If a user has specifically installed software in order not to see popups, why do advertisers think they will be inclined to click them if they do somehow get through?
Because there really are people who will. No, it doesn't make logical sense, but it's true. Human psychology is an oddd thing.
As long as the overall cost of getting the message to those people who will buy is (enough) less than the profit made by getting to them, it doesn't matter how many messages go through to people who won't buy.
You could have developed a better reusable space vehicle in 1981, could you?
Why, no. On the other hand, I wouldn't have pretended it was up to routine use as a launch vehicle, instead of being an X project precursor to a real shuttle.
If the program had been operated from that attitude, it's likely the Challenger disaster would have never happened, since O-ring degredation would have been seen as an important discovery related to the mission ("Hey, look at this bit of data the flights have turned up!") instead of a manageable side-issue ("Oh, only a third of the width eroded away, so there's no need to mess up our payload launch schedule by grounding the shuttles.")
Similarly, we wouldn't have built both the space station and Hubble around assumptions of shuttle servicing missions, which means we'd be in less trouble now. And we'd have been developing a sucessor since 1981, with a operational target date of the late 80s or early 90s, which means we'd probably already have a beter one.
Yeah, I went with a rather conservative 24-month-per-double for the next 8 years, rather than the every-12-months that puts a terabyte drive in the second half of 2008 and a 16-TB in 2012.
Either way, I think it illustrates that these 60-GB drives are still just the beginning.
Under the theory of General Relativity, you're absolutely right.
Under a few other (relatively obscure and incomplete) models of gravity that are possibly true (that is, they accord with relativity in all so-far observed effects), antimatter can have variant gravitational effects, although the mass-energy content is the same as ordinary matter. This could range anywhere from a few percent difference to antigravity.
Since there has been no successful experimental measure of the effect of gravity on antimatter (isolating electromagnetic effects has been a real problem), the question is still open (slightly) while we try to solve the problems of bringing GR into accord with both QM and the motions of galaxies.
"3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime . . . by induction, all odd numbers >1 are prime."
Of course, we should consult a newspaper statistician.
"Hmm, let's take a random sampling of ten numbers, 1-100. In order from least to greatest: 3 16 23 52 64 71 73 82 90 96. We can conclude from this that 40% of all numbers 1-100 are odd, that all odd numbers 1-100 are prime, that no even numbers 1-100 are prime, and that the average number is 57."
Given the Geneva Conventions do not mention political prisoners, what possible mess could there be?
Now, the Geneva Convention (III) Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War deals with prisoners of war, and there have been claims that prisoners taken in Iraq are being denied their rights under it. What does the Convention say?
The fourth article of the Geneva Convention (III) Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War has explicit definitions of who qualifies for the rights granted by the Convention. In the Iraq/Afghanistan-relevant text, 4A(2), it includes a four-part test for members of resistance movements. Members of such movements must:
(a) be commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; (b) have a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; (c) carry arms openly; and (d) conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
If resisters fail any of those tests, they are not prisoners of war upon capture, and the Geneva Convention (III) Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War does not apply to them. They cannot be "denied" their rights under the Convention because they do not have any rights under the Convention. Want to guess how many of the people launching attacks on U.S. forces are carrying their arms openly and wearing insignia that can be identified at at distance?
What does being elected have anything to do with justification of otherwise-unjustified acts?
If, as the poster contended, "nothing" justified the intervention, then that the government merely had the power to so intervene doesn't change it, any more than the power of the California legislature to outlaw . ..
. . . the use of Linux . .. . . . the sale of sex toys . .. . . . liquor . .. . . . asprin . .. . . . cat ownership . .. . . . pencils . ..
. . . would, on its own, justify any of those things.
Remember how the republicans got Iraq to hold off releasing hostages until Reagan was elected?
No.
First, because it was Iran that was holding the embassy hostage, not Iraq.
Second, because the hostages weren't released until after Reagan's inauguration, several months after the election.
Third, because there's absolutely no evidence that any Republican made any deal of any kind with Khomeni to delay a hostage release. There's just one person's uncorroborated claims, which is the same "evidence" there's behind the delusional claims that Hillary Clinton arranged Vince Foster's murder.
So, you're sending your mail encrypted and you have a magical way of stopping the person who decrypts it from showing it to other people?
Well, in that case, you don't have to worry about Gmail either, since it can't read your encrypted message. If you're not doing that, then you don't have privacy now, so why are you worrying about Gmail?
Really, just because Google is shattering your illusions is no reason to punish it with legislation.
We think it postdates the Iran-Iraq war (since Iraq used less efficient sarin delivery devices up until the close of that war), so it's, at a best guess, no more than fifteen years old.
However, since the manufacture or posession of binary sarin shells was never disclosed by Iraq in any of its WMD statements, and since none of the weapons inspectors ever found such shells or equipment for their manufacture, we have no idea when they were made.
Sure, it could have been made in 1989. Or it could have been made in 1994 under the noses of the inspectors. Or in 1999 after the inspectors were kicked out. We don't know, because Iraq never disclosed that it had these shells and the inspectors never found these types of shells.
In fact, the only thing we know for certain is that this wasn't an old dud buried in the sand from the Iran-Iraq War, because Iraq never used weapons of this design in that war. Which means there's probably a stockpile of these shells out there somewhere, since it isn't a one-off type of item.
In early America, there were no restrictions on buying, selling, owning, or making military-grade firearms. And people would have laughed had you claimed the Federal Government, as opposed to the individual states, had any power to restrict any of those things. After all, it wasn't one of the powers delegated to Congress in the first place, and it was specifically prohibited by the Bill of Rights.
In modern America, hey, just try to buy an automatic rifle with grenade launcher without provoking a Federal case. Now "interstate commerce" has been redefined to merely mean "any commerce", and "shall not be infringed" means "unless a judge appointed by the same bodies that passed the law thinks it's a reasonable infringement."
It sounds like they are trying to reduce dependencies on UNIX in the Wine code. . . . What's the big deal if Wine depends on things in every standard Linux distro?
ReactOS isn't Linux, and so Wine won't run on it if it depends on things in every standard Linux distro. And it isn't a UNIX clone, so UNIX dependencies are a problem.
ReactOS is an attempt at a Windows clone. Rather than rewrite the whole Win32 API from scratch, they decided to use Wine as much as possible. So they're porting Wine to MinGW, and then will clone the bits of Windows necessary to run MinGW. Instant Win32 API layer, so they can concentrate on kernel internals.
"the BBC will enable individuals in the UK to download released content, share it, edit it and create new content. Commercial reuse of the content will not be allowed."
So all they're promising is some content, which will have to be used noncommercially. If I were British, I'd be disappointed.
Since I'm not, I'll just note that it's strongly suggested distribution will be limited to the UK.
They offer only one thing that station wagons don't, but it's an important thing: availability. It's an adaption on the part of automakers to the dual-classification CAFE scheme.
Station wagons are classed as cars, and thus fall under car CAFE requirements. As of the mid-Eighties, they were going extinct, because auto companies couldn't afford to sell them; the fines for violating CAFE standards exceeded the profit one could make by selling station wagons. Oh, you could still get them, but they were more expensive relative to sedans than the old wagons, and smaller too.
The result was the opening for the minivan, pioneered by Chrysler. Since it was classed as a truck for CAFE, they could be sold profitably. And they sold tremendously.
Since it was classed as a light truck, the sales of the SUVs convinced the people in marketing at the Big Three that there was a fortune to be made in selling trucks, including the SUVs built on truck bodies like the Suburban. So amenities in the trucks were improved.
The improved big-truck-based SUVs then showed themselves as better wagon substitute in some roles. Since families were smaller than in the heyday of wagons, the lesser seating wasn't a problem. But SUVs duplicated the cargo capacity of the old wagons-with-jump-seat-turned-down. (Minivans were much less convienent for that, usually requiring removal of the third seat row).
And now that trucks were comfortable and really taking off, smaller SUVs came in, filling the old role of the big sedans but with better margins because of the CAFE requirement difference.
So, basically, the modern SUV is the old big sedan and the old big sedan-based wagon, reworked to exploit the car/truck distinction in CAFE.
The U.S. definition is 50 miles high (80 km). The FAI uses 100 km (62 miles).
Mercury 3 (Freedom 7) reached 186.2 km (115.7 miles) at its greatest distance from Earth, while Vostok I perigeed at 169 km (105 miles) and apogeed at 315 km (196 miles) in its orbit.
The exosphere goes out to 10,000 km (6213 miles); the only humans to ever go beyond it were in Apollo mission 8 and 10-17.
However, it's hard to use it to power vehicles. (Same applies to wind or solar or even coal.) Your choices are batteries (which have major performance drawbacks), or fuel cells running hydrogen extracted by nuclear-generated electricity (which will require all-new vehicles and a new distribution system).
Algae trades those difficulties for a different one -- the physical complexity and capital investemnts to grow enough and extract the oil.
I'm not sure algae will work; it's a lot of infrastructure to set up, and may not be economically feasible. But it's the only fuel "crop" that meets the basic test of petroleum replacemnt -- the physical ability to be grown in sufficient quantities. Not hemp, soybean, and/or canola oil; nor corn and/or sugar cane ethanol; not any combination of conventional crops. Algae is the only plant that could even possibly replace rather than supplement petroleum.
Brazil has sugar cane, which is a far more efficient source of ethanol than anything you can grow in temperate areas. And it has far fewer motor vehicle miles per person than the developed world. That Brazil can do it does not mean the world as a whole can. The numbers just don't work.
Now, if you massively reduce motor fuel consumption worldwide, you have a chance. But as China and India develop, the odds of that happening are close to zero, no matter how far you tighten fuel efficiency standards and add public transportation. It's just not in the cards.
Hemp requires too much arable land per gallon to be a successful biofuel. You could replace all the cropland in the world with it, and you wouldn't cover worldwide motor fuel consupmtion. Same with all the other crops-to-fuel systems, whether ethanol or biodiesel.
Algae is a reasonable possibility, since it can be grown with salt water in shallow pools on otherwise economically useless land. I'm not certain it'd work, but it's the only biofuel that even has a chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Sandstorms, 60 K (110 F) daily temperature swings, and no way to do maintenance, cleaning, or repair.
If a user has specifically installed software in order not to see popups, why do advertisers think they will be inclined to click them if they do somehow get through?
Because there really are people who will. No, it doesn't make logical sense, but it's true. Human psychology is an oddd thing.
As long as the overall cost of getting the message to those people who will buy is (enough) less than the profit made by getting to them, it doesn't matter how many messages go through to people who won't buy.
You could have developed a better reusable space vehicle in 1981, could you?
Why, no. On the other hand, I wouldn't have pretended it was up to routine use as a launch vehicle, instead of being an X project precursor to a real shuttle.
If the program had been operated from that attitude, it's likely the Challenger disaster would have never happened, since O-ring degredation would have been seen as an important discovery related to the mission ("Hey, look at this bit of data the flights have turned up!") instead of a manageable side-issue ("Oh, only a third of the width eroded away, so there's no need to mess up our payload launch schedule by grounding the shuttles.")
Similarly, we wouldn't have built both the space station and Hubble around assumptions of shuttle servicing missions, which means we'd be in less trouble now. And we'd have been developing a sucessor since 1981, with a operational target date of the late 80s or early 90s, which means we'd probably already have a beter one.
Yeah, I went with a rather conservative 24-month-per-double for the next 8 years, rather than the every-12-months that puts a terabyte drive in the second half of 2008 and a 16-TB in 2012.
Either way, I think it illustrates that these 60-GB drives are still just the beginning.
Tell that to the ameobas.
What are you going to do with your terabyte iPod?
Under the theory of General Relativity, you're absolutely right.
Under a few other (relatively obscure and incomplete) models of gravity that are possibly true (that is, they accord with relativity in all so-far observed effects), antimatter can have variant gravitational effects, although the mass-energy content is the same as ordinary matter. This could range anywhere from a few percent difference to antigravity.
Since there has been no successful experimental measure of the effect of gravity on antimatter (isolating electromagnetic effects has been a real problem), the question is still open (slightly) while we try to solve the problems of bringing GR into accord with both QM and the motions of galaxies.
Mathematics is a multi-millenium legacy of useless theory that later turns out to have a practical purpose
So, the answer is "just curiosity -- for now, at least."
"3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime . . . by induction, all odd numbers >1 are prime."
Of course, we should consult a newspaper statistician.
"Hmm, let's take a random sampling of ten numbers, 1-100. In order from least to greatest: 3 16 23 52 64 71 73 82 90 96. We can conclude from this that 40% of all numbers 1-100 are odd, that all odd numbers 1-100 are prime, that no even numbers 1-100 are prime, and that the average number is 57."
Given the Geneva Conventions do not mention political prisoners, what possible mess could there be?
Now, the Geneva Convention (III) Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War deals with prisoners of war, and there have been claims that prisoners taken in Iraq are being denied their rights under it. What does the Convention say?
The fourth article of the Geneva Convention (III) Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War has explicit definitions of who qualifies for the rights granted by the Convention. In the Iraq/Afghanistan-relevant text, 4A(2), it includes a four-part test for members of resistance movements. Members of such movements must:
(a) be commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
(b) have a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
(c) carry arms openly; and
(d) conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
If resisters fail any of those tests, they are not prisoners of war upon capture, and the Geneva Convention (III) Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War does not apply to them. They cannot be "denied" their rights under the Convention because they do not have any rights under the Convention. Want to guess how many of the people launching attacks on U.S. forces are carrying their arms openly and wearing insignia that can be identified at at distance?
What does being elected have anything to do with justification of otherwise-unjustified acts?
.
. . . . . .
If, as the poster contended, "nothing" justified the intervention, then that the government merely had the power to so intervene doesn't change it, any more than the power of the California legislature to outlaw . .
. . . the use of Linux . .
. . . the sale of sex toys . .
. . . liquor . .
. . . asprin . .
. . . cat ownership . .
. . . pencils . .
. . . would, on its own, justify any of those things.
Remember how the republicans got Iraq to hold off releasing hostages until Reagan was elected?
No.
First, because it was Iran that was holding the embassy hostage, not Iraq.
Second, because the hostages weren't released until after Reagan's inauguration, several months after the election.
Third, because there's absolutely no evidence that any Republican made any deal of any kind with Khomeni to delay a hostage release. There's just one person's uncorroborated claims, which is the same "evidence" there's behind the delusional claims that Hillary Clinton arranged Vince Foster's murder.
So, you're sending your mail encrypted and you have a magical way of stopping the person who decrypts it from showing it to other people?
Well, in that case, you don't have to worry about Gmail either, since it can't read your encrypted message. If you're not doing that, then you don't have privacy now, so why are you worrying about Gmail?
Really, just because Google is shattering your illusions is no reason to punish it with legislation.
No, we don't know how old the shell is.
We think it postdates the Iran-Iraq war (since Iraq used less efficient sarin delivery devices up until the close of that war), so it's, at a best guess, no more than fifteen years old.
However, since the manufacture or posession of binary sarin shells was never disclosed by Iraq in any of its WMD statements, and since none of the weapons inspectors ever found such shells or equipment for their manufacture, we have no idea when they were made.
Sure, it could have been made in 1989. Or it could have been made in 1994 under the noses of the inspectors. Or in 1999 after the inspectors were kicked out. We don't know, because Iraq never disclosed that it had these shells and the inspectors never found these types of shells.
In fact, the only thing we know for certain is that this wasn't an old dud buried in the sand from the Iran-Iraq War, because Iraq never used weapons of this design in that war. Which means there's probably a stockpile of these shells out there somewhere, since it isn't a one-off type of item.
In early America, there were no restrictions on buying, selling, owning, or making military-grade firearms. And people would have laughed had you claimed the Federal Government, as opposed to the individual states, had any power to restrict any of those things. After all, it wasn't one of the powers delegated to Congress in the first place, and it was specifically prohibited by the Bill of Rights.
In modern America, hey, just try to buy an automatic rifle with grenade launcher without provoking a Federal case. Now "interstate commerce" has been redefined to merely mean "any commerce", and "shall not be infringed" means "unless a judge appointed by the same bodies that passed the law thinks it's a reasonable infringement."
It sounds like they are trying to reduce dependencies on UNIX in the Wine code. . . . What's the big deal if Wine depends on things in every standard Linux distro?
ReactOS isn't Linux, and so Wine won't run on it if it depends on things in every standard Linux distro. And it isn't a UNIX clone, so UNIX dependencies are a problem.
ReactOS is an attempt at a Windows clone. Rather than rewrite the whole Win32 API from scratch, they decided to use Wine as much as possible. So they're porting Wine to MinGW, and then will clone the bits of Windows necessary to run MinGW. Instant Win32 API layer, so they can concentrate on kernel internals.
"some of the BBC's audio and video programming"
"the BBC will enable individuals in the UK to download released content, share it, edit it and create new content. Commercial reuse of the content will not be allowed."
So all they're promising is some content, which will have to be used noncommercially. If I were British, I'd be disappointed.
Since I'm not, I'll just note that it's strongly suggested distribution will be limited to the UK.
They offer only one thing that station wagons don't, but it's an important thing: availability. It's an adaption on the part of automakers to the dual-classification CAFE scheme.
Station wagons are classed as cars, and thus fall under car CAFE requirements. As of the mid-Eighties, they were going extinct, because auto companies couldn't afford to sell them; the fines for violating CAFE standards exceeded the profit one could make by selling station wagons. Oh, you could still get them, but they were more expensive relative to sedans than the old wagons, and smaller too.
The result was the opening for the minivan, pioneered by Chrysler. Since it was classed as a truck for CAFE, they could be sold profitably. And they sold tremendously.
Since it was classed as a light truck, the sales of the SUVs convinced the people in marketing at the Big Three that there was a fortune to be made in selling trucks, including the SUVs built on truck bodies like the Suburban. So amenities in the trucks were improved.
The improved big-truck-based SUVs then showed themselves as better wagon substitute in some roles. Since families were smaller than in the heyday of wagons, the lesser seating wasn't a problem. But SUVs duplicated the cargo capacity of the old wagons-with-jump-seat-turned-down. (Minivans were much less convienent for that, usually requiring removal of the third seat row).
And now that trucks were comfortable and really taking off, smaller SUVs came in, filling the old role of the big sedans but with better margins because of the CAFE requirement difference.
So, basically, the modern SUV is the old big sedan and the old big sedan-based wagon, reworked to exploit the car/truck distinction in CAFE.
Well, what do you mean by "space"?
The U.S. definition is 50 miles high (80 km). The FAI uses 100 km (62 miles).
Mercury 3 (Freedom 7) reached 186.2 km (115.7 miles) at its greatest distance from Earth, while Vostok I perigeed at 169 km (105 miles) and apogeed at 315 km (196 miles) in its orbit.
The exosphere goes out to 10,000 km (6213 miles); the only humans to ever go beyond it were in Apollo mission 8 and 10-17.
Oh, I agree. I like nuclear power.
However, it's hard to use it to power vehicles. (Same applies to wind or solar or even coal.) Your choices are batteries (which have major performance drawbacks), or fuel cells running hydrogen extracted by nuclear-generated electricity (which will require all-new vehicles and a new distribution system).
Algae trades those difficulties for a different one -- the physical complexity and capital investemnts to grow enough and extract the oil.
I'm not sure algae will work; it's a lot of infrastructure to set up, and may not be economically feasible. But it's the only fuel "crop" that meets the basic test of petroleum replacemnt -- the physical ability to be grown in sufficient quantities. Not hemp, soybean, and/or canola oil; nor corn and/or sugar cane ethanol; not any combination of conventional crops. Algae is the only plant that could even possibly replace rather than supplement petroleum.
Brazil has sugar cane, which is a far more efficient source of ethanol than anything you can grow in temperate areas. And it has far fewer motor vehicle miles per person than the developed world. That Brazil can do it does not mean the world as a whole can. The numbers just don't work.
Now, if you massively reduce motor fuel consumption worldwide, you have a chance. But as China and India develop, the odds of that happening are close to zero, no matter how far you tighten fuel efficiency standards and add public transportation. It's just not in the cards.
Maryland is one of those small, unimportant states on the East Coast, right?
10,000 square miles is just one ninth the total Federally-owned land in Nevada alone.
VIPER.
Hemp requires too much arable land per gallon to be a successful biofuel. You could replace all the cropland in the world with it, and you wouldn't cover worldwide motor fuel consupmtion. Same with all the other crops-to-fuel systems, whether ethanol or biodiesel.
Algae is a reasonable possibility, since it can be grown with salt water in shallow pools on otherwise economically useless land. I'm not certain it'd work, but it's the only biofuel that even has a chance.
ISO-9000 was not developed by an ISO-9000-conformant process. How can you trust it?