To be fair, I would be likely to swear at *anyone* who obstructs traffic by blocking a lane while going 10-15 mph under the speed limit. But for some reason cyclists are the only ones who ever seem to do that.
A better question: how many legit files did they have to sort through to find the illicit ones? I'm guessing that even on those 88 "bad" newgroups, they had to go through many thousands of files before they found anything illegal.
In New Zealand they have an elegant solution; the minimum salary for a foreign worker who is there on their equivalent of the H-1B program is $55,000. That ensures that companies are only likely to bring in foreign workers if there is a genuine shortage of people with their particular skills. Your salary is usually a pretty direct measure of how scarce people with your abilities/training are and how much demand there is, so anyone who is coming into the county to fill a shortage in a particular field should almost by definition be getting a relatively high salary.
Fermilab's budget is well over $300 million. I'm somehow skeptical that a mere $5 million would be enough to "save" it if it were having money problems.
(c) Taken as a whole, the work has no artistic, political, or social value. I always thought that was rather odd. Does graphic pornography suddenly stop being obscene if the actors all shout "Vote Nader and remember to recycle!" at the end?
Most of them were probably just too lazy to bother. I'm guessing that the information requested was a bit more complex than "How many kwh per month do you guys use?" The lack of replies probably has more to do with the data center people having better things to do.
His point was not that vegan diets lack protein, he was simply pointing out that meat is not a high-energy food. Vegan diets most certainly do NOT need to lack protein. Just look at all the BODY BUILDERS who take soy protein supplements.
Thank you! I would mod you up if I could. I am sick to death of people not understanding that although BMI isn't particularly useful for individuals, it is a valid measurement of the overall level of body fat in a large population. Whenever there's a discussion of average health/weight that involves BMI, idiots invariaby come out of the woodwork with self-ritious stories about how BMI isn't a good measure of their individual fitness. Who cares about your individual level of fitness? We're talking about the fitness of an entire population, whch is exactly what BMI is useful for.
The atmosphere is 78% nitrogen and 20% oxygen. If you could extract oxygen from the ice, you're still missing 4/5 of your atmosphere. All that you need to breath is about 2 psi partial pressure of oxygen. The nitrogen isn't necessary. Mars has enough gravity to support about 5 psi atmospheric pressure, so it isn't really a problem.
Then of course there's the issue of what happens to all that free oxygen. Oxygen is highly reactive and tends to, well, oxidize whatever it comes into contact with; that's going to scrub it out of the atmosphere. That means that you have to produce vastly more than you'd need just to fill an atmosphere, and that's why it took hundreds of millions of years after photosynthesis became common before Earth had anything like a breathable atmosphere. It took a long time of oxygen to build up on earth because our atmosphere was full of methane and ammonia, along with other fun reducing agents. That's not the case on Mars.
We don't know everything, but we are most certainly not "completely clueless," and no one is suggesting that we "randomly tinker and watch what happens." There are many genes whose functions are very well understood.
If we are going to consider the desires of the hypothetical person that the embryo might grow into (like whether or not he would want to be a glowing mutant), surely that hypothetical person would prefer to be born a mutant than to not be born at all.
It's not really as bad as it sounds. A real implementation wouldn't use two separate spacecraft, it would simply have the lens connected to the camera with a really long, thin, light-weight scaffolding. The camera would be mounted with a system of precision motors and laser range finders that could adjust the exact position of the camera on its end of the scaffold. A scaffolding of three aluminum poles that were each 10 km long and 1 cm across would only mass something like 9 tons, which is easily within the capabilities of existing launch vehicles. The only problem would be that you would need to actually assemble it in orbit. Which would be a bit of a project, but it's not a show-stopper, especially considering the payoff once it was assembled.
This is true, and oh so ironic. Steamboat Willy has now been under copyright for 80 years, while The Jungle Book was "only" 73 years old when Disney made their animated version.
The usefulness of Craigslist can vary quite a lot too, mainly depending on where you live. I currently live in a college town, so Craigslist works pretty well - most of the people trying to sell things are savvy enough to make understand what they are selling and make useful listing.
In my last city, on the other hand, Craigslist was littered with useless postings in which clueless people were trying to sell things that they didn't understand. 90+ percent of the adds were along the lines of "Used black and white printer. $40 or best offer." No mention of if it's a laser or inkjet printer, the manufacturer, how old it is, etc. God forbid you actually post a specific model number. There were also many adds like "Used computer system, 6 years old, in good shape. Cost $1200 new, asking $800." Good luck trying to explain to them that their 6 year old computer is now worth a lot less than when they paid for it; they usually just look at you suspiciously and assume that you're trying to rip them off.
I'm not saying that ebay is great either, but at least the national (or international) nature of the sales allows you to get the same amount of usefullness out of it no matter where you live. Craigslist can easily be nearly useless for you if you happen to live in the wrong place.
The problem with the Drake equation is that we have *no idea* what values to use for many of the variables. How likely is it that a planet able to support life will develop life? How likely is it that once life develops, intelligence will develop? You can insert any number you like, from 1 to 10E-5000 or beyond. This makes the equation mostly meaningless.
The entire Apollo program cost about $135 billion, adjusted for inflation. The marginal cost of a single Saturn V launch was about $1.2 billion, again after inflation. And today the U.S. spends $1.2 trillion/year on defense. In other words, the U.S. spends 9 times the *total* cost of the Apollo program every single year on defense. If you took just 5% of the military budget and gave it to NASA, that would be enough to launch 50 Satrun V's per year. But hey, I'm sure that 5% means the difference between whether or not the terrorists win.
In order to accept that every person who uses OSS that they got for free is a lost customer who would have purchased non-OSS software, you have to accept that demand does not go up as price goes down. Which is clearly absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, I would be likely to swear at *anyone* who obstructs traffic by blocking a lane while going 10-15 mph under the speed limit. But for some reason cyclists are the only ones who ever seem to do that.
It seems to have more to do with a high standard of living than anything else.
A better question: how many legit files did they have to sort through to find the illicit ones? I'm guessing that even on those 88 "bad" newgroups, they had to go through many thousands of files before they found anything illegal.
I doubt they care about IRC, since there cant be many users and it couldn't be taking up much bandwidth.
Since when is *any* signature considered "security"? Its just a legal formality.
In New Zealand they have an elegant solution; the minimum salary for a foreign worker who is there on their equivalent of the H-1B program is $55,000. That ensures that companies are only likely to bring in foreign workers if there is a genuine shortage of people with their particular skills. Your salary is usually a pretty direct measure of how scarce people with your abilities/training are and how much demand there is, so anyone who is coming into the county to fill a shortage in a particular field should almost by definition be getting a relatively high salary.
Fermilab's budget is well over $300 million. I'm somehow skeptical that a mere $5 million would be enough to "save" it if it were having money problems.
For most slashdotters that *is* a big deal.
Most of them were probably just too lazy to bother. I'm guessing that the information requested was a bit more complex than "How many kwh per month do you guys use?" The lack of replies probably has more to do with the data center people having better things to do.
His point was not that vegan diets lack protein, he was simply pointing out that meat is not a high-energy food. Vegan diets most certainly do NOT need to lack protein. Just look at all the BODY BUILDERS who take soy protein supplements.
Thank you! I would mod you up if I could. I am sick to death of people not understanding that although BMI isn't particularly useful for individuals, it is a valid measurement of the overall level of body fat in a large population. Whenever there's a discussion of average health/weight that involves BMI, idiots invariaby come out of the woodwork with self-ritious stories about how BMI isn't a good measure of their individual fitness. Who cares about your individual level of fitness? We're talking about the fitness of an entire population, whch is exactly what BMI is useful for.
But we're talking about embryos that would never even be created in the first place were it not for the experimentation.
We don't know everything, but we are most certainly not "completely clueless," and no one is suggesting that we "randomly tinker and watch what happens." There are many genes whose functions are very well understood.
If the alternative was to not be born at all? I'm pretty sure I know what I would pick.
If we are going to consider the desires of the hypothetical person that the embryo might grow into (like whether or not he would want to be a glowing mutant), surely that hypothetical person would prefer to be born a mutant than to not be born at all.
The sperm and egg are both very much alive before they join.
It's not really as bad as it sounds. A real implementation wouldn't use two separate spacecraft, it would simply have the lens connected to the camera with a really long, thin, light-weight scaffolding. The camera would be mounted with a system of precision motors and laser range finders that could adjust the exact position of the camera on its end of the scaffold. A scaffolding of three aluminum poles that were each 10 km long and 1 cm across would only mass something like 9 tons, which is easily within the capabilities of existing launch vehicles. The only problem would be that you would need to actually assemble it in orbit. Which would be a bit of a project, but it's not a show-stopper, especially considering the payoff once it was assembled.
Indeed - it's actually a bit of a plot hole that Peter Parker, who was clearly very smart, would behave that way.
This is true, and oh so ironic. Steamboat Willy has now been under copyright for 80 years, while The Jungle Book was "only" 73 years old when Disney made their animated version.
The usefulness of Craigslist can vary quite a lot too, mainly depending on where you live. I currently live in a college town, so Craigslist works pretty well - most of the people trying to sell things are savvy enough to make understand what they are selling and make useful listing.
In my last city, on the other hand, Craigslist was littered with useless postings in which clueless people were trying to sell things that they didn't understand. 90+ percent of the adds were along the lines of "Used black and white printer. $40 or best offer." No mention of if it's a laser or inkjet printer, the manufacturer, how old it is, etc. God forbid you actually post a specific model number. There were also many adds like "Used computer system, 6 years old, in good shape. Cost $1200 new, asking $800." Good luck trying to explain to them that their 6 year old computer is now worth a lot less than when they paid for it; they usually just look at you suspiciously and assume that you're trying to rip them off.
I'm not saying that ebay is great either, but at least the national (or international) nature of the sales allows you to get the same amount of usefullness out of it no matter where you live. Craigslist can easily be nearly useless for you if you happen to live in the wrong place.
The problem with the Drake equation is that we have *no idea* what values to use for many of the variables. How likely is it that a planet able to support life will develop life? How likely is it that once life develops, intelligence will develop? You can insert any number you like, from 1 to 10E-5000 or beyond. This makes the equation mostly meaningless.
The entire Apollo program cost about $135 billion, adjusted for inflation. The marginal cost of a single Saturn V launch was about $1.2 billion, again after inflation. And today the U.S. spends $1.2 trillion/year on defense. In other words, the U.S. spends 9 times the *total* cost of the Apollo program every single year on defense. If you took just 5% of the military budget and gave it to NASA, that would be enough to launch 50 Satrun V's per year. But hey, I'm sure that 5% means the difference between whether or not the terrorists win.
In order to accept that every person who uses OSS that they got for free is a lost customer who would have purchased non-OSS software, you have to accept that demand does not go up as price goes down. Which is clearly absurd.