First, while nature didn't intend cows to eat corn, I doubt it intended them to eat high concentrations of flaxseeds either. (And I don't really think nature intends anything, not being a person). Second, if you would RTFA, you would see that your suggestion, which is a good idea by the way, is also one that TFA suggests! Third, who said genetically engineered? The article didn't, the summary didn't, and not even the headline did, which is well above par for Slashdot fearmongering! They're talking about selective breeding. And it sounds like the gene they're looking for makes cows produce less methane by virtue of converting more food energy into muscle, which means they'll have less food fermenting into methane in their stomachs over long periods. I could be wrong, but I'd imagine that would have a byproduct of making the beef leaner.
RTFA, that's exactly what they're suggesting, in addition to breeding out the genes that make them overproduce methane. In fact, read your own link, too, because it suggests creating new bacteria that don't make as much methane, which is a bit more radical than simple selective breeding...
They are proposing multiple solutions that can work together. Solution one, the one that makes for a good headline, is to use selective breeding to select against the genes that cause an overproduction of methane in the cow's gut, though they're also looking at genes that make the cow more efficient about converting food to muscle, so the food will ferment less in their stomachs. Solution two is to get them on a high energy diet. They make methane because the food they eat ferments in their stomach. Corn ferments a lot. Grass ferments a lot too, but not as much as corn. Higher fat vegetable sources like seeds don't ferment nearly as much, but are very expensive compared to corn or grass.
To answer your question, and that of all the other people being clever, the article says they produce less methane in their gut, not that they burp less...
Various music labels have argued that anything more than a 2x penalty for commercial copyright infringement is unconstitutional, when they themselves got caught selling albums featuring music to which they hold no license. Meanwhile, they argue in court that 4000x penalties are FINE for non-commercial infringement, and in fact, are lobbying Congress HARD to bump that up from 4000x to 150,000x. Hasn't gone poorly for them, I'm not so sure it's a bad practice;)
RTFA. It's not just the one date. It's also the fact that Best Buy KNOWS when it was replaced, and it was AFTER she was informed she was being sued. The chronology is set. It happened in this order. 1) (Unlicensed?) investigators find that this user account "tereastarr@KaZaA" is sharing a whole lot of music. For some reason they think it's a good idea to PM this account through KaZaA and say "You're busted!". 2) AFTER THAT HAPPENED her HD "Breaks" and she takes it to Best Buy for THEM to replace it. They do so. This is confirmed by her receipts. 3) She says under oath and says it happened a year before the alleged infringement. The manufacture date strongly implies this is wrong, the receipts prove beyond any doubt that this is wrong. Did she just remember wrong? It was Feb 2005, that's pretty close to 2004. That alone isn't very damning. What's damning is that the user name "tereastarr" is the same as her PCs login ID, and her e-mail address. And right after they told this account it was being sued, she had her HD replaced and the original destroyed. "A hacker broke into my XP box and installed KaZaA and used it to share songs, and they used my own username to frame me, then by sheer coincidence when my PC got messaged I was being sued, which I didn't notice, my HD broke seconds later and I had to replace the drive, and since I didn't even get the message there was no need for me to remember exactly when it happened relative to the alleged infringement" doesn't strike me even as reasonable doubt, and you don't even need that much for a civil case!
Unlike the other stores though, they won't have to pay for any of those applications, which will be very attractive.'"
It's right in the summary. They basically want a repository front-end, but one that's closer to the iPhone store. Probably with user rankings and reviews, whatever else. App of the week or whatever? Who knows. They call it a store because not everybody knows what they mean if they say a GUI repository front end, but they've probably heard of the iPhone store by now. It might be a poor word choice/analogy, but since store can also mean a place where goods are stored, as opposed to where they are sold, it escapes being an outright incorrect word choice on a technicality;) Now if they made their client work on both Linux and Windows netbooks, that would be pretty cool too. It doesn't sound like that in the article, but who knows.
This is actually all about the fact that it's a video game, not what it's depicting at all. These are the same people campaigning against video game violence. I mean, a US ambassidor complaining about how criminal this game is? Sorry, but the US makes lots of live action movies about rape, some of it raping children. Because it's one of women's favorite porno genera, right behind romance novels. Big beefy burglar/pirate/apple thief/dad's friend babysitting can't resist her feminine and lustful charms, and has his way with the poor housewife/maiden/orchard owners daughter/"14 year old" (Who is a 25 year old with a giant boob job, but wearing a schoolgirl outfit, pigtails, and braces, so I guess she's 14!) That's good healthy American porno, son! But put any of that in game form, it's the worst thing in the world!
a far better solution would be a call to your local news organizations about how the school district is getting kids lost on their bus system and admits to doing that regularly. Raise a stink at school board meetings, PTA meetings, and so forth. Get other parents involved. You're talking about a school district's incompetence endangering not only your own child but all the children in the district.
Two problems with this. First, it's a lot of work. Second, he wanted a solution that runs on Linux.
They had loads of fun in Canada, too. You see, Health Canada investigated their "auditing" and found them to be, in fact, pedaling "Alternative Healing" but doing so in a fraudulent manner, and they published this report. There was also a Canadian couple that quit Scientology and was telling their story. Now, fast forward a bit, and the Church of Scientology has infiltrated the US government almost to the top. There is a huge raid on their offices, which uncovers a lot of interesting information. First, it had information all about their undercover ops in the US and Canada. It also had information about how they bound and held prisoner Michael Miesner. For whatever reason, those charges in the USA got themselves vanished, but not before the FBI forwarded this information to Canada! Now Canada finds here in their cabinets, confidential government of Ontario and RCMP memos! They find they have agents infiltrating the hospital where the doctor who wrote that scathing report on their psychic healing works! They find they have guys in Canada Revenue looking for dirt on the couple I mentioned before, anything to bring them down! Not willing to bring charges on that alone, the RCMP sent two undercover agents into the Toronto branch. Using information they gathered, warrants were issued and all kinds of files and audiotapes were seized. They had all the evidence they needed for these break ins and thefts and assorted other crimes. They had also broken into many Toronto office buildings to steal corporate information, too, anything to potentially in the future be used against their enemies (who are legion). In the end, 14 people plus the Church itself were all summonsed. The Church tried to get the warrants invalidated. They failed. They tried to blackmail the judge, they failed. They tried to plea bargain, "we'll donate millions to any charity you want if you drop the charges against the church, you can have our members, fine, but not the church." It was declined. They tried to get all of their files detailing their undercover ops and breakins and criminal harassment ruled as confessional material, and inadmissible in court due to priest-parishioner confidentiality. That failed too. Then they tried a massive smear campaign against the Crown prosecutor. THAT stunt got the church itself a $1.6 million dollar judgment. And since their lawyer was spewing it too in press releases, he himself got a $400,000 judgment. (never libel nor slander a LAWYER). In the end, all of the criminals working for the Church were convicted (some cases are still ongoing I believe, 20 years later). The church is still trying to appeal its own convictions and judgments. Their fine for libel though, and their lawyer's, those have been upheld all the way to the Supreme Court, so that's done, no more appeals, only took 10 years! They repeated their slander every step of the way, too, in press releases and in court, and in every appeal they maintained its truth even though most of it was provably false. I would have thought that continuing to repeat the same lies after a judgment for doing so would be contempt of court, and get their lawyer hauled before the judge in irons, but I guess the Canadian legal system doesn't work like the American versions do on TV?;)
And yes, the Church called the Ontario government Nazis. The church has its own fake "tolerance" watchdog organization. According to their brochures, they stand up against all intolerance, though in practice only if it is against the CoS. It condemned the government for persecuting a poor religion, when all the religion did was slander, libel, and order criminal acts against Canadians and their government. I believe the argument went, "Members of the church give all their worldly possessions to us, and we support them. So fining the church directly punishes all of our members! You have a slippery slope that says a church is responsible for the actions of its members, and you can punish all members of the church for the actions of one
Superman was never "ends justify means" superhero, he was always trying to save the innocent and would take the hard road if it meant more lives saved (hard as in much harder to do, harder on him, etc.).
In the early Superman issues, the major bad guys were bankers and lobbyists who wanted to get the USA involved in WW2. Superman had no qualms threatening to electrocute lobbyists and drop them from buildings if they didn't spill the beans on who they were working for so Superman could go crack their skulls. At least he was educational about it "Don't worry, we can touch this powerline safely, there's no path for the current to flow through if you aren't touching the ground. Or another wire. Oops, that was close, almost touched two there!"
Batman was a millionaire by birth and by being an intelligent businessman... he didn't "steal food from the mouths of poor and oppressed", he made his money and used it. I will admit that he was very much 'outside the law' and a vigilante, more concerned with taking out the bad guy vs saving the innocent.
With all the miracle cures Batman comes up with for villain-made diseases and chemicals, you'd think he could cure normal ones too, but no. That's reading between the lines of course. But Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic, he really does invent these things! Lots of his riches come not from selling inventions, but by accepting money to bury them! He cured the common cold but takes monthly payments from big pharma to keep it a secret. I think he invented cold fusion, and takes big payments to keep it in the basement. Modern Marvel had a good narrative reason for all this dickishness. Basically, they thought it was a deficiency that superhero inventors never invented anything useful for anything besides crime fighting. They figured Mr. Fantastic would invent all kinds of useful shit, being the smartest guy on Earth and all. So rather than ignore it, they decided that yes, he DOES cure diseases in his spare time. The trouble is, if he cures all disease, solves world hunger, solves pollution issues thanks to miniaturized cold fusion power, then he moves the entire world very rapidly towards a Utopian Star Trek setting. How can Marvel make hamfisted analogies to current geopolitical issues by having George W. Bush waterboard Captain America, and herd all superheros into concentration camps? They can't! Thus, out of necessity, Reed Richards must take a "Prime Directive" approach to the world, and be very very careful to change nothing outside the scope of stopping the assorted doomsday plots that directly involve him. "THE STATUS MUST BE QUO", etc.
Can you tell somebody got me a "philosophy of comic books" book last Christmas? lol
For coding courses, all our code goes through electronic marking before it reaches the marker. Students know that the electronic marking is looking for cheaters. Given this, they think they can to a Replace All on variable names and get away with it. They can't. They also try to confuse it by putting what are essentially NOPs, like "x = x;" or "x = x + 0;" That might work (but it doesn't) but its certainly bizarre enough to get the attention of the human marker. But still, the instructors let is slide, it's a lot of paperwork, and always leads to parents threatening to sue, demanding their right to a fair trial, face their accuser, get a refund on tuition, etc.
Ummm, a PRNG in your computer, open source or not, is purely deterministic, and so the complete and polar opposite of "Random." A hardware RNG could have open source drivers or not, but it's a hardware device. They tend to be skewed and also to have some dependence between bits, when what you really want is for each bit to be uniformly and independently random. Either way, even with your own drivers, you have to trust the device. Cue the Dilbert comic: "Seven Seven Seven Seven Seven Seven..." "Are you sure it's random?" "That's the thing with randomness, you can never be certain." It's actually quite difficult to look at the output from a RNG and determine if there's any dependence between bits, and if there's any skew towards either 1 or 0.
Without copyright, the profiteering publishers just publish anything they find, and the authors get $0. It was, in fact, created for the express purpose of taking that power away from the big publishing houses.
Why not cut out the middle man and ask them to find a way to turn sand directly into high strength flexible glass instead of the weak rigid stuff we currently have? As you say, we have lots of sand. So just get some chemists, buy them some coffee, and this weekend they can bang out the designs for Ultraglass (tm) light, flexible, and easy to work as wood, strong as steel, biodegradable as wood, too...hey, sounds like wood has almost all the properties you want. Screw the chemists, just find a biology student and get them to invent a tree that's as hard as steel. That shouldn't take more than an afternoon, there's already woods that come close! For an added bonus, let's engineer it so it can grow in salt water, then we can grow them anywhere, and not increase our consumption of fresh water to do so!
If only science worked that way, and just wanting something meant it was possible!
What the fuck is wrong with Slashdot??? The guy saying that your right to download movies for free is the same as your right to sit on the bus regardless of your skin color, he gets a +5 and hailed as a god among men, and the guy who says that's a retarded comparison is modded Troll. Every last one of you honestly believes that downloading Angels and Demons is exactly the same thing as refusing to give up your seat on a bus because of the color of your skin? Honestly? HONESTLY?
Read the article. Yes, you can refuse, and they can't force their way in. But you'll get a crippling fine if you refuse them. YOU HAVE TO LET THEM IN. It's not constitutional, the Supreme Court has said any searches require a warrant, even administrative searches. But nobody at all cares about constitutionality, you'll get a huge fine, and you're screwed. Nobody will listen, nobody ever listens. The Fire Department can, at any time, ask to inspect your smoke detectors, and you'll get a huge fine if you don't let them in. It's not constitutional at all, but they don't care, the local police don't care, and the courts don't care. If and when they report something unrelated they find to the police, then maybe, just maybe, you'll be able to appeal that conviction high enough. But I doubt it.
Nope, they mean exactly what they said. They mean the dimension of the vector space, not the physical dimensions of the material. To identify a bit being stored, you REQUIRE 5 coordinates: X,Y,Z,wavelength,polarity. So, the vector space had D=5.
Slashdot Mirror
First, while nature didn't intend cows to eat corn, I doubt it intended them to eat high concentrations of flaxseeds either. (And I don't really think nature intends anything, not being a person). Second, if you would RTFA, you would see that your suggestion, which is a good idea by the way, is also one that TFA suggests! Third, who said genetically engineered? The article didn't, the summary didn't, and not even the headline did, which is well above par for Slashdot fearmongering! They're talking about selective breeding. And it sounds like the gene they're looking for makes cows produce less methane by virtue of converting more food energy into muscle, which means they'll have less food fermenting into methane in their stomachs over long periods. I could be wrong, but I'd imagine that would have a byproduct of making the beef leaner.
RTFA, that's exactly what they're suggesting, in addition to breeding out the genes that make them overproduce methane. In fact, read your own link, too, because it suggests creating new bacteria that don't make as much methane, which is a bit more radical than simple selective breeding...
They are proposing multiple solutions that can work together. Solution one, the one that makes for a good headline, is to use selective breeding to select against the genes that cause an overproduction of methane in the cow's gut, though they're also looking at genes that make the cow more efficient about converting food to muscle, so the food will ferment less in their stomachs. Solution two is to get them on a high energy diet. They make methane because the food they eat ferments in their stomach. Corn ferments a lot. Grass ferments a lot too, but not as much as corn. Higher fat vegetable sources like seeds don't ferment nearly as much, but are very expensive compared to corn or grass.
To answer your question, and that of all the other people being clever, the article says they produce less methane in their gut, not that they burp less...
Just put the wind farms where you're deforesting, and they'll cancel each other out and provide the same net atmospheric drag as before? ;)
Various music labels have argued that anything more than a 2x penalty for commercial copyright infringement is unconstitutional, when they themselves got caught selling albums featuring music to which they hold no license. Meanwhile, they argue in court that 4000x penalties are FINE for non-commercial infringement, and in fact, are lobbying Congress HARD to bump that up from 4000x to 150,000x. Hasn't gone poorly for them, I'm not so sure it's a bad practice ;)
RTFA. It's not just the one date. It's also the fact that Best Buy KNOWS when it was replaced, and it was AFTER she was informed she was being sued. The chronology is set. It happened in this order. 1) (Unlicensed?) investigators find that this user account "tereastarr@KaZaA" is sharing a whole lot of music. For some reason they think it's a good idea to PM this account through KaZaA and say "You're busted!". 2) AFTER THAT HAPPENED her HD "Breaks" and she takes it to Best Buy for THEM to replace it. They do so. This is confirmed by her receipts. 3) She says under oath and says it happened a year before the alleged infringement. The manufacture date strongly implies this is wrong, the receipts prove beyond any doubt that this is wrong. Did she just remember wrong? It was Feb 2005, that's pretty close to 2004. That alone isn't very damning. What's damning is that the user name "tereastarr" is the same as her PCs login ID, and her e-mail address. And right after they told this account it was being sued, she had her HD replaced and the original destroyed. "A hacker broke into my XP box and installed KaZaA and used it to share songs, and they used my own username to frame me, then by sheer coincidence when my PC got messaged I was being sued, which I didn't notice, my HD broke seconds later and I had to replace the drive, and since I didn't even get the message there was no need for me to remember exactly when it happened relative to the alleged infringement" doesn't strike me even as reasonable doubt, and you don't even need that much for a civil case!
So it's not an extra-marital affair if your lover is also married? ;)
Heck, I don't think that book could even contain Category: Anime
I've never seen notes like that. I've seen notes like "Turn to page 427" and on page 427 it says "SHEEP!"
It's right in the summary. They basically want a repository front-end, but one that's closer to the iPhone store. Probably with user rankings and reviews, whatever else. App of the week or whatever? Who knows. They call it a store because not everybody knows what they mean if they say a GUI repository front end, but they've probably heard of the iPhone store by now. It might be a poor word choice/analogy, but since store can also mean a place where goods are stored, as opposed to where they are sold, it escapes being an outright incorrect word choice on a technicality ;) Now if they made their client work on both Linux and Windows netbooks, that would be pretty cool too. It doesn't sound like that in the article, but who knows.
This is actually all about the fact that it's a video game, not what it's depicting at all. These are the same people campaigning against video game violence. I mean, a US ambassidor complaining about how criminal this game is? Sorry, but the US makes lots of live action movies about rape, some of it raping children. Because it's one of women's favorite porno genera, right behind romance novels. Big beefy burglar/pirate/apple thief/dad's friend babysitting can't resist her feminine and lustful charms, and has his way with the poor housewife/maiden/orchard owners daughter/"14 year old" (Who is a 25 year old with a giant boob job, but wearing a schoolgirl outfit, pigtails, and braces, so I guess she's 14!) That's good healthy American porno, son! But put any of that in game form, it's the worst thing in the world!
Two problems with this. First, it's a lot of work. Second, he wanted a solution that runs on Linux.
They had loads of fun in Canada, too. You see, Health Canada investigated their "auditing" and found them to be, in fact, pedaling "Alternative Healing" but doing so in a fraudulent manner, and they published this report. There was also a Canadian couple that quit Scientology and was telling their story. Now, fast forward a bit, and the Church of Scientology has infiltrated the US government almost to the top. There is a huge raid on their offices, which uncovers a lot of interesting information. First, it had information all about their undercover ops in the US and Canada. It also had information about how they bound and held prisoner Michael Miesner. For whatever reason, those charges in the USA got themselves vanished, but not before the FBI forwarded this information to Canada! Now Canada finds here in their cabinets, confidential government of Ontario and RCMP memos! They find they have agents infiltrating the hospital where the doctor who wrote that scathing report on their psychic healing works! They find they have guys in Canada Revenue looking for dirt on the couple I mentioned before, anything to bring them down! Not willing to bring charges on that alone, the RCMP sent two undercover agents into the Toronto branch. Using information they gathered, warrants were issued and all kinds of files and audiotapes were seized. They had all the evidence they needed for these break ins and thefts and assorted other crimes. They had also broken into many Toronto office buildings to steal corporate information, too, anything to potentially in the future be used against their enemies (who are legion). In the end, 14 people plus the Church itself were all summonsed. The Church tried to get the warrants invalidated. They failed. They tried to blackmail the judge, they failed. They tried to plea bargain, "we'll donate millions to any charity you want if you drop the charges against the church, you can have our members, fine, but not the church." It was declined. They tried to get all of their files detailing their undercover ops and breakins and criminal harassment ruled as confessional material, and inadmissible in court due to priest-parishioner confidentiality. That failed too. Then they tried a massive smear campaign against the Crown prosecutor. THAT stunt got the church itself a $1.6 million dollar judgment. And since their lawyer was spewing it too in press releases, he himself got a $400,000 judgment. (never libel nor slander a LAWYER). In the end, all of the criminals working for the Church were convicted (some cases are still ongoing I believe, 20 years later). The church is still trying to appeal its own convictions and judgments. Their fine for libel though, and their lawyer's, those have been upheld all the way to the Supreme Court, so that's done, no more appeals, only took 10 years! They repeated their slander every step of the way, too, in press releases and in court, and in every appeal they maintained its truth even though most of it was provably false. I would have thought that continuing to repeat the same lies after a judgment for doing so would be contempt of court, and get their lawyer hauled before the judge in irons, but I guess the Canadian legal system doesn't work like the American versions do on TV? ;)
And yes, the Church called the Ontario government Nazis. The church has its own fake "tolerance" watchdog organization. According to their brochures, they stand up against all intolerance, though in practice only if it is against the CoS. It condemned the government for persecuting a poor religion, when all the religion did was slander, libel, and order criminal acts against Canadians and their government. I believe the argument went, "Members of the church give all their worldly possessions to us, and we support them. So fining the church directly punishes all of our members! You have a slippery slope that says a church is responsible for the actions of its members, and you can punish all members of the church for the actions of one
Many asian cultures consider repeating numbers to be lucky, regardless of if the Babylonians considered them divine or not.
In the early Superman issues, the major bad guys were bankers and lobbyists who wanted to get the USA involved in WW2. Superman had no qualms threatening to electrocute lobbyists and drop them from buildings if they didn't spill the beans on who they were working for so Superman could go crack their skulls. At least he was educational about it "Don't worry, we can touch this powerline safely, there's no path for the current to flow through if you aren't touching the ground. Or another wire. Oops, that was close, almost touched two there!"
With all the miracle cures Batman comes up with for villain-made diseases and chemicals, you'd think he could cure normal ones too, but no. That's reading between the lines of course. But Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic, he really does invent these things! Lots of his riches come not from selling inventions, but by accepting money to bury them! He cured the common cold but takes monthly payments from big pharma to keep it a secret. I think he invented cold fusion, and takes big payments to keep it in the basement. Modern Marvel had a good narrative reason for all this dickishness. Basically, they thought it was a deficiency that superhero inventors never invented anything useful for anything besides crime fighting. They figured Mr. Fantastic would invent all kinds of useful shit, being the smartest guy on Earth and all. So rather than ignore it, they decided that yes, he DOES cure diseases in his spare time. The trouble is, if he cures all disease, solves world hunger, solves pollution issues thanks to miniaturized cold fusion power, then he moves the entire world very rapidly towards a Utopian Star Trek setting. How can Marvel make hamfisted analogies to current geopolitical issues by having George W. Bush waterboard Captain America, and herd all superheros into concentration camps? They can't! Thus, out of necessity, Reed Richards must take a "Prime Directive" approach to the world, and be very very careful to change nothing outside the scope of stopping the assorted doomsday plots that directly involve him. "THE STATUS MUST BE QUO", etc.
Can you tell somebody got me a "philosophy of comic books" book last Christmas? lol
For coding courses, all our code goes through electronic marking before it reaches the marker. Students know that the electronic marking is looking for cheaters. Given this, they think they can to a Replace All on variable names and get away with it. They can't. They also try to confuse it by putting what are essentially NOPs, like "x = x;" or "x = x + 0;" That might work (but it doesn't) but its certainly bizarre enough to get the attention of the human marker. But still, the instructors let is slide, it's a lot of paperwork, and always leads to parents threatening to sue, demanding their right to a fair trial, face their accuser, get a refund on tuition, etc.
Ummm, a PRNG in your computer, open source or not, is purely deterministic, and so the complete and polar opposite of "Random." A hardware RNG could have open source drivers or not, but it's a hardware device. They tend to be skewed and also to have some dependence between bits, when what you really want is for each bit to be uniformly and independently random. Either way, even with your own drivers, you have to trust the device. Cue the Dilbert comic: "Seven Seven Seven Seven Seven Seven..." "Are you sure it's random?" "That's the thing with randomness, you can never be certain." It's actually quite difficult to look at the output from a RNG and determine if there's any dependence between bits, and if there's any skew towards either 1 or 0.
When told the only ironic thing about the song is that it contains pretty much no irony, she said "I know, it's a malapropism." *eye roll*
Without copyright, the profiteering publishers just publish anything they find, and the authors get $0. It was, in fact, created for the express purpose of taking that power away from the big publishing houses.
They do have it, they wanted $20 for that information though.
Why not cut out the middle man and ask them to find a way to turn sand directly into high strength flexible glass instead of the weak rigid stuff we currently have? As you say, we have lots of sand. So just get some chemists, buy them some coffee, and this weekend they can bang out the designs for Ultraglass (tm) light, flexible, and easy to work as wood, strong as steel, biodegradable as wood, too...hey, sounds like wood has almost all the properties you want. Screw the chemists, just find a biology student and get them to invent a tree that's as hard as steel. That shouldn't take more than an afternoon, there's already woods that come close! For an added bonus, let's engineer it so it can grow in salt water, then we can grow them anywhere, and not increase our consumption of fresh water to do so!
If only science worked that way, and just wanting something meant it was possible!
What the fuck is wrong with Slashdot??? The guy saying that your right to download movies for free is the same as your right to sit on the bus regardless of your skin color, he gets a +5 and hailed as a god among men, and the guy who says that's a retarded comparison is modded Troll. Every last one of you honestly believes that downloading Angels and Demons is exactly the same thing as refusing to give up your seat on a bus because of the color of your skin? Honestly? HONESTLY?
Read the article. Yes, you can refuse, and they can't force their way in. But you'll get a crippling fine if you refuse them. YOU HAVE TO LET THEM IN. It's not constitutional, the Supreme Court has said any searches require a warrant, even administrative searches. But nobody at all cares about constitutionality, you'll get a huge fine, and you're screwed. Nobody will listen, nobody ever listens. The Fire Department can, at any time, ask to inspect your smoke detectors, and you'll get a huge fine if you don't let them in. It's not constitutional at all, but they don't care, the local police don't care, and the courts don't care. If and when they report something unrelated they find to the police, then maybe, just maybe, you'll be able to appeal that conviction high enough. But I doubt it.
Nope, they mean exactly what they said. They mean the dimension of the vector space, not the physical dimensions of the material. To identify a bit being stored, you REQUIRE 5 coordinates: X,Y,Z,wavelength,polarity. So, the vector space had D=5.