THEY have? B-) )
But their rocket won't fire its engines until it's already 80,000 ft off the ground and tethered beneath a reusable, piloted helium balloon. It will hang in an 80 up angle. [...]
A helium-fueled cold gas-reaction control system (RCS) will give the ship attitude control.
That's nice, except for one thing: Where are they going to get the helium? As I understand it that's a very scarce resource (wells in US and "The Former Soviet Union") only, with a rather limited capacity.
When the weight comes off the piloted launch balloon it's going to head up big time unless they vent much of the helium (or it's a collapsable pressure-vessel design). And using jets of helium for attitude control will be a big consumer of it, too.
Fix those two issues and it looks much better - but still not great. Going up with the ballon doesn't consume energy because you're neutrally bourant. But if you're not going to dump the helium you have to compress it to get back down, and THAT takes as much (or more) energy as lifting the rocket you just launched with an electric elevator.
It's still 'way better than rockets from the ground. But it's still a lot of fuel to take up just to compress the helium so the balloon can get back down.
What does someone like Weird Al Yankovich do? Does he pay the copyright holders for the songs he parodies? Seems like whatever applies to W.A.Y. applies here.
Parodying the SONG ITSELF is fair use. Using a warped version of the song to satarize SOMETHING ELSE is NOT.
Which actually makes sense.
Parodying an artwork is a free speech issue - and any impact on the artwork's sales are likely to be a result of the legitimate critique rather than unfari competition from a cheap copy. Requiring license from the artist whose work you're parodying would stifle parody.
Using a distorted version of an artwork to satarize something else potentially reduces the value of the artwork itself - by associating it with the satire - and thus limits its market. (It's like using an oldies hit song in a commercial.) So it's appropriate to require a satarist who wishes to use an art work in this way to obtain a license and pay the original artist for the work. Then the artist can make an informed decision of whether he wishes to have his work used in this way, and negotiate reasonable payment for this use (and its resulting curtailment of other, similar, potential uses).
Dr Robert Hare (emeritus professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia) estimates psychopathy at 1% of the population at large.
The estimate I've seen was also 1% (with uncertainty leading to a range of 0.5% to 2%). But the researcher in question also distinguished psycopathy from sociopathy, and estimated sociopathy a bit higher. (For instance: In prisons there were something like two or three sociopaths for each psychopath, which might be a ballpark estimate for the population as a whole.) The resulting behaviors were pretty similar - but if the mechanisms are different you might expect to find some behavioral distinctions if you look hard enough.
The distinction he made was that sociopathy was learned and psychopathy was inborn (like color blindness or birth defects) - without making any statement about whether the mechanism was genetic, foetal insult, or whatever.
Unfortunately I don't recall the name of the author in question. So we might be talking about the same guy with the same estimate. B-)
You can't vaccinate against morphine... it modulates ion channels which you would have to somehow remove
Yes you can. You can produce antibodies that bind the active parts of the appropriate drugs, or that bind to the receptors in ways that block them without activating them. These will reduce or eliminate the effect of the drug on the receptor....and then you would have serious issues.
Absolutely:
For starters, if it blocks the drugs, what do you want to bet that you'll also block the effects of the natural compounds. Then those vaccinated will be something like a drug addict in withdrawal FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES. Everything would HURT. Just sitting around would hurt. Exercise would hurt more. Painkillers wouldn't work.
Imagine one of these kids in highschool - the worst of "whiny wimps" just sitting there. Sports would be agony. And that's before the unimunized jocks start beating on him to watch him squirm.
Then there are the feedback mechanisms modulating the number of receptors, production of neurotransmitters, and production of antibodies. The reduced performance of the neurotransmitter-receptor system will result in the increase in the number of receptors (already known to be part of the addiction mechanism) and/or the increase in the production of the neurotransmitter.
But with antibodies to naturally produced protiens, this could produce more stimulation of the immune system: More antibodies against the receptors. Inflamation (of the BRAIN!) in the affected sites. Possible immune cascade from the inflamation causing the production of antibodies to OTHER self-antigens, and a runaway autoimmune disease akin to a cross between Graves and Lupus.
Then there's the question of what this will do to other behavior. It's making a MAJOR change to the internal reward pathways of the brain. How will these people do in school? On the job? How will they respond to advertising? Political propaganda? Religious indoctrination?
There are indications that psycopathy is the result of a failure in an emotional pathway, leading to both loss of guilt feelings and risk-taking in an attempt to achieve any feeling at all. Is THIS the pathway in question? Will an "immunization" program raise the incidence of psychopathy from about 1% of the population to the bulk of it? Will we have a generation of used car salesmen, confidence men, gangsters, death-squad members, and political dictators?
Or is it NOT the same pathway, but one that produces some OTHER pathology when it fails? Will we find ourselves with a generation of some OTHER, formerly-rare, pathological stereotype as the bulk of our population?
Fooling around with something as basic as the reward hardware of the mind is NOT something you can do and expect no undesirable side-effects.
That would be worse than coffee on the strung-out side, and wouldn't provide any water.
See if Jolt makes a Kosher edition around passover. I'm not sure what law corn syrup violates but Kosher Coke uses Sucrose, as does Canadian and some Southern Cokes.
I've given up on Jolt after they added corn syrup well BEFORE they changed the label - and I was wondering why I was feeling ill for months... Don't trust 'em any more. (Also my cafeine tolerance is down so Diet Pepsi does it for me - and is readily available.) But thanks.
As I understand it they get really picky about not eating ANYTHING that MIGHT contain a TRACE of something other than kosher wheat flour that COULD have been used to make bread. So corn, rye, millet, etc. in any form - including sweeteners - are out.
(There's one group, though, that considers corn syrup Kosher. But the manufacturers put BIG WARNING labels on things they certify about who certified it, so mainstream Kosher-keepers don't accidentally break their rule set.)
I would not be surprised if AL-queda did not frequent slashdot, for "up to the minute cutting edge ideas".
I'm sure AL-queda can figure out plenty of stuff like this for themselves.
The way to keep ahead is to keep open.
No, it's the UN that's responsible for that.
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GPS Coke Can X-Rayed
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It is the lack of a free market to transport that food to market efficiently.
Yes, and do you know who is responsible for that? The US and Europe, with their lavish farm subsidies. If Western nations ever allowed the free market to operate in developing nations, problems with food and poverty in the world would be greatly reduced.
No, what's responsible for that - in Kosovo at least - is the UN's arms embargo. By disarming everybody who wasn't supported by an outside group (typically a large country), they left them at the mercy of those who WERE supported by such powers, and who wanted to eliminate them. Thus starvation, and genocide.
That's one special case. But there are plenty of other special cases.
For instance: Iraq under Sadam. Turns out (as siezed documents show) many of the high UN officials - and high officials from various UN member countries - were on-the-take from the Oil-for-Palaces program - whose gravy train ended with the invasion. For over a decade the UN stood by while Sadam slaughtered Iraqui citizens - and many of the members opposed the invasion right up to the end (then made nicey-nice to join in on the reconstruction gravy-train once the bribes stopped flowing). Any bets on how much of that was due to bought politicians rather than principled opposition?
Or take Biafra: Millions starved into death or plague, or masacred (with MACHETTIES - who needs guns?) because disarmament rendered them helpless before organized military opposition.
Starvation doesn't come from "greedy corporations" "wasting money". They'd LOVE to feed the world - they'd make MORE MONEY that way!
Starvation comes from government and proto-government intervention, through misguided policies or outright planned genocide.
The solution to genocide is allow the potential victims - which means EVERYBODY - to arm themselves for their own defense. The solution to starvation is to eliminate the governmental obstacles to people feeding themselves, whether by raising their own food or earning enough after-confiscation cash to buy it from others.
And the obstacle to both is governmental force, implemented either by malicious people or people too ignorant or stupid to understand that the SECOND-order effects of government programs often completely swamp and reverse the expected FIRST-order effects.
Dose anyone here regularly carry 12-pack boxes of cola on flights?
I used to carry large bottles or multiple cans of Jolt Cola on long air flights at one point. I'd be in caffeine withdrawal by the end of the flight otherwise (or strung out from substituting coffee) and couldn't drink ordinary colas due to an allergy to corn sweeteners.
Eventually Jolt switched to corn sweetener, too, I finally switched to commercial diet colas - and cut back on the caffeine. But I still carry a few on, and a sandwich, rather than be at the mercy of the flight's timing of drink and food delivery and food ingredient choices.
Because jolt is hard to find, I'd often carry enough for the far-end stay as well. And because stowed luggage is a pain, for short trips I'd try to do everything carryon. So if Jolt had come in 12-packs, yes, I'd have carried them on at times.
So it's easy for me to imagine other people among the millions of air-travelers - say ones with a strong preference for Coke and a long flight ahead on a Pepsi-serving airline - who might very well tote a 12-pack among their carryon luggage. Or who might not notice, in a rush of packing, that one of the Cokes they stuffed in their bag was a "winning can".
On another occasion, I was actually arrested at an airport because my keychain had a 2 cm long cheap pistol pendant on it. I am not kidding. This was many years pre-9/11, btw.
Long before the terrorism scare - in the decades of lull between the insurance bombings and hijackings-to-cuba and the use of boxcutters to hijack planes on 9/11 - I took a cross-country air flight. Unfortunately I had left a pocketknife in my carryon luggage (from a previous trip where it was checked baggage).
The pocket knife was a retracting-shield model (a workaround for anti-switchblade laws), with a shirt pocket clip, about the total length of a pen. They spotted it and had me open the bag for inspection.
I pointed out that it had been at the bottom of a carryon too big to access conveniently inside the plane, so obviously I wasn't trying to use it on the crew. I pointed out that it was of legal length and design, and offered to have them gate-check the bag so it wouldn't be accessable to me on the plane (or could they hold it for me until my return because it was kinda pricey). And I pointed out that I had a non-refundable ticket, so if I missed this plane due to delays could they please let the airline know that I'd missed it because they'd detained me so I wouldn't have to pay full-fare to take a later trip?
The security team didn't want to make a call that might cost somebody official some trouble and/or money, so they called the sherrif's detail. (County airport.) They didn't want to make that call either. Just before the plane was to go they passed me through.
This ended up with me on the plane with the knife in my shirt pocket. So if I'd really been a hijacker it would have been more convenient.
NOWadays they'd probably just confiscate it - and maybe make me miss the plane or bust me for having it if I complained. Hijacking planes with small cutting implements and using them to kill thousands of unrelated ground-dwellers is no longer a theoretical threat, and they've had lots of shaking-out of procedures for handling inadvertent carriers of undesired objects.
Re:Okay I am confused. what is the point?
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GPS Coke Can X-Rayed
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If security sees something they don't trust then they call the bomb experts. Simple. Better a false alarm then having a plane blow up.
This seems to give the X-ray operators the idea that some cans can contain electronics.
Yep.
So all a terrorist now has to do is make his detonator be as neat as the coke can, thanks to the handy photo's and a x-ray operator will think "oh a suspicous thing oh no wait I seen that presentation this is one of them cans no need to check further".
Nope.
The FIRST lesson for operators is that a can full of electronics MIGHT not be a bomb, and might not be known to the poor sap who had one in his carry-on lunch. So don't throw the lucky winner up against the wall and start punching him when he complains that he'll miss his plane.
Second: This tells the operators how to tell the DIFFERENCE between a can-bomb and a can-phone, so they don't even need to open the box if it's the latter.
Of course they won't just let the guy through with the phone. They'll haul him and his luggage aside and compare the image to their handouts of that PDF file. If they get a mismatch they'll still call the bomb squad. But if they get a match they'll tell him it looks like he got the lucky can, but we gotta open the bag to check it - and watch him call for his car.
Watching the harried commuter decide between making his non-refundable-ticket air flight and getting the free SUV (and camera crew) delivered to the airport would make a GREAT break from a boring day of looking at X-rays of business suits and toothbrushes.
Anyone care to explain xray photos in full color? In all the images, the PCBs are green, the coke is brownish, etc... how the hell does an xray machine do color? or are they simply colored after the fact for clarity?
It's called "false color", and has been used to improve visual display from remote sensing equipment for decades - and manual map making for centuries. (Think of a crop map with each field color-coded accroding to what is grown there.)
You could break the observed density of the material into classes, or X-ray with multiple wavelengths that are absorbed differently by different materials and map the combinations into classes.
Then you assign a color to each class. Even for monochrome density masks, just assigning a different color to ranges of density helps pick out shapes. But if you've got targets that bin into nice like-measureing clusters you can pick colors for each one that look like targets of interest in that bin would look in visible light: Green for fiberglass, dark for metal makes a PC board full of electronics LOOK like PC boards full of electronics. Brown for mostly-water makes cans of water-based drinks look like cola, and so on. This makes them easier to spot, easing operator training requirements and lowering error rates.
A little image processing on neighboring pixels can help you keep contiguous pieces colored the same even with noise and overlapping in the data. More spread-out image processing can help you recognize things like cylindrical objects containing a uniform substance, and give them a density change rather than rainbow mach bands, and so on.
If you look at the X-Rays, the main difference between a real explosive device, and the GPS coke can, is that the GPS coke can just has electronics and batteries.
Simple:
- Use a small detonator, shaped like a battery, in the battery cluster.
- Substitute explosives for coke in the rest of the cans in the 12 pack.
But if I were a security type (especially on a military vessel - and MORE especially on, say, a carrierr) I'd be more concerned about a device composed of a satellite cellphone / GPS system (with custom software and enough batteries to keep it running in bursts for months) than eleven 12-oz cans of plastique and a detonator. Dandy spy tool - tracks the carrier group just by being there, and provides comm for the spy. Plausible denyability, too.
What I'd be more concerned about, with respect to terrorism, is fake "claim the car" cans.
Mossad (Israel's analog of the CIA) has already assasinated at least one Palestinian military leader by swapping his cellphone with tweaked with a hunk of plastique, set up to blow his head off when they called it and he answered. Now we know what the "winning cans" look like.
A terrorist could manufacture look-alikes, full of C4 and set up to blow when you hit the button. MUCH easier and cheaper to design and fabricate (especially for a terrorist operation with a billion-dollar bankroll) than the real ones. Most people coming across one of these when opening a 12- or 24-pack will immediately hit the button to claim the car. BOOM!
A few hundred of these slipped into shipments of Coke delivered to stores on the same day could cause a LOT of death and panic among the authorities before they figured out what was happening and got the word out - espeically if the outside of the can was part of the explosive so it isn't recognizable after, and they'd have to infer what was going on from finding most of the bomb victims in their kitchens near a just-opened 12-pack.
So if I find one of those cans, I'm going to take it out back and rig a jig with a LONG string to push the button from a distance the first time. B-)
(Interestingly, gun control in the US has always been about denying self-defense to the lower classes. But that's another thread.)
Knife control - especially switchblades, too. Specifically, certain immigrant waves (such as poor Itialians around WWI - WWII) who used it as their personal protection "weapon of choice". (And thus whose criminal classes would commonly chose it for intimidation, since carrying it would let them blend with the crowd.)
Switchblades aka automatic knives aren't illegal to own in most states. The law varies from state to state, and in Oregon, they are legal to buy and carry as long as they aren't concealed.
I think they're also allowed concealed under the same on-demand licensing as guns. (But I'm not an Oregonian so check that if you want to carry one.)
It's interesting WHY they're legal in Oregon:
Oregon has had legal open carry of guns for a long time, and on-demand licensing for concealed weapons carry as well. It also has a provision in its constitution that it can't pass laws that penalize some social and economic classes and not others.
It had an anti-switchblade law, like much of the rest of the US. But a person being tried for violating it argued that he could have carried a gun in the same way, which would have been at least as dangerous, but that guns were expensive and switchblades cheap. So the law was discriminating by income level, denying the poor self-defense options that were afforded to the more well-to-do.
The judge bought it and the law was thrown out.
(Interestingly, gun control in the US has always been about denying self-defense to the lower classes. But that's another thread.)
Does this mean that we can finally get rid of annoying antenna connector types such as RP-SMA and RP-TNC that were originally devised just to make it a pain in the ass to switch out factory antennas?
No. They explicitly kept that provision (including the part that required the manufacturers to switch to still newer pain-ion-the-backside unuque antenna connectors once third parties are marketing adapters for the old ones.)
They want to make it enough of a pain to install an uncertified combo that you can't do it by accident and unknowingly. (Of course the fact that most of us have been unaware that hooking up a cantenna WAS illegal proves that's bogus. But it didn't stop them from continuing it.)
IMHO they should have allowed the industry to collude to standardize one or a small set of connectors with defined signal limits for what the card can feed it on one side and what the antenna/transmission line can do on the other, and let the antenna and card vendors work to that. Then you could meet the FCC's targets with a O(M+N) rather than an O(M*N) solution, and eliminate the prolifertation of low-volume and thus pricey connectors.
It depends on how well she develops the ability. Walking upright makes you easier to catch, running upright makes you much harder to.
For a monkey or ape, which doesn't have the adaptations for it, running up right is slower than on all fours. (That's why they switch back to all four when in a hurry.)
The advantage of the two-legged walk for people is that it is lower-energy, not that it's faster. This lets us jog for a long time, at speeds that quickly overheat and exhaust prey animals until they drop from heat prostration.
People can outrun some horses in a very short sprint (though I wouldn't bet on it for quarterhorses). And they can jog down darn near anything. But in the middle distances other animals do better.
It may have been a defect when the first human did it, but it survived and we ended up all the better for it.
In particular it gave us a new hunting mode (like wolf packs but better) that, in combination with freeing the hands for weapon use, put us on top of the food chain and gave us the safety and leisure to develop agriculture and technology.
But I'd put my money on weakening of the arms, whether through loss of control or coordination through nerve damage or some other flu side-effect, making quadrapedal motion difficult.
For a four-legger like a dog this would be crippling. (Dogs can't do two-legs for long due to blood pressure issues.) But for a monkey or ape with both four and two legged gaits, it's just an annoyance: Just drop the one that doesn't work so well any more and you're hardly bothered. (Like a kid with a knee injury no longer skipping.)
How can this be possible? I thought the whole point of black holes being 'black' was because they had a spherical boundary the crossing thereof would result in an escape velocity greater than C.
If you have to exceed C to get going fast enough to coast out, when you fall you get accellerated to more than C as you coast in.
It's pretty straightforward: a black hole has an event horizon, but nothing ever actually crosses it. The information can be retrieved from the black hole because it was never inside the event horizon.
Is that because things falling in go into a rapid orbit that doesn't decay enough to pass them through the horizon because they can't lose enough energy to finish falling in? Or is it related to the asymptopic time-slowdown as things approach the event horizon (which I thought was a relativistic artifact from the viewpoint of the distant observer, not something that also occurs in the coordinate system of the entering object)?
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It's a ridiculously tiny jump from freedom of speech to freedom of information. The only reason it seems like a big jump to having no copyrights is that, although we're far better off than some parts of the world, we don't REALLY have free speech.
The US constitution, while protecting speech, explicitly authorized (even mandates) the protection of innovation by granting monopolies on copying.
In the case of literature and the like this is intended to keep publishers from printing copies without paying the authors, for a limited time.
In the case of inventions to encourage invention by protecting against reverse-engineered copies for a limited time in return for publication of complete descriptions of how to "practice the invention" after the time expires.
Over two centuries of legal hacking have worked around the original intent of the provision. But the provision is still there. And the Constitution is the SOLE authorizing document for the government - the "kernel code", so to speak.
If you want to make such a change, you need to amend the consititution. That's a really tough road to hoe.
Linux deviates from Posix in several ways, and at least one of them is deliberate - because Linus is convinced that his way is better. Posix can't change because that would break all the existing and past unixes. IMHO Linus is unlikely to change because he believes in the advantages of his way.
(I don't recall what the particular difference was but as I recall Linus had a very good point. Security? Robustness? Anyhow it should be trivial to look it up - which I'd do if I had the time just now.)
And I don't see that it really matters, since they can continue as two operating systems and virtually anything will operate well on both, and some things break even crossing between Posix-compatible systems. Linux is doing quite well as is and may end up dominating. The rumors of the demise of the BSDs seem overblown. And who knows what will come next.
Does anyone besides the /. reader base really care though?
Yes.
The main tool of propagandists is not the big lie, but bias:
- Distort qualitative opinions and cost-benefit analyses by giving rare occurrences of one sort lots of articles, common occurrences of the other little or none.
- Give one side front-page billing, hide the other on back pages.
- Give one side the first position in the article, the other one sentence near the end.
- Use loaded terms. (Example: If you live in a "home", on "grounds", in a "church camp", or even a "mansion" you're innocent, a "compound" and you're a demon.)
The establishment media have been doing this for years, and the cost of entry (and for some, government licensing requirements and regulations) have kept other voices from being heard. Their propaganda and viewpoints have converged into lockstep - by their herd-mentality following of the "Paper of Record"'s call on what events deserve coverage if nothing else.
The internet now makes it impossible for the establishment media to bury a story, and to keep other viewpoints marginalized by consistent biased characterization. Yet they still try. So when people discover that they can find more of what they're looking for on the net they switch their news sources. This has been a disaster for the establishment media.
A news search engine biases placement of their own content first (and possibly other like-minded content second, random content third, and different-minded last), rather than giving placement solely on the search match, enables them to pull the same class of stunt on their engine's users. To people who are searching the web to escape biased news coverage this matters very greatly. Once they understand MSNBC has done this (even at a subconscious level) they are likely to avoid it in favor of other resources.
But the presence of the biased engine means many people new to the web, who latch onto that engine first, will be long delayed in their appreciation of and access to unbiased search engines and unbiased or other-biased news sources.
Imagine a volunteer adhoc city/country/world-wide wifi network with spare net bandwidth donated by thousends of people from homes [...]
Imagine the bills to and/or disconnects of the home "donors" for violations of their Terms of Service agreements.
If you wanna do this you need to do your interconnect by peering with a backbone provider - which means paying a fee for their long-haul if you don't have long-haul facilities of your own (like among three or more well-separated major cities) to contribute to the backbone.
... The potential for these in kinky sex toy designs is astounding.
I imagine the B&D crowd is panting at the very though. (But then they usually are...)
The EFF letter makes a serious policitical oopsie by using the term "collective license".
The word "collective" is an instant turnoff for Republicans (as well as Libertarians), and that's over half of congress at the moment. Say "collective" and from your own mouth you have labeled yourself as a socialist crypto-commie trying to steal everything that isn't nailed down, keep most of it for yourselves and your cronies, and use the rest to buy votes from illegal immigrtants and welfare cheats.
It's also not the correct term-of-law, which is "mandatory license".
Making something "mandatory" goes over well with most Republicans who got as far as congress, all Democrats, and the whole left-wing wacko squad. (The Libertarians will scream - but how much power do THEY have? B-) )
But their rocket won't fire its engines until it's already 80,000 ft off the ground and tethered beneath a reusable, piloted helium balloon. It will hang in an 80 up angle. [...]
A helium-fueled cold gas-reaction control system (RCS) will give the ship attitude control.
That's nice, except for one thing: Where are they going to get the helium? As I understand it that's a very scarce resource (wells in US and "The Former Soviet Union") only, with a rather limited capacity.
When the weight comes off the piloted launch balloon it's going to head up big time unless they vent much of the helium (or it's a collapsable pressure-vessel design). And using jets of helium for attitude control will be a big consumer of it, too.
Fix those two issues and it looks much better - but still not great. Going up with the ballon doesn't consume energy because you're neutrally bourant. But if you're not going to dump the helium you have to compress it to get back down, and THAT takes as much (or more) energy as lifting the rocket you just launched with an electric elevator.
It's still 'way better than rockets from the ground. But it's still a lot of fuel to take up just to compress the helium so the balloon can get back down.
What does someone like Weird Al Yankovich do? Does he pay the copyright holders for the songs he parodies? Seems like whatever applies to W.A.Y. applies here.
Parodying the SONG ITSELF is fair use. Using a warped version of the song to satarize SOMETHING ELSE is NOT.
Which actually makes sense.
Parodying an artwork is a free speech issue - and any impact on the artwork's sales are likely to be a result of the legitimate critique rather than unfari competition from a cheap copy. Requiring license from the artist whose work you're parodying would stifle parody.
Using a distorted version of an artwork to satarize something else potentially reduces the value of the artwork itself - by associating it with the satire - and thus limits its market. (It's like using an oldies hit song in a commercial.) So it's appropriate to require a satarist who wishes to use an art work in this way to obtain a license and pay the original artist for the work. Then the artist can make an informed decision of whether he wishes to have his work used in this way, and negotiate reasonable payment for this use (and its resulting curtailment of other, similar, potential uses).
Dr Robert Hare (emeritus professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia) estimates psychopathy at 1% of the population at large.
The estimate I've seen was also 1% (with uncertainty leading to a range of 0.5% to 2%). But the researcher in question also distinguished psycopathy from sociopathy, and estimated sociopathy a bit higher. (For instance: In prisons there were something like two or three sociopaths for each psychopath, which might be a ballpark estimate for the population as a whole.) The resulting behaviors were pretty similar - but if the mechanisms are different you might expect to find some behavioral distinctions if you look hard enough.
The distinction he made was that sociopathy was learned and psychopathy was inborn (like color blindness or birth defects) - without making any statement about whether the mechanism was genetic, foetal insult, or whatever.
Unfortunately I don't recall the name of the author in question. So we might be talking about the same guy with the same estimate. B-)
You can't vaccinate against morphine ... it modulates ion channels which you would have to somehow remove
...and then you would have serious issues.
Yes you can. You can produce antibodies that bind the active parts of the appropriate drugs, or that bind to the receptors in ways that block them without activating them. These will reduce or eliminate the effect of the drug on the receptor.
Absolutely:
For starters, if it blocks the drugs, what do you want to bet that you'll also block the effects of the natural compounds. Then those vaccinated will be something like a drug addict in withdrawal FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES. Everything would HURT. Just sitting around would hurt. Exercise would hurt more. Painkillers wouldn't work.
Imagine one of these kids in highschool - the worst of "whiny wimps" just sitting there. Sports would be agony. And that's before the unimunized jocks start beating on him to watch him squirm.
Then there are the feedback mechanisms modulating the number of receptors, production of neurotransmitters, and production of antibodies. The reduced performance of the neurotransmitter-receptor system will result in the increase in the number of receptors (already known to be part of the addiction mechanism) and/or the increase in the production of the neurotransmitter.
But with antibodies to naturally produced protiens, this could produce more stimulation of the immune system: More antibodies against the receptors. Inflamation (of the BRAIN!) in the affected sites. Possible immune cascade from the inflamation causing the production of antibodies to OTHER self-antigens, and a runaway autoimmune disease akin to a cross between Graves and Lupus.
Then there's the question of what this will do to other behavior. It's making a MAJOR change to the internal reward pathways of the brain. How will these people do in school? On the job? How will they respond to advertising? Political propaganda? Religious indoctrination?
There are indications that psycopathy is the result of a failure in an emotional pathway, leading to both loss of guilt feelings and risk-taking in an attempt to achieve any feeling at all. Is THIS the pathway in question? Will an "immunization" program raise the incidence of psychopathy from about 1% of the population to the bulk of it? Will we have a generation of used car salesmen, confidence men, gangsters, death-squad members, and political dictators?
Or is it NOT the same pathway, but one that produces some OTHER pathology when it fails? Will we find ourselves with a generation of some OTHER, formerly-rare, pathological stereotype as the bulk
of our population?
Fooling around with something as basic as the reward hardware of the mind is NOT something you can do and expect no undesirable side-effects.
Wouldn't NoDoz have been easier to carry?
That would be worse than coffee on the strung-out side, and wouldn't provide any water.
See if Jolt makes a Kosher edition around passover. I'm not sure what law corn syrup violates but Kosher Coke uses Sucrose, as does Canadian and some Southern Cokes.
I've given up on Jolt after they added corn syrup well BEFORE they changed the label - and I was wondering why I was feeling ill for months... Don't trust 'em any more. (Also my cafeine tolerance is down so Diet Pepsi does it for me - and is readily available.) But thanks.
As I understand it they get really picky about not eating ANYTHING that MIGHT contain a TRACE of something other than kosher wheat flour that COULD have been used to make bread. So corn, rye, millet, etc. in any form - including sweeteners - are out.
(There's one group, though, that considers corn syrup Kosher. But the manufacturers put BIG WARNING labels on things they certify about who certified it, so mainstream Kosher-keepers don't accidentally break their rule set.)
I would not be surprised if AL-queda did not frequent slashdot, for "up to the minute cutting edge ideas".
I'm sure AL-queda can figure out plenty of stuff like this for themselves.
The way to keep ahead is to keep open.
It is the lack of a free market to transport that food to market efficiently.
Yes, and do you know who is responsible for that? The US and Europe, with their lavish farm subsidies. If Western nations ever allowed the free market to operate in developing nations, problems with food and poverty in the world would be greatly reduced.
No, what's responsible for that - in Kosovo at least - is the UN's arms embargo. By disarming everybody who wasn't supported by an outside group (typically a large country), they left them at the mercy of those who WERE supported by such powers, and who wanted to eliminate them. Thus starvation, and genocide.
That's one special case. But there are plenty of other special cases.
For instance: Iraq under Sadam. Turns out (as siezed documents show) many of the high UN officials - and high officials from various UN member countries - were on-the-take from the Oil-for-Palaces program - whose gravy train ended with the invasion. For over a decade the UN stood by while Sadam slaughtered Iraqui citizens - and many of the members opposed the invasion right up to the end (then made nicey-nice to join in on the reconstruction gravy-train once the bribes stopped flowing). Any bets on how much of that was due to bought politicians rather than principled opposition?
Or take Biafra: Millions starved into death or plague, or masacred (with MACHETTIES - who needs guns?) because disarmament rendered them helpless before organized military opposition.
Starvation doesn't come from "greedy corporations" "wasting money". They'd LOVE to feed the world - they'd make MORE MONEY that way!
Starvation comes from government and proto-government intervention, through misguided policies or outright planned genocide.
The solution to genocide is allow the potential victims - which means EVERYBODY - to arm themselves for their own defense. The solution to starvation is to eliminate the governmental obstacles to people feeding themselves, whether by raising their own food or earning enough after-confiscation cash to buy it from others.
And the obstacle to both is governmental force, implemented either by malicious people or people too ignorant or stupid to understand that the SECOND-order effects of government programs often completely swamp and reverse the expected FIRST-order effects.
Dose anyone here regularly carry 12-pack boxes of cola on flights?
I used to carry large bottles or multiple cans of Jolt Cola on long air flights at one point. I'd be in caffeine withdrawal by the end of the flight otherwise (or strung out from substituting coffee) and couldn't drink ordinary colas due to an allergy to corn sweeteners.
Eventually Jolt switched to corn sweetener, too, I finally switched to commercial diet colas - and cut back on the caffeine. But I still carry a few on, and a sandwich, rather than be at the mercy of the flight's timing of drink and food delivery and food ingredient choices.
Because jolt is hard to find, I'd often carry enough for the far-end stay as well. And because stowed luggage is a pain, for short trips I'd try to do everything carryon. So if Jolt had come in 12-packs, yes, I'd have carried them on at times.
So it's easy for me to imagine other people among the millions of air-travelers - say ones with a strong preference for Coke and a long flight ahead on a Pepsi-serving airline - who might very well tote a 12-pack among their carryon luggage. Or who might not notice, in a rush of packing, that one of the Cokes they stuffed in their bag was a "winning can".
On another occasion, I was actually arrested at an airport because my keychain had a 2 cm long cheap pistol pendant on it. I am not kidding. This was many years pre-9/11, btw.
Long before the terrorism scare - in the decades of lull between the insurance bombings and hijackings-to-cuba and the use of boxcutters to hijack planes on 9/11 - I took a cross-country air flight. Unfortunately I had left a pocketknife in my carryon luggage (from a previous trip where it was checked baggage).
The pocket knife was a retracting-shield model (a workaround for anti-switchblade laws), with a shirt pocket clip, about the total length of a pen. They spotted it and had me open the bag for inspection.
I pointed out that it had been at the bottom of a carryon too big to access conveniently inside the plane, so obviously I wasn't trying to use it on the crew. I pointed out that it was of legal length and design, and offered to have them gate-check the bag so it wouldn't be accessable to me on the plane (or could they hold it for me until my return because it was kinda pricey). And I pointed out that I had a non-refundable ticket, so if I missed this plane due to delays could they please let the airline know that I'd missed it because they'd detained me so I wouldn't have to pay full-fare to take a later trip?
The security team didn't want to make a call that might cost somebody official some trouble and/or money, so they called the sherrif's detail. (County airport.) They didn't want to make that call either. Just before the plane was to go they passed me through.
This ended up with me on the plane with the knife in my shirt pocket. So if I'd really been a hijacker it would have been more convenient.
NOWadays they'd probably just confiscate it - and maybe make me miss the plane or bust me for having it if I complained. Hijacking planes with small cutting implements and using them to kill thousands of unrelated ground-dwellers is no longer a theoretical threat, and they've had lots of shaking-out of procedures for handling inadvertent carriers of undesired objects.
If security sees something they don't trust then they call the bomb experts. Simple. Better a false alarm then having a plane blow up.
This seems to give the X-ray operators the idea that some cans can contain electronics.
Yep.
So all a terrorist now has to do is make his detonator be as neat as the coke can, thanks to the handy photo's and a x-ray operator will think "oh a suspicous thing oh no wait I seen that presentation this is one of them cans no need to check further".
Nope.
The FIRST lesson for operators is that a can full of electronics MIGHT not be a bomb, and might not be known to the poor sap who had one in his carry-on lunch. So don't throw the lucky winner up against the wall and start punching him when he complains that he'll miss his plane.
Second: This tells the operators how to tell the DIFFERENCE between a can-bomb and a can-phone, so they don't even need to open the box if it's the latter.
Of course they won't just let the guy through with the phone. They'll haul him and his luggage aside and compare the image to their handouts of that PDF file. If they get a mismatch they'll still call the bomb squad. But if they get a match they'll tell him it looks like he got the lucky can, but we gotta open the bag to check it - and watch him call for his car.
Watching the harried commuter decide between making his non-refundable-ticket air flight and getting the free SUV (and camera crew) delivered to the airport would make a GREAT break from a boring day of looking at X-rays of business suits and toothbrushes.
Anyone care to explain xray photos in full color? In all the images, the PCBs are green, the coke is brownish, etc... how the hell does an xray machine do color? or are they simply colored after the fact for clarity?
It's called "false color", and has been used to improve visual display from remote sensing equipment for decades - and manual map making for centuries. (Think of a crop map with each field color-coded accroding to what is grown there.)
You could break the observed density of the material into classes, or X-ray with multiple wavelengths that are absorbed differently by different materials and map the combinations into classes.
Then you assign a color to each class. Even for monochrome density masks, just assigning a different color to ranges of density helps pick out shapes. But if you've got targets that bin into nice like-measureing clusters you can pick colors for each one that look like targets of interest in that bin would look in visible light: Green for fiberglass, dark for metal makes a PC board full of electronics LOOK like PC boards full of electronics. Brown for mostly-water makes cans of water-based drinks look like cola, and so on. This makes them easier to spot, easing operator training requirements and lowering error rates.
A little image processing on neighboring pixels can help you keep contiguous pieces colored the same even with noise and overlapping in the data. More spread-out image processing can help you recognize things like cylindrical objects containing a uniform substance, and give them a density change rather than rainbow mach bands, and so on.
So how are you going to manage that?
If you look at the X-Rays, the main difference between a real explosive device, and the GPS coke can, is that the GPS coke can just has electronics and batteries.
Simple:
- Use a small detonator, shaped like a battery, in the battery cluster.
- Substitute explosives for coke in the rest of the cans in the 12 pack.
But if I were a security type (especially on a military vessel - and MORE especially on, say, a carrierr) I'd be more concerned about a device composed of a satellite cellphone / GPS system (with custom software and enough batteries to keep it running in bursts for months) than eleven 12-oz cans of plastique and a detonator. Dandy spy tool - tracks the carrier group just by being there, and provides comm for the spy. Plausible denyability, too.
What I'd be more concerned about, with respect to terrorism, is fake "claim the car" cans.
Mossad (Israel's analog of the CIA) has already assasinated at least one Palestinian military leader by swapping his cellphone with tweaked with a hunk of plastique, set up to blow his head off when they called it and he answered. Now we know what the "winning cans" look like.
A terrorist could manufacture look-alikes, full of C4 and set up to blow when you hit the button. MUCH easier and cheaper to design and fabricate (especially for a terrorist operation with a billion-dollar bankroll) than the real ones. Most people coming across one of these when opening a 12- or 24-pack will immediately hit the button to claim the car. BOOM!
A few hundred of these slipped into shipments of Coke delivered to stores on the same day could cause a LOT of death and panic among the authorities before they figured out what was happening and got the word out - espeically if the outside of the can was part of the explosive so it isn't recognizable after, and they'd have to infer what was going on from finding most of the bomb victims in their kitchens near a just-opened 12-pack.
So if I find one of those cans, I'm going to take it out back and rig a jig with a LONG string to push the button from a distance the first time. B-)
(Interestingly, gun control in the US has always been about denying self-defense to the lower classes. But that's another thread.)
Knife control - especially switchblades, too. Specifically, certain immigrant waves (such as poor Itialians around WWI - WWII) who used it as their personal protection "weapon of choice". (And thus whose criminal classes would commonly chose it for intimidation, since carrying it would let them blend with the crowd.)
Switchblades aka automatic knives aren't illegal to own in most states. The law varies from state to state, and in Oregon, they are legal to buy and carry as long as they aren't concealed.
I think they're also allowed concealed under the same on-demand licensing as guns. (But I'm not an Oregonian so check that if you want to carry one.)
It's interesting WHY they're legal in Oregon:
Oregon has had legal open carry of guns for a long time, and on-demand licensing for concealed weapons carry as well. It also has a provision in its constitution that it can't pass laws that penalize some social and economic classes and not others.
It had an anti-switchblade law, like much of the rest of the US. But a person being tried for violating it argued that he could have carried a gun in the same way, which would have been at least as dangerous, but that guns were expensive and switchblades cheap. So the law was discriminating by income level, denying the poor self-defense options that were afforded to the more well-to-do.
The judge bought it and the law was thrown out.
(Interestingly, gun control in the US has always been about denying self-defense to the lower classes. But that's another thread.)
Does this mean that we can finally get rid of annoying antenna connector types such as RP-SMA and RP-TNC that were originally devised just to make it a pain in the ass to switch out factory antennas?
No. They explicitly kept that provision (including the part that required the manufacturers to switch to still newer pain-ion-the-backside unuque antenna connectors once third parties are marketing adapters for the old ones.)
They want to make it enough of a pain to install an uncertified combo that you can't do it by accident and unknowingly. (Of course the fact that most of us have been unaware that hooking up a cantenna WAS illegal proves that's bogus. But it didn't stop them from continuing it.)
IMHO they should have allowed the industry to collude to standardize one or a small set of connectors with defined signal limits for what the card can feed it on one side and what the antenna/transmission line can do on the other, and let the antenna and card vendors work to that. Then you could meet the FCC's targets with a O(M+N) rather than an O(M*N) solution, and eliminate the prolifertation of low-volume and thus pricey connectors.
It depends on how well she develops the ability. Walking upright makes you easier to catch, running upright makes you much harder to.
For a monkey or ape, which doesn't have the adaptations for it, running up right is slower than on all fours. (That's why they switch back to all four when in a hurry.)
The advantage of the two-legged walk for people is that it is lower-energy, not that it's faster. This lets us jog for a long time, at speeds that quickly overheat and exhaust prey animals until they drop from heat prostration.
People can outrun some horses in a very short sprint (though I wouldn't bet on it for quarterhorses). And they can jog down darn near anything. But in the middle distances other animals do better.
It may have been a defect when the first human did it, but it survived and we ended up all the better for it.
In particular it gave us a new hunting mode (like wolf packs but better) that, in combination with freeing the hands for weapon use, put us on top of the food chain and gave us the safety and leisure to develop agriculture and technology.
Could be. Worth looking into.
But I'd put my money on weakening of the arms, whether through loss of control or coordination through nerve damage or some other flu side-effect, making quadrapedal motion difficult.
For a four-legger like a dog this would be crippling. (Dogs can't do two-legs for long due to blood pressure issues.) But for a monkey or ape with both four and two legged gaits, it's just an annoyance: Just drop the one that doesn't work so well any more and you're hardly bothered. (Like a kid with a knee injury no longer skipping.)
How can this be possible? I thought the whole point of black holes being 'black' was because they had a spherical boundary the crossing thereof would result in an escape velocity greater than C.
If you have to exceed C to get going fast enough to coast out, when you fall you get accellerated to more than C as you coast in.
What's wrong with THAT picture?
It's pretty straightforward: a black hole has an event horizon, but nothing ever actually crosses it. The information can be retrieved from the black hole because it was never inside the event horizon.
Is that because things falling in go into a rapid orbit that doesn't decay enough to pass them through the horizon because they can't lose enough energy to finish falling in? Or is it related to the asymptopic time-slowdown as things approach the event horizon (which I thought was a relativistic artifact from the viewpoint of the distant observer, not something that also occurs in the coordinate system of the entering object)?