Would you suggest the U.S. put a bunch of coal-burning plants in downtown Manhattan for fuel efficiency?
I wouldn't suggest coal, coal's a killer. However, you're writing like the Manhattanites are making rational choices on this, and they're just plain not.
Right now, Manhattan doesn't want Nukes nearby either (not even nice clean pebble bed designs). For nuke plants, most of them define nearby as "same solar system".
They don't want to upgrade their existing Hydro infrastructure, either (even when it crashes the rest of the Northeast grid).
The locals have also opposed initiatives to build tide or wave power plants as much as 100 miles away, just to preserve all the coast for small boat traffic (big ships can operate safely in their normal channels near wave engines, its just non-commercial pleasure craft that are at real risk. Can't alienate a few power boaters just to lessen their dependency on imported oil, killer coal, and obsolete transmission systems).
Manhattan did want wind power, but not workable forms - that is, they would be fine with picturesque little windmills atop a few small buildings, but not with hundreds or thousands of rotors with blades bigger than 747 wings, which is what it would take to make a real dent.
The average person in Manhattan seems to want the rest of the country to take all the pollution headakes and send them electricity for free, and to shut up and let them make all the political decisions even remotely relating to power generation. The way their leaders talk when it comes to power generation, the people are genuinely so out of touch they think this can happen. So no, I don't want them to build coal-burning plants in downtown Manhattan - I want them to freeze to death in the dark before their irrationality takes the rest of us down with them. I'd like them growing up and fixing their problems even more, but I suspect that physical law is the harshest of teachers, yet alas, the only one they will heed in the end.
You're right about why most Americans have cars. Where it falls down is we don't have good public transport even in many high density areas where it would be most cost effective, and most of us don't even car pool even when it looks the most feasable.
Most of America is not next to a train track, but most of industrial America once was, and it's expenses like limiting train speeds to 60 and even 40 MPH and then paying double and even triple time for the resulting crews being on duty for more than 8 hour shifts that made trains less than competitive with trucks. Look at the benefits packages the railroad unions negotiated, look at how much load on the highways a typical semi imposes over and above those 2,000 dollars in road use taxes the industry cites as proof it's supposedly paying its share, remember all those semi drivers that get paid the same even when they drive 20 hour shifts, and then talk about expense.
Microsoft got a pass with the current anti-trust situation in the US. They are well aware this can change overnight based on their anti-competitive actions, or based on a change in government administration in the US.
Precisely what the people who think Microsoft can even possibly retain their current marketshare overlook. Some people seem to think MS has deep enough pockets to influence a whole string of elections, AND go up against half the NYSE or more, AND keep the OEMs supporting them, all at the same time. Sorry, but that's just nowhere close to reality.
Electioneering is a real bitch. Whatever you spend on helping a given senator or president get elected has to come back to you in a single term, with interest, or you just lost money. Microsoft is now fighting a war on at least three fronts, against foes with total resources a hundred times theirs or more. Those foes don't all particularly want to totally crush Microsoft, or it would have already happened. Many of them just want to curb Microsoft's expansion in one area or another, or win a little victory her or there and stay out of other parts of Microsoft's business entirely. By and large, they are succeeding at their goals and MS is taking the hits.
I have to agree that pointing your cameras at their cameras isn't symetric, ethically, but I'd dispute one of your other points:
Why should a random private mall employee have a philosophical privacy and surveillance discussion with some self-righteous, cynical privacy advocate.
Leaving aside the prejudicial language that makes your remark beg the question -
1. Because that private employee is specially recognized by the state in his job, and his testimony in court is considered expert testimony? Shouldn't an 'expert' on matters of law enforcement be able to engage in a 'philosophical' discussion of an area at least closely related to that which he is supposedly expert in (i.e. the legal limits of obtaining evidence)?
2. Because most of these private employees have officially received training in legal rights isssues and signed legal doccuments attesting to that fact in an effort to keep their employer from facing various lawsuits?
3. Because about 50% of the time, the private employee is an off duty policeman or deputy working a second job, about whom the first point applies in spades, redoubled with an ace kicker?
If you ever try something like these protests, you will find you can't talk to mall management about the issues. You can't attend a board of directors meeting and bring this sort of thing up, even if you are a small stockholder. Try either, and you will find yourself talking to PR flack lawyers who will swear they don't have the authority to commit to giving you their own name, let alone changing policy, if you aren't on the reciving end of an injunction. So, you can't resolve any problem through the owners, or through management, and by your arguement, you can't do anything, even peripherally, to help resolve it where the rubber meets the road either.
By your own arguement, including that bold face reference to private property, we have two entities, an individual, and a corporation, both allegedly equal in the eyes of the law, and any individual's complaint what-so-ever can NEVER be resolved to the satisfaction of the individual except if a good portion of individuals stop trying to resolve complaints on a volutary basis and switch to immediately and agressively taking them to court. I can see the point you make in the quoted section, especially in the abstract. It would be so much better for everyone in the long run if management wasn't used to hiding behind cheap employees instead of dealing with things that are really their job. Unfortunately, given decades of systemic abuse, it leads inexorably to a law-suit happy society.
That's sort of my point. Yes this is useful science - it's a proof in practice of the potential feasability of using DNA for some forms of parallel computation, and I'm sorry if it seemed like I was rejecting that accomplishment. That's a pretty decent thing to have done, even to this stage.
Where I see a problem is there's no natural mapping between using Sierpinski Triangles as a form of binary decision tree, and their other aspect as an example fractal entity (and of course a real world construct can't scale down to subatomic levels to create true fractal dimensionality anyways).
Judging from the article, I gathered that the use of fractal properties was somehow important, and had potential broader implications for the use of fractal math in building real world systems. Since several people responded to my post, I went back and read some more allegedly related papers and abstracts, and can now confidently say the fractal properties are irrelevant to the underlieng math used in the actual computation. Some of the sites tracking this paper are erroniously cross-indexing it.
I'm inclined to the "realistic consequences of violence are generally better" school lately. What I think is worse though, is a mixture, where "Fate" or "God" or whatever seems to control how bad the violence is. I'm referring to all the movies where the minor villains get shot quickly and cleanly, and the really nasty villain whom the audience has special reasons to hate gets a specially nasty demise, like falling from an airplane onto high tension wires.
Most really nasty people are still heroes in their own minds, who can internally justify the pain and suffering they inflict on others as a consequence of those other people's actions and not their own. Films and TV that encourage people to think fate will make the bad guys miss, and the good guys can automatically inflict justice just by using force, are much worse than some more violent films that show that even the nastyest bad guy may have a family that will miss him, or that innocent bystanders sometimes get hit.
With that said, remember how lousy stormtroopers' aim is? How the trees on the forest moon of Endor like to jump out in front of speederbikes? There's a definite touch of this "Fate keeps the good guys from inflicting collateral damage" mentality in the SW films.
Star Wars is far from the worst on this, hence Luke loses a hand in what's probably the best episode, and other bad things have permanent consequences even to good people. Just imagine what Star Wars would look like as six episodes of Die Hard in space.
At first, I thought the DNA assembly-Sierpinski Triangle story was particularly interesting, as a link between real world information storage and the usually unworldly area of fractal geometry. On following the story, it turns out that the error rate is simply enormous (1 to 10%). DNA, in normal use, works about a billion times more reliably than it does here.
You could probably coax DNA to assemble into face centered cubic crystals with a much lower error rate than that. Hell, you might be able to get little figures of Snoopy and Garfield more reliably than these Sierpinski Triangles. This is like proving you could workably rebuild the Golden Gate bridge from Mayonaise and save the tax-payers a fortune, for sufficiently low values of "workable","fortune", and probably "Mayo".
All the people who are questioning why an amphibian has hooters are missing the point. If she was flat chested, she might look like a skinny guy. Here she is, swimming through the water, showing a lot of leg and a pert butt, and just when the viewer's little George starts perking up, there's that icky thought, "Oh my Midiclorians, what if 'she' is a skinny guy fish-thing?".
This way, any viewer who responds to the more subtle feminine cues can check for bumpies and be assured he is wholesomely turned on by an obviously female overgrown mutant carp, and isn't some kind of prevert that would dig male horribly deformed giant walking catfish.
Platypi do not have breasts, or even nipples. Females lactate through many small, pore-like openings on their bellies, and must lay on their backs and allow the milk to form pools for the young to nurse from. (Even your link touches upon this)
This sounds a lot like what William Gibson called NAS (Neural Attenuation Syndrome) in Johnny Mnemonic. It's also been described by Vinge in True Names, and in half a dozen other SF stories under a variety of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) and ETLAs (Extended TLAs). This article represents yet another victim of EPAS (Endlessly Proliferating Acronym Syndrome). Add to its list of symptoms, the inability to find out that others have already coined acronyms and there's no need for a new one. Obviously, we must give till it hurts to find a cure.
In general, sequential numbers have not been considered a sign of possible counterfeiting in many years. In addition, the only method worth employing to duplicate bills as cheap as the 2$ is essentially simple photocopy, which results in identical, not sequential numbers. Making sequential 2$s would probably cost more than 2$ each once you factor in the parts like paper that appeared correct, and any professional would duplicate older 20$s or 5$s instead, just as they would avoid sequential numbers.
It is possible that the young employee actually heard of that old sequential rule of thumb, but much more likely he did not think any such thing at the time and was coached to make that claim by the manager after the situation went wrong. This can probably be determined for sure - Best Buy uses a videotape or CD instruction set for training cashiers, and what's on the tape or CD can be checked against what the cashier now claims. Best Buy may be able to raise reasonable doubt this way but I wouldn't bet on beating the preponderance test in a civil suite.
What makes you think the employee did this out of innocent stupidity and ignorance, rather than malice? The victim was creating an annoying situation for him. Did he really not understand what 2$ bills were? Did he really think that sequential serial numbers were a sign of possible counterfeits? Or did he knowingly attempt an act of malicious prosecution (although it might better be called a conspiracy civil rights violation at the federal level)? From the original article, there's certainly enough evidence for that for a grand jury to remand to trial.
Reprimanded? Fined? Employment terminated? How about imprisoned? I wouldn't wish the pound-me-in-the-ass part even on them, even though it looks like they did on Mr. Bolesta, but if there's any malicious intent on a single employee's part, everything short of that is appropriate.
As you put it, They are your oppressors.. As I would put it, there are times Godwin's law is a damned nuisance.
Glad to hear this idea goes back at least to Crick, although I presume from the your context more recently than his Nobel days.
I don't have anything definitive, but if you'ld settle for "just maybe interesting", this:
might qualify, or at least lead you to something deeper.
Note: if you just google for 'Glial' and 'memory', you will probably first and foremost get a lot of claims that certain Statin drugs that are known to be absorbed heavily by glial cells can also adversely affect long term memory. You'll have to wade through quite a bit of that to find links pointing to more fundamental research. Best of luck if you bother.
re. multiple connections and non-static/non-singular thresholds, that's not only interesting, but it sounds like it will apply whether glial memory applies or turns out to be a red herring.
The few significantly wrong values stand out. I found myself wanting to organize a whole group to tell it over and over, "Snails are Molluscs", so it could get on with some of the more subjective/harder ones. I'd say that's basically a parental response, and is wrong on multiple counts, (for just one, it would be acting like mindpixel has a semi-predictable lifetime and will "go farther in life" if it gets some learning out of the way earlier).
And to think I've been smug about the people who fell for Parry and Eliza.
Plus there's some indications the glial cells do something related to thought, maybe as much slower, limited to chemical speed storage. Since there's about 100 glial cells/neuron in some parts of the mammalian brain, and some neurons may be in chemical contact with a thousand of them or more, while in other cases some glial cells may be in contact only with each other, there may well be another one or two orders of magnetude involved.
Worse, this actually adds to the problem on multiple levels. What we could call the irreduceable basic element we need to use may itself be more complex than we thought, like a neural machine with only a few data connections, but which has to internally coordinate two or even several different 'busses' with widely varying speeds to do its basic job. Include the combinations of these also being more complex than was initially thought, and the overall difficulty could easily be 4 or 5 orders of magnetude harder than A.I. researchers thought in the 80's and 90's.
That's modern literary criticism for you. Deconstructing a text always reveals a myriad of things that prove the deconstructor is cleverer than the mere author. If it doesn't, we deconstruct it again. Sometimes we find things that aren't even there. Just be glad I wasn't looking for OEdipal tendencies this time.
Seriously, I don't suppose you'ld be willing to mention some of the ones nobody has found yet? Or is that grist for next year's April 1st mill?
The researcher is claiming that his theory accounts for both dark matter and dark energy, as well as some observations like x-ray bursts from the cores of active galaxies.
Conventional theory doesn't tie dark matter to dark energy at all. If the popularizations hadn't used the word dark in both cases, the two concepts would easily be completely unrelated.
Several candidates for dark matter are very conventional forms of matter, such as neutrinos or even plain old neutronium, which don't need an exotic explanation. Others involve particles we have produced in accelerators or theorize on the basis of data we have obtained ever since the 1940's.
Dark Energy, o.t.o.h., is something very different. The evidence for it is all very recent, and the theories proposed are all well outside the standard model for Cosmology.
Thinking we even need a single theory to explain both only makes sense if you can first disprove the more conventional explanations for dark matter.
Copyright should expire within a human lifetime to bring the law in line with both the Constitution and physical fact.
Originally, people had a natural right to copy. In the Constitution, part of that natural right gets tranferred back to the originator of the work to encourage the artist to make works. It's somewhat like saying a person has a natural right to swing their arms, but part of that right is taken away, when someone's nose would lie at the end of the swing.
When you die, the natural right to copy stops. No one ever made a copy even one second after they died. So where can copyright lasting longer than a human life come from? If the extra isn't transferred from the people, it must be manufactured by the goverment out of nothing, or taken from some other source. While its possible the courts could decide there was a transfer from some other source, like stacking comeing generations rights on top of ours, the court hasn't proposed such a theory, so for now, 'made from nothing' is still something the government can claim as it sees fit.
Great - the same government that gave life plus 70 copyright therefore has the right to take that right away without it counting as unlawful siezure, they don't have to pay for it, and the results don't have to revert to the people, but could now revert to the government instead. Hey all you artists who think life +70 is a great thing, did you realize that the government now has an incentive to take it away and can keep it for themselves? How many generations do you think your life+70 will actually stay in your hands?
You need to go back and re-parse the post and the one just before it. I claimed Lear invented the 8 track. I offered the opinion the 8 track had certain advantages which made it, (by 1966 standards) neat technology. Since this was in response to a post that described the 8 track dismissively as simply a low fidelity system, I cited features the 8 track incorporated to back up my opinion with facts. I didn't claim Lear invented all its predecessor tech, so there's no need for you to attempt to refute that claim.
Actually thinking about it yourself after posting? This is Slashdot! You're supposed to just wait for someone else to Google a link, then assume it deserves +1 Informative without actually clicking it. You're making the rest of us look like slackers.
The abstract is not only false, it is exceptionally information dense, with many rather esoteric references. For example, it uses the word nacirema, an apparent nonsense word that is actually american spelled backwards. This likely comes from a classic parody scientific article "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" from American Anthropologist 58:3, June 1956, Reprinted in "A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown". Here we have an April Fool that refers to other April Fools.
I have counted 147 such references in this one abstract alone, which is over twice the old world record for an abstract based April Fool and will place/. firmly in the Guiness book next year. I was very pleased to be able to demonstrate mathematically that this record was a theoretical maximum and will thus stand forever, although the proof is too long to be contained in this post.
Sometimes those reasons are economic, rather than technical. I can't answer for why the OP has switched back and forth, but I've sometimes used photoshop because a client specifically wanted me to - they wanted not just complete illustrations but some of the seperate layers and intermediate work files to pass on to others, plus assurance these would look right/work in photoshop. In the end, a requirement such as that means it's simply easier to do the whole project start to finish there.
Also, there are lots of often pricy special filters that are not part of photoshop itself, but were made by third party developers specifically as add ons for it, and if you want to use one of these, it pretty much dictates using photoshop. Most of this can be avoided by writing your own filter params for freeware programs, but a.) you have to know how, b.) it can take a little time, and deadlines don't care, and c.) some shops' legal types are actually worried this skirts too close to violating a EULA clause against reverse engineering.
(I also started doing illustrations using a bunch of small, limited freeware tools, and often had to switch twenty times between three or four of em to finish a single small project, so I've gotten strongly biased against swapping partially completed files around, probably more than most - maybe this colors my opinions above).
I wish I could claim that the U.S. government isn't going to tax it so heavily as to destroy all the gains this would mean for private vehicle owners. Given the current climate, I'm not at all sure of that.
The 8 track was a low fidelity end user thing that had three great advantages: it could be built using 1966 technology, it supported endless loop recording for radio stations to put commercials and short songs on, and it could easily and safely be loaded and unloaded by an automobile driver. It was invented by William Powell Lear, creator of the Lear Jet.
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Would you suggest the U.S. put a bunch of coal-burning plants in downtown Manhattan for fuel efficiency?
I wouldn't suggest coal, coal's a killer.
However, you're writing like the Manhattanites are making rational choices on this, and they're just plain not.
Right now, Manhattan doesn't want Nukes nearby either (not even nice clean pebble bed designs). For nuke plants, most of them define nearby as "same solar system".
They don't want to upgrade their existing Hydro infrastructure, either (even when it crashes the rest of the Northeast grid).
The locals have also opposed initiatives to build tide or wave power plants as much as 100 miles away, just to preserve all the coast for small boat traffic (big ships can operate safely in their normal channels near wave engines, its just non-commercial pleasure craft that are at real risk. Can't alienate a few power boaters just to lessen their dependency on imported oil, killer coal, and obsolete transmission systems).
Manhattan did want wind power, but not workable forms - that is, they would be fine with picturesque little windmills atop a few small buildings, but not with hundreds or thousands of rotors with blades bigger than 747 wings, which is what it would take to make a real dent.
The average person in Manhattan seems to want the rest of the country to take all the pollution headakes and send them electricity for free, and to shut up and let them make all the political decisions even remotely relating to power generation. The way their leaders talk when it comes to power generation, the people are genuinely so out of touch they think this can happen. So no, I don't want them to build coal-burning plants in downtown Manhattan - I want them to freeze to death in the dark before their irrationality takes the rest of us down with them. I'd like them growing up and fixing their problems even more, but I suspect that physical law is the harshest of teachers, yet alas, the only one they will heed in the end.
You're right about why most Americans have cars. Where it falls down is we don't have good public transport even in many high density areas where it would be most cost effective, and most of us don't even car pool even when it looks the most feasable.
Most of America is not next to a train track, but most of industrial America once was, and it's expenses like limiting train speeds to 60 and even 40 MPH and then paying double and even triple time for the resulting crews being on duty for more than 8 hour shifts that made trains less than competitive with trucks. Look at the benefits packages the railroad unions negotiated, look at how much load on the highways a typical semi imposes over and above those 2,000 dollars in road use taxes the industry cites as proof it's supposedly paying its share, remember all those semi drivers that get paid the same even when they drive 20 hour shifts, and then talk about expense.
Microsoft got a pass with the current anti-trust situation in the US. They are well aware this can change overnight based on their anti-competitive actions, or based on a change in government administration in the US.
Precisely what the people who think Microsoft can even possibly retain their current marketshare overlook. Some people seem to think MS has deep enough pockets to influence a whole string of elections, AND go up against half the NYSE or more, AND keep the OEMs supporting them, all at the same time. Sorry, but that's just nowhere close to reality.
Electioneering is a real bitch. Whatever you spend on helping a given senator or president get elected has to come back to you in a single term, with interest, or you just lost money. Microsoft is now fighting a war on at least three fronts, against foes with total resources a hundred times theirs or more. Those foes don't all particularly want to totally crush Microsoft, or it would have already happened. Many of them just want to curb Microsoft's expansion in one area or another, or win a little victory her or there and stay out of other parts of Microsoft's business entirely. By and large, they are succeeding at their goals and MS is taking the hits.
I have to agree that pointing your cameras at their cameras isn't symetric, ethically, but I'd dispute one of your other points:
Why should a random private mall employee have a philosophical privacy and surveillance discussion with some self-righteous, cynical privacy advocate.
Leaving aside the prejudicial language that makes your remark beg the question -
1. Because that private employee is specially recognized by the state in his job, and his testimony in court is considered expert testimony? Shouldn't an 'expert' on matters of law enforcement be able to engage in a 'philosophical' discussion of an area at least closely related to that which he is supposedly expert in (i.e. the legal limits of obtaining evidence)?
2. Because most of these private employees have officially received training in legal rights isssues and signed legal doccuments attesting to that fact in an effort to keep their employer from facing various lawsuits?
3. Because about 50% of the time, the private employee is an off duty policeman or deputy working a second job, about whom the first point applies in spades, redoubled with an ace kicker?
If you ever try something like these protests, you will find you can't talk to mall management about the issues. You can't attend a board of directors meeting and bring this sort of thing up, even if you are a small stockholder. Try either, and you will find yourself talking to PR flack lawyers who will swear they don't have the authority to commit to giving you their own name, let alone changing policy, if you aren't on the reciving end of an injunction. So, you can't resolve any problem through the owners, or through management, and by your arguement, you can't do anything, even peripherally, to help resolve it where the rubber meets the road either.
By your own arguement, including that bold face reference to private property, we have two entities, an individual, and a corporation, both allegedly equal in the eyes of the law, and any individual's complaint what-so-ever can NEVER be resolved to the satisfaction of the individual except if a good portion of individuals stop trying to resolve complaints on a volutary basis and switch to immediately and agressively taking them to court. I can see the point you make in the quoted section, especially in the abstract. It would be so much better for everyone in the long run if management wasn't used to hiding behind cheap employees instead of dealing with things that are really their job. Unfortunately, given decades of systemic abuse, it leads inexorably to a law-suit happy society.
That's sort of my point.
Yes this is useful science - it's a proof in practice of the potential feasability of using DNA for some forms of parallel computation, and I'm sorry if it seemed like I was rejecting that accomplishment. That's a pretty decent thing to have done, even to this stage.
Where I see a problem is there's no natural mapping between using Sierpinski Triangles as a form of binary decision tree, and their other aspect as an example fractal entity (and of course a real world construct can't scale down to subatomic levels to create true fractal dimensionality anyways).
Judging from the article, I gathered that the use of fractal properties was somehow important, and had potential broader implications for the use of fractal math in building real world systems. Since several people responded to my post, I went back and read some more allegedly related papers and abstracts, and can now confidently say the fractal properties are irrelevant to the underlieng math used in the actual computation. Some of the sites tracking this paper are erroniously cross-indexing it.
I'm inclined to the "realistic consequences of violence are generally better" school lately.
What I think is worse though, is a mixture, where "Fate" or "God" or whatever seems to control how bad the violence is. I'm referring to all the movies where the minor villains get shot quickly and cleanly, and the really nasty villain whom the audience has special reasons to hate gets a specially nasty demise, like falling from an airplane onto high tension wires.
Most really nasty people are still heroes in their own minds, who can internally justify the pain and suffering they inflict on others as a consequence of those other people's actions and not their own. Films and TV that encourage people to think fate will make the bad guys miss, and the good guys can automatically inflict justice just by using force, are much worse than some more violent films that show that even the nastyest bad guy may have a family that will miss him, or that innocent bystanders sometimes get hit.
With that said, remember how lousy stormtroopers' aim is? How the trees on the forest moon of Endor like to jump out in front of speederbikes? There's a definite touch of this "Fate keeps the good guys from inflicting collateral damage" mentality in the SW films.
Star Wars is far from the worst on this, hence Luke loses a hand in what's probably the best episode, and other bad things have permanent consequences even to good people. Just imagine what Star Wars would look like as six episodes of Die Hard in space.
At first, I thought the DNA assembly-Sierpinski Triangle story was particularly interesting, as a link between real world information storage and the usually unworldly area of fractal geometry. On following the story, it turns out that the error rate is simply enormous (1 to 10%). DNA, in normal use, works about a billion times more reliably than it does here.
You could probably coax DNA to assemble into face centered cubic crystals with a much lower error rate than that. Hell, you might be able to get little figures of Snoopy and Garfield more reliably than these Sierpinski Triangles. This is like proving you could workably rebuild the Golden Gate bridge from Mayonaise and save the tax-payers a fortune, for sufficiently low values of "workable","fortune", and probably "Mayo".
My mistake on "Neural" v. "Nerve", but Gibson did write the screenplay himself, (or at least that's how the credits read), so he must approve of it.
All the people who are questioning why an amphibian has hooters are missing the point. If she was flat chested, she might look like a skinny guy. Here she is, swimming through the water, showing a lot of leg and a pert butt, and just when the viewer's little George starts perking up, there's that icky thought, "Oh my Midiclorians, what if 'she' is a skinny guy fish-thing?".
This way, any viewer who responds to the more subtle feminine cues can check for bumpies and be assured he is wholesomely turned on by an obviously female overgrown mutant carp, and isn't some kind of prevert that would dig male horribly deformed giant walking catfish.
Platypi do not have breasts, or even nipples. Females lactate through many small, pore-like openings on their bellies, and must lay on their backs and allow the milk to form pools for the young to nurse from. (Even your link touches upon this)
/ platypus/Duckbillprintout.shtml
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/mammals
In addition, Platypusses do not waste their time seeing this movie. Platypoids have better things to do.
This sounds a lot like what William Gibson called NAS (Neural Attenuation Syndrome) in Johnny Mnemonic. It's also been described by Vinge in True Names, and in half a dozen other SF stories under a variety of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) and ETLAs (Extended TLAs). This article represents yet another victim of EPAS (Endlessly Proliferating Acronym Syndrome). Add to its list of symptoms, the inability to find out that others have already coined acronyms and there's no need for a new one. Obviously, we must give till it hurts to find a cure.
In general, sequential numbers have not been considered a sign of possible counterfeiting in many years. In addition, the only method worth employing to duplicate bills as cheap as the 2$ is essentially simple photocopy, which results in identical, not sequential numbers. Making sequential 2$s would probably cost more than 2$ each once you factor in the parts like paper that appeared correct, and any professional would duplicate older 20$s or 5$s instead, just as they would avoid sequential numbers.
It is possible that the young employee actually heard of that old sequential rule of thumb, but much more likely he did not think any such thing at the time and was coached to make that claim by the manager after the situation went wrong. This can probably be determined for sure - Best Buy uses a videotape or CD instruction set for training cashiers, and what's on the tape or CD can be checked against what the cashier now claims. Best Buy may be able to raise reasonable doubt this way but I wouldn't bet on beating the preponderance test in a civil suite.
What makes you think the employee did this out of innocent stupidity and ignorance, rather than malice? The victim was creating an annoying situation for him. Did he really not understand what 2$ bills were? Did he really think that sequential serial numbers were a sign of possible counterfeits? Or did he knowingly attempt an act of malicious prosecution (although it might better be called a conspiracy civil rights violation at the federal level)? From the original article, there's certainly enough evidence for that for a grand jury to remand to trial.
Reprimanded? Fined? Employment terminated? How about imprisoned? I wouldn't wish the pound-me-in-the-ass part even on them, even though it looks like they did on Mr. Bolesta, but if there's any malicious intent on a single employee's part, everything short of that is appropriate.
As you put it, They are your oppressors.. As I would put it, there are times Godwin's law is a damned nuisance.
Glad to hear this idea goes back at least to Crick, although I presume from the your context more recently than his Nobel days.
f ings/astrocytes.html
I don't have anything definitive, but if you'ld settle for "just maybe interesting", this:
http://apu.sfn.org/content/Publications/BrainBrie
might qualify, or at least lead you to something deeper.
Note: if you just google for 'Glial' and 'memory', you will probably first and foremost get a lot of claims that certain Statin drugs that are known to be absorbed heavily by glial cells can also adversely affect long term memory. You'll have to wade through quite a bit of that to find links pointing to more fundamental research. Best of luck if you bother.
re. multiple connections and non-static/non-singular thresholds, that's not only interesting, but it sounds like it will apply whether glial memory applies or turns out to be a red herring.
The few significantly wrong values stand out. I found myself wanting to organize a whole group to tell it over and over, "Snails are Molluscs", so it could get on with some of the more subjective/harder ones. I'd say that's basically a parental response, and is wrong on multiple counts, (for just one, it would be acting like mindpixel has a semi-predictable lifetime and will "go farther in life" if it gets some learning out of the way earlier).
And to think I've been smug about the people who fell for Parry and Eliza.
Plus there's some indications the glial cells do something related to thought, maybe as much slower, limited to chemical speed storage. Since there's about 100 glial cells/neuron in some parts of the mammalian brain, and some neurons may be in chemical contact with a thousand of them or more, while in other cases some glial cells may be in contact only with each other, there may well be another one or two orders of magnetude involved.
Worse, this actually adds to the problem on multiple levels. What we could call the irreduceable basic element we need to use may itself be more complex than we thought, like a neural machine with only a few data connections, but which has to internally coordinate two or even several different 'busses' with widely varying speeds to do its basic job. Include the combinations of these also being more complex than was initially thought, and the overall difficulty could easily be 4 or 5 orders of magnetude harder than A.I. researchers thought in the 80's and 90's.
That's modern literary criticism for you. Deconstructing a text always reveals a myriad of things that prove the deconstructor is cleverer than the mere author. If it doesn't, we deconstruct it again. Sometimes we find things that aren't even there. Just be glad I wasn't looking for OEdipal tendencies this time.
Seriously, I don't suppose you'ld be willing to mention some of the ones nobody has found yet? Or is that grist for next year's April 1st mill?
The researcher is claiming that his theory accounts for both dark matter and dark energy, as well as some observations like x-ray bursts from the cores of active galaxies.
Conventional theory doesn't tie dark matter to dark energy at all. If the popularizations hadn't used the word dark in both cases, the two concepts would easily be completely unrelated.
Several candidates for dark matter are very conventional forms of matter, such as neutrinos or even plain old neutronium, which don't need an exotic explanation. Others involve particles we have produced in accelerators or theorize on the basis of data we have obtained ever since the 1940's.
Dark Energy, o.t.o.h., is something very different. The evidence for it is all very recent, and the theories proposed are all well outside the standard model for Cosmology.
Thinking we even need a single theory to explain both only makes sense if you can first disprove the more conventional explanations for dark matter.
Copyright should expire within a human lifetime to bring the law in line with both the Constitution and physical fact.
Originally, people had a natural right to copy. In the Constitution, part of that natural right gets tranferred back to the originator of the work to encourage the artist to make works. It's somewhat like saying a person has a natural right to swing their arms, but part of that right is taken away, when someone's nose would lie at the end of the swing.
When you die, the natural right to copy stops. No one ever made a copy even one second after they died. So where can copyright lasting longer than a human life come from? If the extra isn't transferred from the people, it must be manufactured by the goverment out of nothing, or taken from some other source. While its possible the courts could decide there was a transfer from some other source, like stacking comeing generations rights on top of ours, the court hasn't proposed such a theory, so for now, 'made from nothing' is still something the government can claim as it sees fit.
Great - the same government that gave life plus 70 copyright therefore has the right to take that right away without it counting as unlawful siezure, they don't have to pay for it, and the results don't have to revert to the people, but could now revert to the government instead. Hey all you artists who think life +70 is a great thing, did you realize that the government now has an incentive to take it away and can keep it for themselves? How many generations do you think your life+70 will actually stay in your hands?
My comatose, vaccinated relative on the Gates foundation board was just ethnicly cleansed, you insensitive clod!
You need to go back and re-parse the post and the one just before it. I claimed Lear invented the 8 track. I offered the opinion the 8 track had certain advantages which made it, (by 1966 standards) neat technology. Since this was in response to a post that described the 8 track dismissively as simply a low fidelity system, I cited features the 8 track incorporated to back up my opinion with facts. I didn't claim Lear invented all its predecessor tech, so there's no need for you to attempt to refute that claim.
Actually thinking about it yourself after posting? This is Slashdot! You're supposed to just wait for someone else to Google a link, then assume it deserves +1 Informative without actually clicking it. You're making the rest of us look like slackers.
The abstract is not only false, it is exceptionally information dense, with many rather esoteric references. For example, it uses the word nacirema, an apparent nonsense word that is actually american spelled backwards. /. firmly in the Guiness book next year. I was very pleased to be able to demonstrate mathematically that this record was a theoretical maximum and will thus stand forever, although the proof is too long to be contained in this post.
This likely comes from a classic parody scientific article "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" from American Anthropologist 58:3, June 1956, Reprinted in "A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown". Here we have an April Fool that refers to other April Fools.
I have counted 147 such references in this one abstract alone, which is over twice the old world record for an abstract based April Fool and will place
Sometimes those reasons are economic, rather than technical. I can't answer for why the OP has switched back and forth, but I've sometimes used photoshop because a client specifically wanted me to - they wanted not just complete illustrations but some of the seperate layers and intermediate work files to pass on to others, plus assurance these would look right/work in photoshop. In the end, a requirement such as that means it's simply easier to do the whole project start to finish there.
Also, there are lots of often pricy special filters that are not part of photoshop itself, but were made by third party developers specifically as add ons for it, and if you want to use one of these, it pretty much dictates using photoshop. Most of this can be avoided by writing your own filter params for freeware programs, but a.) you have to know how, b.) it can take a little time, and deadlines don't care, and c.) some shops' legal types are actually worried this skirts too close to violating a EULA clause against reverse engineering.
(I also started doing illustrations using a bunch of small, limited freeware tools, and often had to switch twenty times between three or four of em to finish a single small project, so I've gotten strongly biased against swapping partially completed files around, probably more than most - maybe this colors my opinions above).
I wish I could claim that the U.S. government isn't going to tax it so heavily as to destroy all the gains this would mean for private vehicle owners. Given the current climate, I'm not at all sure of that.
The 8 track was a low fidelity end user thing that had three great advantages: it could be built using 1966 technology, it supported endless loop recording for radio stations to put commercials and short songs on, and it could easily and safely be loaded and unloaded by an automobile driver. It was invented by William Powell Lear, creator of the Lear Jet.
http://www.recording-history.org/HTML/8track1.htm
It seemed neat to someone because it really was neat, at least compared to vinyl records.