Truth is NOT an absolute defence against libel in some jurisdictions. Two that I am aware of are New South Wales, Australia (where I live and work as a journalist and therefore am required to have a working knowledge of these things) and Switzerland, where Andrew Jennings was sued by the IOC after writing 'The New Lords of the Rings' because it contained a bunch of true statements that upset former fascist Juan-Antonio Samaranch.
TWIAVBP, and assuming that speech enjoys the same protections elsewhere as it does in the US is unfortunately a good way to end up looking silly.
What muppet modded this insightful? If diseases didn't exist, then we wouldn't need immune systems, so we wouldn't be vulnerable to infection because there would be nothing to infect us.
I think the problem is not the tool itself, but how poorly it usually works. The sound quality is often very poor, the signal is unreliable and in countries like Australia (big land area, low population) the geographical coverage is abysmal.
It's very much an 'insufficiently advanced' technology.
What monopoly? There are several decent search engines and dozens of others. Google's monopoly is of 'search engines called Google' only.
I suspect Google doesn't filter for these sites because to do so would be expensive and time-consuming, and would cause the same arms race between sites and Google that we see in email.
"Genetic engineering on humans puts me in mind of Hitler and his master race."
There always seems to be an undercurrent of this whenever human cloning is discussed.
I shudder to think what would have happened if Hitler had implemented a massive cloning program when he came to power in 1933. By 1939 he'd have been able to invade Poland with an army of terrifying, blond-haired, blue-eyed...
The fundamental problem with a weapon like this is that it's even more indiscriminate than a high-explosive bomb. It will take out essential services that are keeping alive non-combatants - and people who aren't even capable of being combatants.
"its not considered unsolicited advertising if you have prior business with the entity"
Only because direct-marketing scum have brainwashed us into believing that certain types of business have special rights to intrude on our time and waste it to their commercial ends.
Do you really believe that absolutely anyone you have ever done business with, of any kind, suddenly has the right to contact you, at any time, to attempt to renew or continue that business? Your bank? You insurance agency? Your plumber? Joe's Cabs? Pizza Heaven? Wal-mart?
It's total nonsense. Business transactions are one-offs. If I want to do business with you again I will contact you. If you attempt to waste my time, not only will you likely cop an earful of abuse but there is no way I will do business with you ever again.
While direct marketing exists -- be it by phone, snail mail, or people ringing your doorbell -- spammers will rightly point to it as providing moral justification for their activities. I see no qualitative difference between someone advertising Viagra in my Inbox and someone phoning me up to see if I want to sell my house. It's all an unnecessary intrusion on my time. A plague on the lot of them, and on fools who value their personal time so little as to tolerate them.
This has sort of been tried. Back in the 30s to 50s all sorts of derailleur designs were tried, and some did sit above the sprockets. The problem is, to change gear in this location you have to shove around a section of chain that's under tension because it's between teh chainring and sprockets.
This mean, among other things, that shifting gets harder when you are putting a grater load through the chain... which is often when you most want to change gear!
Nevertheless, this is how front derailleurs work - they crudely shove a tensioned chain around from one chainring to another. It's not elegant and even with recent improvements in the shape of chainring and sprocket teeth to make it easier to move the chain between them, it sometimes works poorly.
From my very vague recollection of Whitt and Wilson's "Bicycling Science" you can decelerate a standard upright bicycle at about 6 m/s^2 with just the front brake, and only about 4 m/s^2 with just the rear brake. If you're only going to have one brake ona bike, you want it on the front.
As other posters have pointed out, you can also decelerate a fixed-wheel bike by pushing against the pedals. For non-cyclists who aren't familiar with fixed-wheel bikes, there's no freewheel. If the back wheel is turning, so are the pedals.
Elliptical chain rings have come and gone time and time again over the last few decades. Most recently, US rider Bobby Julich used them in the time trial at the world championships last months. You can just see them in this picture.
The bottom line is that they don't seem to make a significant difference. Bike racing - and especially time trialling - is pretty brutally selective. If something makes you go faster, it shows up in your times, and, like the aerodynamic handlebars everyone started using in the late 80s, it gets adopted very quickly, or the UCI bans it.
If elliptical chainrings made you go faster, everyone would race on them.
35-40lbs is light for a downhill bike. I ride with a guy who likes to throw himself off improbable drops and indulge in other silliness. He rides a downhill bike that tips the scales at 55lbs, and - being a fit sod - he rides it uphill too.
Weight isn't the issue. Shaft drives are simply less efficient than chain drives because of friction between the bevel gears. If you're trying to go as fast as possible (and I can't see any other point of building a carbon fiber recumbent) then you don't want to be throwing away 5-10 percent of the feeble output of your human power plant in transmission losses.
Your typical bike helmet is designed to reduce the deceleration experienced by your brain to levels that won't cause serious injury in a crash at low speed (typically below 10 mph), with no other vehicle involved. In a collision with a half-ton truck doing 50mph, you're cactus if it hits your head, regardless of whether or not you have ten ounces of styrofoam wrapped round your skull.
Helmets are extremely useful for bouncing low-hanging branches off your head when mountain biking and for mitigating the consequences of incompetent riding and bad luck. Good example: at the cycling website where I'm an editor we recently recieved a letter from a reader who was very glad he'd been wearing a helmet when he crashed. He'd been trying to wipe glass off his tyres with a tyre lever while riding. If he'd been concentrating on riding instead of a pointless ritual (any glass that's going to cause a puncture is through your tyres within seconds of you hitting it, long before you have time to wipe it off) he wouldn't have crashed. Okay, so if you're going to ride like a nob, wear a helmet, but don't kid yourself it'll make any difference when Jo Sixpack in his/her SUV fails to see you.
The reason why some people get so heated about this issue is that the constant calls to 'wear your helmet' that we hear distract from the things that actually help make cyclists safer: better road behaviour by those in control of the vehicles that kill us, and a higher level of traffic skill and awareness on our part. It also seems that the introduction of mandatory helmet use in Australia and New Zealand led to a reduction in cycling, though the statistics are controversial to say the least.
As the British medical Association (which supports the encouragement of helmet use but not its mandation) puts it: "Focussing on cycle helmets as the answer to reducing cycle accidents could detract resources from other more effective means of accident prevention."
I have a vague recollection of reading somewhere (how's *that* for a cite) that tech author Cary Lu was a noted hater of computer noise. His solution was to use external SCSI drives in the next room, connected to his Mac by cables through the wall.
An advantage of digital I've not seen mentioned yet is the speed with which you get results. You take shots, you plug the camera into your computer (or yank the card from the camera and put it in your card reader) and - boom! - there are your shots, all ready for printing, messing about with in Photoshop, sending to friends etc etc. No dropping a roll off at the lab, waiting, going back for it, scanning, ordering prints etc etc.
Now, I know this is only really important for some classes of pro photographers, but as a 'casual' photographer I have taken more pics with the Nikon 950 I picked up cheap a year ago than in the previous several years with the Canon film SLR that's gathering dust on the shelf over there, and the instant gratification of digital is a big part of the reason.
A related advantage is that you can review your pics on the camera's LCD immediately after you've taken them, and eliminate total duds straight away.
A downside, so I don't come across as shilling too much for digital: if you're travelling, with no way to dump images off your camera's flash card, you're stuffed when you reach the capacity. With film, you just buy more rolls; the equivalent 'buy more and bigger cards' gets spendy quickly.
I'm saving up for the magnesium-bodied, Japanese-made Canon 10D over the plastic-bodied, Taiwanese-made 300D, but I'm fully aware I may just be being a hardware snob.
That SciAm article is woefully out of date. A test for EPO was introduced at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and successfully used to nab cross-country skier Johann Muhlegg. Several other athletes have also tested positive for EPO since then.
The test isn't cheap to do, though, so anti-doping agencies tend to run a very few random tests, and use the EPO test when there is already reason to be suspicious. That's what happened in Muhlegg's case - he consistently exhibited a red blood cell level that was just under 50 percent (EPO boosts red blood cell production, increasing the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood; many sports stop you competing on 'health grounds' if your blood contains more than 50 percent red cells).
The IOC no longer sets anti-doping policy; that's the job of WADA, the World
Anti-Doping Agency. WADA sets policy that governments and sports governing
bodies are effectively obliged to implement, because if they don't the IOC can
yank their right to appear at the Olympics.
WADA has just decided to remove
caffeine and pseudoephedrine from the 2004
Prohibited List, and while this hasn't beem explained by WADA, the presumed
rationale is that while they definitely have performance-enhancing (ergogenic)
effects, these two substances do not pose a substantial threat to health. It's
a controversial
move.
Just about everything that is on the controlled list does have negative health
effects. Control of drugs in sport is supposed to be about protecting the health
of athletes, though this point usually gets lost in drug-warrior ranting about
catching 'cheats'.
Health is the only remotely rational basis for restricting what substances
and methods athletes may or may not use to enhance performance, in my opinion.
The alternative is hand-waving about fairness and the purity of sport, and arbitrary
decisions about what is therefore permitted and what isn't.
However, I think a precautionary principle should also apply: if an ergogenic
substance or method is not demonstrated to pose a nil or very low risk to athlete's
health it should be banned. The idea there is to discourage athletes from messing
about with experimental drugs and techniques that may turn out to have negative
effects in the long term.
Ergogenic gene therapy gets caught by the precautionary principal. It's way
to early to tell if it's even safe for people whose lives it might save (and
I hope for the sake of people like the poster with Cystic Fibrosis and Celiac
Disease that it does turn out to be safe and effective). There's no way
we should be letting athletes mess about with gene therapy just so they can
kick a ball harder or run faster.
Slashdot Mirror
He took Bill Gates from the ancient gallery.
And he walked on down the hall.
You can do this with Tweak-UI. More info here
The Apple Bandaï Pippin was Apple's attempt at a console. One from the 'What were they thinking?' file. More info here
Once more with four-part harmony and feeling:
Truth is NOT an absolute defence against libel in some jurisdictions. Two that I am aware of are New South Wales, Australia (where I live and work as a journalist and therefore am required to have a working knowledge of these things) and Switzerland, where Andrew Jennings was sued by the IOC after writing 'The New Lords of the Rings' because it contained a bunch of true statements that upset former fascist Juan-Antonio Samaranch.
TWIAVBP, and assuming that speech enjoys the same protections elsewhere as it does in the US is unfortunately a good way to end up looking silly.
that's a long shift.
What muppet modded this insightful? If diseases didn't exist, then we wouldn't need immune systems, so we wouldn't be vulnerable to infection because there would be nothing to infect us.
The argument is destroyed by its own premise.
Learn to think, FFS.
I think the problem is not the tool itself, but how poorly it usually works. The sound quality is often very poor, the signal is unreliable and in countries like Australia (big land area, low population) the geographical coverage is abysmal.
It's very much an 'insufficiently advanced' technology.
Damn handy, though.
What's annoying is calls to other people's phones.
In summary, it's the old saying: never try to extort more than it costs to have you killed.
What monopoly? There are several decent search engines and dozens of others. Google's monopoly is of 'search engines called Google' only.
I suspect Google doesn't filter for these sites because to do so would be expensive and time-consuming, and would cause the same arms race between sites and Google that we see in email.
"Genetic engineering on humans puts me in mind of Hitler and his master race."
There always seems to be an undercurrent of this whenever human cloning is discussed.
I shudder to think what would have happened if Hitler had implemented a massive cloning program when he came to power in 1933. By 1939 he'd have been able to invade Poland with an army of terrifying, blond-haired, blue-eyed ...
five-and-a-half-year-olds.
Scary stuff indeed.
Mod parent up!
The fundamental problem with a weapon like this is that it's even more indiscriminate than a high-explosive bomb. It will take out essential services that are keeping alive non-combatants - and people who aren't even capable of being combatants.
"its not considered unsolicited advertising if you have prior business with the entity"
Only because direct-marketing scum have brainwashed us into believing that certain types of business have special rights to intrude on our time and waste it to their commercial ends.
Do you really believe that absolutely anyone you have ever done business with, of any kind, suddenly has the right to contact you, at any time, to attempt to renew or continue that business? Your bank? You insurance agency? Your plumber? Joe's Cabs? Pizza Heaven? Wal-mart?
It's total nonsense. Business transactions are one-offs. If I want to do business with you again I will contact you. If you attempt to waste my time, not only will you likely cop an earful of abuse but there is no way I will do business with you ever again.
While direct marketing exists -- be it by phone, snail mail, or people ringing your doorbell -- spammers will rightly point to it as providing moral justification for their activities. I see no qualitative difference between someone advertising Viagra in my Inbox and someone phoning me up to see if I want to sell my house. It's all an unnecessary intrusion on my time. A plague on the lot of them, and on fools who value their personal time so little as to tolerate them.
This mean, among other things, that shifting gets harder when you are putting a grater load through the chain... which is often when you most want to change gear!
Nevertheless, this is how front derailleurs work - they crudely shove a tensioned chain around from one chainring to another. It's not elegant and even with recent improvements in the shape of chainring and sprocket teeth to make it easier to move the chain between them, it sometimes works poorly.
From my very vague recollection of Whitt and Wilson's "Bicycling Science" you can decelerate a standard upright bicycle at about 6 m/s^2 with just the front brake, and only about 4 m/s^2 with just the rear brake. If you're only going to have one brake ona bike, you want it on the front.
As other posters have pointed out, you can also decelerate a fixed-wheel bike by pushing against the pedals. For non-cyclists who aren't familiar with fixed-wheel bikes, there's no freewheel. If the back wheel is turning, so are the pedals.
Elliptical chain rings have come and gone time and time again over the last few decades. Most recently, US rider Bobby Julich used them in the time trial at the world championships last months. You can just see them in this picture.
The bottom line is that they don't seem to make a significant difference. Bike racing - and especially time trialling - is pretty brutally selective. If something makes you go faster, it shows up in your times, and, like the aerodynamic handlebars everyone started using in the late 80s, it gets adopted very quickly, or the UCI bans it.
If elliptical chainrings made you go faster, everyone would race on them.
35-40lbs is light for a downhill bike. I ride with a guy who likes to throw himself off improbable drops and indulge in other silliness. He rides a downhill bike that tips the scales at 55lbs, and - being a fit sod - he rides it uphill too.
Weight isn't the issue. Shaft drives are simply less efficient than chain drives because of friction between the bevel gears. If you're trying to go as fast as possible (and I can't see any other point of building a carbon fiber recumbent) then you don't want to be throwing away 5-10 percent of the feeble output of your human power plant in transmission losses.
Your typical bike helmet is designed to reduce the deceleration experienced by your brain to levels that won't cause serious injury in a crash at low speed (typically below 10 mph), with no other vehicle involved. In a collision with a half-ton truck doing 50mph, you're cactus if it hits your head, regardless of whether or not you have ten ounces of styrofoam wrapped round your skull.
Helmets are extremely useful for bouncing low-hanging branches off your head when mountain biking and for mitigating the consequences of incompetent riding and bad luck. Good example: at the cycling website where I'm an editor we recently recieved a letter from a reader who was very glad he'd been wearing a helmet when he crashed. He'd been trying to wipe glass off his tyres with a tyre lever while riding. If he'd been concentrating on riding instead of a pointless ritual (any glass that's going to cause a puncture is through your tyres within seconds of you hitting it, long before you have time to wipe it off) he wouldn't have crashed. Okay, so if you're going to ride like a nob, wear a helmet, but don't kid yourself it'll make any difference when Jo Sixpack in his/her SUV fails to see you.
The reason why some people get so heated about this issue is that the constant calls to 'wear your helmet' that we hear distract from the things that actually help make cyclists safer: better road behaviour by those in control of the vehicles that kill us, and a higher level of traffic skill and awareness on our part. It also seems that the introduction of mandatory helmet use in Australia and New Zealand led to a reduction in cycling, though the statistics are controversial to say the least.
As the British medical Association (which supports the encouragement of helmet use but not its mandation) puts it: "Focussing on cycle helmets as the answer to reducing cycle accidents could detract resources from other more effective means of accident prevention."
I have a vague recollection of reading somewhere (how's *that* for a cite) that tech author Cary Lu was a noted hater of computer noise. His solution was to use external SCSI drives in the next room, connected to his Mac by cables through the wall.
An advantage of digital I've not seen mentioned yet is the speed with which you get results. You take shots, you plug the camera into your computer (or yank the card from the camera and put it in your card reader) and - boom! - there are your shots, all ready for printing, messing about with in Photoshop, sending to friends etc etc. No dropping a roll off at the lab, waiting, going back for it, scanning, ordering prints etc etc.
Now, I know this is only really important for some classes of pro photographers, but as a 'casual' photographer I have taken more pics with the Nikon 950 I picked up cheap a year ago than in the previous several years with the Canon film SLR that's gathering dust on the shelf over there, and the instant gratification of digital is a big part of the reason.
A related advantage is that you can review your pics on the camera's LCD immediately after you've taken them, and eliminate total duds straight away.
A downside, so I don't come across as shilling too much for digital: if you're travelling, with no way to dump images off your camera's flash card, you're stuffed when you reach the capacity. With film, you just buy more rolls; the equivalent 'buy more and bigger cards' gets spendy quickly.
I'm saving up for the magnesium-bodied, Japanese-made Canon 10D over the plastic-bodied, Taiwanese-made 300D, but I'm fully aware I may just be being a hardware snob.
When you choose to play a sport, you choose to abide by its rules.
That SciAm article is woefully out of date. A test for EPO was introduced at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and successfully used to nab cross-country skier Johann Muhlegg. Several other athletes have also tested positive for EPO since then.
The test isn't cheap to do, though, so anti-doping agencies tend to run a very few random tests, and use the EPO test when there is already reason to be suspicious. That's what happened in Muhlegg's case - he consistently exhibited a red blood cell level that was just under 50 percent (EPO boosts red blood cell production, increasing the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood; many sports stop you competing on 'health grounds' if your blood contains more than 50 percent red cells).
The IOC no longer sets anti-doping policy; that's the job of WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency. WADA sets policy that governments and sports governing bodies are effectively obliged to implement, because if they don't the IOC can yank their right to appear at the Olympics.
WADA has just decided to remove caffeine and pseudoephedrine from the 2004 Prohibited List, and while this hasn't beem explained by WADA, the presumed rationale is that while they definitely have performance-enhancing (ergogenic) effects, these two substances do not pose a substantial threat to health. It's a controversial move.
Similarly, there have been calls for the control of use of creatine, which is also generally accepted to have some fairly minor ergogenic effects; but any health negatives are unproven, so it hasn't been controlled.
Just about everything that is on the controlled list does have negative health effects. Control of drugs in sport is supposed to be about protecting the health of athletes, though this point usually gets lost in drug-warrior ranting about catching 'cheats'.
Health is the only remotely rational basis for restricting what substances and methods athletes may or may not use to enhance performance, in my opinion. The alternative is hand-waving about fairness and the purity of sport, and arbitrary decisions about what is therefore permitted and what isn't.
However, I think a precautionary principle should also apply: if an ergogenic substance or method is not demonstrated to pose a nil or very low risk to athlete's health it should be banned. The idea there is to discourage athletes from messing about with experimental drugs and techniques that may turn out to have negative effects in the long term.
Ergogenic gene therapy gets caught by the precautionary principal. It's way to early to tell if it's even safe for people whose lives it might save (and I hope for the sake of people like the poster with Cystic Fibrosis and Celiac Disease that it does turn out to be safe and effective). There's no way we should be letting athletes mess about with gene therapy just so they can kick a ball harder or run faster.
These parents just need to send their kids to school in smaller versions of their own tin-foil beanies.