Yes, this could be a major advance in journalism so long as Reuters executes well. Verification is essential (which is not tremendously difficult so long as it's made a priority) and consistently paying and paying well for items sent in will determine the likelihood that people bother.
I've occasionally had friends send photos to me, or the other way around, of things that capture an event far better than the news did the next day. There will be times when this is the case of civil rights abuses that we can verify happened but not see; the visual depiction may accelerate civil rights advances by pushing people to action.
Or, as you point out, Reuters may do no verification and set us back ages by showing false inflammatory images in the news.
IANAB as well but I've known several stem cell researchers for years now and never heard of "de-differentiating;" I believe you're making that up to understand the infinite division of cancer cells. Any cell can divide infinitely - not just stem cells. Stem cells are unique for a different reason: they can differentiate into any of the category of cell they belong to (embryonic can become truly any cell).
Typically biologists, upon discovering a cell they're interested in, "make it immortal" by what is sometimes also called "giving it cancer." They remove the controls that cause the cell to die on its own (programmed cell death) and divide gradually. This simplifies experimentation as a single capture may yield numerous experiments.
You can't blame researchers for seeing this standard lab practice and extending it to their understanding of cancer. Perhaps this worldwide method has blinded researchers until now to a very important segment of the real cancer lifecycle.
If this theory proves true, this is a very major discovery, that suits the unpredictability and brutal nature of existing cancer treatments and could finally lead to highly targeted cures given the very small number of unique roots.
This is a typical case of trying to solve a people problem by changing a setting. Guess what? Users will get pissed, and just change it back. If Microsoft were stupid enough to take this guy's lead they'd be decried here on Slashdot in seconds, something like "Microsoft tells millions of paying users when their PC is allowed to be on."
The right way to solve this is to fix the cultural idea that a PC should always be on: Windows Update, Defrag, AntiVirus, and every single Distributed Computing project assume your machine should be on 24x7, even when you're gone. In some cases the software fails to work properly if you do shut down at night!
Anyway, the guy has a point - computers are on too much - but this definitely isn't the answer. Get the message out about Power Save features. Pass a law requiring all PCs to be able to Hibernate and recover from said mode as-shipped (this is rare!). Put Hibernate button on the keyboard that can wake the PC back up. And make sure no software counts on you running the computer but not using it!
When those things are in place, you'll see a lot more power savings going on.
Video cards are getting absurd, but this really ties it up. At over 300watts and this size, I've officially built a desktop gaming PC that's smaller and uses less power than this card alone.. and that was only 3 years ago! There's so many parallel, custom instruction set processors on this it's truly a rendering farm stuffed onto one piece of silicon. I can't decide whether that's irresponsible or appropriate, but I do know no system I've built would even fit this card, let alone power it, let alone be tolerable sitting next to me (vacuum cleaner anyone?). I'll wait for the single slot edition, thanks... .
This is a common problem with education today. Whenever you're making rules you can't help the urge to "help" those in your charge by making rules that don't discipline bad behavior, they "encourage healthy habits..." but whose habits are those?
People learn differently. If you're worried these podcasts could be used to cheat (I'm not seeing that here), then limiting someone for any other reason can, at best, do nothing. At worst it affects good students. So, a good way to protect yourself from that is to consider the many different ways a good student might learn, even if it's not your way, or what you consider best.
Consider a very good student I know who now is a successful PhD/MD (from back when you couldn't do them together) and a marathon runner. I actually know 2 such people by the way, before anyone suggests this sort of person is the only on the planet. So let's take this first student - he would go to class and study and noticed his health was in disrepair, so he'd record the lecture in class, then go running listening to the tapes. He'd repeat the entire class before finals. Over time, he went from being able to run 1mile, to 12.
Now Consider the idea of delaying the posting, or placing a login in front. In the case of the delay, if this student couldn't make it to 1 class because of a personal event, and the next class was the next day, they'd be forced to miss 1 lecture while attending the next, then listen to the previous out of order. A small loss but again, for no gain.
In the case of a login, this makes the mp3 harder to access, which on some portable devices can be prohibitive. For example if this good student had a device that could download it directly (rather than to a PC then transferred), navigating a login can present a lot of challenge, depending on the limitations of the device.
Anyway - the point is, don't limit good students. They're already working their butts off, they don't need someone telling them how to learn - they'll find their way and the best way for them will differ from yours.
The article mentions there was originally a gesture for every move and they were big sweeping motions - like Wolverine's uppercut was a real uppercut. Then they made the guy simplify it to 5 common, simple wrist flicks. What? The Wii lets me do an uppercut for the first time, I want an uppercut! If I wanted abstracted wrist twitches I'd play Xbox. The Wii's goal is it feels natural - and a natural uppercut is an uppercut, not a wrist flick up.
Lame. Go back to the original plan, or at least leave it as an option. I was amped about this game until this article - now it's off my list.
Given researchers' habit of experimenting on mice, is it only a matter of time before this gene is inserted into 2 baby mice, and one asks the other, "What we gonna do tonight Brain?" If so, we might not like the other's answer.
I would go as far as to say that great implementations of great concepts are "high brow" - like Dungeon Keeper 2 or Black and White 2. DK2 can make being evil so funny... and every now and then as you crush the life out of a do-good hollering knight it makes you think.
I experienced moments in Half Life where I've never been as scared and thrilled as when in that chase, and in Half Life 2 that were so graphically beautiful and yet societally sad it was really breath-taking. There are even sections of Splinter Cell that make you think, and moral decisions abound for you - you can play each of the 3 in the series taking maybe 3 lives in the entire game if you choose to take the challenge; even more challenging is harming no more than 6.
And what about Second Life? No high-brow? I think this guy hangs around too many sports game players. There's a lot of crap out there, and with EA's help there's more than ever, but to suggest true works of digital art aren't being released is just a journalist scraping for something to write about.
The one efficiency I see in this system over others is that perhaps if this were to drive the compressor/pump on an AC, that perhaps the hot grill on an AC that normally just exhausts heat could actually be heating the boiling process for this cooling system. The AC could theoretically ramp up its cooling factor and efficiency as it ran in this way... and perhaps power itself, though that's not something you can determine from the general statements available.
I certainly don't know enough about thermodynamics to say whether you're removing heat overall (upconverting it in a sense), or just making better use of the heat that's already there... but it's about time somebody sucked in heat and put out electricity in a window-sized unit already. I'm tired of the power outtages in Cambridge.
I took this article to be about our development as early mammals - rodents. Monkeys and snakes have a pointless evolutionary relationship, but you can bet mice are bound to snakes in an evolutionary way.
I agree the article is a reach, but it's not a reach to suggest that our vision, and our instinctual reaction to a snake's attack, could have developed while we were a snake's favorite food, and never left us.
As for why primates developed more complex brains... not seeing a shred of evidence there. Since when does Fox News devote a whole section to "Science" that isn't about the evils of NASA and the global warming "myth"?
How do you feel about the years of wait for CSS2.1 and its several near-misses with becoming a Recommendation?
How would you feel about breaking CSS3 down into even smaller chunks so that the approval process can get back on its feet, with W3C standards moving out of 1999 (when the last CSS Recommendation was approved - CSS 1.0)?
Are *you* an FPS gamer? If not, please don't speak for others, who you apparently hold a low opinion of.
I love FPS games through and through and won't play another FPS game on a console after the frustration of GTA3 (Columbian fish cart anyone?) on PS2. The aiming is just awful compared to point, shoot. Nintendo Wii is about to be the first console I'll buy since the PS2, and I hope some great shooters make it into the games list.
And a little physical exertion when gaming is a much-welcome addition to my favorite addiction.
Fair point there Fanboy - it's the most risky piece of their overall brand, certainly. But, even there they've done a good job marketing to a professional crowd, and fitting it into the Creative Professional half of their branding. Nintendo just doesn't sell to that crowd; they sell to the parent buying for their kids. Apple sells to the parent buying for themselves.
There was just an article posted on Slashdot about Apple's brand - premium, professional goods sold to a very specific professional market. NOT TOYS. Nintendo makes cheap toys for kids. They may be very fun toys that I enjoy playing with as an adult, but the brands don't match, and Apple is nothing without their brand.
For the most part the technical details are just flat out missing from this article, and I agree with other posters the water example is crap, both because the water turbulence in the example would be untenable for making things invisible in dealing with light, and because the water is flowing in just one direction. I think it's just a stupid metaphor to make press.
If there's any technical basis to this it sounds a little bit like they propose to use these "metamaterials" to hop up the wavelength of the incoming photon momentarily to something huge, so it bends itself around the object cloaked, then returns to its normal wavelength, never losing its original vector, and eliminating the problem of recalculating position.
This is different from say, wrapping an object to be cloaked in fiberoptics, which with proper channeling might carry light in and out as intended, but you lose vector temporarily and must solve position on the other side with awfully careful channeling. The surface carrying the cloaking wrap could not be allowed to bend, for example.
I guess if they ever got it to work it would be interesting to see how lossy the "metamaterials" were, as we know fiberoptics are not 100% lossless - the cloaked object might be distinguishable as a faint shadow, variably darker and lighter in areas where the lossiness peaks and valleys.
I'd be very interested to see it, but I'd also be very interested to see a teleporter. A guy making news in the BBC saying he has an idea for a teleporter doesn't help me get to work any faster. Water metaphor or no.
Perhaps this is just the result of a self-maintaining O2/O3 cycle, in response to our destruction of upper O3.
Oxygen can be broken by UV, but splitting it mixes a lot of free O atoms with the existing O2, encouraging Ozone production. Ozone blocks UV, and Ozone lifts itself slowly to our upper atmosphere, protecting the Oxygen (and us) below. So long as there's sufficient Oxygen available to feed this process, you can view this as a self-maintaining cycle, where depleted Ozone will be (slowly) responded to by increased Ozone production in the lower atmosphere, because O2 there is now being struck by more UV. That Ozone will rise and eventually protect the lower O2, and so presumably Ozone production would drop off again as the balance is restored.
So, perhaps the increase in lower stratospheric Ozone is perfectly explained by this self-balancing nature of sunlight, O2, and O3. The zone with increased production is exactly the zone you'd expect in this balance to increase production after a depletion in the upper atmosphere: the layer directly below, rich with O2. This could be tested for in part by testing for a recent reduction in O2 in the same area, in line with the increase in O3.
Other explanations include our increased O3 production (pollution) making its way gradually into the lower stratosphere. It's possible both of these are combining to cause this, as most natural events tend to be the result of many contributing factors.
I agree with you, they are not special citizens in one regard - that being, anyone, including you can become a member of the press, simply by reporting on current events. That's part of the point of the free press - any citizen can investigate and report, and in doing so they are specially protected by the Constitution, because of the essential benefit they're providing to the nation.
And the point isn't that the press has special privileges to break the law. Rather, they have the right as a Free Press, under the First Amendment, and one of the core intentions of the Constitution in the first place, to reveal embarassing information about the government. The fact that a law was made against just that doesn't mean the law was constitutional. I'm certain that exactly the text of that 1998 law will be ruled unconstitutional in many regards, and this essential protection will be restored.
It has to. Or we've truly lost all that America is supposed to be, and will become a country that fiercely and without question defends... the ability to fiercely defend without question.
That's really not true. The major distinction between a "patent troll" and a "small inventor with few resources" is where those resources are going. A little inspection of that small inventor will show that most of what that inventor has is going into inventing that idea, even if they have little to do it with - that's where it's allocated. The patent troll can easily be shown to have allocated nothing to making the idea happen, and everything to "protecting" it.
This is a brilliant move on the Supreme Court's part, because the analysis of harm will require just this sort of inquiry. Now when a patent troll makes these claims, if they ask for an injunction to start the pain they'll be forced to answer the embarassing question of what they're doing to bring their wonderful idea to society. And they will lose that injunction, quickly.
Yes, the above poster has the right answer. Longer work hours might play a role, but the real factor is the difference in environmental laws. For example, our FDA sees no problem in US food producers putting drugs in our food.
Take dairy alone: Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) is injected into most US cattle. It's been repeatedly stated here that there's no scientific study showing this hormone affects the humans that eat it; but a little more digging reveals that's because scientists view such a study as silly, as it seems almost impossible to anyone in the field that it would not affect the human consumer. So the same drug meant to fatten and tenderize our cows is tenderizing us. That can't be healthy. rBGH is banned throughout Europe.
The way livestock are raised here makes them prone to disease (sound familiar?) so antibiotics are fed to them as a daily supplement. These antibiotics inevitably remain when we then consume them. Further, this daily regimen ensures that any bacteria surviving in that beef are immune to those same antibiotics, reducing our ability to cure ourselves with medicine when we actually get sick.
The list of differences in our food and water laws between the US and Europe goes on and on. US firms consistently state a long list of risk factors are safe, yet in Europe these things are banned and surprise! Europeans are healthier. Could it be these obvious risks are what they are?
If you have a look at the Wiki entry, or some of the posts here, you'll notice the overall speed of the chip is entirely dictated by voltage.
Although current chips are clocked (partly dictated by voltage as well) to manage heat, this heat is actually caused by each of the operation circuits in a chip having current pass through it, then, on the next cycle, having that occur again.
This case is no different - heat is caused for the exact same reason, and at a given voltage, the maximum amount that a given circuit could be used is constant - for example, the ADD op might be the fastest and could survive 10million ops per second, so you set the voltage for that speed, and all goes to plan.
It is notable though that many clocked chips do a lot of useless ops (creating heat) and throw the results away, for cheaper flow and design. A clockless chip like this will save a great deal on heat in this regard, because by design it has to only use the ops it actually needs (or the process will break down). Further, the clock circuitry itself adds a lot of heat that this design avoids. It's possible the speed of some operations, especially smaller ones like ADD, could dwarf the maximum speed obtainable by say, an Intel chip, at the same heat levels.
I noticed that very recently, all NBC-copyrighted content disappeared from YouTube. That's a signal to me monetary concerns are being considered, as that's a very lawyerly thing to do. Perhaps a stronger revenue model is in the works, and this is a step to prepare the site for it.
This is my most-wanted feature on Slashdot - applying a Karma penalty to posts made within a certain amount of time of the article's posting. I would probably apply a -3 and then relax it from there. The posts made earliest on Slashdot, even marked "5", are 99% of the time worth nothing posted at any other time - and truly worth that latter value.
Slashdot really needs a way to moderate articles, so that when a mountain of readers can immediately see it's a bunch of crap, we can just kick it off the homepage and the people subscribing to the daily newsletter don't have to even sit through yet another dumb article.
Give us the ability to kick nonsense like this off the front page!
Yes, everyone prior to this post is missing the fact that he's not convicted for deleting files - he was just sent back to a lower court because there were new details that needed to be clarified, whereas before there were insufficient details to even proceed with the suit.
The judge simply found that the secure deletion of files created uncertainty - not guilt - uncertainty. He punted sorting out that uncertainty to the lower court. The company will now at least get its due process of arguing the legality of the secure delete (probably not successful there) and surrounding evidence of what was likely to have been deleted (better chances there), which they're owed, and the lower court can decide on the real matter at hand - did this guy steal a client list from a former employer?
Technically speaking:
The most interesting detail to me in this case is the way that the "Secure Delete" was proven - which is, the company said Citrin did it, and he excused it, which implied that he did it. It would be interesting if he denied that accusation - could they prove that a hard drive had secure delete software run on it? What if he were smart enough to run the secure delete software from an outside CD or thumb drive leaving no install trace, and to use one that dumps random bytes, not 0's, where the files to be deleted once were? What would the court demand as proof, and could they properly interpret it?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this could be a major advance in journalism so long as Reuters executes well. Verification is essential (which is not tremendously difficult so long as it's made a priority) and consistently paying and paying well for items sent in will determine the likelihood that people bother.
I've occasionally had friends send photos to me, or the other way around, of things that capture an event far better than the news did the next day. There will be times when this is the case of civil rights abuses that we can verify happened but not see; the visual depiction may accelerate civil rights advances by pushing people to action.
Or, as you point out, Reuters may do no verification and set us back ages by showing false inflammatory images in the news.
IANAB as well but I've known several stem cell researchers for years now and never heard of "de-differentiating;" I believe you're making that up to understand the infinite division of cancer cells. Any cell can divide infinitely - not just stem cells. Stem cells are unique for a different reason: they can differentiate into any of the category of cell they belong to (embryonic can become truly any cell).
Typically biologists, upon discovering a cell they're interested in, "make it immortal" by what is sometimes also called "giving it cancer." They remove the controls that cause the cell to die on its own (programmed cell death) and divide gradually. This simplifies experimentation as a single capture may yield numerous experiments.
You can't blame researchers for seeing this standard lab practice and extending it to their understanding of cancer. Perhaps this worldwide method has blinded researchers until now to a very important segment of the real cancer lifecycle.
If this theory proves true, this is a very major discovery, that suits the unpredictability and brutal nature of existing cancer treatments and could finally lead to highly targeted cures given the very small number of unique roots.
This is a typical case of trying to solve a people problem by changing a setting. Guess what? Users will get pissed, and just change it back. If Microsoft were stupid enough to take this guy's lead they'd be decried here on Slashdot in seconds, something like "Microsoft tells millions of paying users when their PC is allowed to be on."
The right way to solve this is to fix the cultural idea that a PC should always be on: Windows Update, Defrag, AntiVirus, and every single Distributed Computing project assume your machine should be on 24x7, even when you're gone. In some cases the software fails to work properly if you do shut down at night!
Anyway, the guy has a point - computers are on too much - but this definitely isn't the answer. Get the message out about Power Save features. Pass a law requiring all PCs to be able to Hibernate and recover from said mode as-shipped (this is rare!). Put Hibernate button on the keyboard that can wake the PC back up. And make sure no software counts on you running the computer but not using it!
When those things are in place, you'll see a lot more power savings going on.
Video cards are getting absurd, but this really ties it up. At over 300watts and this size, I've officially built a desktop gaming PC that's smaller and uses less power than this card alone.. and that was only 3 years ago! There's so many parallel, custom instruction set processors on this it's truly a rendering farm stuffed onto one piece of silicon. I can't decide whether that's irresponsible or appropriate, but I do know no system I've built would even fit this card, let alone power it, let alone be tolerable sitting next to me (vacuum cleaner anyone?). I'll wait for the single slot edition, thanks... .
Sounds like that cell phone's got data to steal - good thing they put that sound on it to alert thieves to its readiness and location.
I need to start designing cell phones... how do so many terrible ideas like this make it to market?
This is a common problem with education today. Whenever you're making rules you can't help the urge to "help" those in your charge by making rules that don't discipline bad behavior, they "encourage healthy habits..." but whose habits are those?
People learn differently. If you're worried these podcasts could be used to cheat (I'm not seeing that here), then limiting someone for any other reason can, at best, do nothing. At worst it affects good students. So, a good way to protect yourself from that is to consider the many different ways a good student might learn, even if it's not your way, or what you consider best.
Consider a very good student I know who now is a successful PhD/MD (from back when you couldn't do them together) and a marathon runner. I actually know 2 such people by the way, before anyone suggests this sort of person is the only on the planet. So let's take this first student - he would go to class and study and noticed his health was in disrepair, so he'd record the lecture in class, then go running listening to the tapes. He'd repeat the entire class before finals. Over time, he went from being able to run 1mile, to 12.
Now Consider the idea of delaying the posting, or placing a login in front. In the case of the delay, if this student couldn't make it to 1 class because of a personal event, and the next class was the next day, they'd be forced to miss 1 lecture while attending the next, then listen to the previous out of order. A small loss but again, for no gain.
In the case of a login, this makes the mp3 harder to access, which on some portable devices can be prohibitive. For example if this good student had a device that could download it directly (rather than to a PC then transferred), navigating a login can present a lot of challenge, depending on the limitations of the device.
Anyway - the point is, don't limit good students. They're already working their butts off, they don't need someone telling them how to learn - they'll find their way and the best way for them will differ from yours.
Just post them the day of.
The article mentions there was originally a gesture for every move and they were big sweeping motions - like Wolverine's uppercut was a real uppercut. Then they made the guy simplify it to 5 common, simple wrist flicks. What? The Wii lets me do an uppercut for the first time, I want an uppercut! If I wanted abstracted wrist twitches I'd play Xbox. The Wii's goal is it feels natural - and a natural uppercut is an uppercut, not a wrist flick up.
Lame. Go back to the original plan, or at least leave it as an option. I was amped about this game until this article - now it's off my list.
Given researchers' habit of experimenting on mice, is it only a matter of time before this gene is inserted into 2 baby mice, and one asks the other, "What we gonna do tonight Brain?" If so, we might not like the other's answer.
I would go as far as to say that great implementations of great concepts are "high brow" - like Dungeon Keeper 2 or Black and White 2. DK2 can make being evil so funny... and every now and then as you crush the life out of a do-good hollering knight it makes you think.
I experienced moments in Half Life where I've never been as scared and thrilled as when in that chase, and in Half Life 2 that were so graphically beautiful and yet societally sad it was really breath-taking. There are even sections of Splinter Cell that make you think, and moral decisions abound for you - you can play each of the 3 in the series taking maybe 3 lives in the entire game if you choose to take the challenge; even more challenging is harming no more than 6.
And what about Second Life? No high-brow? I think this guy hangs around too many sports game players. There's a lot of crap out there, and with EA's help there's more than ever, but to suggest true works of digital art aren't being released is just a journalist scraping for something to write about.
The one efficiency I see in this system over others is that perhaps if this were to drive the compressor/pump on an AC, that perhaps the hot grill on an AC that normally just exhausts heat could actually be heating the boiling process for this cooling system. The AC could theoretically ramp up its cooling factor and efficiency as it ran in this way... and perhaps power itself, though that's not something you can determine from the general statements available.
I certainly don't know enough about thermodynamics to say whether you're removing heat overall (upconverting it in a sense), or just making better use of the heat that's already there... but it's about time somebody sucked in heat and put out electricity in a window-sized unit already. I'm tired of the power outtages in Cambridge.
I took this article to be about our development as early mammals - rodents. Monkeys and snakes have a pointless evolutionary relationship, but you can bet mice are bound to snakes in an evolutionary way.
I agree the article is a reach, but it's not a reach to suggest that our vision, and our instinctual reaction to a snake's attack, could have developed while we were a snake's favorite food, and never left us.
As for why primates developed more complex brains... not seeing a shred of evidence there. Since when does Fox News devote a whole section to "Science" that isn't about the evils of NASA and the global warming "myth"?
How do you feel about the years of wait for CSS2.1 and its several near-misses with becoming a Recommendation?
How would you feel about breaking CSS3 down into even smaller chunks so that the approval process can get back on its feet, with W3C standards moving out of 1999 (when the last CSS Recommendation was approved - CSS 1.0)?
Are *you* an FPS gamer? If not, please don't speak for others, who you apparently hold a low opinion of.
I love FPS games through and through and won't play another FPS game on a console after the frustration of GTA3 (Columbian fish cart anyone?) on PS2. The aiming is just awful compared to point, shoot. Nintendo Wii is about to be the first console I'll buy since the PS2, and I hope some great shooters make it into the games list.
And a little physical exertion when gaming is a much-welcome addition to my favorite addiction.
Fair point there Fanboy - it's the most risky piece of their overall brand, certainly. But, even there they've done a good job marketing to a professional crowd, and fitting it into the Creative Professional half of their branding. Nintendo just doesn't sell to that crowd; they sell to the parent buying for their kids. Apple sells to the parent buying for themselves.
Agreed.
There was just an article posted on Slashdot about Apple's brand - premium, professional goods sold to a very specific professional market. NOT TOYS. Nintendo makes cheap toys for kids. They may be very fun toys that I enjoy playing with as an adult, but the brands don't match, and Apple is nothing without their brand.
For the most part the technical details are just flat out missing from this article, and I agree with other posters the water example is crap, both because the water turbulence in the example would be untenable for making things invisible in dealing with light, and because the water is flowing in just one direction. I think it's just a stupid metaphor to make press.
If there's any technical basis to this it sounds a little bit like they propose to use these "metamaterials" to hop up the wavelength of the incoming photon momentarily to something huge, so it bends itself around the object cloaked, then returns to its normal wavelength, never losing its original vector, and eliminating the problem of recalculating position.
This is different from say, wrapping an object to be cloaked in fiberoptics, which with proper channeling might carry light in and out as intended, but you lose vector temporarily and must solve position on the other side with awfully careful channeling. The surface carrying the cloaking wrap could not be allowed to bend, for example.
I guess if they ever got it to work it would be interesting to see how lossy the "metamaterials" were, as we know fiberoptics are not 100% lossless - the cloaked object might be distinguishable as a faint shadow, variably darker and lighter in areas where the lossiness peaks and valleys.
I'd be very interested to see it, but I'd also be very interested to see a teleporter. A guy making news in the BBC saying he has an idea for a teleporter doesn't help me get to work any faster. Water metaphor or no.
Perhaps this is just the result of a self-maintaining O2/O3 cycle, in response to our destruction of upper O3.
Oxygen can be broken by UV, but splitting it mixes a lot of free O atoms with the existing O2, encouraging Ozone production. Ozone blocks UV, and Ozone lifts itself slowly to our upper atmosphere, protecting the Oxygen (and us) below. So long as there's sufficient Oxygen available to feed this process, you can view this as a self-maintaining cycle, where depleted Ozone will be (slowly) responded to by increased Ozone production in the lower atmosphere, because O2 there is now being struck by more UV. That Ozone will rise and eventually protect the lower O2, and so presumably Ozone production would drop off again as the balance is restored.
So, perhaps the increase in lower stratospheric Ozone is perfectly explained by this self-balancing nature of sunlight, O2, and O3. The zone with increased production is exactly the zone you'd expect in this balance to increase production after a depletion in the upper atmosphere: the layer directly below, rich with O2. This could be tested for in part by testing for a recent reduction in O2 in the same area, in line with the increase in O3.
Other explanations include our increased O3 production (pollution) making its way gradually into the lower stratosphere. It's possible both of these are combining to cause this, as most natural events tend to be the result of many contributing factors.
I agree with you, they are not special citizens in one regard - that being, anyone, including you can become a member of the press, simply by reporting on current events. That's part of the point of the free press - any citizen can investigate and report, and in doing so they are specially protected by the Constitution, because of the essential benefit they're providing to the nation.
And the point isn't that the press has special privileges to break the law. Rather, they have the right as a Free Press, under the First Amendment, and one of the core intentions of the Constitution in the first place, to reveal embarassing information about the government. The fact that a law was made against just that doesn't mean the law was constitutional. I'm certain that exactly the text of that 1998 law will be ruled unconstitutional in many regards, and this essential protection will be restored.
It has to. Or we've truly lost all that America is supposed to be, and will become a country that fiercely and without question defends... the ability to fiercely defend without question.
That's really not true. The major distinction between a "patent troll" and a "small inventor with few resources" is where those resources are going. A little inspection of that small inventor will show that most of what that inventor has is going into inventing that idea, even if they have little to do it with - that's where it's allocated. The patent troll can easily be shown to have allocated nothing to making the idea happen, and everything to "protecting" it.
This is a brilliant move on the Supreme Court's part, because the analysis of harm will require just this sort of inquiry. Now when a patent troll makes these claims, if they ask for an injunction to start the pain they'll be forced to answer the embarassing question of what they're doing to bring their wonderful idea to society. And they will lose that injunction, quickly.
Yes, the above poster has the right answer. Longer work hours might play a role, but the real factor is the difference in environmental laws. For example, our FDA sees no problem in US food producers putting drugs in our food.
Take dairy alone: Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) is injected into most US cattle. It's been repeatedly stated here that there's no scientific study showing this hormone affects the humans that eat it; but a little more digging reveals that's because scientists view such a study as silly, as it seems almost impossible to anyone in the field that it would not affect the human consumer. So the same drug meant to fatten and tenderize our cows is tenderizing us. That can't be healthy. rBGH is banned throughout Europe.
The way livestock are raised here makes them prone to disease (sound familiar?) so antibiotics are fed to them as a daily supplement. These antibiotics inevitably remain when we then consume them. Further, this daily regimen ensures that any bacteria surviving in that beef are immune to those same antibiotics, reducing our ability to cure ourselves with medicine when we actually get sick.
The list of differences in our food and water laws between the US and Europe goes on and on. US firms consistently state a long list of risk factors are safe, yet in Europe these things are banned and surprise! Europeans are healthier. Could it be these obvious risks are what they are?
If you have a look at the Wiki entry, or some of the posts here, you'll notice the overall speed of the chip is entirely dictated by voltage.
Although current chips are clocked (partly dictated by voltage as well) to manage heat, this heat is actually caused by each of the operation circuits in a chip having current pass through it, then, on the next cycle, having that occur again.
This case is no different - heat is caused for the exact same reason, and at a given voltage, the maximum amount that a given circuit could be used is constant - for example, the ADD op might be the fastest and could survive 10million ops per second, so you set the voltage for that speed, and all goes to plan.
It is notable though that many clocked chips do a lot of useless ops (creating heat) and throw the results away, for cheaper flow and design. A clockless chip like this will save a great deal on heat in this regard, because by design it has to only use the ops it actually needs (or the process will break down). Further, the clock circuitry itself adds a lot of heat that this design avoids. It's possible the speed of some operations, especially smaller ones like ADD, could dwarf the maximum speed obtainable by say, an Intel chip, at the same heat levels.
I noticed that very recently, all NBC-copyrighted content disappeared from YouTube. That's a signal to me monetary concerns are being considered, as that's a very lawyerly thing to do. Perhaps a stronger revenue model is in the works, and this is a step to prepare the site for it.
This is my most-wanted feature on Slashdot - applying a Karma penalty to posts made within a certain amount of time of the article's posting. I would probably apply a -3 and then relax it from there. The posts made earliest on Slashdot, even marked "5", are 99% of the time worth nothing posted at any other time - and truly worth that latter value.
Slashdot really needs a way to moderate articles, so that when a mountain of readers can immediately see it's a bunch of crap, we can just kick it off the homepage and the people subscribing to the daily newsletter don't have to even sit through yet another dumb article.
Give us the ability to kick nonsense like this off the front page!
Yes, everyone prior to this post is missing the fact that he's not convicted for deleting files - he was just sent back to a lower court because there were new details that needed to be clarified, whereas before there were insufficient details to even proceed with the suit.
The judge simply found that the secure deletion of files created uncertainty - not guilt - uncertainty. He punted sorting out that uncertainty to the lower court. The company will now at least get its due process of arguing the legality of the secure delete (probably not successful there) and surrounding evidence of what was likely to have been deleted (better chances there), which they're owed, and the lower court can decide on the real matter at hand - did this guy steal a client list from a former employer?
Technically speaking:
The most interesting detail to me in this case is the way that the "Secure Delete" was proven - which is, the company said Citrin did it, and he excused it, which implied that he did it. It would be interesting if he denied that accusation - could they prove that a hard drive had secure delete software run on it? What if he were smart enough to run the secure delete software from an outside CD or thumb drive leaving no install trace, and to use one that dumps random bytes, not 0's, where the files to be deleted once were? What would the court demand as proof, and could they properly interpret it?