Joking aside, Linux usability has come a long way in the last few years. When I first installed Red Hat 5.2 back in the day, it burned down my house, killed my dog, ran away with my wife, and then I had to configure the serial ports by manually editing a config file. These days there's a GUI for that.
My guess is that it uses reflective glass beads injected into the skin with compressed air. The pattern could then be read with any electromagnetic wave that can penetrate a few millimetres of skin, eg microwaves.
By backing down they don't just avoid an investigation, they avoid testing the legality of the program. That could be useful if they want to reinstate the program under the next Congress. But more importantly, the claims about wartime Presidential powers that were used to justify the wiretapping program are still being used to justify other questionably legal actions (perhaps even including the covert expansion of the Iraq war into Iran and Syria). The administration wants to avoid a direct court battle over those powers, and by backing down over the wiretapping program it's hoping to pacify Congress without establishing any precedents.
At the moment if i move i have to update all the different agencies. Banks, Telcoms, Electricity, Tax offices, Immigration(if needed), Government support ( pensions etc ), voting enrolment. Now imagine they are all linked and i phone a single number and POOF. All changed at once.
No problem - just send me your bank account details, social security number, name, address, phone number and date of birth and I'll take care of everything. I won't even charge you for the service.
See, it's true - privatising government services saves money!
Information can only be gathered and used for a specified purpose - you can't "reuse" information for purposes other than those for which it was gathered.
With a new database the government could get round this by specifying a very broad range of purposes for the data (as Transport For London did with the Oyster card), but that tactic can't be applied to an existing database.
Let's not forget we are talking about Europe where many countries issue personal IDs and keep registries of all citizens at several levels with mandatory registration.
That's true, but no country in the world has a computerised database of all its citizens. The fact that it's computerised makes all the difference - paper records are harder to search, harder to copy, and harder to cross-reference. That makes it much more expensive to engage in widespread surveillance, identity theft or profiling.
Perhaps our failure to understand chaotic phenomena such as turbulence is due to the fact that we're trying to explain large-scale behaviour in terms of the emergent properties of small-scale behaviour, rather than trying to explain small-scale behaviour in terms of the impact of increasingly precise observation on large-scale behaviour?
If observation changes the outcome of the experiment, should we expect a system observed at a large scale to behave in the same way when observed at a small scale? And if not, how can we hope to build a unified theory of behaviour at all scales?
I'm sorry, but I don't understand what rights are violated by having to show ID.
I take it you don't believe in a "right to privacy"? Fair enough. Apart from privacy, no rights are directly violated by having to show ID. But then again no rights are directly violated by having a cop following you around 24 hours a day - into your workplace, your home, your bathroom, your bedroom - silently watching and recording everything you do. This would doubtless be a very effective anti-terrorism measure, but nevertheless most people would be outraged if the state demanded it.
The point is not that ID cards directly undermine any particular right - it's that they allow any number of rights to be undermined more easily, by making it easier to monitor individuals.
It's not a site that makes Yahoo work better, it's a design project that presents web pages with the text and images removed to draw attention to design elements like structure, layout and colour.
Let's just look at their home pages: Yahoo's, which has no less than 12 panes, including one that's just a graphical advertisement -- oh, yeah, there's a search box around there somewhere, too; Google's, which is a logo and a search box.
You can see the difference even more clearly when you remove the text. Yahoo doesn't look too bad compared to Lycos and Exite.
olfactory receptors might actually be capable of detecting quantum-level effects, unlike brain neurons which lack anything near the sensitivity required for that
I've been saying this all along! Whoever smelt it dealt it.
Unfortunately the Uncertainty Principle states that you can't simultaneously know what a fart smells like and where it came from. That explains why your own farts never smell as bad.
Take the function 1/x for example. If you were to divide by 0- (that is, a negative value that is infinitely close to zero), it would be -INF. If you were to divide by 0+, it would be INF.
That's a good point, but I'm not sure nullity is supposed to define the value of 1/0. According to the article, nullity = 0/0. I suppose it's a matter of operator precedence whether x/0 = (x*0)/0 = 0/0 = nullity, in which case 1/0 = 2/0 = 3/0 etc, or whether x/0 = x*(0/0) = x * nullity, which seems the more interesting possibility to me, because in some cases you might be able to cancel the nullities later and reemerge onto the number line. That would make it possible to use nullity in a calculation requiring a real output, much as you can use imaginary or negative numbers in calculations that require real or positive outputs - a sort of "suspension of disbelief" that has useful results.
Adding an equal or greater number of liberal light bulbs is the only way to effect change.
Sure, that's what they tell you before the election. Four years later you realise the electricity bill's gone through the roof and it's still fücking dark.
He argued that in all countries and times, the distribution of income and wealth follows a regular logarithmic pattern that can be captured by the formula:
log N = log A + m log x
This has indeed been shown to be true for a wide range of societies. (Or approximately true - power law distributions tend to fit the top end better than the bottom.) But societies vary widely in the value of m, the power law exponent, which determines the steepness of the curve - do 20% of the people receive 80% of the income, or do 5% of the people receive 95% of the income? This study shows that the curve is steeper for wealth than it is for income, and much steeper than the widely quoted 80/20 rule.
Arches are very strong, as opposed wooden square door frames.
In a wood-framed building it's true that the doorways aren't particularly strong, but then again the walls aren't particularly heavy or brittle. In a brick building, on the other hand, the doorways are usually protected by reinforced concrete lintels, which contain steel bars and are thus much less likely than bricks to collapse under tension.
Did the satellite tell anyone it noticed anything? That's important too.
No, it just snickered. It's seen a couple of other things coming our way too, but whenever the operators try to get more information is just says "Oh you'll find out. You'll find out... soon enough."
Then i contains a bit-for-bit copy of the IEEE floating-point representation of 3.0.
OK, so here's what's confusing me: when you right-shift i, what effect does that have on the floating point value? I don't think it's a simple divide by two, because a float contains a sign bit, an 8-bit exponent and a 23-bit mantissa. Right-shifting would seem to divide the exponent by two (i.e. take the square root), but it would also shift the least significant bit of the exponent into the most significant bit of the mantissa (making the mantissa negative if the exponent was odd, or positive if the exponent was even?). How on earth does subtracting the result from a magic value then give you the inverse square root?
Slashdot Mirror
Joking aside, Linux usability has come a long way in the last few years. When I first installed Red Hat 5.2 back in the day, it burned down my house, killed my dog, ran away with my wife, and then I had to configure the serial ports by manually editing a config file. These days there's a GUI for that.
My guess is that it uses reflective glass beads injected into the skin with compressed air. The pattern could then be read with any electromagnetic wave that can penetrate a few millimetres of skin, eg microwaves.
By backing down they don't just avoid an investigation, they avoid testing the legality of the program. That could be useful if they want to reinstate the program under the next Congress. But more importantly, the claims about wartime Presidential powers that were used to justify the wiretapping program are still being used to justify other questionably legal actions (perhaps even including the covert expansion of the Iraq war into Iran and Syria). The administration wants to avoid a direct court battle over those powers, and by backing down over the wiretapping program it's hoping to pacify Congress without establishing any precedents.
Does the statement "murder isn't stealing" condone murder?
No problem - just send me your bank account details, social security number, name, address, phone number and date of birth and I'll take care of everything. I won't even charge you for the service.
See, it's true - privatising government services saves money!
With a new database the government could get round this by specifying a very broad range of purposes for the data (as Transport For London did with the Oyster card), but that tactic can't be applied to an existing database.
Not even close.
If observation changes the outcome of the experiment, should we expect a system observed at a large scale to behave in the same way when observed at a small scale? And if not, how can we hope to build a unified theory of behaviour at all scales?
I take it you don't believe in a "right to privacy"? Fair enough. Apart from privacy, no rights are directly violated by having to show ID. But then again no rights are directly violated by having a cop following you around 24 hours a day - into your workplace, your home, your bathroom, your bedroom - silently watching and recording everything you do. This would doubtless be a very effective anti-terrorism measure, but nevertheless most people would be outraged if the state demanded it.
The point is not that ID cards directly undermine any particular right - it's that they allow any number of rights to be undermined more easily, by making it easier to monitor individuals.
It's not a site that makes Yahoo work better, it's a design project that presents web pages with the text and images removed to draw attention to design elements like structure, layout and colour.
You can see the difference even more clearly when you remove the text. Yahoo doesn't look too bad compared to Lycos and Exite.
Not according to Roger Penrose...
Unfortunately the Uncertainty Principle states that you can't simultaneously know what a fart smells like and where it came from. That explains why your own farts never smell as bad.
O(1)
This has indeed been shown to be true for a wide range of societies. (Or approximately true - power law distributions tend to fit the top end better than the bottom.) But societies vary widely in the value of m, the power law exponent, which determines the steepness of the curve - do 20% of the people receive 80% of the income, or do 5% of the people receive 95% of the income? This study shows that the curve is steeper for wealth than it is for income, and much steeper than the widely quoted 80/20 rule.
No, it just snickered. It's seen a couple of other things coming our way too, but whenever the operators try to get more information is just says "Oh you'll find out. You'll find out... soon enough."