Now, I'm in no way advocating the removal of the concept of jury nullification from our system, but I'm simply stating that to just throw out such a blanket action as the answer to this question doesn't help much because the action itself is under attack by significant powers in the legal realm. One still couldn't really fault them for trying though. The reasoning would go something like this - "Ok, we may or may not be allowed to find for the defendant in this case because it's so obvious she did it - but we do find the punishment to be excessive, cruel and unconscionable so we are going to at least/try/ to go back out there and say 'we find for the defendant' and then if the judge looks sternly at us and says 'oh no you dont - back into your little room with you' then we are going to come back out and say 'the jury reluctantly finds for the plaintiff' and at least we will get some headlines and public debate out of this outrage".
(Hey - it's a train of thought - it's allowed to be run-on:-)
Of course, a jury is less likely to want to go that extra mile for a defendant that they feel kept lying to them throughout the proceedings. If she were going for this sort of verdict (however much of a long shot it may be), she should probably have been straight with them from start to finish.
the thing is cops have a lot of power to fabricate or destory evidence. If the court system does not take into account that cops will be selfish, career-seeking bastards, then there is something wrong with the court system. These characteristics must be expected of all people, always, when designing such a system. Not because all people actually/are/ like that but because enough of them are that it will become a problem if it's not provided for.
If you blur out someone's face, the detail can never be recovered. No, not even by the NSA. The information is lost. You *can* sharpen up edges and improve contrast, but if the information just plain isn't there any more there's not a lot you can do. If the result after blurring is in some way dependent upon the original image, then: 1) If you have a list of suspects, you could apply the same algorithm to each of them and see which one best matches the picture. 2) If you have a blurred-out video sequence, you have a lot of time data to work with. As the camera pans, or the person moves about, different pixels will get blurred in different ways and this will happen in a way that depends on the data of the original picture. Capture enough of these frames, and you/might/ be able to work yourself back to reconstructing one single picture that is reasonably close to the subject's actual appearance. You will definately not be able to reconstruct each and every one of the individual frames in the sequence but that's probably not necessary anyway.
Look at how police are compensated. They get rewarded for closing cases. The focus is on arresting a suspect and getting a conviction. Whether or not it's the right person is not part of their pay package. Actually it is - it comes bundled with the "getting a conviction" part. If you were to demand any stricter proof than that - well, you'll need a psychic. Preferrably one that actually works. It is unclear to me how this could be the basis of any sort of sensible compensation system.
In this particular case, vf = vi + a * t seems most appropriate (where vf is final velocity, vi is initial velocity, a is accelleration and t is duration of acceleration). Assuming vf = 0 and solving for a, we get a = vi/t (1) Solving for t yields t = vi/a (2)
"vi" after a 6-foot fall can be determined by using another of the equations: vf^2 = vi^2 + 2ad (where d is distance in meters, let's use 2 meters for 6 feet. We must assume that vi is zero.) vf^2 = 2ad = 2 * 9.8 * 2 = about 40 m2/s2 (for simplicity). vf = sqrt(40) m/s = about 6 (for simplicity)
For an object that travels at 6 m/s, we can use equation (2) above to learn how much time it must decellerate over in order to experience 900 Gs. 900G is (approx) 9000 m/s2 so we get t = vi / a = (6 / 9000)s = 0.00067 seconds
So what we learn is that a disk that is dropped from 6 feet has a speed of 6 m/s as it hits the ground. Upon hitting, it starts deforming and if this is a reasonably linear process (which may or may not be the case) then a constant 900Gs throughout means that it took 0.00067 seconds to come to a complete stop.
Determining how many millimeters of the disk and/or ground got deformed during the decelleration is left as an exercise for the reader:-)
It isn't uncommon for people to view advertising as intrusive and a bad thing. It is conceivable that this is because the overwhelming majority of advertisments you are exposed to are completely irrelevant for you. Google's promise is to ensure that the ads you get are considerably more relevant and if they succeed in this, people might change their minds about it.
If you study history, you'd know that in fact they were ready to give up. But not unconditionally, which is what the US needed. Even/with/ the bombs, they wouldn't surrender/entirely/ unconditionally (they insisted on keeping the Emperor) but it was apparantly good enough for the US.
Some of the generals didn't want to give up, but the emperor did and was ready to surrender. And the hardliner generals were ready to have him replaced should he decide to do so.
The nuclear bombs were entirely unnecessary and just caused a large and needless loss of civilian life. That assessment is made in ignorance of how Japan may have developed had they been allowed a conditional surrender with more leeway on their part. Their complete disarmament, for instance, would have been unlikely to take place. If their expansionist hawks had been allowed to help form its future policies, this might very well have cost more SE Asian lives in the following decades than the nukes did.
To everyone else offcourse it is obvious, I spend ALL my money in the economy, it does not matter to the economy WHAT it is spend upon. If I don't spend it in shop A I spend it in shop B, shopowner A may not like it but the economy doesn't give a shit, as long as I spend. (Assuming for a moment that the economy doesn't mind us anthropomorphising it . ..) The above isn't entirely correct. Capitalism builds on a premise that what people spend money on is a decent expression of what sort of things they want and what sort of things they think are "good". When you stop spending money on music/in spite/ of you actually liking music (and obtaining it by other means), you are effectively feeding the economy erroneous information and this will, in principle, reduce the quality of the market. So while the money is not lost to the economy, its value has been degraded somewhat.
Why is the related story to this story is the story itself? It appears to me that the Firehose story is this story before it got edited. This is presumably useful in that you get to review the efficiency of our highly dedicated and professional editors.
In the case of this story, note that the capitalisation in the story title differs between the Firehose and the actual story. I haven't examined the text to see if that was changed in any way.
Certain materials like metals for antennas and other commodities associated with RFID production probably have some relatively stable and fixed long term costs for example. Generally speaking, metals have become substantially more expensive over the last several years - as is the case with most other raw materials. Many put this down to the growth of China.
We respectfully request that you cease and desist from listening to our music. Technically, we're probably already there. When playing music, you are sending electrical signals down a wire - this is a copy of the music. Then you induce vibrations in a speaker corresponding to the music - another copy. This then produces sound waves to travel through the air - a third copy. The sound waves hit your ears and induce neural impulses that are transmitted towards your brain - a fourth copy. Finally, you build an internal cognitive picture of the music in question, which makes for the fifth and final theft.
When you have bought a CD, you are/possibly/ allowed to hold it in your hand, look at it and wistfully try to imagine what the music might be like if you were permitted to actually listen to it. But I may be overly optimistic. After all, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
Without hardware protected memory, 'different user accounts' is essentially just slightly more elaborate than the 'protection' on a Windows 98 machine. You know, the OS where you hit 'cancel' to skip logging on the system. I don't think you skip logging on the system so much as you skip logging on the network (with a very Microsoft-esque notion of what "the network" actually is). Getting into the system is a given on W98 as having physical access to the machine is essentially the same as having access to the system.
I think the point is that if you live in the US and some stupid federal law bans something you'd like to get, you're basically screwed unless you live near the Mexican or Canadian border (and most people don't). In Europe, however, physical distances are comparatively small and so if your own so-anti-fascist-that-it-borders-on-fascism government decides to ban something, it's a couple of hours on the train at most to get to a more free-thinking nation where you/can/ get the contraband.
it literally gives players the hands of a killer I believe the word they were looking for was "metaphorically", but it is USA Today so you can't really expect too much. Either that, or the game comes bundled with two Hands of Vecna . . .
Blaming the internet for spam is like blaming pig farmers for low quality hot dogs. There's a connection, but you're missing other, unconnected factors that contribute more to the problem. Bzzzt.
moderatorrater (1095745), you are fined five credits for providing a non-car analogy on Slashdot.
Islam is the same thing as Christianity - only with minor updates and changes. Same basic rules (plus couple of new ones), same prophets, same angels... It even has Jesus - only his name is Isa (like the slot) in Qur'an. So what you're basically saying is that, at one time, a group of Christians reviewed their religion and went "God, what a holy mess - we'll just have to ditch it and rewrite it all from scratch."
Of course, we all know how/that/ is likely to turn out . . .
Well I think the problem is that with every religion you have open minded streams of the religion and bonehead people who would love to burn others for their believes. The islam, christianity, judaism, buddhism etc... are very similar in this regard. No, they aren't.
Jews and Judaism have never crusaded against anyone or instituted any forced conversions ever. The accusation wasn't about converting people - it was about killing them more or less at random. Jews certainly did their part to make Palestine a hell-hole prior to the establishment of the modern state of Israel. In this, Jewish fanatics were no better (but probably no worse either) than all the other religious nutcases that inhabited the region at the time.
(...) While in other states you simply drop off your empty cans at a participating grocery store, and they print you a receipt (at no additional charge) that you can exchange for cash or just apply to your grocery bill. Private companies foot the bill but in return they get foot traffic to their stores, so they are more than willing to pay. In Norway, it works almost exactly like this, except everyone who sells soft drinks (and other bottled stuff)/must/ accept returns of empty containers. I think it's part of the contract they have with the manufacturers but it could also be backed by law for all I know. (I think containers that cannot be returned for a refund get some hefty additional pollution tax levied, so manufacturers have financial motivation to ensure theirs is part of a recycling system.)
Seems to me that the point here is really that in some ways, human vision is 'broken' and that maybe it isn't the best apparatus for machines to use. If we want to welcome our robotic overlords, we should be improving on the vision model, not trying to give machines the same flawed framework. When humans have the vision that they do, it is likely that this is at or reasonably close to some local maximum in the space of all possible vision systems (that's what evolution tends to do). It isn't unreasonable to assume that this is a relatively efficient tradeoff point between processing requirements and results biased towards human needs. If so, then it makes sense to use this as the starting point for machine vision as it may turn out to be a efficient solution for most of their needs as well.
Of course, the particular maximum is probably heavily influenced by nature having to work with wetware as well as some very specific requirements of cavemen so we may be able to discover even more efficient tradeoffs for machines in the future.
One would hope that, 2,000 years from now, our descendants will all look back at Sputnik and see it as a great triumph of all mankind, not just the accomplishment of one tribe trying to best another. The likelihood of this occurring is, of course, quite small, but one can dream. Events like this tend to be glorified over time. The good parts get remembered and the bad parts get forgotten or dismissed as "the spirit of the times" or "we shouldn't judge their actions by modern standards" etc. So long as communism remains a non-threat (and thus there is no political necessity to vilify it) I think any bribes will be soundly forgotten 2,000 years from now:-)
A bigger disgrace is that the world didn't join. Again, not for the reasons listed in a SoTU. But because getting him out was the right (morally) thing to do. But then,/those/ should have been the reasons that were brought forward, and/those/ should have been the facts presented to the UN. The US could have used this as an excellent opportunity to shame the rest of the world into following their lead. That case, however, was never made.
When trying to convince someone to support you, it seems silly to expect that they will follow you for all the arguments that you are/not/ making.
I'd say that the current American democracy IS representative of the population. The people who don't vote made a choice not to count in decisions (for whatever tragic reason). They don't want to have a say, and thus don't really count, by choice. You do realise that what you're basically saying here is that people who don't vote aren't actually people?
I'm just saying that these people who don't want a voice, shouldn't expect to be heard. But that isn't the point. It's not that they have a need to be heard - clearly being heard doesn't interest them. The problem is that/we/ need to hear them and them refusing to talk to us is a serious problem.
Even if they were to start an armed rebellion (something that would surprise me, since we're dealing with apathy, not the best precondition for revolution), Perhaps, but then this is not the only type of calamity that can strike an apathic "democracy". Consider that we currently have an extremely wealthy drug cartel that is the cause of much organised crime throughout the world and that the fact that these people are so well-funded is causing serious problems for life, liberty, democracy and the economy. Suppose for a moment that much of the reason for this is the zero tolerance perpetuated through the war on drugs and that this war started mainly because the people who voted for it are the 20% of the population that have never been exposed to drugs or drug users and who harbour an irrational level of fear of both drugs and those who use it. If the drug using demographic could have bothered to vote, perhaps society's response to the drug problem would have been less ill-informed, less draconian and less nurturing of organized crime. If so, then we all would have benefited and, conversely, we are all currently suffering for this failure of democracy. While this situation may or may not be true for drugs, the example illustrates the type of pitfalls we are likely to blunder straight into when we are only too happy to accept that "oh well, 50% no-shows, no big deal, slackers the lot of them".
all the hardship would be ultimately their fault for their choice of not having a choice. When your home is burned to the ground and your children have been killed on the front lines, I fail to see what sort of comfort this is going to be to you. (Replace with your calamity of choice.)
Slashdot Mirror
(Hey - it's a train of thought - it's allowed to be run-on
Of course, a jury is less likely to want to go that extra mile for a defendant that they feel kept lying to them throughout the proceedings. If she were going for this sort of verdict (however much of a long shot it may be), she should probably have been straight with them from start to finish.
1) If you have a list of suspects, you could apply the same algorithm to each of them and see which one best matches the picture.
2) If you have a blurred-out video sequence, you have a lot of time data to work with. As the camera pans, or the person moves about, different pixels will get blurred in different ways and this will happen in a way that depends on the data of the original picture. Capture enough of these frames, and you
The equations of motion can be found at
:-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equations_of_motion#Linear_equations_of_motion
In this particular case,
vf = vi + a * t
seems most appropriate (where vf is final velocity, vi is initial velocity, a is accelleration and t is duration of acceleration).
Assuming vf = 0 and solving for a, we get
a = vi/t (1)
Solving for t yields
t = vi/a (2)
"vi" after a 6-foot fall can be determined by using another of the equations:
vf^2 = vi^2 + 2ad
(where d is distance in meters, let's use 2 meters for 6 feet. We must assume that vi is zero.)
vf^2 = 2ad = 2 * 9.8 * 2 = about 40 m2/s2 (for simplicity).
vf = sqrt(40) m/s = about 6 (for simplicity)
For an object that travels at 6 m/s, we can use equation (2) above to learn how much time it must decellerate over in order to experience 900 Gs. 900G is (approx) 9000 m/s2 so we get
t = vi / a = (6 / 9000)s = 0.00067 seconds
So what we learn is that a disk that is dropped from 6 feet has a speed of 6 m/s as it hits the ground. Upon hitting, it starts deforming and if this is a reasonably linear process (which may or may not be the case) then a constant 900Gs throughout means that it took 0.00067 seconds to come to a complete stop.
Determining how many millimeters of the disk and/or ground got deformed during the decelleration is left as an exercise for the reader
The above isn't entirely correct. Capitalism builds on a premise that what people spend money on is a decent expression of what sort of things they want and what sort of things they think are "good". When you stop spending money on music
In the case of this story, note that the capitalisation in the story title differs between the Firehose and the actual story. I haven't examined the text to see if that was changed in any way.
Some people have peanut allergies so severe that even being on the same planet as a peanut is potentially fatal.
Some people have peanut allergies so severe that even talking in a language that has a word for peanut is potentially fatal.
Some people have peanut allergies so severe that even the existence of the idea of something that may be vaguely peanut-shaped is potentially fatal.
Dear sir or madam;
We respectfully request that you cease and desist from listening to our music. Technically, we're probably already there. When playing music, you are sending electrical signals down a wire - this is a copy of the music. Then you induce vibrations in a speaker corresponding to the music - another copy. This then produces sound waves to travel through the air - a third copy. The sound waves hit your ears and induce neural impulses that are transmitted towards your brain - a fourth copy. Finally, you build an internal cognitive picture of the music in question, which makes for the fifth and final theft.
When you have bought a CD, you are
I think the point is that if you live in the US and some stupid federal law bans something you'd like to get, you're basically screwed unless you live near the Mexican or Canadian border (and most people don't). In Europe, however, physical distances are comparatively small and so if your own so-anti-fascist-that-it-borders-on-fascism government decides to ban something, it's a couple of hours on the train at most to get to a more free-thinking nation where you /can/ get the contraband.
moderatorrater (1095745), you are fined five credits for providing a non-car analogy on Slashdot.
It even has Jesus - only his name is Isa (like the slot) in Qur'an. So what you're basically saying is that, at one time, a group of Christians reviewed their religion and went "God, what a holy mess - we'll just have to ditch it and rewrite it all from scratch."
Of course, we all know how
The islam, christianity, judaism, buddhism etc... are very similar in this regard. No, they aren't.
Jews and Judaism have never crusaded against anyone or instituted any forced conversions ever. The accusation wasn't about converting people - it was about killing them more or less at random. Jews certainly did their part to make Palestine a hell-hole prior to the establishment of the modern state of Israel. In this, Jewish fanatics were no better (but probably no worse either) than all the other religious nutcases that inhabited the region at the time.
Of course, the particular maximum is probably heavily influenced by nature having to work with wetware as well as some very specific requirements of cavemen so we may be able to discover even more efficient tradeoffs for machines in the future.
It is a stream of water smaller than a river.
When trying to convince someone to support you, it seems silly to expect that they will follow you for all the arguments that you are