Your thoughts are borne out by Lucas' own words to some degree (and I agree a Herbert influence doesn't even seem plausible), though he might have come by any Arthurian influence second-hand. I found this interesting reading. It appears that it is a published book now, though I read a 533 pg. pdf draft (3rd online edition) that I downloaded about 18 months ago. A pertinent quote (pg. 19-20):
In addition to comic books, Lucas began devouring science fiction magazines such as Amazing and Astounding Tales, magazines which were the regular homes of science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein and E. E. Smith. "As a kid, I read a lot of science fiction," Lucas recalls. "But instead of reading technical hard science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov, I was interested in Harry Harrison and a fantastic, surreal approach to the genre."
"One of my favorite things were [sic] Republic serials and things like Flash Gordon."
Later, it is established that the rest of Lucas' borrowings are mostly from the realm of film, specifically Kurosawa. I would not really call the book a sympathetic portrayal, but the author (Michael Kaminski) goes on to contend that Star Wars is basically as original as any film, and that George Lucas' primary failing was to overly involve himself in the production of the script, an area which was never really his forte (and which he apparently did not enjoy, and found very difficult at the time he was writing the first three films). In fact, Lucas' university projects apparently included mostly documentaries and art films with little or no dialogue.
I don't know if I would say Lucas was a hack from the beginning, but I would agree that wholeheartedly that he had/has absolutely no interest in science fiction except insofar as he finds the future a compelling setting. He exists in...a galaxy far, far away from Asimov's.
You know, the Patriot Act did have a sunset provision, and it was renewed anyway with quite a bit of bipartisan vigor, if not the near-unanimity of the first round. I don't think automatic expiration is quite going to cut it. It seems like it wouldn't hurt...but consider this: if there were a deluge of laws coming up for renewal constantly, it is possible that the legislature would spend even less time reading legislation than it already does. That said, perhaps if the restrictions only applied to certain classes of laws, that disadvantage could be avoided.
Forget the issue of IE6 (and IE7? I can only imagine that the site is some kind of "cutting-edge" javascript/css abomination if it fails utterly in IE7.), how do you imagine this guy's website is going to perform on cellphone and other mobile browsers? If fewer than 5% of the users are using any version of IE, they must be awfully technical indeed; I imagine that many of them also possess smartphones. I know that since I have started browsing in earnest on my phone, I have run into far too many websites with extremely basic content that nevertheless completely implode in multiple mobile browsers. And if the mobile browsers can render your website, I guarantee that you will also engender rage and resentment amongst users if they have to switch user agents just to placate your naive redirects.
While IE6 is declining in popularity, phones will only increase. Firefox Mobile may be more powerful than IE6, but the same cannot be said for any of the other (currently far more common) browsers, and no phone has more than VGA resolution. Many sites that do render mostly properly have nevertheless brought potent curses to my lips when I tried to use their tiny and/or heavily javascripted navigation menus with a touchscreen. And Flash! I won't even go there...
Of course,/. is a shining example of many of those pitfalls. While ajax support is indeed more efficient in theory, in addition to avoiding spurious reloads, the/. 2.0 design managed to destroy the client browsing experience in favor of (presumably) server-side efficiency. Whenever there is, say, an evolution article (~1000 posts), firefox more often than not gives me a javascript timeout for the page on a Core2 (I browse at -1, nested, all comments; the "50/100 per page" views never really worked either since it would break between threads, which are sometimes hundreds of comments long, resulting in four or five nearly identical numbered pages--but at least they didn't bring processors to their knees). And while/. does render on my phone, it certainly cannot be said to render well, or with anything approaching speed. At least it doesn't have insulting UA checks and I can read the bare comments (after I manage to log in, anyway--the threaded view is an absolute disaster).
Fail gracefully. Hell, that is the whole idea behind CSS. So what if a website looks aesthetically awful in some browsers? At least it renders! When you start going overboard with javascript, however, and the content of the site (which has, maddeningly enough, been substantially present on the client all along) won't even appear until 5000 lines of script execute correctly...claiming that such things are "necessary" is total bullshit unless you have some kind of super heavyweight web-app like Google Documents; many of pages I browse work and look just fine with scripting disabled; many, however, were programmed by a bunch of assholes.
Salon.com comes to mind: until a few weeks ago, it worked just fine. Then, they had some kind of web 2.0 revelation. Actually, the site looks pretty much the same, except that now only two paragraphs of an article usually displays initially until you click the js link which unhides the rest of the article...and then reloads the page one second later just to make you angry...sometimes in an infinite loop. Ironically, the site works just fine with scripting turned totally off; it is only when scripting is allowed for the "salon.com" domain but not the tens of advertising/tracking partner domains that everything goes to hell. The page reloads unnecessarily because the massive unhiding function blows up in some tracking code before it returns false, and if you get really lucky it then keeps running the function over and over and over again (I can't reproduce that at this moment, but reading the code, I can only imagine that it involves the story ids stored in the cookie, which can trigger instant expansion when the page is reloa
Experimental Procedure: We put the laboratory mice in a microwave oven and cooked on "High" for five minutes, exposing them to radiation of similar frequency to that emitted by common cellular phones.
Results: The mice appear to be done approximately "medium."
Conclusion: Microwave radiation is quickly fatal at doses two orders of magnitude beyond cellphone level (meta-conclusion: effects were found).
This is the problem with statistical analyses such as sociologists like to perform: aggregating papers, attributing some binary conclusion to every paper, and then producing nearly meaningless percentages. This one was compiled by a biologist, but that's the next thing to sociology anyway;p. Even if actual cellphones, etc. produce effects in rats, that still doesn't mean that the same effects would be observed in humans: rats are a lot smaller. You might as well throw humans in microwaves and call it a valid model.
One of the scary references in the article is to a early 2000s study purporting that cellphone EM caused Alzheimer's in mice. But wait...Cellphones reduce mouse Alzheimer's (2009). (meta-conclusion: effects were found). Now, you might say that researcher is working for The Man, but he claims he was expecting the opposite result when he began. Someone else could write a meta-study "Microwave study results rarely replicated: are biologists bad at designing and properly controlling physics experiments?"
I actually had to research nested quotations to type the correction: I wasn't sure if I needed another period after the inner quote. I do think that this quibble is more solid than "Don't start a sentence with a conjunction," and others that were never consistently observed by prominent writers.
Aside from the obvious objection that others have made (the dead fish paper was pointing out that some psych researchers use statistical analyses of dubious rigor, not that fMRI doesn't work!), there is an even more relevant fact. I just read this paper, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with fMRI. And if you had actually read the link that you included, you would realize that the SciAm article claims no such thing! That article indicates that other fMRI studies imply that the accepted criteria for distinguishing conciousness and vegetative states might be overly arbitrary. The SciAm author's point is that even someone who fails the test given in the paper in question might not be considerably less conscious than someone who does pass, and that a single criterion (conditioned response to audio tone/eye pressure) is overly limiting.
Indeed, you could make that objection based on the model's accuracy:
The model incorrectly classified 2 out of 11 individuals in the vegetative state and 4 out of 9 nonâ"vegetative state subjects, leaving the model with an accuracy of 72.7% (Ï2 = 3.61, P = 0.057).
The model was no better than a random choice for classifying the patients who were not in a vegetative state (they observed that learning was a poor differentiator of vegetative and minimally conscious states)...but luckily they are actually suggesting the test not for determine vegetative state diagnosis, but as a measure of improvement potential. The test had much better correlation with subsequent condition improvement in the subjects:
We performed a logistic regression to evaluate whether conditioned stimulus late anticipatory-baseline could differentiate between recovery and no recovery. Learning (conditioned stimulus late anticipatory-baseline, Ï2 = 5.02, P = 0.025) indicated, with an accuracy of 86%, whether a subject had shown signs of recovery or not.
In fact, it is clear from the appendix that there were no false negatives in that measure (i.e. no nonlearners improved); both of the misclassifications were learners who failed to improve. The point of the paper was not even to evaluate a specific test of learning, but rather to establish that learning ability is highly correlated with recovery potential.
Given the trend of sequential misinformed first posts, I think it's time to push for research on the moderation process, to ensure that slashdot moderators don't upmoderate based on the perceived confidence of the poster, independent of actual veracity.
From the manufacturer's (singularly uninformative) website:
In addition, we have implemented our own proprietary Cell ID technology which provides a swift approximate location of your child. This is then refined using GPS to achieve an accuracy of 3 metres. This action can be driven via your mobile phone using the texting facility. The benefit of using dual locating technology is that the child can still be located in instances where normal GPS technology may not be sufficient
I don't see how they could possibly transmit the location without incorporating a phone; that is confirmed by this blurb, since they would need a GSM antenna to use Cell ID. Trend Research claims that the location is actually accessed by text-messaging a query to the phone number of the child's device--so it is at least capable of sending and receiving text messages. The unit's triggers are also programmed with scripting commands sent in text messages. But why buy a num8 instead of a phone? According to the manufacturer:
And unlike similar locator products, num8 has been cleverly concealed in a child's digital watch that is securely fastened to your child and cannot be removed or deactivated without your knowledge. No other child locator in the world can match this.
"As far as the child is concerned it's a digital watch," said Lok8u CEO Steve Salmon in a Guardian report. "For the parent it's a child-locating product."
Consider that in conjunction with:
How long does each charge last?
Approximately 2-3 days
I'm sure that little Timmy will be much less suspicious if mommy takes his (unreasonably cumbersome and feature-barren) watch every night and plugs it into a charger than if she surreptitiously tracks him via a trojaned cellphone. Perhaps mobilewhack knows the true reason?
To help parents in properly monitoring the whereabouts of their kids, a new device called the Num8 (pronounced as "new mate") has been unveiled by Lok8u. This new device takes the place of the standard mobile phones which have been discouraged for use by kids due to health reasons.
Uh oh! I hope little Timmy doesn't doesn't rest his head on his watch hand (admittedly, this device would be txing at full power for a tiny fraction of the time required for a voice call, but I'm sure that wouldn't deter someone who makes buying decisions based on the perceived health risks of microwave RF)...
I like to drink organic milk (at $4/half gallon!) much more than "regular milk," but I don't delude myself into believing that it has something to do with the "organic" farming. The taste differences in raw milk, normal milk, and organic milk can be accounted for by pasteurization alone: whether there is no pasteurization, "super-pasteurization" or "ultra-pasteurization" (organic milk). The organic milk is actually the *most* processed kind of milk. I find that ultra-pasteurized 1% milk tastes as good as regular 3.5%, that regular 1% is gross, and regular skim tastes like polluted water. I wish there was "regular" ultra-pasteurized so that I could enjoy such milk at lower cost, though...
Hold on there--I am pleased to report that you are utterly incorrect! Perhaps if you had read the article you so ironically cited, you would realize that you are talking about the standards for passenger automobiles, a class that excludes all trucks and SUVs! It seems that at least four people with mod points lack CTRL+F skills as well. But in lieu of overrating you I will explain why you are wrong...in great detail.
If the new vehicle is a category 1 truck that has a combined fuel economy value that is at least 2, but less than 5, miles per gallon higher than the traded-in vehicle, the credit is $3,500. If the new category 1 truck has a combined fuel economy value that is at least 5 miles per gallon higher than the traded-in vehicle, the credit is $4,500.
A category 1 truck is a nonpassenger automobile. This category includes sport utility vehicles (SUVs), small and medium pickup trucks and small and medium passenger and cargo vans.
A category 2 truck is a large van or a large pickup truck, based upon the length of the wheelbase (more than 115 inches for pickup trucks and more than 124 inches for vans).
Now, I copied that from the FAQ, but I actually looked up the relevant section in the law as well:
the term `category 2 truck' means a large van or a large pickup, as categorized by the Secretary using the method used by the Environmental Protection Agency and described in the report entitled `Light-Duty Automotive Technology and Fuel Economy Trends: 1975 through 2008';
and then the EPA report (which explains the classification method in Appendix A)
The truck size classification scheme used in this report is based primarily on published wheelbase data. For cars, vehicle classification as to vehicle type, size class, and manufacturer/ marketing group generally follows fuel economy label, Fuel Economy Guide, and fuel economy standards protocols; exceptions are listed in Table A-3. The classification of a vehicle for this report is based on the authors' engineering judgment and is not a replacement for definitions used in implementing automotive standards legislation.
An old 17mpg pickup might very well be a category 2 truck, but even if that were the case, every SUV is category 1 truck regardless of size (even the Yukon XL--that was the one I checked--the EPA report wasn't terribly helpful there. This legislation seems awfully slipshod...).
Thus, by buying a 19mpg SUV to replace an old category 1 or 2 truck, you would in fact become eligible for a $3500 worth of 'free congressional money.' To get the full $4500, you would need a 5 mpg improvement (i.e. a 22mpg SUV).
Now, if you wanted to instead replace an old (big) category 2 truck with a new (big) category 2 truck, then the new truck would need to be 1mpg more efficient for the $3500, or 2mpg more efficient for the $4500.
The SUV classification standards are pretty hilarious as well. Here is the explanatory language in the rule:
The term "passenger automobile" and its definition are taken from the agency's
fuel economy statute. The definition excludes vehicles that NHTSA has determined are
1) not manufactured primarily for transporting persons and 2) vehicles that are capable of
off-highway operation.
So...SUVs are classified as non-passenger vehicles because they are capable of off-highway operation! I'm sure that is a huge use case for all those Escalades. In fact, it goes on to say that currently 2WD SUVs are eligible as well, as long as the model is also available in 4WD, although they are discontinuing the application of that rule in 2011. Someone can try to make the argument that this is at least as stimulating as just giving GM the money directly, and at least lots of people get (part of a) car out of it this way, but arguing that this is some kind of significant environmental program is just laughable.
I think a better analogy would be that this is akin to 50% of professional programmers beginning every new project in COBOL, or 89% of programmers occasionally programming business applications in Brainfuck, because they believe that its design has a simple power and effectiveness.
This is not entirely accurate--I just switched from AT&T to Verizon (and from an OpenMoko Neo Freerunner to a Blackberry Storm). While the Storm still has bugs, it is about 1000% more reliable than the Freerunner, and it is nice having more than about 18 hours of battery...on standby (though the week after I switched, they issued a recall for the buzzing issue--one bug down, a few hundred to go), even considering the dearth of Storm-optimized (and free) software. Anyway, so far I have roamed over much of Ohio, Central New York, and Western Pennsylvania, and I can confidently say that there Verizon has ridiculously better coverage than AT&T (I had AT&T for many years, and a Freerunner for only a few months, so all of my data is not based on its dubious GSM antenna). But wait, why did I spent time blathering about my Storm? Aha! It has a SIM card as well, and is capable of GSM roaming! Of course, if I drive over to Canada it will probably be like $.50 a minute, but it would be the same with AT&T (and I don't even want to contemplate data charges...); I could hypothetically get a Canada or global roaming plan from Verizon to alleviate that.
So, you might want to keep that in mind if you find yourself chained to AT&T. Verizon CSRs are pretty evil (and I have heard they are the worst), but in my experience AT&T CSRs were hardly incompetent at ruining your day either.
Actually, I found a real article that describes this research, and the solution that is proposed is this: Moore will make the cows metabolize their food more efficiently, so that for a given weight of cow, it will have eaten less over its lifetime, and thus have produced less methane. The research actually sounds really boring. It would be much more exciting if he were changing the metabolism of a cow's cellulose-digesting symbiotes to replace methane entirely with some more desirable byproducts. Of course, the really exciting research would be if he were attempting to make cows able to directly digest cellulose, eliminating the methane-producing bacteria entirely.
Of course, Moore is probably funded by some lame greenhouse-gas grant, but it is entirely possible that if he succeeds there will be a market for cows that need to eat 20% less than their fellows on that merit alone.
The parent post is modded funny because of its sarcastic tone, but reading TFA, these were my only thoughts. The parent has a very good point: you cannot genetically engineer a cow to 'produce less methane' because cows produce no methane: the bacteria and protists colonizing their gut produce methane. Whether cows belch, fart, or exhale methane, it has to escape somehow. The only way to "lower methane levels in the digestive system" without modifying the bacteria would be to make the cow absorb and metabolize methane! That sounds a lot more difficult than changing the gut bacteria composition. I think it is likely that quite a bit was lost in the journey from research to newspaper article here.
This study is neither surprising nor controversial. They refer to "geoengineering" multiple times in the article, but it is clear that the study refers only to the specific geoengineering in which the albedo of the earth is changed with atmospheric particulates. They concluded that it would stop global warming, but not stop CO2 accumulation/acidification of the oceans. Well, that hardly makes it a bad idea--it just isn't a complete solution.
It only means that we need to have a separate project to counter the acidification of the oceans--perhaps genetically engineered algae or something.
Even if paper companies were the third largest greenhouse gas emitter, judging by TFA, an extremely large portion of that comes from the wood products they burn as 'black liquor.' They could be the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world, and if the gasses all came from wood, it wouldn't really matter, because cutting down the same forest over and over to make paper has no long-term net effect on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The trees will be replaced; the carbon will be fixed again. Burning wood has a completely different effect from freeing the carbon fixed in the bowels of the earth for millions of years as coal or oil.
Troops were only quartered in foreign countries in which British troops were fighting wars or police actions. They were rarely quartered in Britain itself (save Ireland, anyway, that hotbed of rebellion), because they never had to fight a land war in Britain, much like American troops were not quartered in American houses, except...during the War of 1812 and the Civil War, during which troops were, in fact, quartered in American houses. Particularly during the Civil War, troops were quartered in southern homes, and some northern homes, without any provision by Congress. Oh.
I will agree that the right to bring torts before a jury has largely not been infringed, however. This pdf that I found details some of the (largely unsuccessful) challenges based on it, mostly involving the limit of the power of a judge to vacate or direct a jury verdict, a power which existed at the time of the passage of the Seventh Amendment.
If you want to test the power of the Seventh Amendment today, you could always start a substantial rebellion in your state of residence, and see what happens. I'm sure we will all be interested in the result. Really, though, two out of ten amendments have remained largely uninfringed, and you think that is a great record? The Third Amendment requires pretty extraordinary circumstances to violate, and the government has no interest in violating the seventh amendment. Instead of forcing a bench trial, the Congress or the courts just find that you can't sue the government at all in various cases (Cough! AT&T! Cough! NSA!)--constitutional crisis avoided, apparently.
The GP does appear to be rather unhinged. He may be reading the Bill of Rights, but apparently he isn't reading the news. There have certainly been plenty of supreme court cases dealing with violations of the first and second amendments in the past decade, even: perhaps a certain recent landmark Washington D.C. case should be foremost in your mind. And as for the first, please advert to COPA and its ilk--the Congress keeps on trying--or to state laws establishing mandatory video game ratings/controls, for that matter. Finally, in the spirit of the GP's anal imagery, I will leave you with with this metaphor: thank goodness! I have made it through my sentence in federal PMITA prison, and only 80% of my orifices (including all the important ones, admittedly) have been regularly forcibly violated! But my left ear goes on, unblemished!
I can't believe you were modded (5, Interesting) because your information retrieval skills are pathetic and weak! Wait...yes, I can. Anyway, behold!
A cursory search of relevant sources (i.e. senate.gov) would have revealed: a press release detailing all of this on the website of Senator Snowe and Senator Rockefeller, and another press release on the website of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which contains a quote from the very organization that posted the text of the bill. Maybe the CDT has a sense of humor, but you can be sure that the Senate Committee on [...] does not.
I decided to be different and actually read the bill in question. While the submitter's notions about data monitoring are merely fantasies as yet, the bill is nevertheless somewhat disturbing. Relevant excerpts follow (emphasis added):
(a) IN GENERAL.--Within 1 year after the date of
21 enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Commerce shall
22 develop or coordinate and integrate a national licensing,
23 certification, and periodic recertification program for cy-
24 bersecurity professionals.
1 (b) MANDATORY LICENSING.--Beginning 3 years
2 after the date of enactment of this Act, it shall be unlawful
3 for any individual to engage in business in the United
4 States, or to be employed in the United States, as a pro-
5 vider of cybersecurity services to any Federal agency or
6 an information system or network designated by the Presi-
7 dent, or the President's designee, as a critical infrastruc-
8 ture information system or network, who is not licensed
9 and certified under the program.
"Well," you say, "it's not so bad--what infrastructure is really 'critical,' after all?"
21 (3) FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND UNITED
22 STATES CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE INFORMATION
23 SYSTEMS AND NETWORKS.--The term ''Federal gov-
24 ernment and United States critical infrastructure in-
25 formation systems and networks'' includes--
1 (A) Federal Government information sys-
2 tems and networks; and
3 (B) State, local, and nongovernmental in-
4 formation systems and networks in the United
5 States designated by the President as critical
6 infrastructure information systems and net-
7 works.
Alas, dear reader, it appears that the wifi router in your closet is critical if the President says it is. I hope your certifications are up to date. Really, though, while I don't expect the president to declare your router critical (mine, on the other hand...), it does seem a bit burdensome that he can suddenly require every employee of AT&T, Verizon, Cogent, Level3, Savvis, etc. to go through some arbitrary training program that the secretary of commerce made up over cocktails last night. But we are not yet finished:
18 SEC. 14. PUBLIC-PRIVATE CLEARINGHOUSE.
19 (a) DESIGNATION.--The Department of Commerce
20 shall serve as the clearinghouse of cybersecurity threat
21 and vulnerability information to Federal government and
22 private sector owned critical infrastructure information
23 systems and networks.
24 (b) FUNCTIONS.--The Secretary of Commerce--
1 (1) shall have access to all relevant data con-
2 cerning such networks without regard to any provi-
3 sion of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting
4 such access;
5 (2) shall manage the sharing of Federal govern-
6 ment and other critical infrastructure threat and
7 vulnerability information between the Federal gov-
8 ernment and the persons primarily responsible for
9 the operation and maintenance of the networks con-
10 cerned; and
11 (3) shall report regularly to the Congress on
12 threat information held by the Federal government
13 that is not shared with the persons primarily respon-
14 sible for the operation and maintenance of the net-
15 works concerned.
So! The department of commerce will have unlimited access to all network information regarding all the networks that take the President's fancy, and then they will apparently collect secret information about them which they will reveal to none but the Congress. At least all that topology information will save the NSA some time next time they want to upgrade their wiretaps on the backbone. And, finally:
9 SEC. 17. AUTHENTICATION AND CIVIL LIBERTIES REPORT.
10 Within 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act,
11 the President, or
The submitter of this story and various people in various internet forums [cough.] seem to be under the impression that this story has something to do with a possible violation of rights, online or otherwise. Even the various blog posts linked to in the summary, however, only detail Alaska State Rep. Mike Doogan's puerile tendency engage in online name-calling, and Nixonesque paranoia and obsession with the press. Doogan didn't obtain any information illegally (indeed, likely and luckily, he lacks the power to do so); he just became obsessed with the identity of blogger "Mudflats," and felt the need to "out" said blogger and complain about how unfair everyone was being in the print and internet media.
In conclusion, this story tells us that Rep. Mike Doogan is a paranoid whiner who thinks that the internet is Serious Business. There is a right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure, and a right to freedom of the press, but if anyone thinks that there a right to publish anonymously, even in the face of a breech of said anonymity using public information, that person is the one who lacks an understanding of the first amendment. Indeed, the (obsessive, childish, etc.) State Representative (i.e. The Man) is fully exercising his first amendment right to freedom of speech in this case. It would be a dark day indeed if Rep. Mike Doogan needed a state interest, compelling or otherwise, to whine in emails about bloggers being mean to him on the interwebs.
The article doesn't really say that Windows and Linux aren't "designed" for quad+ core chips; it just says that most software is still single threaded. No kidding.
No, I was groaning all through the summary. The term utterly lacks dignity, in my opinion. It is hard to imagine a "Cyber-Czar" doing anything worthwhile. "Cyber-" invariably summons up images of bad 90's movies (though I never saw Lawnmower Man), and William Gibson's earlier novels, the technology in which seems even more quaint and anachronistic today. Creating an office of Cybersecurity just makes Obama seem foolish and out of touch (even if the system of nomenclature originated elsewhere, he's the president); there is no reason that it couldn't be called "Information Security," "Network Security," or something equally mundane and relatively dignified.
From TFA:
Hathaway chairs the National Cyber Study Group (NCSG), a senior-level inter-agency body and is recognised as being instrumental in developing the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI).
It takes a more serious person than I to read a sentence like that without giggling. Please. I'm sure thousands of bureaucrats have wet dreams about being "instrumental" in developing a "Cybersecurity Initiative." I hope that put that in her epitaph some day.
And now you go quoting the parent with no sense of irony! Harebrained! Harebrained! The scheme is worthy of a rabbit, not a strand of hair. Now you've made me...loose...my temper!
The total yearly amount of biodiesel available from this "abundant" source worldwide is less than the amount of motor gasoline consumed in a single day in the U.S. in 2007. To be fair, TFA implies nothing of the sort, the summary is just rather enthusiastic.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if we granted that all of those protections are fully effective, you are totally ignoring civil forfeiture. Thank you, "war on drugs."
In addition to comic books, Lucas began devouring science fiction magazines such as Amazing and Astounding Tales, magazines which were the regular homes of science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein and E. E. Smith. "As a kid, I read a lot of science fiction," Lucas recalls. "But instead of reading technical hard science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov, I was interested in Harry Harrison and a fantastic, surreal approach to the genre."
"One of my favorite things were [sic] Republic serials and things like Flash Gordon."
Later, it is established that the rest of Lucas' borrowings are mostly from the realm of film, specifically Kurosawa. I would not really call the book a sympathetic portrayal, but the author (Michael Kaminski) goes on to contend that Star Wars is basically as original as any film, and that George Lucas' primary failing was to overly involve himself in the production of the script, an area which was never really his forte (and which he apparently did not enjoy, and found very difficult at the time he was writing the first three films). In fact, Lucas' university projects apparently included mostly documentaries and art films with little or no dialogue.
I don't know if I would say Lucas was a hack from the beginning, but I would agree that wholeheartedly that he had/has absolutely no interest in science fiction except insofar as he finds the future a compelling setting. He exists in...a galaxy far, far away from Asimov's.
You know, the Patriot Act did have a sunset provision, and it was renewed anyway with quite a bit of bipartisan vigor, if not the near-unanimity of the first round. I don't think automatic expiration is quite going to cut it. It seems like it wouldn't hurt...but consider this: if there were a deluge of laws coming up for renewal constantly, it is possible that the legislature would spend even less time reading legislation than it already does. That said, perhaps if the restrictions only applied to certain classes of laws, that disadvantage could be avoided.
Forget the issue of IE6 (and IE7? I can only imagine that the site is some kind of "cutting-edge" javascript/css abomination if it fails utterly in IE7.), how do you imagine this guy's website is going to perform on cellphone and other mobile browsers? If fewer than 5% of the users are using any version of IE, they must be awfully technical indeed; I imagine that many of them also possess smartphones. I know that since I have started browsing in earnest on my phone, I have run into far too many websites with extremely basic content that nevertheless completely implode in multiple mobile browsers. And if the mobile browsers can render your website, I guarantee that you will also engender rage and resentment amongst users if they have to switch user agents just to placate your naive redirects.
/. is a shining example of many of those pitfalls. While ajax support is indeed more efficient in theory, in addition to avoiding spurious reloads, the /. 2.0 design managed to destroy the client browsing experience in favor of (presumably) server-side efficiency. Whenever there is, say, an evolution article (~1000 posts), firefox more often than not gives me a javascript timeout for the page on a Core2 (I browse at -1, nested, all comments; the "50/100 per page" views never really worked either since it would break between threads, which are sometimes hundreds of comments long, resulting in four or five nearly identical numbered pages--but at least they didn't bring processors to their knees). And while /. does render on my phone, it certainly cannot be said to render well, or with anything approaching speed. At least it doesn't have insulting UA checks and I can read the bare comments (after I manage to log in, anyway--the threaded view is an absolute disaster).
While IE6 is declining in popularity, phones will only increase. Firefox Mobile may be more powerful than IE6, but the same cannot be said for any of the other (currently far more common) browsers, and no phone has more than VGA resolution. Many sites that do render mostly properly have nevertheless brought potent curses to my lips when I tried to use their tiny and/or heavily javascripted navigation menus with a touchscreen. And Flash! I won't even go there...
Of course,
Fail gracefully. Hell, that is the whole idea behind CSS. So what if a website looks aesthetically awful in some browsers? At least it renders! When you start going overboard with javascript, however, and the content of the site (which has, maddeningly enough, been substantially present on the client all along) won't even appear until 5000 lines of script execute correctly...claiming that such things are "necessary" is total bullshit unless you have some kind of super heavyweight web-app like Google Documents; many of pages I browse work and look just fine with scripting disabled; many, however, were programmed by a bunch of assholes.
Salon.com comes to mind: until a few weeks ago, it worked just fine. Then, they had some kind of web 2.0 revelation. Actually, the site looks pretty much the same, except that now only two paragraphs of an article usually displays initially until you click the js link which unhides the rest of the article...and then reloads the page one second later just to make you angry...sometimes in an infinite loop. Ironically, the site works just fine with scripting turned totally off; it is only when scripting is allowed for the "salon.com" domain but not the tens of advertising/tracking partner domains that everything goes to hell. The page reloads unnecessarily because the massive unhiding function blows up in some tracking code before it returns false, and if you get really lucky it then keeps running the function over and over and over again (I can't reproduce that at this moment, but reading the code, I can only imagine that it involves the story ids stored in the cookie, which can trigger instant expansion when the page is reloa
Experimental Procedure: We put the laboratory mice in a microwave oven and cooked on "High" for five minutes, exposing them to radiation of similar frequency to that emitted by common cellular phones.
;p. Even if actual cellphones, etc. produce effects in rats, that still doesn't mean that the same effects would be observed in humans: rats are a lot smaller. You might as well throw humans in microwaves and call it a valid model.
Results: The mice appear to be done approximately "medium."
Conclusion: Microwave radiation is quickly fatal at doses two orders of magnitude beyond cellphone level (meta-conclusion: effects were found).
This is the problem with statistical analyses such as sociologists like to perform: aggregating papers, attributing some binary conclusion to every paper, and then producing nearly meaningless percentages. This one was compiled by a biologist, but that's the next thing to sociology anyway
One of the scary references in the article is to a early 2000s study purporting that cellphone EM caused Alzheimer's in mice. But wait...Cellphones reduce mouse Alzheimer's (2009). (meta-conclusion: effects were found). Now, you might say that researcher is working for The Man, but he claims he was expecting the opposite result when he began. Someone else could write a meta-study "Microwave study results rarely replicated: are biologists bad at designing and properly controlling physics experiments?"
should have been "contains".
You meant '"contains."'
I actually had to research nested quotations to type the correction: I wasn't sure if I needed another period after the inner quote. I do think that this quibble is more solid than "Don't start a sentence with a conjunction," and others that were never consistently observed by prominent writers.
Indeed, you could make that objection based on the model's accuracy:
The model was no better than a random choice for classifying the patients who were not in a vegetative state (they observed that learning was a poor differentiator of vegetative and minimally conscious states)...but luckily they are actually suggesting the test not for determine vegetative state diagnosis, but as a measure of improvement potential. The test had much better correlation with subsequent condition improvement in the subjects:
In fact, it is clear from the appendix that there were no false negatives in that measure (i.e. no nonlearners improved); both of the misclassifications were learners who failed to improve. The point of the paper was not even to evaluate a specific test of learning, but rather to establish that learning ability is highly correlated with recovery potential.
Given the trend of sequential misinformed first posts, I think it's time to push for research on the moderation process, to ensure that slashdot moderators don't upmoderate based on the perceived confidence of the poster, independent of actual veracity.
I don't see how they could possibly transmit the location without incorporating a phone; that is confirmed by this blurb, since they would need a GSM antenna to use Cell ID. Trend Research claims that the location is actually accessed by text-messaging a query to the phone number of the child's device--so it is at least capable of sending and receiving text messages. The unit's triggers are also programmed with scripting commands sent in text messages. But why buy a num8 instead of a phone? According to the manufacturer:
Consider that in conjunction with:
I'm sure that little Timmy will be much less suspicious if mommy takes his (unreasonably cumbersome and feature-barren) watch every night and plugs it into a charger than if she surreptitiously tracks him via a trojaned cellphone. Perhaps mobilewhack knows the true reason?
Uh oh! I hope little Timmy doesn't doesn't rest his head on his watch hand (admittedly, this device would be txing at full power for a tiny fraction of the time required for a voice call, but I'm sure that wouldn't deter someone who makes buying decisions based on the perceived health risks of microwave RF)...
I like to drink organic milk (at $4/half gallon!) much more than "regular milk," but I don't delude myself into believing that it has something to do with the "organic" farming. The taste differences in raw milk, normal milk, and organic milk can be accounted for by pasteurization alone: whether there is no pasteurization, "super-pasteurization" or "ultra-pasteurization" (organic milk). The organic milk is actually the *most* processed kind of milk. I find that ultra-pasteurized 1% milk tastes as good as regular 3.5%, that regular 1% is gross, and regular skim tastes like polluted water. I wish there was "regular" ultra-pasteurized so that I could enjoy such milk at lower cost, though...
If the new vehicle is a category 1 truck that has a combined fuel economy value that is at least 2, but less than 5, miles per gallon higher than the traded-in vehicle, the credit is $3,500. If the new category 1 truck has a combined fuel economy value that is at least 5 miles per gallon higher than the traded-in vehicle, the credit is $4,500.
A category 1 truck is a nonpassenger automobile. This category includes sport utility vehicles (SUVs), small and medium pickup trucks and small and medium passenger and cargo vans.
A category 2 truck is a large van or a large pickup truck, based upon the length of the wheelbase (more than 115 inches for pickup trucks and more than 124 inches for vans).
Now, I copied that from the FAQ, but I actually looked up the relevant section in the law as well:
the term `category 2 truck' means a large van or a large pickup, as categorized by the Secretary using the method used by the Environmental Protection Agency and described in the report entitled `Light-Duty Automotive Technology and Fuel Economy Trends: 1975 through 2008';
and then the EPA report (which explains the classification method in Appendix A)
The truck size classification scheme used in this report is based primarily on published wheelbase data. For cars, vehicle classification as to vehicle type, size class, and manufacturer/ marketing group generally follows fuel economy label, Fuel Economy Guide, and fuel economy standards protocols; exceptions are listed in Table A-3. The classification of a vehicle for this report is based on the authors' engineering judgment and is not a replacement for definitions used in implementing automotive standards legislation.
An old 17mpg pickup might very well be a category 2 truck, but even if that were the case, every SUV is category 1 truck regardless of size (even the Yukon XL--that was the one I checked--the EPA report wasn't terribly helpful there. This legislation seems awfully slipshod...).
Thus, by buying a 19mpg SUV to replace an old category 1 or 2 truck, you would in fact become eligible for a $3500 worth of 'free congressional money.' To get the full $4500, you would need a 5 mpg improvement (i.e. a 22mpg SUV).
Now, if you wanted to instead replace an old (big) category 2 truck with a new (big) category 2 truck, then the new truck would need to be 1mpg more efficient for the $3500, or 2mpg more efficient for the $4500.
The SUV classification standards are pretty hilarious as well. Here is the explanatory language in the rule:
The term "passenger automobile" and its definition are taken from the agency's fuel economy statute. The definition excludes vehicles that NHTSA has determined are 1) not manufactured primarily for transporting persons and 2) vehicles that are capable of off-highway operation.
So...SUVs are classified as non-passenger vehicles because they are capable of off-highway operation! I'm sure that is a huge use case for all those Escalades. In fact, it goes on to say that currently 2WD SUVs are eligible as well, as long as the model is also available in 4WD, although they are discontinuing the application of that rule in 2011. Someone can try to make the argument that this is at least as stimulating as just giving GM the money directly, and at least lots of people get (part of a) car out of it this way, but arguing that this is some kind of significant environmental program is just laughable.
I think a better analogy would be that this is akin to 50% of professional programmers beginning every new project in COBOL, or 89% of programmers occasionally programming business applications in Brainfuck, because they believe that its design has a simple power and effectiveness.
This is not entirely accurate--I just switched from AT&T to Verizon (and from an OpenMoko Neo Freerunner to a Blackberry Storm). While the Storm still has bugs, it is about 1000% more reliable than the Freerunner, and it is nice having more than about 18 hours of battery...on standby (though the week after I switched, they issued a recall for the buzzing issue--one bug down, a few hundred to go), even considering the dearth of Storm-optimized (and free) software. Anyway, so far I have roamed over much of Ohio, Central New York, and Western Pennsylvania, and I can confidently say that there Verizon has ridiculously better coverage than AT&T (I had AT&T for many years, and a Freerunner for only a few months, so all of my data is not based on its dubious GSM antenna). But wait, why did I spent time blathering about my Storm? Aha! It has a SIM card as well, and is capable of GSM roaming! Of course, if I drive over to Canada it will probably be like $.50 a minute, but it would be the same with AT&T (and I don't even want to contemplate data charges...); I could hypothetically get a Canada or global roaming plan from Verizon to alleviate that.
So, you might want to keep that in mind if you find yourself chained to AT&T. Verizon CSRs are pretty evil (and I have heard they are the worst), but in my experience AT&T CSRs were hardly incompetent at ruining your day either.
Actually, I found a real article that describes this research, and the solution that is proposed is this: Moore will make the cows metabolize their food more efficiently, so that for a given weight of cow, it will have eaten less over its lifetime, and thus have produced less methane. The research actually sounds really boring. It would be much more exciting if he were changing the metabolism of a cow's cellulose-digesting symbiotes to replace methane entirely with some more desirable byproducts. Of course, the really exciting research would be if he were attempting to make cows able to directly digest cellulose, eliminating the methane-producing bacteria entirely.
Of course, Moore is probably funded by some lame greenhouse-gas grant, but it is entirely possible that if he succeeds there will be a market for cows that need to eat 20% less than their fellows on that merit alone.
The parent post is modded funny because of its sarcastic tone, but reading TFA, these were my only thoughts. The parent has a very good point: you cannot genetically engineer a cow to 'produce less methane' because cows produce no methane: the bacteria and protists colonizing their gut produce methane. Whether cows belch, fart, or exhale methane, it has to escape somehow. The only way to "lower methane levels in the digestive system" without modifying the bacteria would be to make the cow absorb and metabolize methane! That sounds a lot more difficult than changing the gut bacteria composition. I think it is likely that quite a bit was lost in the journey from research to newspaper article here.
This study is neither surprising nor controversial. They refer to "geoengineering" multiple times in the article, but it is clear that the study refers only to the specific geoengineering in which the albedo of the earth is changed with atmospheric particulates. They concluded that it would stop global warming, but not stop CO2 accumulation/acidification of the oceans. Well, that hardly makes it a bad idea--it just isn't a complete solution.
It only means that we need to have a separate project to counter the acidification of the oceans--perhaps genetically engineered algae or something.
Even if paper companies were the third largest greenhouse gas emitter, judging by TFA, an extremely large portion of that comes from the wood products they burn as 'black liquor.' They could be the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world, and if the gasses all came from wood, it wouldn't really matter, because cutting down the same forest over and over to make paper has no long-term net effect on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The trees will be replaced; the carbon will be fixed again. Burning wood has a completely different effect from freeing the carbon fixed in the bowels of the earth for millions of years as coal or oil.
Troops were only quartered in foreign countries in which British troops were fighting wars or police actions. They were rarely quartered in Britain itself (save Ireland, anyway, that hotbed of rebellion), because they never had to fight a land war in Britain, much like American troops were not quartered in American houses, except...during the War of 1812 and the Civil War, during which troops were, in fact, quartered in American houses. Particularly during the Civil War, troops were quartered in southern homes, and some northern homes, without any provision by Congress. Oh.
I will agree that the right to bring torts before a jury has largely not been infringed, however. This pdf that I found details some of the (largely unsuccessful) challenges based on it, mostly involving the limit of the power of a judge to vacate or direct a jury verdict, a power which existed at the time of the passage of the Seventh Amendment.
If you want to test the power of the Seventh Amendment today, you could always start a substantial rebellion in your state of residence, and see what happens. I'm sure we will all be interested in the result. Really, though, two out of ten amendments have remained largely uninfringed, and you think that is a great record? The Third Amendment requires pretty extraordinary circumstances to violate, and the government has no interest in violating the seventh amendment. Instead of forcing a bench trial, the Congress or the courts just find that you can't sue the government at all in various cases (Cough! AT&T! Cough! NSA!)--constitutional crisis avoided, apparently.
The GP does appear to be rather unhinged. He may be reading the Bill of Rights, but apparently he isn't reading the news. There have certainly been plenty of supreme court cases dealing with violations of the first and second amendments in the past decade, even: perhaps a certain recent landmark Washington D.C. case should be foremost in your mind. And as for the first, please advert to COPA and its ilk--the Congress keeps on trying--or to state laws establishing mandatory video game ratings/controls, for that matter. Finally, in the spirit of the GP's anal imagery, I will leave you with with this metaphor: thank goodness! I have made it through my sentence in federal PMITA prison, and only 80% of my orifices (including all the important ones, admittedly) have been regularly forcibly violated! But my left ear goes on, unblemished!
I can't believe you were modded (5, Interesting) because your information retrieval skills are pathetic and weak! Wait...yes, I can. Anyway, behold!
A cursory search of relevant sources (i.e. senate.gov) would have revealed: a press release detailing all of this on the website of Senator Snowe and Senator Rockefeller, and another press release on the website of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which contains a quote from the very organization that posted the text of the bill. Maybe the CDT has a sense of humor, but you can be sure that the Senate Committee on [...] does not.
"Well," you say, "it's not so bad--what infrastructure is really 'critical,' after all?"
Alas, dear reader, it appears that the wifi router in your closet is critical if the President says it is. I hope your certifications are up to date. Really, though, while I don't expect the president to declare your router critical (mine, on the other hand...), it does seem a bit burdensome that he can suddenly require every employee of AT&T, Verizon, Cogent, Level3, Savvis, etc. to go through some arbitrary training program that the secretary of commerce made up over cocktails last night. But we are not yet finished:
So! The department of commerce will have unlimited access to all network information regarding all the networks that take the President's fancy, and then they will apparently collect secret information about them which they will reveal to none but the Congress. At least all that topology information will save the NSA some time next time they want to upgrade their wiretaps on the backbone. And, finally:
The submitter of this story and various people in various internet forums [cough.] seem to be under the impression that this story has something to do with a possible violation of rights, online or otherwise. Even the various blog posts linked to in the summary, however, only detail Alaska State Rep. Mike Doogan's puerile tendency engage in online name-calling, and Nixonesque paranoia and obsession with the press. Doogan didn't obtain any information illegally (indeed, likely and luckily, he lacks the power to do so); he just became obsessed with the identity of blogger "Mudflats," and felt the need to "out" said blogger and complain about how unfair everyone was being in the print and internet media.
In conclusion, this story tells us that Rep. Mike Doogan is a paranoid whiner who thinks that the internet is Serious Business. There is a right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure, and a right to freedom of the press, but if anyone thinks that there a right to publish anonymously, even in the face of a breech of said anonymity using public information, that person is the one who lacks an understanding of the first amendment. Indeed, the (obsessive, childish, etc.) State Representative (i.e. The Man) is fully exercising his first amendment right to freedom of speech in this case. It would be a dark day indeed if Rep. Mike Doogan needed a state interest, compelling or otherwise, to whine in emails about bloggers being mean to him on the interwebs.
The article doesn't really say that Windows and Linux aren't "designed" for quad+ core chips; it just says that most software is still single threaded. No kidding.
No, I was groaning all through the summary. The term utterly lacks dignity, in my opinion. It is hard to imagine a "Cyber-Czar" doing anything worthwhile. "Cyber-" invariably summons up images of bad 90's movies (though I never saw Lawnmower Man), and William Gibson's earlier novels, the technology in which seems even more quaint and anachronistic today. Creating an office of Cybersecurity just makes Obama seem foolish and out of touch (even if the system of nomenclature originated elsewhere, he's the president); there is no reason that it couldn't be called "Information Security," "Network Security," or something equally mundane and relatively dignified.
From TFA:
It takes a more serious person than I to read a sentence like that without giggling. Please. I'm sure thousands of bureaucrats have wet dreams about being "instrumental" in developing a "Cybersecurity Initiative." I hope that put that in her epitaph some day.
And now you go quoting the parent with no sense of irony! Harebrained! Harebrained! The scheme is worthy of a rabbit, not a strand of hair. Now you've made me...loose...my temper!
The total yearly amount of biodiesel available from this "abundant" source worldwide is less than the amount of motor gasoline consumed in a single day in the U.S. in 2007. To be fair, TFA implies nothing of the sort, the summary is just rather enthusiastic.
I could claim that I was born before the 13th General Conference on Weights and Measures and exhort you to get off my lawn...but I'd be lying.