No, it's not the end of trolling. If anything, smart trolls will simply begin taking care to add "In my opinion..." at the beginning of their posts. Statements of opinion are generally immune from defamation claims.
I doubt that many people will go and "brows around" in all that data, but there will probably be specialists in certain fields who will take a look to see if there's anything relevant to them. Someone whose was, say, and education researcher, might search through it to see if there are any studies related to education effectiveness vs. funding/number of students/teacher salary/whatever, even if they aren't going to care about the rest of it.
FYI, you can refuse to allow stores to look in your bag. There's nothing they can do about it, other then possibly telling you not to come back - which is pretty unlikely.
But we have no idea what the odds are of winning this particular lottery. Maybe every planet that develops life has a 99% chance of evolving sentient, intelligent, tool-using life. In that case it's very unlikely that we're the first. Or maybe only one living planet in a billion produces intelligent, advanced life, in which case we very well could be the first in the galaxy. With no way of knowing the odds of advanced life arising, it's impossible to evaluate the odds that we're the first, so for the moment it's as good an explanation as any.
You would almost certainly not "send small groups of people (or aliens or whatever) across trillions of miles, probably in some kind of hibernated state, in the hope that they'll bump into a habitable somewhere, set up shop, and begin to populate." Most likely you would use your big space-based telescopes to pick out a system that look favorable, then send an uncrewed probe or two to check it out, and then only launch colonists once you knew exactly where you were going.
The person who wrote the summary doesn't seem to understand what the research is trying to do. They aren't trying to make part human/part animal creatures. They are trying to use animal eggs to grow human stem cells, by injecting human DNA into the egg and getting it to reproduce. The outcome that they're looking for is a mass of human stem cells that could be used to, say, create a new organ for a person who needed a transplant.
Something I have long wondered about but never seen an answer to is what happens when a person under 18 buys a computer game and installs it himself. Minors generally can't be held to contracts, right? So are minors not allowed to install their own games without violating copyright? If a minor does install a game, what are the legal ramifications? Of course the game companies know damn well that a huge percentage of their customers are going to be under 18. I have never seen a "If you are under 18, get a parent to click yes!" box pop up on a game EULA.
But does anyone actually purchase things from spammers? Or are spammers just ripping off one merchant after another, charging them for spam and promising great returns even though no one might respond?
My guess is that the usefulness (if there's any in the first place) would go way down when used on someone who was simply reciting a pre-written/memorized speech.
I came here to say exactly the same thing, but I see you beat me to it. Call any data recovery service you want and ask them if they can recover data from a drive that has been overwritten even once, and they will all apologize and tell you that they can't. It doesn't matter how much money you're willing to throw at them - the technology simply doesn't exist.
I don't really know how breathalyzers work, but it seems reasonable for their software to be bug-free. It probably just measures the value of the current passing though an alcohol fuel cell or something, computes what BAC that corresponds to, and displays a number. We probably aren't talking about thousands of lines of code here.
You would think that at the very least she would try going to a local computer store and explain the problem to them, at which point they would surely have told her what to do. The fact that she apparently didn't even try something as basic as that before dropping out of college over the issue is indeed beyond stupid.
It depends on how well you can make metrics to measure whether or not a game is fun, and how much freedom you give the computer to change things. A computer might have an easier time developing truly original games than a person, since the computer won't have any preconceptions about what games are "supposed" to be like.
And even if it was always derivative, I for one think it would be pretty cool if we could make games that dynamically generated original levels/maps/whatever that were truly interesting, rather than just random.
In that case, I would probably prefer to cut the silk worms out of the picture and eat the plants myself - thermodynamics tells us that this will be more energy efficient. Unless I'm only "ranching" the meat for the luxury of it, in which case I will probably want something other than silkworm.
According to the article, the kid tried to frame his father for the shootings. That seems to strongly indicate that he was indeed aware that the deaths would be forever.
The big issue with space missions in mass. Silk worms aren't going to magically create silk worm meat (or whatever you call it) from nothing - for ever 1 kg of silk worm that you grow to eat, you will have to bring along at least 1 kg of silkworm food. So why not just bring human-edible food instead of silk worm food?
The slowdowns are "inexplicable" in the sense that although I know they are caused by programs hogging resources, I have no idea which programs/processes/whatever are doing it or why they are doing it.
I have a lot of Apple fanboy friends, and they finally convinced me to spend the extra money for a macbook pro when it came time to buy a new laptop. So far I've been seriously underwhelmed. Contrary to the claims of virtually every Apple user I know, my new laptop with OS X doesn't appear to be any more stable than my old Windows XP laptop. It still periodically locks up for no apparent reason, which I can only solve by making it force-quit applications. It still sometimes slows down for no apparent reason (presumably because something is hogging resources). Also, a few weeks ago one of the updates killed my laptop's display somehow and I had to plug it into an external monitor to fix it - which was a huge pain in the ass, because for some inexplicable reason the macbook pro doesn't have a standard VGA port for connecting to external monitors, AND Apple didn't bother to include the necessary adapters with the laptop. Maybe the update was a ploy to see how many people they could force to buy $16 adapters?
Overall I'm still enjoying my laptop, but I'm astounded that so many people basically lied to me with claims of how perfectly stable and wonderful macs are. I find it very difficult to believe that I'm the only one who has to force-quit applications or deal with inexplicable slowdowns. Surely all these fanboys are having the same sorts of problems. So why can't they just admit it? Why do they have to insist that everything is perfect?
You thought wrong. The guy from the article was a grad student. Virtually all U.S. universities pay their grad students for the work that they do, and do not charge them tuition. Grad students are esentially employees, and he almost certaily was paid for his development work on this project.
I'm not sure you understand the issues involved. If you try to pump air into your 36k km "tube," it will all simply fall back to earth due to the pull of earth's gravity. You will end up with 99.999999% of your air sitting in the bottom of the tube, with the other 35500 km or so still under vacuum.
It's exactly the same with textbooks. Publishing companies complain that they have to charge $150 for a textbook because they only make money on the first year or so of a textbook's life, because after that everyone is buying them used. This ignores the fact that people would be a lot less interested in buying used textbooks (or selling back their old textbooks at the end of the term) if they weren't so expensive.
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No, it's not the end of trolling. If anything, smart trolls will simply begin taking care to add "In my opinion..." at the beginning of their posts. Statements of opinion are generally immune from defamation claims.
The carbon in the cows came from plants, which came from CO2 when the plants where doing photosynthesis - so it is carbon neutral.
I doubt that many people will go and "brows around" in all that data, but there will probably be specialists in certain fields who will take a look to see if there's anything relevant to them. Someone whose was, say, and education researcher, might search through it to see if there are any studies related to education effectiveness vs. funding/number of students/teacher salary/whatever, even if they aren't going to care about the rest of it.
FYI, you can refuse to allow stores to look in your bag. There's nothing they can do about it, other then possibly telling you not to come back - which is pretty unlikely.
But we have no idea what the odds are of winning this particular lottery. Maybe every planet that develops life has a 99% chance of evolving sentient, intelligent, tool-using life. In that case it's very unlikely that we're the first. Or maybe only one living planet in a billion produces intelligent, advanced life, in which case we very well could be the first in the galaxy. With no way of knowing the odds of advanced life arising, it's impossible to evaluate the odds that we're the first, so for the moment it's as good an explanation as any.
You would almost certainly not "send small groups of people (or aliens or whatever) across trillions of miles, probably in some kind of hibernated state, in the hope that they'll bump into a habitable somewhere, set up shop, and begin to populate." Most likely you would use your big space-based telescopes to pick out a system that look favorable, then send an uncrewed probe or two to check it out, and then only launch colonists once you knew exactly where you were going.
The person who wrote the summary doesn't seem to understand what the research is trying to do. They aren't trying to make part human/part animal creatures. They are trying to use animal eggs to grow human stem cells, by injecting human DNA into the egg and getting it to reproduce. The outcome that they're looking for is a mass of human stem cells that could be used to, say, create a new organ for a person who needed a transplant.
Something I have long wondered about but never seen an answer to is what happens when a person under 18 buys a computer game and installs it himself. Minors generally can't be held to contracts, right? So are minors not allowed to install their own games without violating copyright? If a minor does install a game, what are the legal ramifications? Of course the game companies know damn well that a huge percentage of their customers are going to be under 18. I have never seen a "If you are under 18, get a parent to click yes!" box pop up on a game EULA.
But does anyone actually purchase things from spammers? Or are spammers just ripping off one merchant after another, charging them for spam and promising great returns even though no one might respond?
My guess is that the usefulness (if there's any in the first place) would go way down when used on someone who was simply reciting a pre-written/memorized speech.
The rats in the study were injected anyway, not exposed to smoke.
I take it you've never heard of a "field sobriety test"?
I came here to say exactly the same thing, but I see you beat me to it. Call any data recovery service you want and ask them if they can recover data from a drive that has been overwritten even once, and they will all apologize and tell you that they can't. It doesn't matter how much money you're willing to throw at them - the technology simply doesn't exist.
I don't really know how breathalyzers work, but it seems reasonable for their software to be bug-free. It probably just measures the value of the current passing though an alcohol fuel cell or something, computes what BAC that corresponds to, and displays a number. We probably aren't talking about thousands of lines of code here.
You would think that at the very least she would try going to a local computer store and explain the problem to them, at which point they would surely have told her what to do. The fact that she apparently didn't even try something as basic as that before dropping out of college over the issue is indeed beyond stupid.
It depends on how well you can make metrics to measure whether or not a game is fun, and how much freedom you give the computer to change things. A computer might have an easier time developing truly original games than a person, since the computer won't have any preconceptions about what games are "supposed" to be like.
And even if it was always derivative, I for one think it would be pretty cool if we could make games that dynamically generated original levels/maps/whatever that were truly interesting, rather than just random.
In that case, I would probably prefer to cut the silk worms out of the picture and eat the plants myself - thermodynamics tells us that this will be more energy efficient. Unless I'm only "ranching" the meat for the luxury of it, in which case I will probably want something other than silkworm.
According to the article, the kid tried to frame his father for the shootings. That seems to strongly indicate that he was indeed aware that the deaths would be forever.
The big issue with space missions in mass. Silk worms aren't going to magically create silk worm meat (or whatever you call it) from nothing - for ever 1 kg of silk worm that you grow to eat, you will have to bring along at least 1 kg of silkworm food. So why not just bring human-edible food instead of silk worm food?
The slowdowns are "inexplicable" in the sense that although I know they are caused by programs hogging resources, I have no idea which programs/processes/whatever are doing it or why they are doing it.
I have a lot of Apple fanboy friends, and they finally convinced me to spend the extra money for a macbook pro when it came time to buy a new laptop. So far I've been seriously underwhelmed. Contrary to the claims of virtually every Apple user I know, my new laptop with OS X doesn't appear to be any more stable than my old Windows XP laptop. It still periodically locks up for no apparent reason, which I can only solve by making it force-quit applications. It still sometimes slows down for no apparent reason (presumably because something is hogging resources). Also, a few weeks ago one of the updates killed my laptop's display somehow and I had to plug it into an external monitor to fix it - which was a huge pain in the ass, because for some inexplicable reason the macbook pro doesn't have a standard VGA port for connecting to external monitors, AND Apple didn't bother to include the necessary adapters with the laptop. Maybe the update was a ploy to see how many people they could force to buy $16 adapters?
Overall I'm still enjoying my laptop, but I'm astounded that so many people basically lied to me with claims of how perfectly stable and wonderful macs are. I find it very difficult to believe that I'm the only one who has to force-quit applications or deal with inexplicable slowdowns. Surely all these fanboys are having the same sorts of problems. So why can't they just admit it? Why do they have to insist that everything is perfect?
You thought wrong. The guy from the article was a grad student. Virtually all U.S. universities pay their grad students for the work that they do, and do not charge them tuition. Grad students are esentially employees, and he almost certaily was paid for his development work on this project.
I'm not sure you understand the issues involved. If you try to pump air into your 36k km "tube," it will all simply fall back to earth due to the pull of earth's gravity. You will end up with 99.999999% of your air sitting in the bottom of the tube, with the other 35500 km or so still under vacuum.
It's exactly the same with textbooks. Publishing companies complain that they have to charge $150 for a textbook because they only make money on the first year or so of a textbook's life, because after that everyone is buying them used. This ignores the fact that people would be a lot less interested in buying used textbooks (or selling back their old textbooks at the end of the term) if they weren't so expensive.
Only the lowest few tens of km will be in the atmosphere. The cable will be at least 36000 km long.