It's my experience that governments' initiatives at law enforcement turn out to be unfair and inequitable (and I have the police-inflicted injuries to prove it). Citizens' private initiatives are no more or less likely than governments' initiatives to be unfair or inequitable - at least if the RIAA comes to my door I can tell them to fuck off.
You seem to be forgetting something here. The reason you can tell the RIAA to fuck off if they come to your door is because you have a reasonable expectation that, if they don't fuck off, you can call on the government to remove them from your property.
Considering how thin the Martian atmosphere is, if it is so thin that there is no scattering to make the sky blue, what is holding up those dust particles? After a duststorm there will be dust in the air (until it falls back to the ground), but would that even make the sky red, or a different colour again?
A combination of lower gravity and finer particle sizes. On Earth, very small dust particles tend to get cemented together by water into larger particles, but on Mars, there isn't any free water to do this. Further, the lack of water means no rain to wash dust out of the atmosphere.
The particles are small, but still large enough to tint the atmosphere.
Yes, and no: depending on who you talk to, and the definition of Universe. The best one I can come up with is "all space which is connected (in a mathematical sense) and includes me at the present time". In that sense, regions of black holes are another Universe, for instance.
There are other statements like "the Universe is everything that can be observed", which is a much more limiting definition (fundamentally, there's a ton of spacetime outside all of humanity's forward and backward light cones), or "the Universe is everything", which, well, pretty much occludes all "outside"-ness, because as soon as you find something outside, it's not outside. Oookay.
Is it meaningful to talk about the portions of the universe that are outside our light cones as being mathematically connected to us? You can say that they were, but not that they are. There's no such thing as an instantaneous "now" snapshot of the universe, just a snapshot of the current surface of the backwards light cone. In practice, "everything that I can observe" and "everything that is connected to me" refer to the same thing.
You would think that they'd have an action plan when they embark on such a gigantic, life-critical project.
Coloring the air inside and lookingout for the colored air coming out, comes to my dumb mind, though;)
Color it with what? The ISS is a closed environment, so anything you release into the atmosphere will stay there for years. Once you find and fix the leak, you've now got a colored gas in the station's air system. It need to be completely non-toxic, since the astronauts will be breathing it for long periods of time. It can't be too vivid a color, or it will obscure vision. It can't react with other materials, or it will interfere with experiments.
Basically, the only gasses that meet these requirements are the noble gasses, and those are colorless.
Of course, you've got to either reduce the pressure very slowly or prebreathe pure O2 for a while first or risk getting the bends due to pressure change.
That wouldn't surprise me. I also noticed that the Proxomitron projects is listed as dead.
Listing it as "dead" is somewhat misleading. The program itself is no longer being developed, but anyone can write filters for it, and filter development is still quite active. (See proxomitron.info)
Without the input of a strong day/night cycle, our day cycle tends to settle on a 25-26 hour day, but this varies from person to person. With a strong day/night cycle, it settles on a 24 hour day. But the pattern of this day changes with age:
Young children tend to go to sleep around sundown, and sleep solidly until sunup. The times of sleep and wakefullness get later with age, so that teenagers and young adults tend to go to sleep late at night, and sleep until well after sunup (there's a reason high-school students have trouble getting up in time for school!). From about age 25-30 to late middle age, the pattern is sleep from shortly after sundown, followed by a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night, then another period of sleep until around sunup. From late middle age onwards, the pattern is to go to sleep around sundown, getting up well before sunrise.
I'm not sure the Proxomitron scales well enough to be used at an ISP level. I know I've had trouble with it handling more than 40 or so connections at a time, but that might just be the fact that I was running it on a Win98 box.
The kind that don't work - The one's where they try to determine whether or not a popup is an advertisement.
And the kind that work - The one's that block ALL popup's.
The Proxomitron uses the first kind, and it's very good at blocking only ad popups: I see one or two ad popups a year, and I don't have to turn the filtering off for sites that make honest use of popups.
Add my parents to this list. They bought an iBook two and a half years ago, with the extended AppleCare warrenty, and it's covered the two problems they had with it: a worn-out power cord fraying, and the battery losing its ability to hold a charge after two years.
I honestly don't understand why people complain about "search spam". I've never had trouble using Google to find the results I'm looking for, unless I'm searching for something so obscure it might not even be on the web, or when I'm searching for something that would be better served using a specialized search engine (such as looking up FCC identification numbers).
A good point. I switched to Altavista back in the days, because they had a relatively clean layout of the search results, which came up on the screen really fast. Later I switched to Google because of their even cleaner and more functional UI, not because I was getting better search results from them (there wasn't much difference that I noticed).
"Back in the day" for you must have been fairly recent. When I switched from Altavista to Google, doing a search for anything obscure (say, accidental death rates in national parks) meant putting your search terms into Altavista, spending the next ten minutes refining the search to get the number of results down to manageable levels, then checking each of the remaining thousand hits individually. Google, with its ability to put the page you're looking for in the top ten (and usually in the top spot!) was amazing.
Of course, for me "back in the day" was when Altavista was at altavista.digital.com
You can get a similar effect in Google by adding a word or two of context to your search. Searching for "paris hilton" gets millions of links to sites claiming to sell the tapes, but searching for "paris hilton hotel" gets hotels in France.
Fascinating. This way, you don't have to bother installing something and hope it doesn't fsck up your computer. It might be slightly less efficient than a dedicated, installed program, but this way, they can harness the power of a computer just casually browsing a web page. Very innovative.
Right. Now you visit a web page and hope it doesn't fsck up your web browser. Fun.
2 Slash song prices charge 29 cents per download. You''ll make it up in volume.
No you won't. The labels take 70 cents from all of the "legitimate" services. At 29 cents, you want as little volume as possible because you'll lose money on every download.
You can make up for loss on every sale with volume if you have exponentially increasing sales every month. As long as that's true, this month's sales will more than cover last month's expenses, leaving you with a tidy profit. Of course, the down side is that when the growth rate slows down, you'll go bankrupt the next month, but that's a small price to pay...
Geez, you need to get over the "stolen election" idea. Every recount of the Florida ballots came out in Bush's favor.
Not true. If you use the criteria the Republicans wanted for which ballots count how, Gore wins. If you use the criteria the Democrats wanted, Bush wins.
Here in Canada there was a court case finding that kiddie porn art (i.e. no kids were harmed, these were drawings and paintings) were found to be illegal and so the same laws applied to these paintings.
Here in the US, there was a court case finding that kiddie porn art was constitutionally protected free speech, as no actual children were harmed in the making. (For the curious, check the 2000 and 2001 Supreme Court decisions. I don't have the time to look it up myself.)
Slashdot Mirror
It's my experience that governments' initiatives at law enforcement turn out to be unfair and inequitable (and I have the police-inflicted injuries to prove it). Citizens' private initiatives are no more or less likely than governments' initiatives to be unfair or inequitable - at least if the RIAA comes to my door I can tell them to fuck off.
You seem to be forgetting something here. The reason you can tell the RIAA to fuck off if they come to your door is because you have a reasonable expectation that, if they don't fuck off, you can call on the government to remove them from your property.
>> All the dust in the atmosphere is heavily red-tinted due to iron content, by my understanding.
> No, no, no, iron is a *metal*, not a gas!
Oxygen is a metal too!
Just ask any astronomer!
Considering how thin the Martian atmosphere is, if it is so thin that there is no scattering to make the sky blue, what is holding up those dust particles? After a duststorm there will be dust in the air (until it falls back to the ground), but would that even make the sky red, or a different colour again?
A combination of lower gravity and finer particle sizes. On Earth, very small dust particles tend to get cemented together by water into larger particles, but on Mars, there isn't any free water to do this. Further, the lack of water means no rain to wash dust out of the atmosphere.
The particles are small, but still large enough to tint the atmosphere.
The Earth's sky is blue because Nitrogen scatters blue light. Last I checked, there ain't a whole lot of Nitrogen in the Martian atmosphere.
It isn't just nitrogen. Any molecule of about that size (oxygen, carbon dioxide, water vapor, etc) will tend to scatter blue light.
Also ironic: the FTC posts their own email address online (uce@ftc.gov) at the bottom of their webpage!
uce@ftc.gov? That's a spamtrap address if I ever saw one!
I'm sure that someone, somewhere, is going to do this. After all, someone went to the effort to make a RAID 0 array using floppy disks!
Yes, and no: depending on who you talk to, and the definition of Universe. The best one I can come up with is "all space which is connected (in a mathematical sense) and includes me at the present time". In that sense, regions of black holes are another Universe, for instance.
There are other statements like "the Universe is everything that can be observed", which is a much more limiting definition (fundamentally, there's a ton of spacetime outside all of humanity's forward and backward light cones), or "the Universe is everything", which, well, pretty much occludes all "outside"-ness, because as soon as you find something outside, it's not outside. Oookay.
Is it meaningful to talk about the portions of the universe that are outside our light cones as being mathematically connected to us? You can say that they were, but not that they are. There's no such thing as an instantaneous "now" snapshot of the universe, just a snapshot of the current surface of the backwards light cone. In practice, "everything that I can observe" and "everything that is connected to me" refer to the same thing.
You could probably replicate the game in a few weeks in Java, but I doubt anyone today would accept the graphics... :-(
Depends. What's the gameplay like? After all, Nethack is still popular, and I guarantee the graphics aren't as good.
I don't know about that. Compared to some of the stuff in the IOCCC, APL is pretty tame.
You would think that they'd have an action plan when they embark on such a gigantic, life-critical project.
;)
Coloring the air inside and lookingout for the colored air coming out, comes to my dumb mind, though
Color it with what? The ISS is a closed environment, so anything you release into the atmosphere will stay there for years. Once you find and fix the leak, you've now got a colored gas in the station's air system. It need to be completely non-toxic, since the astronauts will be breathing it for long periods of time. It can't be too vivid a color, or it will obscure vision. It can't react with other materials, or it will interfere with experiments.
Basically, the only gasses that meet these requirements are the noble gasses, and those are colorless.
Of course, you've got to either reduce the pressure very slowly or prebreathe pure O2 for a while first or risk getting the bends due to pressure change.
:-)
You think 190 days is long enough?
That wouldn't surprise me. I also noticed that the Proxomitron projects is listed as dead.
Listing it as "dead" is somewhat misleading. The program itself is no longer being developed, but anyone can write filters for it, and filter development is still quite active. (See proxomitron.info)
Without the input of a strong day/night cycle, our day cycle tends to settle on a 25-26 hour day, but this varies from person to person. With a strong day/night cycle, it settles on a 24 hour day. But the pattern of this day changes with age:
Young children tend to go to sleep around sundown, and sleep solidly until sunup. The times of sleep and wakefullness get later with age, so that teenagers and young adults tend to go to sleep late at night, and sleep until well after sunup (there's a reason high-school students have trouble getting up in time for school!). From about age 25-30 to late middle age, the pattern is sleep from shortly after sundown, followed by a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night, then another period of sleep until around sunup. From late middle age onwards, the pattern is to go to sleep around sundown, getting up well before sunrise.
I'm not sure the Proxomitron scales well enough to be used at an ISP level. I know I've had trouble with it handling more than 40 or so connections at a time, but that might just be the fact that I was running it on a Win98 box.
There are 2 types of popup blockers.
The kind that don't work - The one's where they try to determine whether or not a popup is an advertisement.
And the kind that work - The one's that block ALL popup's.
The Proxomitron uses the first kind, and it's very good at blocking only ad popups: I see one or two ad popups a year, and I don't have to turn the filtering off for sites that make honest use of popups.
Add my parents to this list. They bought an iBook two and a half years ago, with the extended AppleCare warrenty, and it's covered the two problems they had with it: a worn-out power cord fraying, and the battery losing its ability to hold a charge after two years.
They're differentiating themselves from the "high-power, high-heat, high-speed" and "low-power, low-heat, low-speed" chips.
I honestly don't understand why people complain about "search spam". I've never had trouble using Google to find the results I'm looking for, unless I'm searching for something so obscure it might not even be on the web, or when I'm searching for something that would be better served using a specialized search engine (such as looking up FCC identification numbers).
A good point. I switched to Altavista back in the days, because they had a relatively clean layout of the search results, which came up on the screen really fast. Later I switched to Google because of their even cleaner and more functional UI, not because I was getting better search results from them (there wasn't much difference that I noticed).
"Back in the day" for you must have been fairly recent. When I switched from Altavista to Google, doing a search for anything obscure (say, accidental death rates in national parks) meant putting your search terms into Altavista, spending the next ten minutes refining the search to get the number of results down to manageable levels, then checking each of the remaining thousand hits individually. Google, with its ability to put the page you're looking for in the top ten (and usually in the top spot!) was amazing.
Of course, for me "back in the day" was when Altavista was at altavista.digital.com
You can get a similar effect in Google by adding a word or two of context to your search. Searching for "paris hilton" gets millions of links to sites claiming to sell the tapes, but searching for "paris hilton hotel" gets hotels in France.
Fascinating. This way, you don't have to bother installing something and hope it doesn't fsck up your computer. It might be slightly less efficient than a dedicated, installed program, but this way, they can harness the power of a computer just casually browsing a web page. Very innovative.
Right. Now you visit a web page and hope it doesn't fsck up your web browser. Fun.
Now if she was really cool she'd get someone to take some naughty shots of her in the police station.
But only after making sure there weren't any identifiable objects in the background -- or she'd get busted again!
2 Slash song prices charge 29 cents per download. You''ll make it up in volume.
No you won't. The labels take 70 cents from all of the "legitimate" services. At 29 cents, you want as little volume as possible because you'll lose money on every download.
You can make up for loss on every sale with volume if you have exponentially increasing sales every month. As long as that's true, this month's sales will more than cover last month's expenses, leaving you with a tidy profit. Of course, the down side is that when the growth rate slows down, you'll go bankrupt the next month, but that's a small price to pay...
Geez, you need to get over the "stolen election" idea. Every recount of the Florida ballots came out in Bush's favor.
Not true. If you use the criteria the Republicans wanted for which ballots count how, Gore wins. If you use the criteria the Democrats wanted, Bush wins.
Here in Canada there was a court case finding that kiddie porn art (i.e. no kids were harmed, these were drawings and paintings) were found to be illegal and so the same laws applied to these paintings.
Here in the US, there was a court case finding that kiddie porn art was constitutionally protected free speech, as no actual children were harmed in the making. (For the curious, check the 2000 and 2001 Supreme Court decisions. I don't have the time to look it up myself.)