The department of Defense exists to deal with armed enemies who have the intent to severely damage or destroy the United States. That's why its there - it is believed that such threats exist, the U. S. wants to counter them, and this is its primary tool for doing so.
So saying the DoD shouldn't need to defend against a threat that could equally well be used by an organized enemy as part of a war, is not like blaming the victim in a rape case. It's more like saying that it's the Tiger-Hunter's own fault if he forgot to pack his ammunition. If the DoD doesn't have a mandate to take all reasonable steps to defend against attacks that can compromise the security of the U. S., then let's shut the whole military down, and save the taxes, they're not actually supposed to do anything.
1. Some 'copying', i.e. from from drive to RAM, has already been held to be legally exempt from the very definition you are trying to give it, in reference to various EULA's and such. While some courts are still wrangling over just what does and doesn't count, such actions as sending data to a printer buffer and then printing it definitely don't count as multiple violations of copyright.
Your claim that 'every time you open the file after that, another set of copies gets made" is absurd, and has gotten inexperienced lawyers censured for invoking it in actual courts. It would make every person reading an electronic book they had legitimately paid for a criminal, as they have purchased only one copy and no rights to reproduce it. 2. By your definition, you have made a copy of a written document by looking at it (a copy then exists as an inverted image on your retina.) You have then made another copy by retaining that image in your brain, and by your brain's having converted the data to an interpreted set of ideas and not just an image in the visual cortex, you have made a third copy. If you even consider speaking the words you have seen, a fourth copy has just been made, in your brain's speech processing regions. So, your argument apparently makes all reading illegal.
A few of the Supreme Court appointees have actually been people without law degrees, and some more have been people who didn't actually first serve as judges in any lesser capacity. In fact, it used to be fairly common for the president of that time to appoint former governors or cabinet members to the court, and some of these had never practiced law, either from the bench or in front of it. What's surprising is that during those times the SCOTUS has been led by someone who wasn't ever a trial lawyer, they dealt with, on average, about 35% more cases per session, and whenever at least one justice wasn't, about 20% more.
Hey, we just found the one guy in California that actually drives the speed limit!
Actually, good point - with all the Gerrymandering that goes on, who wants to bet that there aren't manifold cases such as this. Maybe if you plotted where the 10 Federal districts fall, and what cities in those districts actually hold the courts, you'd find lots of cases such as this.
For state cases, I'm a eastern Tennessee resident, and Memphis, the largest city by population, is in the far bottom left corner of the state, 300+ miles away. I've heard of several cases involving east tenn. local people that were docketed there instead of Nashville (which is both the capital and near the geographic center of the state).
I have to disagree with the non-story assessment. Let's stipulate that the privacy issue isn't significant here - that CL has acted as their terms of service allow, and even that the academy has a full and unlimited right to know who is selling their tickets, how much they asked for and so on.
We still have a private entity that has made a claim about security against criminal or terrorist acts to justify its actions. Quite possibly, there are clauses in the letters accompanying these tickets that serve as a contract, or make it clear the academy will not honor transferred tickets so the sale was fraudulent (a limited or completely valueless commodity being offered as though it had its full original capabilities).
Maybe the academy didn't even need to particularly justify the claim and it would have stood up in court prima facie, but still, it's another case where somebody without law enforcement status makes a L.E. related decision, and apparently doesn't consult any governmental entity that actually has law enforcement powers (and no, a Civil court proceeding doesn't count when you are making allegations of possible Criminal acts.).
Shouldn't the academy have notified at least local police if they thought there was an increased risk of terrorism? Some of those local police will be providing security and crowd control at the event, after all.
If the civil judge agreed with the academy's argument, (which he must have, to grant the motion), shouldn't he have also passed the information on to a DA for possible criminal investigation? If the judge thought the possible risk fell in the category of terrorism, shouldn't he have notified a Federal agency, particularly the FBI? If all this did somehow happen, why did we hear about the civil part before the Oscars are over? Given that, we have to assume that nobody took the claim seriously enough to tell any law enforcement people. Why are people making the claim there's an increased risk of serious death or destruction from a certain situation and yet not bothering to tell the people whose job is to deal with violence and crime?
And if somebody is crying wolf for their own purposes, in civil court, that sounds like something the court is supposed to censure.
I think these posters are imagining some sort of narrow elliptical orbit, with the Earth at one focus and the Moon at the other.
The first problem is, a typical ellipse just has one focus occupied by a significant mass. Serious gravity at both foci means a narrow, fast elliptical orbit that keeps both foci occupied won't be possible without constant fuel consumption (a powered orbit), and history bears this out (the Apollo lunar insertion orbit looked more like a twisty figure eight, and if the craft didn't burn fuel at both ends, would have pointed well away from the Moon on the next pass). A big ellipse encompassing both points is effectively stable as you point out, but doesn't get close enough to be of any real use.
The bigger problem is, the natural period of any such tight orbit doesn't precess at the same speed the Moon orbits the Earth. The Apollo orbit certainly didn't have a period of 28 days, nor did it precess so that the far end of it followed the Moon's motion. If it had, we could easily have sent supplies for a multi-month or multi-year stay on the Moon - anything that the astronauts in lunar orbit missed on the first pass would be back around again and again until they managed to recover it on some orbit, and it would have effectively accompanied them on their trip, at almost no relative velocity. We would most probably have done the moonshoots by cheaply prepositioning lots of fuel and gear, then injecting something like the LEM into the middle of it.
We would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling inverse square laws of planetary motion.
Not only does it look pretty damned doubtful if she has a claim, but in the U.S at least, the publisher can bring up the daughter's claim that she was hit and the mother wishes to cover that up, as a reasonable defense, and question witness on that point, and so the mother would be risking criminal charges to seek the civil suit. Normally, if charges were brought, the publisher's attorney would first bring a motion to suspend the civil trial until the criminal one was over, and then make a motion to introduce the results of the criminal trial into the resumed civil one, if the mother didn't agree to drop it with prejudice.
Suing in these circumstances is a stupid act, as you are betting possible years in prison, having your name plastered all over the papers in three inch high letters with derogatory headlines, and losing in such a way you have to pay all the opponent's fees, against your chance of success. Just ask Leona Helmsley, whose tax evasion conviction stemmed from civil suits with a bunch of contractors she stiffed, what fighting and losing a merely civil suit can lead to.
As soon as you posted AC, I decided you were 100% wrong. Until then, I thought the parent was giving headlines that were as biased as the sort of fluff stories we see all too often, in the mainstream media today, just biased in the opposite direction. But since you disagree with him, and stoop to name calling, but don't have the courage to use even a slash-nym, I have to side with him. If he's a moron, anything I could fairly, unbiasedly and honestly call you, would look like the ultimate example of flamebait.
To put it more bluntly, you are making the extremist nutcase look good by comparison.
I've read that you can't have knots in 4-space, so how do 4-dimensional beings tie their shoes?
Velcro, but unfortunately there are eight pieces to a velcro set there. (The proof of this is, of course, trivial, per novakyu (636495)). All sentient creatures in 4-space must therefore have at least a pair of hyper-thumbs (thumbs cubed), and not just supra-thumbs (thumbs squared), QED.
If by 'this', you mean the original Riemann zeta hypothesis, yes, there are literally thousands of mathematical proofs which are 'conditioned by Riemann' that is, they assumed the Riemann hypothesis was true so they could do the rest of the math.
Jim Holt, writing in the essay compilation "Year Million" (ed. Damien Broderick), has said that the Reimann hypothesis was so central to further mathematical progress that its truth just had to be assumed, implying that large numbers of mathematicians found it impossible to work without allowing it into their processes. He also points out that the recent proof of Fermat's last theorem was far less important. The essay as a whole gives a lot of insight into the hypothesis and is written for lay readers.
If by 'this', you mean the Li proof, to my admittedly less than perfect knowledge there has been great reluctance to try and create any new theories based on it until it was reviewed, and I can't think of a single one, offhand.
I think you are the first person to mention the prisons in this thread. Personally, I expect the U. S. government to use spy satellites and such. I can see why the U.S. won't acknowledge any specific info on them, although that's of doubtful utility. I'm assuming that most potential enemy nations have the resources to figure out what's up there, by photos, or by having someone live close to the launch sites (just try to hide a delta launch so that no one within 30 miles of the cape knows it happened), and probably by lots of methods. Still, it's at least possible some people hostile to us don't know everything about what might be observing their training camps, etc.
The more remarkable claim is that there are old prisons on U. S. soil, possibly including ones that are officially long closed, and their pictures are blurred out. I don't see how that can be justified. Even if there's no tin-foil hat grade conspiracy with Dick Cheney building secret prisons for the New World Order, it looks like, at the very least, there's a government contingency plan that involves using these facilities, which are often facilities the supreme court decided were cruel and unusual punishment in the 1930's through 60's. The whole situation seems to imply yet another plan that is classified secret because the administration is defying court orders if they implement it, not for more respectable reasons.
I've argued pretty much what you have about Galileo, that he was brilliant as a scientist in an era when the rules of science were less formal, but was lousy on people skills and pissed off a lot of people who didn't just go around 'inquisiting' everyone, then the Roman Catholic church swung into a more fearful than average phase, he lost the protection of a pope that was willing to cut him extra slack, and he had no other moderates and reasonable men left in the church who wanted to stick their necks out for his particular case. His enemies towards the end included plenty of people who either weren't worried about his effect on church doctrine or would have been willing to let him publish despite their concerns, but they were sticking up for more reasonable people, for example, during that same era, there were people in the church making sure Tycho and Copernicus and half a dozen others weren't charged with anything and that C.'s mom wasn't tried for the allegations of witchcraft brought against her by locals.
There was also a lot of dealing with anatomists at the time, and again, some people in the church hierarchy were trying to distinguish between people who were 'just' autopsying naturally obtained corpses, and ones who didn't care how the subject crossed the line into death, and were subsidizing possible murder for hire. Respect for natural science was low, but did that follow from church doctrine or because some natural scientists were behaving like something out of Shelly?
With Bruno, what I'd like to know is, the R.C. church has repeatedly claimed that Bruno got such harsh punishment because there was more to it than just Theological differences. Now this could be a claim that Bruno wasn't just talking about life on other worlds and raising questions about whether such life had a need for a savior and such, but was doing something Occult, or supporting a specific 'cult' such as the Cathars. Bruno certainly could have gotten the pyre for what the rest of us would call a Theological difference and the church could be splitting hairs over what's variant theology and what's occult practice. I'm not saying the Roman Catholic church has never trivialized competing religions or called them just cults. But it would be nice to have someone translate the original texts here into a language I'm more comfortable with, and do a big book on it for modern readers, maybe as part of a Bruno bio.
I said "very brief", as in five minutes to a single first date or less. That you could twist that into agreement is exactly why you deserve to be modded down. You are deliberately misquoting other people's arguments to win. It's like you are in an argument the extinction of the dinosaurs, and someone mentions Passenger Pigeons also died out before any of us here on Slashdot were alive, and you take the two times as the same, i.e. Passenger Pigeons became extinct 65 million years ago.
You need to Google "Sharon Lopatka" to see an example of a woman who deliberately sought out an abusive man, in spades. Oh, but she was obviously mentally ill? I've met others. Let's blame their problems all on men. It's never the woman's fault, it's the man.
You've lectured everyone reading you post about abuse and violence. If you don't want people to do it back, then you're demanding special status. You don't get it. If you have a right to speak, so do I.
You wanted to insult every man on this site, you did insult the one who replied to you. If you mean the accusation that it threatened to abuse the moderation system, go ahead and call Taco. If you don't have the guts to report it, you didn't mean it. I'm not calling you a bitch or whatever, I am calling you a chicken hearted little Troll. This has nothing to do with your gender, you are abusive, misquoting me and denying that I have a right to reply in the same manner as you used. Being a Troll is what I would have modded you down for. I gave you a fair answer instead, go ahead and hate me for it.
No, since we are talking about the earth at time t and then t+1, there is the possibility of a shift in mass, it's just a very tiny amount, only even vaguely determinate. As electrons converge down the wires leading to the LHC, they approximate a spherical section shaped cap over that part of the earth. Its center of mass is initially well below ground, but rises as the electrons arrive in the LHC and add their energy to boost the hadrons which form the hole. Of course, the LHC isn't particularly surrounded by many equal, symetric sets of high tension lines converging from all directions, that's an approximation.
For that matter, do I need to take into account the sunlight that falls on the Earth and the dust that settles in the form of incredible numbers of micrometeorites? Insignificant is the way a professional descries such issues, just as the sound produced by a two car collision is an insignificant part of the energy the cars had before colliding, but technically not zero.
minus the gravitational center of a bunch of electrons that are about to power the LHC
The LHC collides protons, not electrons.
The rest masses of the two protons are trivial. The rest of the energy that forms the black hole comes from acceleration of those two particles to near light speed. It's about 99.9999999999999999999999999999999734 % of the total energy, and it all entered the LHC in the form of regular old electrons passing along copper wires into the accelerating magnets, over the few minutes of the actual run. What were you expecting? Colliders run on special proton pipes?
I would expect a charged black hole to interact via EM far more strongly than by gravity.
Fine, expect away. If it does, then you don't have that stable black hole everyone is posting about. Stable, for a black hole, definitely does not equal internal repulsive forces sufficient to overcome gravity. What you have inside this theoretical black hole is not 2 protons stuck together, it's 2 protons, plus an amount of energy equivalent to millions or even billions of particles at the instant of assimilation. You have a net charge differential equal to being down a net 2 electrons for the whole thing, and you are applying that charge, not to just 2 protons, but to all the contents of the black hole. Energy = Mass.
Any proof of the form, "If it were going to happen, it already would have happened" are intrinsically fallacious (Appeal to Probability),
Granted, but that applies to all possible events. The argument that my making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich might create a black hole and destroy the earth is unrefutable to exactly the same degree, no less and no more. Your additional claim, that the probability doubles for things that have never been done on this planet before is simply rhetorical, and no actual probabilities can be assigned, (as I can prove by two counterexamples if needed). The argument that allowing you to continue breathing might create a black hole and destroy the Earth is also unrefutable on those same grounds. Ergo, you have just proved it would be logical for someone to assassinate you. I don't recommend you develop your line of argument any further.
The Black Hole would be a very tiny mass at creation, so small that the difference between where the earth's center of mass was before and is after is insignificant. (In effect the before state is equal to finding the gravitational center of the earth, minus the gravitational center of a bunch of electrons that are about to power the LHC, then finding the separate center of those electrons poured into the LHC, and comparing that to the after state - where we have to find the gravitational center of the rest of the earth, and the gravitational center of the mini black hole) The center of the rest of the earth doesn't change significantly in the before and after pictures, and the power put into the LHC wasn't enough to cause any noticible wobble before it was used, was it? So it's not going to cause a wobble afterwards.
Now, assuming a stable black hole, it is drawn towards the center of the earth by gravity. Repulsion by solid matter isn't enough to stop it. (Repulsion is an electromagnetic effect - the cloud of electrons around normal nuclei push and so keep matter from passing through other matter. The hole doesn't have a cloud of electrons, so it falls. It 'wants' to go into a narrow elliptical orbit around the earth's core. (It's not falling straight towards the core, because the spot where it formed on the earth's surface has sideways velocity from the earth's rotation). As the hole falls it eats stuff, but that means it also emits electromagnetic radiation as stuff falls in. This works out in the end as a kind of friction, so the hole slows in its orbit and spirals inward. By the time it is up to a few milligrams weight, it is in a tight little orbit around the earth's core, and we are all alive, waiting for it to gradually gain weight. (If the boffins have told us). This takes a year or so, with us not really noticing anything until the hole weighs kilotonnes, at which point the last twelve hours or thereabouts get very impressive and the earth goes bye-bye.
So yes, you end up with the moon peacefully orbiting the black hole as the hole orbits the sun, in orbits that are so close to the existing ones it would be a real challenge to find the differences.
Now, the side of the moon towards us got some interesting radiation exposures during the final few minutes, perhaps enough to melt crater walls and such. The effect of all that light from the final flash might conceivably be measurable, out in the 20th decimal place or so when someone measures the Moon's rotational velocity.
Fortunately, this is all based on the idea that a black hole barely bigger than a proton is somehow stable, which we doubt very much.
Your assumption that men only become abusive over time is patently wrong. I've been in group dating scenes before where one woman brought her new boyfriend to the restaurant or whatever, and five minutes later every other female in the group had remarked something on the lines of 'she's an idiot, that guy's a dangerous jerk." etc. (and several of the men had said similar things). Signs are often there early - some women just miss them, and some have a bad habit of getting very head over heals in love so fast that it's easy for the abuser to hide for the very brief time needed.
I met a woman once who openly admitted she was only dating people who had served hard time for violent acts, and she didn't know why she was attracted to that type. Less than a year later she was a murder victim, by one of those types.
If I had mod points I'd mod you down, for being arrogantly wrong. You can make any abusive comments about my dick size you want, but you are still just plain wrong, and somebody needs to tell you. I've seen the exceptions to your blanket generalizations, they are tragic, they are often just plain loathsome situations, and they are unfortunately way too frequent.
Really, neither apes nor wolves can go it alone - the lone wolf bit is largely a myth and most wolves survive because they do manage to get along with the rest of the pack.
A pack/flock/tribe leader can be pretty aggressive, self-aggrandizing and dominating, if several conditions are met. They generally have to provide pretty well for the group, and display at least some tendency to hold the worst of their behavior in check and only release it against extra-group targets.
Humans, with their long, vulnerable childhoods, should be more strongly motivated to build stable and not too unpleasant packs than any other example, not less. We really are all in this together, and our own individual offspring and genetic success are threatened by sufficiently low levels of social integrity, even for those of us on top. Which is why I support castrating those alpha males who just don't get the message with rusty sporks.
That's the real reason some people want to have the Telecoms totally immunized: If they had to defend the charges in court, they would be entitled to present some facts as defense. If the DoJ assured them the actions were legal for example, that's a good reason to say anyone suing can't claim triple damages for gross negligence.
The courts could easily impose only relatively trivial penalties on these companies, and accept a lot of excuses. After all, they were probably pressured by government agencies who said, in effect; "If you don't help us, you're helping the people who commissioned the hit on the WTC." or "If you don't help us, don't be surprised if the public thinks you're not real patriots, and maybe votes with their pocketbooks."
But, the courts would then have the names of the people in government who did this, plus letters, e-mails, and possibly even recorded conversations. This whole Telecom immunity thing is not about protecting the companies, who are not really likely to face the kinds of penalties that would break them or even seriously inconvenience them, anymore than the kid in this story is really likely to get 38 years. Instead, it's about protecting some parts of the government from being implicated if those same companies are allowed their constitutional rights in presenting a fair legal defense.
Of course it doesn't have to be that black and white, and in fact it probably isn't. What's bothering me here is some Republicans who will roundly condemn the Dems for their spinelesness, and then point to a counter-example, and instead of admitting he's a counter-example, find some way to criticize him too. I don't think I've ever seen Kucinich walk on water, but I hate to see people claiming they did see him do just that, and all it proves is that the shipping industry will be ruined if he is taken seriously.
Yes, and that's certainly what I would have done here. If the opposing party were to delay, I would petition for speed and point out the hardship additional waiting would cause due to the gag order. As I understand NZ law, there's some methods for doing just that, even though they aren't exactly like the ones included in US law.
Still, I honestly don't have much respect for a court that lets one side play the system in its favor, and hasn't woken up to the fact that it is doing so. I really hope you don't have much respect for that sort of court either. There are cases where I would be happier with myself to spend the time in jail than to help a corrupt and unjust legal machine give a false appearance that it was still concerned with justice.
Yes, Ha-Ha. Mod you +1 "witty".
What I discussed in the post did not come from any intellectual property exclusive to the company, and it doesn't represent any policy they have which might reflect how I perform my job. I'm pretty damned confident that they take no position on whether Congress is right or wrong in directing a focus for IRS enforcement efforts. My sources for what I have reported can be found by doing a little burrowing on the irs.gov site where they talk about their mandate and current enforcement activities, and from open conferences and sources of professional education that are not in any way exclusive to that unnamed company, often not even ones that unnamed company has even suggested to its employees. Given that, they would not want me to put their name on the post, as that might imply to some, that the unnamed company had an official position, or that I was acting as one who had a fiduciary duty to represent that corporation rather than normal employment duties.
What's sad here is, I actually found what you wrote funny, but my best understanding of the law is that I should probably clarify the situation in the most boring manner possible, just as though your post had whooshed right over my head. I pretty much have an ethical obligation to do this, to retain my own license to practice before the IRS, just in case you are one of those people who is so incredibly stupid as to be serious and not, as it appears, funny. Just on the million to one shot chance you might actually be a low grade moron, who would write the IRS claiming I had misled you on a tax related manner, making you think their was an unnamed company that would do your tax prep if you could only find it, and that was somehow why you delayed in meeting some IRS rule, it's in my best interest to be remorselessly dry and pedantic. This is one reason why pros don't like to give any free advice on slashdot - we often have to answer in a very boring and credulous fashion, acting as though were are the most gullible of fools to believe a sarcastic or ironic post, and being every bit as straight laced as the agencies which regulate us.
So, You are the one really causing all this tedium. This is one of the most nit-picking, dry as week-old-toast-in-the-great-Gobi-dessert posts I have ever seen, and that's all really traceable to you. As other readers gape in slack-jawed somulance at this vast dessicated wasteland of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance you have caused, I hope you're satisfied.
Slashdot Mirror
The department of Defense exists to deal with armed enemies who have the intent to severely damage or destroy the United States. That's why its there - it is believed that such threats exist, the U. S. wants to counter them, and this is its primary tool for doing so.
So saying the DoD shouldn't need to defend against a threat that could equally well be used by an organized enemy as part of a war, is not like blaming the victim in a rape case. It's more like saying that it's the Tiger-Hunter's own fault if he forgot to pack his ammunition. If the DoD doesn't have a mandate to take all reasonable steps to defend against attacks that can compromise the security of the U. S., then let's shut the whole military down, and save the taxes, they're not actually supposed to do anything.
1. Some 'copying', i.e. from from drive to RAM, has already been held to be legally exempt from the very definition you are trying to give it, in reference to various EULA's and such. While some courts are still wrangling over just what does and doesn't count, such actions as sending data to a printer buffer and then printing it definitely don't count as multiple violations of copyright.
Your claim that 'every time you open the file after that, another set of copies gets made" is absurd, and has gotten inexperienced lawyers censured for invoking it in actual courts. It would make every person reading an electronic book they had legitimately paid for a criminal, as they have purchased only one copy and no rights to reproduce it.
2. By your definition, you have made a copy of a written document by looking at it (a copy then exists as an inverted image on your retina.) You have then made another copy by retaining that image in your brain, and by your brain's having converted the data to an interpreted set of ideas and not just an image in the visual cortex, you have made a third copy. If you even consider speaking the words you have seen, a fourth copy has just been made, in your brain's speech processing regions. So, your argument apparently makes all reading illegal.
A few of the Supreme Court appointees have actually been people without law degrees, and some more have been people who didn't actually first serve as judges in any lesser capacity. In fact, it used to be fairly common for the president of that time to appoint former governors or cabinet members to the court, and some of these had never practiced law, either from the bench or in front of it. What's surprising is that during those times the SCOTUS has been led by someone who wasn't ever a trial lawyer, they dealt with, on average, about 35% more cases per session, and whenever at least one justice wasn't, about 20% more.
Hey, we just found the one guy in California that actually drives the speed limit!
Actually, good point - with all the Gerrymandering that goes on, who wants to bet that there aren't manifold cases such as this. Maybe if you plotted where the 10 Federal districts fall, and what cities in those districts actually hold the courts, you'd find lots of cases such as this.
For state cases, I'm a eastern Tennessee resident, and Memphis, the largest city by population, is in the far bottom left corner of the state, 300+ miles away. I've heard of several cases involving east tenn. local people that were docketed there instead of Nashville (which is both the capital and near the geographic center of the state).
I have to disagree with the non-story assessment. Let's stipulate that the privacy issue isn't significant here - that CL has acted as their terms of service allow, and even that the academy has a full and unlimited right to know who is selling their tickets, how much they asked for and so on.
We still have a private entity that has made a claim about security against criminal or terrorist acts to justify its actions. Quite possibly, there are clauses in the letters accompanying these tickets that serve as a contract, or make it clear the academy will not honor transferred tickets so the sale was fraudulent (a limited or completely valueless commodity being offered as though it had its full original capabilities).
Maybe the academy didn't even need to particularly justify the claim and it would have stood up in court prima facie, but still, it's another case where somebody without law enforcement status makes a L.E. related decision, and apparently doesn't consult any governmental entity that actually has law enforcement powers (and no, a Civil court proceeding doesn't count when you are making allegations of possible Criminal acts.).
Shouldn't the academy have notified at least local police if they thought there was an increased risk of terrorism? Some of those local police will be providing security and crowd control at the event, after all.
If the civil judge agreed with the academy's argument, (which he must have, to grant the motion), shouldn't he have also passed the information on to a DA for possible criminal investigation? If the judge thought the possible risk fell in the category of terrorism, shouldn't he have notified a Federal agency, particularly the FBI? If all this did somehow happen, why did we hear about the civil part before the Oscars are over? Given that, we have to assume that nobody took the claim seriously enough to tell any law enforcement people. Why are people making the claim there's an increased risk of serious death or destruction from a certain situation and yet not bothering to tell the people whose job is to deal with violence and crime?
And if somebody is crying wolf for their own purposes, in civil court, that sounds like something the court is supposed to censure.
I think these posters are imagining some sort of narrow elliptical orbit, with the Earth at one focus and the Moon at the other.
The first problem is, a typical ellipse just has one focus occupied by a significant mass. Serious gravity at both foci means a narrow, fast elliptical orbit that keeps both foci occupied won't be possible without constant fuel consumption (a powered orbit), and history bears this out (the Apollo lunar insertion orbit looked more like a twisty figure eight, and if the craft didn't burn fuel at both ends, would have pointed well away from the Moon on the next pass). A big ellipse encompassing both points is effectively stable as you point out, but doesn't get close enough to be of any real use.
The bigger problem is, the natural period of any such tight orbit doesn't precess at the same speed the Moon orbits the Earth. The Apollo orbit certainly didn't have a period of 28 days, nor did it precess so that the far end of it followed the Moon's motion. If it had, we could easily have sent supplies for a multi-month or multi-year stay on the Moon - anything that the astronauts in lunar orbit missed on the first pass would be back around again and again until they managed to recover it on some orbit, and it would have effectively accompanied them on their trip, at almost no relative velocity. We would most probably have done the moonshoots by cheaply prepositioning lots of fuel and gear, then injecting something like the LEM into the middle of it.
We would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling inverse square laws of planetary motion.
Not only does it look pretty damned doubtful if she has a claim, but in the U.S at least, the publisher can bring up the daughter's claim that she was hit and the mother wishes to cover that up, as a reasonable defense, and question witness on that point, and so the mother would be risking criminal charges to seek the civil suit. Normally, if charges were brought, the publisher's attorney would first bring a motion to suspend the civil trial until the criminal one was over, and then make a motion to introduce the results of the criminal trial into the resumed civil one, if the mother didn't agree to drop it with prejudice.
Suing in these circumstances is a stupid act, as you are betting possible years in prison, having your name plastered all over the papers in three inch high letters with derogatory headlines, and losing in such a way you have to pay all the opponent's fees, against your chance of success. Just ask Leona Helmsley, whose tax evasion conviction stemmed from civil suits with a bunch of contractors she stiffed, what fighting and losing a merely civil suit can lead to.
As soon as you posted AC, I decided you were 100% wrong. Until then, I thought the parent was giving headlines that were as biased as the sort of fluff stories we see all too often, in the mainstream media today, just biased in the opposite direction. But since you disagree with him, and stoop to name calling, but don't have the courage to use even a slash-nym, I have to side with him. If he's a moron, anything I could fairly, unbiasedly and honestly call you, would look like the ultimate example of flamebait.
To put it more bluntly, you are making the extremist nutcase look good by comparison.
I've read that you can't have knots in 4-space, so how do 4-dimensional beings tie their shoes?
Velcro, but unfortunately there are eight pieces to a velcro set there. (The proof of this is, of course, trivial, per novakyu (636495)). All sentient creatures in 4-space must therefore have at least a pair of hyper-thumbs (thumbs cubed), and not just supra-thumbs (thumbs squared), QED.
If by 'this', you mean the original Riemann zeta hypothesis, yes, there are literally thousands of mathematical proofs which are 'conditioned by Riemann' that is, they assumed the Riemann hypothesis was true so they could do the rest of the math.
Jim Holt, writing in the essay compilation "Year Million" (ed. Damien Broderick), has said that the Reimann hypothesis was so central to further mathematical progress that its truth just had to be assumed, implying that large numbers of mathematicians found it impossible to work without allowing it into their processes. He also points out that the recent proof of Fermat's last theorem was far less important. The essay as a whole gives a lot of insight into the hypothesis and is written for lay readers.
If by 'this', you mean the Li proof, to my admittedly less than perfect knowledge there has been great reluctance to try and create any new theories based on it until it was reviewed, and I can't think of a single one, offhand.
I think you are the first person to mention the prisons in this thread. Personally, I expect the U. S. government to use spy satellites and such. I can see why the U.S. won't acknowledge any specific info on them, although that's of doubtful utility. I'm assuming that most potential enemy nations have the resources to figure out what's up there, by photos, or by having someone live close to the launch sites (just try to hide a delta launch so that no one within 30 miles of the cape knows it happened), and probably by lots of methods. Still, it's at least possible some people hostile to us don't know everything about what might be observing their training camps, etc.
The more remarkable claim is that there are old prisons on U. S. soil, possibly including ones that are officially long closed, and their pictures are blurred out. I don't see how that can be justified. Even if there's no tin-foil hat grade conspiracy with Dick Cheney building secret prisons for the New World Order, it looks like, at the very least, there's a government contingency plan that involves using these facilities, which are often facilities the supreme court decided were cruel and unusual punishment in the 1930's through 60's. The whole situation seems to imply yet another plan that is classified secret because the administration is defying court orders if they implement it, not for more respectable reasons.
I've argued pretty much what you have about Galileo, that he was brilliant as a scientist in an era when the rules of science were less formal, but was lousy on people skills and pissed off a lot of people who didn't just go around 'inquisiting' everyone, then the Roman Catholic church swung into a more fearful than average phase, he lost the protection of a pope that was willing to cut him extra slack, and he had no other moderates and reasonable men left in the church who wanted to stick their necks out for his particular case. His enemies towards the end included plenty of people who either weren't worried about his effect on church doctrine or would have been willing to let him publish despite their concerns, but they were sticking up for more reasonable people, for example, during that same era, there were people in the church making sure Tycho and Copernicus and half a dozen others weren't charged with anything and that C.'s mom wasn't tried for the allegations of witchcraft brought against her by locals.
There was also a lot of dealing with anatomists at the time, and again, some people in the church hierarchy were trying to distinguish between people who were 'just' autopsying naturally obtained corpses, and ones who didn't care how the subject crossed the line into death, and were subsidizing possible murder for hire. Respect for natural science was low, but did that follow from church doctrine or because some natural scientists were behaving like something out of Shelly?
With Bruno, what I'd like to know is, the R.C. church has repeatedly claimed that Bruno got such harsh punishment because there was more to it than just Theological differences. Now this could be a claim that Bruno wasn't just talking about life on other worlds and raising questions about whether such life had a need for a savior and such, but was doing something Occult, or supporting a specific 'cult' such as the Cathars. Bruno certainly could have gotten the pyre for what the rest of us would call a Theological difference and the church could be splitting hairs over what's variant theology and what's occult practice. I'm not saying the Roman Catholic church has never trivialized competing religions or called them just cults. But it would be nice to have someone translate the original texts here into a language I'm more comfortable with, and do a big book on it for modern readers, maybe as part of a Bruno bio.
Please don't feed the Troll.
I said "very brief", as in five minutes to a single first date or less. That you could twist that into agreement is exactly why you deserve to be modded down. You are deliberately misquoting other people's arguments to win. It's like you are in an argument the extinction of the dinosaurs, and someone mentions Passenger Pigeons also died out before any of us here on Slashdot were alive, and you take the two times as the same, i.e. Passenger Pigeons became extinct 65 million years ago.
You need to Google "Sharon Lopatka" to see an example of a woman who deliberately sought out an abusive man, in spades. Oh, but she was obviously mentally ill? I've met others. Let's blame their problems all on men. It's never the woman's fault, it's the man.
You've lectured everyone reading you post about abuse and violence. If you don't want people to do it back, then you're demanding special status. You don't get it. If you have a right to speak, so do I.
You wanted to insult every man on this site, you did insult the one who replied to you. If you mean the accusation that it threatened to abuse the moderation system, go ahead and call Taco. If you don't have the guts to report it, you didn't mean it. I'm not calling you a bitch or whatever, I am calling you a chicken hearted little Troll. This has nothing to do with your gender, you are abusive, misquoting me and denying that I have a right to reply in the same manner as you used. Being a Troll is what I would have modded you down for. I gave you a fair answer instead, go ahead and hate me for it.
No, since we are talking about the earth at time t and then t+1, there is the possibility of a shift in mass, it's just a very tiny amount, only even vaguely determinate. As electrons converge down the wires leading to the LHC, they approximate a spherical section shaped cap over that part of the earth. Its center of mass is initially well below ground, but rises as the electrons arrive in the LHC and add their energy to boost the hadrons which form the hole. Of course, the LHC isn't particularly surrounded by many equal, symetric sets of high tension lines converging from all directions, that's an approximation.
For that matter, do I need to take into account the sunlight that falls on the Earth and the dust that settles in the form of incredible numbers of micrometeorites? Insignificant is the way a professional descries such issues, just as the sound produced by a two car collision is an insignificant part of the energy the cars had before colliding, but technically not zero.
minus the gravitational center of a bunch of electrons that are about to power the LHC
The LHC collides protons, not electrons.
The rest masses of the two protons are trivial. The rest of the energy that forms the black hole comes from acceleration of those two particles to near light speed. It's about 99.9999999999999999999999999999999734 % of the total energy, and it all entered the LHC in the form of regular old electrons passing along copper wires into the accelerating magnets, over the few minutes of the actual run. What were you expecting? Colliders run on special proton pipes?
I would expect a charged black hole to interact via EM far more strongly than by gravity.
Fine, expect away. If it does, then you don't have that stable black hole everyone is posting about. Stable, for a black hole, definitely does not equal internal repulsive forces sufficient to overcome gravity. What you have inside this theoretical black hole is not 2 protons stuck together, it's 2 protons, plus an amount of energy equivalent to millions or even billions of particles at the instant of assimilation. You have a net charge differential equal to being down a net 2 electrons for the whole thing, and you are applying that charge, not to just 2 protons, but to all the contents of the black hole. Energy = Mass.
Any proof of the form, "If it were going to happen, it already would have happened" are intrinsically fallacious (Appeal to Probability),
Granted, but that applies to all possible events. The argument that my making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich might create a black hole and destroy the earth is unrefutable to exactly the same degree, no less and no more. Your additional claim, that the probability doubles for things that have never been done on this planet before is simply rhetorical, and no actual probabilities can be assigned, (as I can prove by two counterexamples if needed). The argument that allowing you to continue breathing might create a black hole and destroy the Earth is also unrefutable on those same grounds. Ergo, you have just proved it would be logical for someone to assassinate you. I don't recommend you develop your line of argument any further.
Doubt away...
The Black Hole would be a very tiny mass at creation, so small that the difference between where the earth's center of mass was before and is after is insignificant.
(In effect the before state is equal to finding the gravitational center of the earth, minus the gravitational center of a bunch of electrons that are about to power the LHC, then finding the separate center of those electrons poured into the LHC, and comparing that to the after state - where we have to find the gravitational center of the rest of the earth, and the gravitational center of the mini black hole) The center of the rest of the earth doesn't change significantly in the before and after pictures, and the power put into the LHC wasn't enough to cause any noticible wobble before it was used, was it? So it's not going to cause a wobble afterwards.
Now, assuming a stable black hole, it is drawn towards the center of the earth by gravity. Repulsion by solid matter isn't enough to stop it. (Repulsion is an electromagnetic effect - the cloud of electrons around normal nuclei push and so keep matter from passing through other matter. The hole doesn't have a cloud of electrons, so it falls. It 'wants' to go into a narrow elliptical orbit around the earth's core. (It's not falling straight towards the core, because the spot where it formed on the earth's surface has sideways velocity from the earth's rotation). As the hole falls it eats stuff, but that means it also emits electromagnetic radiation as stuff falls in. This works out in the end as a kind of friction, so the hole slows in its orbit and spirals inward. By the time it is up to a few milligrams weight, it is in a tight little orbit around the earth's core, and we are all alive, waiting for it to gradually gain weight. (If the boffins have told us). This takes a year or so, with us not really noticing anything until the hole weighs kilotonnes, at which point the last twelve hours or thereabouts get very impressive and the earth goes bye-bye.
So yes, you end up with the moon peacefully orbiting the black hole as the hole orbits the sun, in orbits that are so close to the existing ones it would be a real challenge to find the differences.
Now, the side of the moon towards us got some interesting radiation exposures during the final few minutes, perhaps enough to melt crater walls and such. The effect of all that light from the final flash might conceivably be measurable, out in the 20th decimal place or so when someone measures the Moon's rotational velocity.
Fortunately, this is all based on the idea that a black hole barely bigger than a proton is somehow stable, which we doubt very much.
I really wish you had signed this instead of posting AC.
Your assumption that men only become abusive over time is patently wrong. I've been in group dating scenes before where one woman brought her new boyfriend to the restaurant or whatever, and five minutes later every other female in the group had remarked something on the lines of 'she's an idiot, that guy's a dangerous jerk." etc. (and several of the men had said similar things). Signs are often there early - some women just miss them, and some have a bad habit of getting very head over heals in love so fast that it's easy for the abuser to hide for the very brief time needed.
I met a woman once who openly admitted she was only dating people who had served hard time for violent acts, and she didn't know why she was attracted to that type. Less than a year later she was a murder victim, by one of those types.
If I had mod points I'd mod you down, for being arrogantly wrong. You can make any abusive comments about my dick size you want, but you are still just plain wrong, and somebody needs to tell you. I've seen the exceptions to your blanket generalizations, they are tragic, they are often just plain loathsome situations, and they are unfortunately way too frequent.
Really, neither apes nor wolves can go it alone - the lone wolf bit is largely a myth and most wolves survive because they do manage to get along with the rest of the pack.
A pack/flock/tribe leader can be pretty aggressive, self-aggrandizing and dominating, if several conditions are met. They generally have to provide pretty well for the group, and display at least some tendency to hold the worst of their behavior in check and only release it against extra-group targets.
Humans, with their long, vulnerable childhoods, should be more strongly motivated to build stable and not too unpleasant packs than any other example, not less. We really are all in this together, and our own individual offspring and genetic success are threatened by sufficiently low levels of social integrity, even for those of us on top. Which is why I support castrating those alpha males who just don't get the message with rusty sporks.
That's the real reason some people want to have the Telecoms totally immunized:
If they had to defend the charges in court, they would be entitled to present some facts as defense. If the DoJ assured them the actions were legal for example, that's a good reason to say anyone suing can't claim triple damages for gross negligence.
The courts could easily impose only relatively trivial penalties on these companies, and accept a lot of excuses. After all, they were probably pressured by government agencies who said, in effect; "If you don't help us, you're helping the people who commissioned the hit on the WTC." or "If you don't help us, don't be surprised if the public thinks you're not real patriots, and maybe votes with their pocketbooks."
But, the courts would then have the names of the people in government who did this, plus letters, e-mails, and possibly even recorded conversations. This whole Telecom immunity thing is not about protecting the companies, who are not really likely to face the kinds of penalties that would break them or even seriously inconvenience them, anymore than the kid in this story is really likely to get 38 years. Instead, it's about protecting some parts of the government from being implicated if those same companies are allowed their constitutional rights in presenting a fair legal defense.
Of course it doesn't have to be that black and white, and in fact it probably isn't. What's bothering me here is some Republicans who will roundly condemn the Dems for their spinelesness, and then point to a counter-example, and instead of admitting he's a counter-example, find some way to criticize him too. I don't think I've ever seen Kucinich walk on water, but I hate to see people claiming they did see him do just that, and all it proves is that the shipping industry will be ruined if he is taken seriously.
Yes, and that's certainly what I would have done here. If the opposing party were to delay, I would petition for speed and point out the hardship additional waiting would cause due to the gag order. As I understand NZ law, there's some methods for doing just that, even though they aren't exactly like the ones included in US law.
Still, I honestly don't have much respect for a court that lets one side play the system in its favor, and hasn't woken up to the fact that it is doing so. I really hope you don't have much respect for that sort of court either. There are cases where I would be happier with myself to spend the time in jail than to help a corrupt and unjust legal machine give a false appearance that it was still concerned with justice.
Yes, Ha-Ha. Mod you +1 "witty".
What I discussed in the post did not come from any intellectual property exclusive to the company, and it doesn't represent any policy they have which might reflect how I perform my job. I'm pretty damned confident that they take no position on whether Congress is right or wrong in directing a focus for IRS enforcement efforts. My sources for what I have reported can be found by doing a little burrowing on the irs.gov site where they talk about their mandate and current enforcement activities, and from open conferences and sources of professional education that are not in any way exclusive to that unnamed company, often not even ones that unnamed company has even suggested to its employees. Given that, they would not want me to put their name on the post, as that might imply to some, that the unnamed company had an official position, or that I was acting as one who had a fiduciary duty to represent that corporation rather than normal employment duties.
What's sad here is, I actually found what you wrote funny, but my best understanding of the law is that I should probably clarify the situation in the most boring manner possible, just as though your post had whooshed right over my head. I pretty much have an ethical obligation to do this, to retain my own license to practice before the IRS, just in case you are one of those people who is so incredibly stupid as to be serious and not, as it appears, funny. Just on the million to one shot chance you might actually be a low grade moron, who would write the IRS claiming I had misled you on a tax related manner, making you think their was an unnamed company that would do your tax prep if you could only find it, and that was somehow why you delayed in meeting some IRS rule, it's in my best interest to be remorselessly dry and pedantic. This is one reason why pros don't like to give any free advice on slashdot - we often have to answer in a very boring and credulous fashion, acting as though were are the most gullible of fools to believe a sarcastic or ironic post, and being every bit as straight laced as the agencies which regulate us.
So, You are the one really causing all this tedium. This is one of the most nit-picking, dry as week-old-toast-in-the-great-Gobi-dessert posts I have ever seen, and that's all really traceable to you. As other readers gape in slack-jawed somulance at this vast dessicated wasteland of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance you have caused, I hope you're satisfied.