As for the source of the hydrogen, Electricity generated from solar power is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Electrolysis is a tremendously inefficient process. "But it's solar, it's free!", you say.
An important aspect of commercial enterprise, which is often missed by many a slashdot poster when they assume "any profit = good". It's not matter of whether you make a profit on $X; it's a matter of whether you'll make more money spending $X on Y, or $X on Z.
It applies in this case. That solar-generated electricity would do a lot more good being fed into the grid where about 2/3rds of it could take the place of coal generated electricity. The coal-burning electricity generating industry spews more crap (much of it low-level radioactive particulate!) into the air than a modern car does. More than, in fact, a well-maintained diesel engine (a poorly maintained or overloaded diesel is another matter.)
It absolutely infuriates me to see electric vehicle owners claiming they're "doing the environment good" by plugging in their car to the grid each night. Some of them say "I'm buying GREEN electricity".
Here's a shocker: if you didn't charge your car using this "green" electricity, it could be replacing coal; instead you're "using" it to replace a fairly non-polluting internal combustion engine. All comes out of the same pot, boys and girls.
Same thing goes for the solar-charged cars. How about putting that power into the grid so that there is less coal burned?
No where in the linked article was there any impliation that Dr. Hwang used any form of pressure, coersion, or other unscrupulous means to obtain the eggs.
Certain questions from a supervisor carry pressure and coersion- simply because the employee fears for their reputation and livelihood. That's precisely why we have numerous sexual harassment laws in the US.
If he asked the group or the donors individually, or dropped hints ("gee, we're having a lot of trouble here, wouldn't it be handy if we had some volunteer donors..." - either way it was coersion. The only way it would not be coersion is if the employee voluntarily donated.
Even then, there's a question of whether she was under self-imposed pressure (ie, "if I don't donate, the project will die and I won't have a job.")
That's one of many reasons the whole thing was unethical.
Consequently, Gerald Schatten, a cell biologist at the University of Pittsburgh, has severed his ties with Mr. Hwang and cited gross breaches of ethics.
What the submitter left out was this nice bit:
Dr. Schatten, who was to have led the organization's board of directors, says he is now severing collaboration with Dr. Hwang, due to questions over the source of human eggs used in a 2004 cloning project, and errors in a 2005 paper coauthored by the scientists.
A 2004 news report in the journal Nature said at least one female laboratory worker had provided eggs for the project, an allegation that Dr. Hwang has denied on several occasions.
Is it just me, or does it look like Schatten didn't have a problem with the forced collection, only starting to sever ties (note the tense there: "is now severing", ie, he hasn't finished?) after problems come up with a paper?
I can't see why else he waited a year after it was public knowledge (and no doubt knowledge to him well before the news report) to sever his ties.
I think that using a search engine to research methods of breaking someone's neck and water levels in nearby lakes is evidence that should be available to officers trying to find out who broke someone's neck and dumped them in a lake.
Have you ever heard of the term "circumstantial evidence"? Google it. And find:
Circumstantial evidence is a fact that can be used to infer another fact.
In other words- you can't use circumstantial evidence to infer guilt in a crime. Joe Shmoe could "google" the local lake because he's a fisherman.
You have no idea how thankful I am that people with your understanding of legal rights hold no position in the legal system, and how happy I am that most judges are appointed, not elected (well, save the grand state of Texas, among other places) because it's idiots like you who erode the rights of your fellow citizens.
Stewart Baker, the Department of Homeland Security's policy czar warned would-be DRM makers: 'It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property -- it's not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it's important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.'
How about: "it's not your computer. You do not have the right to install software components on someone's computer that spy on them, without their permission. That is computer trespassing and wiretapping. The FBI is currently investigating; in the meantime, here is a court order to remove any CDs with this software from shelves immediately, and we expect you to fully assist consumers with identifying whether a machine has the software installed, and the removal process."
What Baker is doing is trumpeting the Homeland Security line ("Won't someone PLEASE think of the Homeland Security?!"), and distracting us from the more important issue-that a corporation installed trojan programs that spy on people, and probably broke an number of laws doing so.
According to the EULA, SpyMon can not be used in 'anti-spyware research,' and detecting it is therefore a violation of it.
Anyone remember those MOTD's on pirate-software FTP sites giving us a pseudo-legal-brief about President Clinton signing some law, and then "FBI AGENTS YOU CANNOT ENTER THIS SITE"?
Just cracking it isn't enough. They have to then sift through gigs of data to look for evidence.
Mmm...I suspect the issue isn't "cracking"; I think the story poster was hinting at this with the last sentence or two. Chances are "crack" is being used liberally to present it using "terms" something Joe Q Legislator and John Z Public can understand. I would bet it is mostly analysis (or as you put it, "sift through".) Chances are serious criminal investigation units already have custom (ie distributed to several systems, nicely wrapped with scripts and such, etc.) cracking solutions akin to L0phtcrack and John The Ripper, set up and ready to go, on some nice hardware- so that if they need to crack a password for someone's Windows account, they can do so, and quickly. Somehow I doubt that it takes them more than 30 days to do so. There is also a considerable amount they can access without any "cracking."
However, nothing trumps the human rights of the suspect. Here in the US, you have to be released within 24 hours of arrest if you are not charged (well, excepting Patriot Act crap.) Often times the police don't have the evidence yet to hold you on a crime. Unfortunately- that's just too bad! Case/workload isn't the burden of the suspect- it's YOUR burden. If YOU can't analyze the hard drive in the time period someone can be legally held...hire more people to do the analysis, or just suck it up.
In which case, maybe it is deliberately misleading. Ie, "We need 90 days to crack encryption" sounds a lot more unavoidable than "we have such a high workload we can't get through looking at the contents of the disk before 90 days." Not to mention, the latter can also imply quite a bit of incompetence (ie, management hasn't scaled hiring/budget to the problem, or management isn't being effective, or they're all taking 2 hour lunches to watch soccer, etc.)
SandStorm simultaneously collects, correlates, and analyzes data on multiple computer systems and departs, leaving no trace of its activities.
So that includes taking whatever data it has supposedly collected/correlated/analyzed, and somehow uploading it somewhere, without my firewall noticing? And it somehow collects this data without my noticing CPU usage, disk IO, and so on?
Everything leaves traces. It has to. If it is clever about how it goes about its work, that is one thing...but to say it "leaves no trace" isn't even "spin"- it's bullshit.
Because what you really want to do to the speeding 3-ton SUV is blind the driver... yup, definitely makes things safer for everyone.
They're referring to suicide bombers in Iraq.
However, I agree the concept is yet another half-baked military weapon (see my comment history re the sonic weapon); what good is blinding a guy who just has to keep driving in a straight line and push a button to blow himself up? And by the time they figure out he's going to actually RUN the roadblock, he's well within the range that everybody's probably gonna die anyway.
Meanwhile, the "insurgents" are using improvised shaped charges to blast right through "armoured" humvees like they're made of paper...but sure, let's keep cranking out the multi-million-dollar laser pointers...
Not a lawyer, [SNIP] Well, I didn't see anything about an assault,
Neither am I, but I do know that assault is the THREAT of violence. Battery is actually DOING IT. Well, at least, that's the historical reading. Google it if you're curious.
Or getting him fired. I read some of the passages, and the methods seemed to be a petition, digging up dirt, or entrapment. That isn't murder.
Sadly in the legal world, you don't get such a distinction. Prosecution would argue that he had plenty of other wordings to choose from, but that "eliminate" has a strong connotation, particularly if one is speaking about a police officer.
The officer would then be asked about how he interpreted the statement- which is mostly what matters. It's how the victim interpreted the assault, not how you intended it.
No matter what the circumstances, no matter what the fora, and no matter what, I think that Freedom of Speech is to be protected. Any attempt at stifling it with whatever justification is the first step towards a slippery slope leading to authoritarian rule and erosion of all kinds of privacy and freedoms...albeit this could take many decades to actually happen.
The kid suggested "eliminating"(executing) a campus police officer AND solicited others to attempt what can only be termed entrapment.
Furthermore, you don't have protections of freedom of speech with ANY organization except the government. I'm really tired of people claiming that they have "Freedom of Speech" every time they get in trouble for spouting whatever they feel like at work, or school, or on private property. EVEN FURTHER, those rights do not include liable, slander, or assault (ie, "I'm going to rape you with this baseball bat!" is not constitutionally protected speech) to name a few. There are CENTURIES of precedence on this issue.
If you RTFA: "Fisher College spokesman John McLaughlin said, ''Cameron Walker was found to be in violation of the Student Guide and Code of Conduct.""
THAT, boys and girls, is why he was expelled. It's not the fact that he had a web log (I refuse to call them blogs); it's that he threatened the life of a school employee. It's pretty fucking clear-cut to me, and I'm really tired of hearing a lot of whining about "oh, poor him". The guy did something completely unjustified and COMPLETELY stupid. He knew the consequences (especially since he was class/school president) of violating the school's code of conduct; it was a private school. His speech was not protected, and furthermore, is most likely criminal in nature.
It's times like this I wish someone like Tom Cruise or someone of similar high-profile would step up and demand that Scientology be taught alongside 'intelligent design.'
Unfortunately, Scientology is far more subtle and dangerous than that. It's a brilliantly operated cult, and that's what makes it dangerous. They're brilliant about it- cold, precise, businesslike. They make the Waco cultists look like dumb hippies.
While everyone likes to joke about Tom Cruise going nuts on TV and such- meanwhile, the "Church" of Scientology sets up "free personality tests" in public places with smiling handsome people to "help you understand yourself better". There were a bunch of these assholes set up at Boston Common this summer, and they were attracting a regular stream of people who have no idea how evil the cult is.
There's no talk about the endless brainwashing. Or the women who have died after getting kidnapped and imprisioned with no food, water, or medical treatment. There's no talk about how Hubbard was supposedly alive for years but suddenly "died" when the (I think?) IRS demanded to see him in person asserting his signature was faked. No talk about how, when the IRS removed Scientology's non-profit status the organization hired private investigators to investigate hundreds of IRS agents and continued a campaign of intimidation and harassment and lawsuits against them and their families- which ended when the head of the Scientologists and their chief counsel just "happened to drop by" (I shit you not, that's exactly how it was claimed on all sides) the office of the head of the IRS and had a "chat" with him. A day later, he reinstates their NPO status!
Wish I could effin' "happen to drop by" the head of the IRS, walk in, talk with him, and get my cult declared a non-profit again.
It's application by the military and police is controversial because of ethical questions, but this seems an ideal use of this technology in private sector. Commercial ships at sea cannot use heavy weapons by international treaty. The Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, is a so-called "non-lethal weapon" developed after the 2000 attack on the USS Cole off Yemen as a way to keep operators of small boats from approaching U.S. warships.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. The USS Cole was bombed by suicide bombers who piloted a boat straight at the ship and then blew themselves up.
A 150 decibel noise seems like a pretty minor convenience compared to blowing yourself up.
Furthermore- let's say the powerboat Good Times is headed towards the USS Paranoid is just a bunch of folks havin' a good time and not noticing the fact that they're bearing down on a warship (sounds strange given how dumb you'd have to be to do it, but people do leave the 'bridge' or controls of their boat quite often. They also tend to get drunk on their boats quite often too.)
With everyone on board unable to move or think because they're incapacitated with pain (and I presume inability to stand because of the inner ear getting wacked out)...don't you think it would be a tad bit difficult for anyone to get up to the controls and stop the boat or change course before it enters some abritrary "safety zone" and get blown into little fiberglass splinters by one of the Paranoid's deck guns?
God, the whole thing sounds like something crafted on HalfBakery.com. Nevermind that far as anyone can tell, the pirates were outrun, not knocked out by some sci-fi weapon...
RAID improves throughput, but not latency. If you need low latency, you need high-RPM drives and no amount of RAID will help you.
That's generally what cache is for- on the drive, on the controller, and in the system itself. Even databases are optimized with the "expense" of disk access kept in mind in the optimizer's strategy.
Storage manufacturers have tackled the issue by introducing a new class of device, the "nearline" drive that, when combined with the aforementioned online and offline segments, tiers today's enterprise storage into three distinct levels. By keeping highly-accessed, current information in the traditional domain of high-speed, swift-actuator drives and relegating less-used but still-accessed data to slower, less expensive devices, drive firms aspire to deliver solutions that balance the needs for performance with cost.
So to cut through the jargon crap- in other words, someone finally remembered that RAID means Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, and that in most cases, when you've got 5 or more drives in an array, you don't need them to be 15,000 RPM?
Don't I recall a recent (last year or two) announcement from a university about a high efficiency solar panel, intended to be used in building construction? The panels were small, inside little cubes, and could pivot, I think?
I'm also quite positive I remember stumbling across a webpage for a US Defense/space contractor, where they offered up solar panel "scraps" (stuff you could still assemble into working modules, with a fair bit of labor) for sale to the public. Efficiency was substantially higher than anything I've seen on the commercial market, though I don't recall figures off the top of my head. They probably cost a lot more to manufacture, but $50M amortized over -possible- solar panels sounds pretty expensive too.
Why couldn't we just give a $50M grant to homeowners to buy solar panels?
At 11.5 percent, it's still got a long way to go to reach Internet Explorer's 85.5 percent, but it's heading in the right direction
You know, it's exactly that attitude of "world domination" that got the Web into the mess it is today. Firefox is not for everyone. I don't want to see it become "what you have to use whether you like it or not", because we've been down that road.
What is nice to see is that users of alternative browsers do make more than single-digit percentages, which of course means they're harder to dismiss. If Apple, The Mozilla Foundation, and Opera can all assure they take the high road at all times with regards to fixing rendering/parsing/etc bugs, MS won't be guaranteed to be the same, but it'll certainly make life easier on web designers.
If designers have to somehow work around 3, 4, 5 different browsers' rendering habits and bugs- things will be a disaster, they'll be frustrated and tempted to just support IE and "the next biggest fish", etc.
Also- I hope all the non-IE browsers are now 'shipping' by default with their own browser strings, not set to pretend to be IE...
I can pull up a list of 500 artists on my iPod and navigate to any one in a matter of seconds.
Funny- I find it takes 5, 10, 15, 20 seconds of:
Start scrolling rubbing my thumb around the wheel
It's not going fast enough down the list, so try to scroll faster
iPod's "scroll acceleration" kicks in. A second or two later, I'm at the end of the list.
Cuss.
Go to step 1.
Ever tried to change the star rating for a song? It's far too sensitive.
Ever tried to switch off your iPod by holding play down- but slide your finger ever so slightly, so the iPod thinks it's a scroll and completely ignores the button press?
Sorry. I liked the scroll-wheel-plus-4-buttons MUCH better. Apple's current design is the equivalent of iDrive, wherein they try to accomplish too much with one control. Same goes for the stick control on Sony Ericsson phones...I can't believe how many times I try to push DOWN on the stick only to have it go to the SIDE...
Also, I'm pretty sure the Slashdot Groupthink doesn't like patents. The concept of turning something to select from a list is about as old as the first radios.
Calm. The. #$@!. Down. It's not that I'm cheap
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OpenBSD 3.8 Released
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Theo decides to release all of their great work under the BSD license so that everyone can benefit from the tools, no questions asked. That's not enough for some people though, complaining that there are no torrents. Maybe you would only support OpenBSD if they emailed you a personally pressed copy for no charge?
No, you assumed that I want a torrent because you think I'm cheap and implied I'm ungrateful.
I don't have a lot of time quite often, and I DO have a short attention span for taking on new projects. An attention span for trying a new OS or distribution that does not go past downloading+burning a CD or DVD. If I like what I see and they ask for donations (provided it's a reasonable amount, goes to a registered NPO they've established ie actually goes to helping the OpenBSD effort) that's fine.
Heck, I can't even get an ISO via FTP. I have to download a whole bunch of packages, make FLOPPIES (what is this, 1995?)...I don't even OWN any floppies...
part 2- not trolling, just a little frustrated
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OpenBSD 3.8 Released
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· Score: 1, Redundant
Guys, I'm not trying to be snippity or troll (haven't been modded that yet, but heading it off at the pass based on the two replies I've seen so far.) It's a little frustrating when I want to try OpenBSD, and I can't because there's no ISO to FTP or torrent.
It takes a fair bit for me to try even a new distribution of linux, and making barriers to keep me from trying out a new OS is a sure fire way to make me find something else to do with the free time I had. I want to quickly download, install, poke around. Not spend $X on a CD, wait for it to come in the mail (why am I explaining this to fellow techies...?:-)
I don't. I plan on downloading a torrent. However, it appears that the OpenBSD team would much rather have me buy a CD, so torrents aren't available...or at least easily accessible. I looked all over the OpenBSD website to no avail.
Funny. This from a company which releases software like GFS, but then seems to almost actively dissuade other distributions from using it.
I'm hard-pressed to come up with other examples right at the moment, but it seems like I've run across several "open-sourced" stuff from Redhat which had virtually zero documentation- not even so much as what they actually DO, how to set them up, etc.
So I'm going to flip it back at RedHat's CEO- buddy:
releasing an Open Source package and giving it nothing more than a nearly blank page on the Redhat site doesn't quite count.
making a distribution, not providing it in binary form, and making it virtually impossible to compile from source, doesn't quite count.
Using lawyers to chase down with a vengance (ie engaging in a thinly veiled attempt to crush) a distribution which (god forbid) exercises its right to use the GPL to build a FREE copy of what you're forced to provide source for...not only doesn't count, it's not very nice, either. Just because something is within your legal right, doesn't mean you have to be an ass about it, and from what I recall, RedHat skipped directly from "hey guys, RedHat is a trademark and we kinda have to control how it is used, so could you please remove it from Whitebox" to nasty-gram- from-the-lawyers.
Using the community to help you develop/test your product, doesn't count. Especially when it's so poorly tested internally, v1 ends up hosing people's machines. I still don't recall anyone at RedHat apologizing for the fiasco that was Fedora 1.
Sorry, folks. I'm just plumb unimpressed with RedHat. They seem very much for taking from the GPL/OSS community, but even more for protecting the hell out of their revenue stream to the absolute line the GPL allows them to. Hell, I can't even get a non-commercial license for RedHat's commercial distribution to learn it, and has anyone SEEN how much the damn certification costs!?
Uh, how do they not pay sales tax? Do they whip out their illegal-immigrant card at the supermarket and say "I'm not a citizen, please remove the sales tax from this purchase" ? Get a clue.
New Hampshire has no salestax, Mr. Knowit A. Dipshit.
My point is that they're doing absolutely nothing to contribute to the NH public; they pay no property, wage, or sales tax...pretty much the only way the government gets any money from you. They're not even spending the money here, they wire it home to Mexico or whereever.
Slashdot Mirror
Electrolysis is a tremendously inefficient process. "But it's solar, it's free!", you say.
An important aspect of commercial enterprise, which is often missed by many a slashdot poster when they assume "any profit = good". It's not matter of whether you make a profit on $X; it's a matter of whether you'll make more money spending $X on Y, or $X on Z.
It applies in this case. That solar-generated electricity would do a lot more good being fed into the grid where about 2/3rds of it could take the place of coal generated electricity. The coal-burning electricity generating industry spews more crap (much of it low-level radioactive particulate!) into the air than a modern car does. More than, in fact, a well-maintained diesel engine (a poorly maintained or overloaded diesel is another matter.)
It absolutely infuriates me to see electric vehicle owners claiming they're "doing the environment good" by plugging in their car to the grid each night. Some of them say "I'm buying GREEN electricity".
Here's a shocker: if you didn't charge your car using this "green" electricity, it could be replacing coal; instead you're "using" it to replace a fairly non-polluting internal combustion engine. All comes out of the same pot, boys and girls.
Same thing goes for the solar-charged cars. How about putting that power into the grid so that there is less coal burned?
Certain questions from a supervisor carry pressure and coersion- simply because the employee fears for their reputation and livelihood. That's precisely why we have numerous sexual harassment laws in the US.
If he asked the group or the donors individually, or dropped hints ("gee, we're having a lot of trouble here, wouldn't it be handy if we had some volunteer donors..." - either way it was coersion. The only way it would not be coersion is if the employee voluntarily donated.
Even then, there's a question of whether she was under self-imposed pressure (ie, "if I don't donate, the project will die and I won't have a job.")
That's one of many reasons the whole thing was unethical.
What the submitter left out was this nice bit:
Dr. Schatten, who was to have led the organization's board of directors, says he is now severing collaboration with Dr. Hwang, due to questions over the source of human eggs used in a 2004 cloning project, and errors in a 2005 paper coauthored by the scientists. A 2004 news report in the journal Nature said at least one female laboratory worker had provided eggs for the project, an allegation that Dr. Hwang has denied on several occasions.
Is it just me, or does it look like Schatten didn't have a problem with the forced collection, only starting to sever ties (note the tense there: "is now severing", ie, he hasn't finished?) after problems come up with a paper?
I can't see why else he waited a year after it was public knowledge (and no doubt knowledge to him well before the news report) to sever his ties.
Have you ever heard of the term "circumstantial evidence"? Google it. And find:
Circumstantial evidence is a fact that can be used to infer another fact.
In other words- you can't use circumstantial evidence to infer guilt in a crime. Joe Shmoe could "google" the local lake because he's a fisherman.
You have no idea how thankful I am that people with your understanding of legal rights hold no position in the legal system, and how happy I am that most judges are appointed, not elected (well, save the grand state of Texas, among other places) because it's idiots like you who erode the rights of your fellow citizens.
How about: "it's not your computer. You do not have the right to install software components on someone's computer that spy on them, without their permission. That is computer trespassing and wiretapping. The FBI is currently investigating; in the meantime, here is a court order to remove any CDs with this software from shelves immediately, and we expect you to fully assist consumers with identifying whether a machine has the software installed, and the removal process."
What Baker is doing is trumpeting the Homeland Security line ("Won't someone PLEASE think of the Homeland Security?!"), and distracting us from the more important issue-that a corporation installed trojan programs that spy on people, and probably broke an number of laws doing so.
Anyone remember those MOTD's on pirate-software FTP sites giving us a pseudo-legal-brief about President Clinton signing some law, and then "FBI AGENTS YOU CANNOT ENTER THIS SITE"?
Mmm...I suspect the issue isn't "cracking"; I think the story poster was hinting at this with the last sentence or two. Chances are "crack" is being used liberally to present it using "terms" something Joe Q Legislator and John Z Public can understand. I would bet it is mostly analysis (or as you put it, "sift through".) Chances are serious criminal investigation units already have custom (ie distributed to several systems, nicely wrapped with scripts and such, etc.) cracking solutions akin to L0phtcrack and John The Ripper, set up and ready to go, on some nice hardware- so that if they need to crack a password for someone's Windows account, they can do so, and quickly. Somehow I doubt that it takes them more than 30 days to do so. There is also a considerable amount they can access without any "cracking."
However, nothing trumps the human rights of the suspect. Here in the US, you have to be released within 24 hours of arrest if you are not charged (well, excepting Patriot Act crap.) Often times the police don't have the evidence yet to hold you on a crime. Unfortunately- that's just too bad! Case/workload isn't the burden of the suspect- it's YOUR burden. If YOU can't analyze the hard drive in the time period someone can be legally held...hire more people to do the analysis, or just suck it up.
In which case, maybe it is deliberately misleading. Ie, "We need 90 days to crack encryption" sounds a lot more unavoidable than "we have such a high workload we can't get through looking at the contents of the disk before 90 days." Not to mention, the latter can also imply quite a bit of incompetence (ie, management hasn't scaled hiring/budget to the problem, or management isn't being effective, or they're all taking 2 hour lunches to watch soccer, etc.)
So that includes taking whatever data it has supposedly collected/correlated/analyzed, and somehow uploading it somewhere, without my firewall noticing? And it somehow collects this data without my noticing CPU usage, disk IO, and so on?
Everything leaves traces. It has to. If it is clever about how it goes about its work, that is one thing...but to say it "leaves no trace" isn't even "spin"- it's bullshit.
His exact words (read the article, read my quote, etc.) were "he needs to be eliminated".
Cheers.
They're referring to suicide bombers in Iraq.
However, I agree the concept is yet another half-baked military weapon (see my comment history re the sonic weapon); what good is blinding a guy who just has to keep driving in a straight line and push a button to blow himself up? And by the time they figure out he's going to actually RUN the roadblock, he's well within the range that everybody's probably gonna die anyway.
Meanwhile, the "insurgents" are using improvised shaped charges to blast right through "armoured" humvees like they're made of paper...but sure, let's keep cranking out the multi-million-dollar laser pointers...
Neither am I, but I do know that assault is the THREAT of violence. Battery is actually DOING IT. Well, at least, that's the historical reading. Google it if you're curious.
Sadly in the legal world, you don't get such a distinction. Prosecution would argue that he had plenty of other wordings to choose from, but that "eliminate" has a strong connotation, particularly if one is speaking about a police officer.
The officer would then be asked about how he interpreted the statement- which is mostly what matters. It's how the victim interpreted the assault, not how you intended it.
The kid suggested "eliminating"(executing) a campus police officer AND solicited others to attempt what can only be termed entrapment.
Furthermore, you don't have protections of freedom of speech with ANY organization except the government. I'm really tired of people claiming that they have "Freedom of Speech" every time they get in trouble for spouting whatever they feel like at work, or school, or on private property. EVEN FURTHER, those rights do not include liable, slander, or assault (ie, "I'm going to rape you with this baseball bat!" is not constitutionally protected speech) to name a few. There are CENTURIES of precedence on this issue.
If you RTFA: "Fisher College spokesman John McLaughlin said, ''Cameron Walker was found to be in violation of the Student Guide and Code of Conduct.""
THAT, boys and girls, is why he was expelled. It's not the fact that he had a web log (I refuse to call them blogs); it's that he threatened the life of a school employee. It's pretty fucking clear-cut to me, and I'm really tired of hearing a lot of whining about "oh, poor him". The guy did something completely unjustified and COMPLETELY stupid. He knew the consequences (especially since he was class/school president) of violating the school's code of conduct; it was a private school. His speech was not protected, and furthermore, is most likely criminal in nature.
Unfortunately, Scientology is far more subtle and dangerous than that. It's a brilliantly operated cult, and that's what makes it dangerous. They're brilliant about it- cold, precise, businesslike. They make the Waco cultists look like dumb hippies.
While everyone likes to joke about Tom Cruise going nuts on TV and such- meanwhile, the "Church" of Scientology sets up "free personality tests" in public places with smiling handsome people to "help you understand yourself better". There were a bunch of these assholes set up at Boston Common this summer, and they were attracting a regular stream of people who have no idea how evil the cult is.
There's no talk about the endless brainwashing. Or the women who have died after getting kidnapped and imprisioned with no food, water, or medical treatment. There's no talk about how Hubbard was supposedly alive for years but suddenly "died" when the (I think?) IRS demanded to see him in person asserting his signature was faked. No talk about how, when the IRS removed Scientology's non-profit status the organization hired private investigators to investigate hundreds of IRS agents and continued a campaign of intimidation and harassment and lawsuits against them and their families- which ended when the head of the Scientologists and their chief counsel just "happened to drop by" (I shit you not, that's exactly how it was claimed on all sides) the office of the head of the IRS and had a "chat" with him. A day later, he reinstates their NPO status!
Wish I could effin' "happen to drop by" the head of the IRS, walk in, talk with him, and get my cult declared a non-profit again.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. The USS Cole was bombed by suicide bombers who piloted a boat straight at the ship and then blew themselves up.
A 150 decibel noise seems like a pretty minor convenience compared to blowing yourself up.
Furthermore- let's say the powerboat Good Times is headed towards the USS Paranoid is just a bunch of folks havin' a good time and not noticing the fact that they're bearing down on a warship (sounds strange given how dumb you'd have to be to do it, but people do leave the 'bridge' or controls of their boat quite often. They also tend to get drunk on their boats quite often too.)
With everyone on board unable to move or think because they're incapacitated with pain (and I presume inability to stand because of the inner ear getting wacked out)...don't you think it would be a tad bit difficult for anyone to get up to the controls and stop the boat or change course before it enters some abritrary "safety zone" and get blown into little fiberglass splinters by one of the Paranoid's deck guns?
God, the whole thing sounds like something crafted on HalfBakery.com. Nevermind that far as anyone can tell, the pirates were outrun, not knocked out by some sci-fi weapon...
That's generally what cache is for- on the drive, on the controller, and in the system itself. Even databases are optimized with the "expense" of disk access kept in mind in the optimizer's strategy.
So to cut through the jargon crap- in other words, someone finally remembered that RAID means Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, and that in most cases, when you've got 5 or more drives in an array, you don't need them to be 15,000 RPM?
I'm also quite positive I remember stumbling across a webpage for a US Defense/space contractor, where they offered up solar panel "scraps" (stuff you could still assemble into working modules, with a fair bit of labor) for sale to the public. Efficiency was substantially higher than anything I've seen on the commercial market, though I don't recall figures off the top of my head. They probably cost a lot more to manufacture, but $50M amortized over -possible- solar panels sounds pretty expensive too.
Why couldn't we just give a $50M grant to homeowners to buy solar panels?
You know, it's exactly that attitude of "world domination" that got the Web into the mess it is today. Firefox is not for everyone. I don't want to see it become "what you have to use whether you like it or not", because we've been down that road.
What is nice to see is that users of alternative browsers do make more than single-digit percentages, which of course means they're harder to dismiss. If Apple, The Mozilla Foundation, and Opera can all assure they take the high road at all times with regards to fixing rendering/parsing/etc bugs, MS won't be guaranteed to be the same, but it'll certainly make life easier on web designers.
If designers have to somehow work around 3, 4, 5 different browsers' rendering habits and bugs- things will be a disaster, they'll be frustrated and tempted to just support IE and "the next biggest fish", etc.
Also- I hope all the non-IE browsers are now 'shipping' by default with their own browser strings, not set to pretend to be IE...
Funny- I find it takes 5, 10, 15, 20 seconds of:
Ever tried to change the star rating for a song? It's far too sensitive.
Ever tried to switch off your iPod by holding play down- but slide your finger ever so slightly, so the iPod thinks it's a scroll and completely ignores the button press?
Sorry. I liked the scroll-wheel-plus-4-buttons MUCH better. Apple's current design is the equivalent of iDrive, wherein they try to accomplish too much with one control. Same goes for the stick control on Sony Ericsson phones...I can't believe how many times I try to push DOWN on the stick only to have it go to the SIDE...
Also, I'm pretty sure the Slashdot Groupthink doesn't like patents. The concept of turning something to select from a list is about as old as the first radios.
No, you assumed that I want a torrent because you think I'm cheap and implied I'm ungrateful.
I don't have a lot of time quite often, and I DO have a short attention span for taking on new projects. An attention span for trying a new OS or distribution that does not go past downloading+burning a CD or DVD. If I like what I see and they ask for donations (provided it's a reasonable amount, goes to a registered NPO they've established ie actually goes to helping the OpenBSD effort) that's fine.
Heck, I can't even get an ISO via FTP. I have to download a whole bunch of packages, make FLOPPIES (what is this, 1995?)...I don't even OWN any floppies...
Guys, I'm not trying to be snippity or troll (haven't been modded that yet, but heading it off at the pass based on the two replies I've seen so far.) It's a little frustrating when I want to try OpenBSD, and I can't because there's no ISO to FTP or torrent. It takes a fair bit for me to try even a new distribution of linux, and making barriers to keep me from trying out a new OS is a sure fire way to make me find something else to do with the free time I had. I want to quickly download, install, poke around. Not spend $X on a CD, wait for it to come in the mail (why am I explaining this to fellow techies...? :-)
I don't. I plan on downloading a torrent. However, it appears that the OpenBSD team would much rather have me buy a CD, so torrents aren't available...or at least easily accessible. I looked all over the OpenBSD website to no avail.
Funny. This from a company which releases software like GFS, but then seems to almost actively dissuade other distributions from using it.
I'm hard-pressed to come up with other examples right at the moment, but it seems like I've run across several "open-sourced" stuff from Redhat which had virtually zero documentation- not even so much as what they actually DO, how to set them up, etc.
So I'm going to flip it back at RedHat's CEO- buddy:
Sorry, folks. I'm just plumb unimpressed with RedHat. They seem very much for taking from the GPL/OSS community, but even more for protecting the hell out of their revenue stream to the absolute line the GPL allows them to. Hell, I can't even get a non-commercial license for RedHat's commercial distribution to learn it, and has anyone SEEN how much the damn certification costs!?
New Hampshire has no salestax, Mr. Knowit A. Dipshit.
My point is that they're doing absolutely nothing to contribute to the NH public; they pay no property, wage, or sales tax...pretty much the only way the government gets any money from you. They're not even spending the money here, they wire it home to Mexico or whereever.