I tried voting on this, and Facebook's own voting system kept failing on some or other unspecified technical "error", so I wouldn't entirely blame apathy, and apathy is also engendered by not bothering to have a working technical system for voting.
If that's true, then Spectre's point is actually even more valid, because if they're more likely to hit certain localized regions then you by just avoiding calculating why and then avoiding those regions you could dramatically reduce the risk of being affected by a tornado even further.
A 1m sea-level rise by 2100 is the same as 5000 years? I think you need math lessons. 100 years is enough for a property to pass hands only a couple of generations. I have colleagues who have property that has been in their family for over 200 years. Hell, with advances in technology many of us here could easily be living well over 100 years. How do you put that in the same league as 5000 years?
You don't have toddlers, do you.
And the irony in your post, bashing people about how it's "not that hard", is that your advice is wrong. The mercury is not in liquid form, it is released as vapor. The correct thing to do is immediately open the doors and windows and leave the room for 15 minutes to allow the vapor can dissipate. I guess it wasn't as easy as you thought.
http://epa.gov/cfl/cflcleanup.htmlhttp://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/cfl.asp
So when your toddler pulls over a lamp and noone knowledgable happens to be watching (and you've just proven how easy it is to be ignorant), then he/she will lean in and look closely with curiosity breathing in big gulps of mercury vapors, just perfect for developing young brains.
Just make sure to make the subject line something like "Someone violating an Apple patent" or Apple won't be bothered to read it.
I say let them suffer and figure it out, they're making billions just suing others instead of improving their products.
Not true, if you were an Apple user you'd be practically working overtime trying to come up with ways to rationalize why and how this supposedly doesn't reflect on Apple specifically.
"Conspiracy theory"? Lol... a "conspiracy theory" for which Microsoft was taken to court and found guilty due to the actual evidence... I suppose the slashdot crowd are getting too young to remember these things, but is it too much to expect to even know the basics of one of the most famous historical antitrust cases in the history of the tech industry?
I think I see where your thinking is confused... you have been conditioned by cultural norms to believe that domestic violence is "bad" but that school bullying is "harmless". In reality, there is no qualitative difference between domestic abuse and bullying, it is virtually the identical thing.. same actions, same effects on victims, it's the same thing. We even have a defense called 'battered wife syndrome', but we haven't yet afforded bullying victims something like 'battered bullying victim syndrome'. This is only because mentally we are still operating under the indoctrination that bullying is "harmless".
Fortunately, this is slowly changing. The endless array of high-profile suicides of bullying victims, a.o. things, is raising public awareness that the problem is real.
Bullying is also a factor in fully two-thirds of school shootings, and in fact, in many school shootings, the shootings were not even random - but directed at the bullies (the media tends to usually leave this information out). Qualitatively, there is no difference between this and a battered wife that one day 'cracked'.
Actually, the only qualitative difference is the one that makes it even worse.. that the victims are not mentally formed adults, but the most vulnerable members of society.
It's not a straw man, it's an analogy, and you completely fail to respond to the arguments. "How they handle themselves" has little to do with the more important point: That members of society who have morals, and aren't sociopaths, actually believe that certain actions are wrong, and that you should take steps against those who commit them, and protect the innocent victims. To suggest that we do this in the adult world but expect the opposite for children is hypocritical and denotes a flawed, inconsistent moral system.
Trying to dismiss the analogy with false claims does not make your glaring inconsistency go away: Either we start blaming the victim in all these situations in adult society as well as for children (and get rid of laws criminalizing domestic abuse, because hey, it's the victim's fault) - or we need to accept that we need to be consistent, and that it is our moral failing if we blame five year old victims and put them into situations where they are unsafe and we fail to protect them.
Either way, the first step needs to come from the victim
Um, we're talking about five year olds here. Are you for real? Five year olds are especially vulnerable. Do you think a five year old has the thinking capacity of an adult? My God, I hope you are never placed anywhere remotely near in charge of any child whatsoever. You think the nation's five year olds must all just wake up tomorrow morning suddenly understanding what they need to do? Seriously? That's your big solution?
Hmm, let's apply this logic to a few other scenarios:
- An abusive husband likes to call his wife a 'stupid f-cking c-nt' and beat her, and you know what she needs to do (according to snsh), she needs to "keep her cool or joke at it, then he'll show her respect -- it all comes down to how she handles herself in those moments", you know.
- Here's another one: An abusive boss likes to push and spit on some of the employees and call them stupid useless idiots. What they need to do, is keep their cool or joke at it, then the boss will show them respect. It all comes down to how they handle themselves.
Does this seem stupid yet? It's bad enough when the victim is an adult, now you think a five year old should put up with it? Really? These actions are criminal when adults do them.
Assuming you're referring to this article in particular, let me define the most important word in the summary.
volunteer/välnti()r/
You don't understand how DNA works. If you have a brother and your brother "volunteers", congratulations, your brother has effectively "volunteered" your DNA (as it's possible to detect sibling matches, as well as other relations). That rather stretches the definition of "volunteer".
It's unlikely the police even expected 100% match here - they were more likely looking for a relative match.
The DNA on the lighter matched DNA from the rape itself
That would either prove they had consensual sex (assuming 16 is legal in the Netherlands), or it proves he raped her, but how does it prove he murdered her? That couldn't possibly have been someone else, after they'd done having sex?
The most likely explanation is that the DNA sample that they believed came from the assailant just happened to be at the crime scene for any of a million other reasons.
Reading the article, all it says is that traces were found 'on the schoolgirl's body' and on a lighter. So even if we take it face value, at worse it seems to "prove" that he might have been there for some reason... e.g. maybe had a smoke with her and possibly sex... that doesn't prove murder. They could've shagged, he could've left, and someone else could've murdered her.
The strange thing about this case is that they were probably more likely to be looking for a match on a relative. Due to the similarities in the DNA of relatives, this seems like a sneaky way to effectively get your DNA against your will (e.g. if you have one brother and your brother 'volunteers', your brother is effectively 'volunteering' your DNA as they can detect a sibling match)... that doesn't sound morally legitimate to me, seems like it would violate the 4th amendment or something if it were in the United States, I think.
The problem is that it is not the default. When you compress something with PNG, more often than not whatever program you're using will decide to use a full 24 bit
No, that is not the problem, and you're not understanding the problem at all. The problem is that some common image programs compress the PNG badly, even if the correct colorspace is selected. This has nothing at all to do with the colorspace. You can select the correct colorspace all day long and those applications will still produce poorly compressed PNGs with file sizes that are larger than they are supposed to be if they were compressed properly.
These application include older versions of Photoshop, as well as MS Paint.
There are several reasons for these problems (and why it's possible for this to occur); one of them is that PNG includes the possibility to choose from different compression algorithms per scanline. A PNG generating application is supposed to determine the optimal method, but lazy software applications do not bother.
Other reasons include saving excessive amounts of header information, and then there are specific applications that add even more nonsense (some of the Adobe apps).
Many people incorrectly blame the PNG format for these inefficiencies.
Some programs are more efficient than others when saving PNG files, this relates to implementation of the PNG compression used by the program. Many graphics programs (such as Apple's Preview software) save PNGs with large amounts of metadata and color-correction data that are generally unnecessary for Web viewing. Unoptimized PNG files from Adobe Fireworks are also notorious for this since they contain options to make the image editable in supported editors
DNA evidence contamination leads to review of 7,000 casesThe police in Victoria are reviewing 7,000 cases involving DNA evidence after they had to withdraw murder charges in a high profile cold case. Police now say they deeply regret having charged a man with the murders of Margaret Tapp and her daughter Seana, at their home in 1984. They charged Russell Gesah two weeks ago, but since then problems have emerged with the DNA evidence.
DNA rape sample procedures 'not adequate'Adam Scott, from Devon, was held for a couple of months after being accused of raping a woman in Manchester. The charges were dropped when it emerged a DNA sample had been contaminated at LGC Forensics.
Police Fear 'Serial Killer' Was Just DNA ContaminationA notorious German serial killer known as "the Phantom of Heilbronn" might not exist. Police believe DNA evidence which pointed to a 15-year trail of crimes across Germany was a case of contaminated cotton swabs.
I think it's almost certainly a false positive (or there's something else fishy about this story... e.g. perhaps it's a ruse to push broader DNA-collecting laws), for the simple reason that, unless it just slipped his mind that he committed a murder, the real murderer would never have volunteered his DNA.
If that's your experience, you're almost certainly using an inferior PNG encoder (yes, PNG compression works in ways that effectively allow 'bad implementations' to create larger files:/.. one of the big things that held it back was a common misconception that it gave inferior compression due to a popular image manipulation package (Photoshop) that had a shitty PNG implementation. With a proper encoder, basically the only time GIF should give you smaller filesizes, is on very small images (e.g. 10x10 pixels), where the size is anyway usually maybe a couple hundred bytes (though this can make some difference, depending on the scale of your application (e.g. if you were tasked on optimizing the size of something that appears on Google's front page that must be delivered trillions of times), it might still be worth bothering to figure out which is smaller in that case, but usually the difference is negligible).
As I see it it's quite simple. If you don't feel you have time to protect your patent then you obviously don't put enough value in it to believe it's worth protecting.... The "I don't have time" argument is bollocks
Do tell how you have time to sift through all existing patents plus 40,000 new patents per year. That is 109 new patents per day, if you work 12-hour days 365 days per year, that means you are sifting through some 9 patents per hour, just to keep up with new patents. And you still have time to invent?
"Fiscal uncertainty" isn't going to dissuade anyone from making a buck if it can be made
Lol.. the whole meaning of the word "uncertainty" points itself to an unknown as to whether "it can be made" - that's the whole point.
And you really think risk is not a factor in investment? Really!? Are you fucking serious? How did you get +5? This is one of the most basic things you'll ever learn in economics.
Two points: One, it's the end of the second tech bubble (in spite of those who have attempted to assure otherwise, we have had a tech bubble), and two, those 'piles of cash' corporations are supposedly 'sitting on' are priced in post-fiscal-cliff dollars, they aren't as much as they seem.
The whole thing stinks to me, some guy not even two months in charge takes this much flak for one program aired on such a huge network that didn't even contain the name of the accused? Puh-lease - 10 to 1 there is some other kind of political wrangling going on here, and this is just an excuse.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried voting on this, and Facebook's own voting system kept failing on some or other unspecified technical "error", so I wouldn't entirely blame apathy, and apathy is also engendered by not bothering to have a working technical system for voting.
If that's true, then Spectre's point is actually even more valid, because if they're more likely to hit certain localized regions then you by just avoiding calculating why and then avoiding those regions you could dramatically reduce the risk of being affected by a tornado even further.
A 1m sea-level rise by 2100 is the same as 5000 years? I think you need math lessons. 100 years is enough for a property to pass hands only a couple of generations. I have colleagues who have property that has been in their family for over 200 years. Hell, with advances in technology many of us here could easily be living well over 100 years. How do you put that in the same league as 5000 years?
You don't have toddlers, do you. And the irony in your post, bashing people about how it's "not that hard", is that your advice is wrong. The mercury is not in liquid form, it is released as vapor. The correct thing to do is immediately open the doors and windows and leave the room for 15 minutes to allow the vapor can dissipate. I guess it wasn't as easy as you thought. http://epa.gov/cfl/cflcleanup.html http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/cfl.asp So when your toddler pulls over a lamp and noone knowledgable happens to be watching (and you've just proven how easy it is to be ignorant), then he/she will lean in and look closely with curiosity breathing in big gulps of mercury vapors, just perfect for developing young brains.
Just make sure to make the subject line something like "Someone violating an Apple patent" or Apple won't be bothered to read it. I say let them suffer and figure it out, they're making billions just suing others instead of improving their products.
if I were an Apple user
Not true, if you were an Apple user you'd be practically working overtime trying to come up with ways to rationalize why and how this supposedly doesn't reflect on Apple specifically.
Load it with one round, then when you discharge it, it is an unloaded firearm.
"Conspiracy theory"? Lol ... a "conspiracy theory" for which Microsoft was taken to court and found guilty due to the actual evidence ... I suppose the slashdot crowd are getting too young to remember these things, but is it too much to expect to even know the basics of one of the most famous historical antitrust cases in the history of the tech industry?
Good straw man argument
I think I see where your thinking is confused ... you have been conditioned by cultural norms to believe that domestic violence is "bad" but that school bullying is "harmless". In reality, there is no qualitative difference between domestic abuse and bullying, it is virtually the identical thing .. same actions, same effects on victims, it's the same thing. We even have a defense called 'battered wife syndrome', but we haven't yet afforded bullying victims something like 'battered bullying victim syndrome'. This is only because mentally we are still operating under the indoctrination that bullying is "harmless".
Fortunately, this is slowly changing. The endless array of high-profile suicides of bullying victims, a.o. things, is raising public awareness that the problem is real.
Bullying is also a factor in fully two-thirds of school shootings, and in fact, in many school shootings, the shootings were not even random - but directed at the bullies (the media tends to usually leave this information out). Qualitatively, there is no difference between this and a battered wife that one day 'cracked'.
Actually, the only qualitative difference is the one that makes it even worse .. that the victims are not mentally formed adults, but the most vulnerable members of society.
It's not a straw man, it's an analogy, and you completely fail to respond to the arguments. "How they handle themselves" has little to do with the more important point: That members of society who have morals, and aren't sociopaths, actually believe that certain actions are wrong, and that you should take steps against those who commit them, and protect the innocent victims. To suggest that we do this in the adult world but expect the opposite for children is hypocritical and denotes a flawed, inconsistent moral system.
Trying to dismiss the analogy with false claims does not make your glaring inconsistency go away: Either we start blaming the victim in all these situations in adult society as well as for children (and get rid of laws criminalizing domestic abuse, because hey, it's the victim's fault) - or we need to accept that we need to be consistent, and that it is our moral failing if we blame five year old victims and put them into situations where they are unsafe and we fail to protect them.
Either way, the first step needs to come from the victim
Um, we're talking about five year olds here. Are you for real? Five year olds are especially vulnerable. Do you think a five year old has the thinking capacity of an adult? My God, I hope you are never placed anywhere remotely near in charge of any child whatsoever. You think the nation's five year olds must all just wake up tomorrow morning suddenly understanding what they need to do? Seriously? That's your big solution?
Hmm, let's apply this logic to a few other scenarios:
- An abusive husband likes to call his wife a 'stupid f-cking c-nt' and beat her, and you know what she needs to do (according to snsh), she needs to "keep her cool or joke at it, then he'll show her respect -- it all comes down to how she handles herself in those moments", you know.
- Here's another one: An abusive boss likes to push and spit on some of the employees and call them stupid useless idiots. What they need to do, is keep their cool or joke at it, then the boss will show them respect. It all comes down to how they handle themselves.
Does this seem stupid yet? It's bad enough when the victim is an adult, now you think a five year old should put up with it? Really? These actions are criminal when adults do them.
"traces found on the schoolgirl's body."
Which could mean he sneezed on her. I took that to imply 'semen' though, but even then, it doesn't prove murder.
Assuming you're referring to this article in particular, let me define the most important word in the summary. volunteer/välnti()r/
You don't understand how DNA works. If you have a brother and your brother "volunteers", congratulations, your brother has effectively "volunteered" your DNA (as it's possible to detect sibling matches, as well as other relations). That rather stretches the definition of "volunteer".
It's unlikely the police even expected 100% match here - they were more likely looking for a relative match.
The DNA on the lighter matched DNA from the rape itself
That would either prove they had consensual sex (assuming 16 is legal in the Netherlands), or it proves he raped her, but how does it prove he murdered her? That couldn't possibly have been someone else, after they'd done having sex?
The most likely explanation is that the DNA sample that they believed came from the assailant just happened to be at the crime scene for any of a million other reasons.
Reading the article, all it says is that traces were found 'on the schoolgirl's body' and on a lighter. So even if we take it face value, at worse it seems to "prove" that he might have been there for some reason ... e.g. maybe had a smoke with her and possibly sex ... that doesn't prove murder. They could've shagged, he could've left, and someone else could've murdered her.
The strange thing about this case is that they were probably more likely to be looking for a match on a relative. Due to the similarities in the DNA of relatives, this seems like a sneaky way to effectively get your DNA against your will (e.g. if you have one brother and your brother 'volunteers', your brother is effectively 'volunteering' your DNA as they can detect a sibling match) ... that doesn't sound morally legitimate to me, seems like it would violate the 4th amendment or something if it were in the United States, I think.
@jandrese: Oops, sorry, I thought the above reply was a reply to my response ...
The problem is that it is not the default. When you compress something with PNG, more often than not whatever program you're using will decide to use a full 24 bit
No, that is not the problem, and you're not understanding the problem at all. The problem is that some common image programs compress the PNG badly, even if the correct colorspace is selected. This has nothing at all to do with the colorspace. You can select the correct colorspace all day long and those applications will still produce poorly compressed PNGs with file sizes that are larger than they are supposed to be if they were compressed properly.
These application include older versions of Photoshop, as well as MS Paint.
There are several reasons for these problems (and why it's possible for this to occur); one of them is that PNG includes the possibility to choose from different compression algorithms per scanline. A PNG generating application is supposed to determine the optimal method, but lazy software applications do not bother.
Other reasons include saving excessive amounts of header information, and then there are specific applications that add even more nonsense (some of the Adobe apps).
Many people incorrectly blame the PNG format for these inefficiencies.
There is more information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics#File_size_and_optimization_software
Some programs are more efficient than others when saving PNG files, this relates to implementation of the PNG compression used by the program. Many graphics programs (such as Apple's Preview software) save PNGs with large amounts of metadata and color-correction data that are generally unnecessary for Web viewing. Unoptimized PNG files from Adobe Fireworks are also notorious for this since they contain options to make the image editable in supported editors
What if it's a false positive?
Also, for those who think this is extremely unlikely and automatically believe DNA evidence is some sort of slam-dunk:
Teenager wrongly accused of rape (and imprisoned) because of DNA contamination (fortunately, it was picked up in this case)
DNA evidence contamination leads to review of 7,000 cases The police in Victoria are reviewing 7,000 cases involving DNA evidence after they had to withdraw murder charges in a high profile cold case. Police now say they deeply regret having charged a man with the murders of Margaret Tapp and her daughter Seana, at their home in 1984. They charged Russell Gesah two weeks ago, but since then problems have emerged with the DNA evidence.
DNA rape sample procedures 'not adequate' Adam Scott, from Devon, was held for a couple of months after being accused of raping a woman in Manchester. The charges were dropped when it emerged a DNA sample had been contaminated at LGC Forensics.
Police Fear 'Serial Killer' Was Just DNA Contamination A notorious German serial killer known as "the Phantom of Heilbronn" might not exist. Police believe DNA evidence which pointed to a 15-year trail of crimes across Germany was a case of contaminated cotton swabs.
Aerosolized Vaccine as an Unexpected Source of False-Positive Bordetella pertussis PCR Results etc.
I think it's almost certainly a false positive (or there's something else fishy about this story ... e.g. perhaps it's a ruse to push broader DNA-collecting laws), for the simple reason that, unless it just slipped his mind that he committed a murder, the real murderer would never have volunteered his DNA.
If that's your experience, you're almost certainly using an inferior PNG encoder (yes, PNG compression works in ways that effectively allow 'bad implementations' to create larger files :/ .. one of the big things that held it back was a common misconception that it gave inferior compression due to a popular image manipulation package (Photoshop) that had a shitty PNG implementation. With a proper encoder, basically the only time GIF should give you smaller filesizes, is on very small images (e.g. 10x10 pixels), where the size is anyway usually maybe a couple hundred bytes (though this can make some difference, depending on the scale of your application (e.g. if you were tasked on optimizing the size of something that appears on Google's front page that must be delivered trillions of times), it might still be worth bothering to figure out which is smaller in that case, but usually the difference is negligible).
As I see it it's quite simple. If you don't feel you have time to protect your patent then you obviously don't put enough value in it to believe it's worth protecting. ... The "I don't have time" argument is bollocks
Do tell how you have time to sift through all existing patents plus 40,000 new patents per year. That is 109 new patents per day, if you work 12-hour days 365 days per year, that means you are sifting through some 9 patents per hour, just to keep up with new patents. And you still have time to invent?
"Fiscal uncertainty" isn't going to dissuade anyone from making a buck if it can be made
Lol .. the whole meaning of the word "uncertainty" points itself to an unknown as to whether "it can be made" - that's the whole point.
And you really think risk is not a factor in investment? Really!? Are you fucking serious? How did you get +5? This is one of the most basic things you'll ever learn in economics.
Two points: One, it's the end of the second tech bubble (in spite of those who have attempted to assure otherwise, we have had a tech bubble), and two, those 'piles of cash' corporations are supposedly 'sitting on' are priced in post-fiscal-cliff dollars, they aren't as much as they seem.
The whole thing stinks to me, some guy not even two months in charge takes this much flak for one program aired on such a huge network that didn't even contain the name of the accused? Puh-lease - 10 to 1 there is some other kind of political wrangling going on here, and this is just an excuse.
If you want to do more than skim the surface of racism, it helps to look at the issue in relation to power structures
OK, let's start by considering that the president of the most powerful country in the world is black.