I do believe that Mohammad is considered by most to have been the perfect human being and the majority of devout Muslims probably strive to live their lives as he did;
To my knowledge, not only is that not the case, but it would be blasphemy for a Muslim to believe that. I'm quite sure they are much like many other religions in that they believe that only God is perfect.
Do note that the Bible addresses it too, among other things instructing slaves to perform their duties well.
Is that in the New Testament?
Yep. Colossians. Timothy has additional instructions for how slaves should behave.
The portions of Genesis about Caanan were used as justification by Christians to enslave black people
Genesis is in the Old Testament. All the other portions probably were as well.
Nope. Matthew and Mark both describe the selling of slaves, and Mark describes a priest who owns a slave. In one of Jesus' parables (in Luke, I think), he says a slave who knowingly misbehaves will be heavily beaten, while one who unknowingly misbehaves will receive only a light beating. In the parable, he neither supports nor condemns slavery, but it is a parable. And in Ephesians, St. Paul says that slaves should obey their owners the way they would obey Christ himself (not surprisingly, that was a favorite of slave owners). And as I recall, somewhere in the New Testament it is said that a runaway slave should be returned to its owner.
The Roman Catholic church is not Christianity. It did not operate merely by Christian scripture, but also by its own personal teachings.
That can be said of virtually any major religion, including Islam. Note the differences between Shi'ites, Sunnis, and Sufis. And the Roman Catholic church was virtually all of Christianity -- particularly in Europe -- for much of the past two millenia.
Have you ever heard the phrase "Life free or die"?
Yep. It comes from a toast written by an American general in 1809 and is now plastered on the license plates of New Hampshire. Has nothing to do with slavery or religion.
Islam is the greatest religious threat to my wellbeing, not Christianity.
Oh, please! You sound... well, rather like a Muslim fundamentalist raving about the U.S.
I forgot to mention this, but in the second link above you'll find evidence that Muslims were trading "black" slaves long before Europeans.
If you want to pick on Muslims for being somehow immoral, you've picked the wrong battle. Black folks in West Africa were trading black slaves before any Europeans ever got there, and quite possibly well before Mohammed was even born. In fact, it was black folks who provided the black slaves that Europeans sent to the New World. Prior to that, Romans traded slaves of all colors -- heck, in Rome you could sell yourself into slavery -- as did Muslims and other North Africans. In the 6th century, Christians in England routinely enslaved pagan children. Slavery exisited in the Far East as well, and there is evidence that it existed in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans. That the Quran addresses it is a reflection of the times, not an indictment of Islam. Do note that the Bible addresses it too, among other things instructing slaves to perform their duties well. The portions of Genesis about Caanan were used as justification by Christians to enslave black people on the basis that they were descended from the Caananites, but other portions have been used to justify slavery of non-blacks.
Mind you, early Christians were anti-slavery, as many of them were slaves themselves, but about 300 years before Mohammed, Christians began to reverse their stance. Need some examples? Around the time Mohammed was born, to encourage celibacy, it was canon law that the children of Christian clerics be enslaved. In 1452, the Pope authorized the enslavement of all non-Christians by the Kings of Spain and Portugal. In the 17th century, at least three Popes personally bought and/or sold Muslim slaves. Late in the 17th century the Pope restricted Christians to owning non-Christian slaves who were the spoils of religious war. It wasn't until the 18th century that a groundswell of anti-slavery sentiment grew amongst Christians.
You'll note that a couple of those items sound an awful lot like the Muslim brand of slavery: Non-believers only, spoils of a religious war. Though Muslims beat Christians to those restrictions by a good 700 years; prior to that, it was perfectly acceptable for Christians to enslave other Christians (and became so again later, as American slaves began to convert to Christianity).
Mind you, the way slavery was practiced prior to the use of black slaves (or "savages," as the enlightened Europeans of the Renaissance referred to them) in the Americas was quite different from the way we think of it today. Nobody thinks it was a pleasant experience, but slaves were at least treated as humans (albeit the lowest class of humans), rather than animals, as they were so often treated in the Americas. In fact, a Muslim friend of mine claims that the Quran requires humane treatment of slaves, and that a true Muslim could never treat a slave the way slaves were often treated in the American South.
Pointing out that Muslims used to own slaves would be a much more compelling argument for how Christians are like Muslims, not unlike them.
Please cite which sura in the Quran that forbids pictures of the prophet.
There is none:)
What makes you think it has to be explicitly stated? The interpretation of what it does state is all that matters. Anybody who has spent much time in a Christian church is well aware of how that works, and it should hardly come as a surprise that Muslims are the same way. Christians have had their share of prohibitions based on non-literal interpretations of the Bible over the centuries. The de facto ban on science at the start of the Renaissance comes to mind.
You can buy pictures depicting Mohammed almost everywhere in the Islamic world.
Well, according to the article you linked to, Shi'ites have less of a problem with it than Sunnis do. Again, an issue of interpretation. And I don't know where in the Islamic world you've been, but in the places I've been I've never seen an image of Mohammed. I won't claim to have been a lot of places, but I grew up near the largest Muslim population in the U.S., and I've visited Muslim-dominated areas of the largest Muslim country in the world....
So net net we gain about 1/3 gallon of gasoline equivalent in 8 hrs. Not much gain really.
Really? Consider an average workday. You drive to work, park your car for 8 hours, and drive home. Your hybrid gets 60 mpg and let's say you live 10 miles from work. That's 20 miles round-trip, consuming about 1/3 gallon of gas. But your solar panel has given you 1/3 gallon of gasoline equivalent, so you get to work using (essentially) no gasoline at all. How is that not much gain?
A solar panel on top of a hybrid is really just a special case of the plug-in hybrid, which is touted by many as having great promise for exactly this reason. It won't help heavy drivers, but it should be great for commuters.
And that reminds me of the idiots who stopped letting their children watch Barney when they found out the guy in the purple dinosaur costume was black!
The above statement is like saying that rainstorms have overtaken tornados in prevalence. That doesn't matter, because tornados do much, much more damage than rainstorms do.
I think you're missing the point. The comparison makes no pretense of describing the damage that the Kama Sutra worm might do, merely how common it is in the wild. That the worm dropped in prevalence over the past couple of days indicates that people are doing something about it and it is now likely to affect fewer computers. Likewise, comparing the prevalence of rainstorms to that of tornados says nothing about the damage likely to be done, but does indicate that you're more likely to get wet than to find yourself in a swirling vortex.
I don't about you, but while I'm prepared to handle a tornado, it's the rain that's on my mind when I wake up in the morning.
While opinions are protected, false 'facts' are not. The following (from the original) are not opinions, but were persented as statements of fact, not opinion:
The BoingBoing post is not, in fact, "the original." It quotes a post at another site that gives enough information about the problem for a knowledgeable person to reproduce it. IANAL, but I'm pretty certain that Doctorow's quoting of a source -- one that is fully cited via the link at the bottom of his post -- would not be enough for a successful lawsuit even if the source is incorrect, provided he believes it to be accurate. I'm also fairly certain that any opinions he forms and reports on the basis of information gathered from said source would not meet the legal standard for libel. Now toss in the fact that quite a few people have, in fact, reproduced the problem and it's pretty much impossible to claim libel against Doctorow, let alone his source.
Finally, if simply reporting a story can be called harassment, as the Starforce PR guy claims, then Bill Clinton is likely the most harassed person in American history and the FBI should be investigating virtually the entire American press. But reporting what is legitimately believed to be true is neither libel nor harassment, however much Starforce may dislike it. Furthermore, I highly doubt they intend to sue anybody -- it would be much cheaper for them to simply fix their code. I suspect they're looking to make a quick a buck and move on, and that the intimidation tactics are just to prolong the project.
Their "Schematics" clearly show that active ingredient is still SiO, Silicone. They designed a way to put it on flexible substrate. So did many other people. Perhaps they deliver excellent performance cells. However, it does not change the fact that it is still Silicone that moves electrons.
What you are looking at is a silicon oxide antireflection coating layer. It has nothing whatsoever to do with moving electrons -- in fact, it is an insulator. The active layer is the CIGS layer, with the electrical contacts being the ZnO and Mo layers. The amount of Si in this solar is a fraction of a percent of that in crystalline silicon solar cells, and it is likely deposited from silane and oxygen.
The interesting thing here is that the fastest growing solar cell market is not silicon: it's organic solar cells. They're incredibly cheap, but currently inefficient. However, their efficiency has been growing dramatically.
I suppose that's possible, given that there were no shipments of organic solar cells in 2003, so that if there were any shipments of them in 2004 the growth rate would be infinite. I have not yet seen the technology-by-technology breakdown for 2004, but if any organic solar cells were shipped last year it was in tiny quantities. Crystalline silicon is, in fact, the fastest-growing cell market and will very likely remain so for the foreseeable future.
As for the cost of organic solar cells, they are projected to be cheap, but nobody has really accurately priced out a commercial fab because the technology is still too immature to be thinking about large-scale production.
At least when I was there (granted a few years ago), the Claremount was all about irony. Where else can you go listen to disco music, drink PBR out of a can, and witness some of the ugliest, fattest, nastiest strippers of all time? I just like watching Blondie (the cracked out fat stripper) beat up on frat boys with her breasts. Good times.
It's still like that. (What can I say, I live a few blocks away from it.) It's under new ownership now, but there was such an outcry about losing it that the new owners decided to keep it as-is. Wish they'd do something about the flophouse upstairs, though. But for dancing on a Saturday night, the Clairmont is a million times better than any Buckhead dance club I've been to.
I've also lived within blocks of the other club mentioned in the interview (The Blind Pig in Ann Arbor), and while I've had many a great night there, I can't say it's the spectacle that the Clairmont is....
Why are people here up in arms when GPL code is stolen, but not when copyrighted music or movies are illegally downloaded or swapped?
The short answer is not that stealing IP from the record companies is justifiable, but rather that the record companies have acted like bastards and a lot of people would like to see them get screwed. It's not unlike stealing the bully's lunch money.
Now the long answer:
I think it's partly a haves vs. have-nots thing, but I also think it has a lot to do with the disingenuous way the music industry has tried to assert itself. It, along with its partners, has used strong-arm tactics to force changes in copyright law that are favorable to it; it has sued its customers; and it is trying to foist DRM on its customers that will force them to pay for the same music multiple times, just to name a few of its moves. All the while, it has claimed that it is only defending the rights of its musicians, and while a few musicians have sided with the RIAA, quite a large number of them have stepped forward with stories about how they get screwed by the record companies and actually make very little money themselves from record sales.
While I, personally, think downloading music illegally is wrong and don't engage in it myself, I have zero sympathy for the music industry because they have created the adversarial relationship with their customers that they now find themselves in. People would have much more sympathy for the record companies if they compensated artists fairly (so that they actually had the artists on their sides) and acted as if their customers are valuable to them, and I suspect illegal downloads would be much less of a problem for them to boot.
It's not unlike what happened to the tobacco industry. Had tobacco companies not been so disingenuous about their marketing practices and the dangers of smoking for so long, they likely would not have faced the penalties that have been levied against them over the past decade. Instead, they got royally screwed in a tremendous backlash -- made worse by their own actions -- and most people were happy to see it happen. It's not a perfect analogy -- music doesn't give you nic fits and lung cancer -- but you get my meaning.
Record companies want to control our listening habits and milk our pocketbooks; open-source software coders want to give us helpful, high-quality software for free. That's the difference, and while those statements may or may not reflect reality, those are the images they have. Public relations can turn people against you just as effectively as it can win them over to your side.
Now is it really any wonder that nobody gives a damn about the record companies?
I have to agree with this. My cable supplier (Comcast) has On Demand. While it is nice to catch up on Monty Python when I feel like it, only a few episodes are available, and I have no idea if one day they'll drop it as a choice.
My thoughts exactly. Plus, how would broadband movies be different from pay-per-view? Why would I choose to watch a movie on my computer screen when I can have the same movie sent to my TV screen instead?
Broadband won't kill the DVD for exactly the same reasons pay-per-view has not.
No, CDs will not die off. At least not quite yet. There is something more rewarding about having an LP or a CD as opposed to pointing to a folder which represents a a few sectors of your hard drive in such an order that they can play 'Blueberry Hill'.
For me, it's more about DRM. I would be happy to buy music online, but I want to be able to listen to it when I want, where I want, on whatever device I want, without having to break laws, risk rendering the file unplayable while removing the DRM, or buy the same music more than once. And while I could always buy from AllofMP3.com, I'm a little wary of sending my credit card number to Russia (though, come to think of it, Aeroflot and a couple of shops in the Moscow airport have it...).
Of course, the music industry will soon distribute DRM on its CDs, at which point I will have to choose between being an unscrupulous lawbreaker, not spending money on music, and sending my credit card number to Russia.
The nanometer-scale scale towers, which would be coated by the special p-type and n-type semiconductor (p/n) junction materials used to generate electrical current, would increase the surface area available to produce electricity.
Generally, increasing surface area on solar cells is detrimental to producing electricity, particularly if the semiconductor material is very thin. (Yes, I am well aware that it is more than counteracted by the additional light coupled into the cell, but the writer makes it sound as though increasing surface area is a magical formula for making more power. And the increase in surface area, by itself, is still detrimental.) I would very much like to know what are the "special" semiconductor materials they plan to coat the towers with.
I don't think this is so much a breakthrough as it is just another in a long line of textured substrates for thin-film solar cells that don't even work yet and won't be hitting the market for another 10 years.
Because their cells will be more efficient, Ready believes they can use older and more mature p/n-type material technologies and less costly silicon wafers to hold down costs and rapidly advance the project into products that can be used in the field.
If he is going to use silicon wafers as simple substrates then his cells had better be substantially more efficient than standard crystalline silicon solar cells -- otherwise, he is guaranteed to be priced out of the market. Silicon wafers make up half the cost of a solar module, and the module materials and assembly make up another 30-35%. Assuming he can actually deposit these nanotowers and their semiconductor coatings at a cost similar to that of converting a silicon wafer to a silicon solar cell, it doesn't give him much choice but to leverage efficiency to get a lower cost per watt.
I wonder why some US people still say that they live in the land of the Free with all the regulation that their government is imposing on them...
I guess anti-federalism only goes so far when your morals and religion are different from those of the anti-federalists. Or when the anti-federalists see an opportunity to line the pocketbooks of themselves and/or their buddies.
What's next? Required religious programming during the "family hour," with mandatory tithing by all?
I guess this means Sir Bill will soon have all of us hauled off to the digital stockades screaming, "Help! I'm being oppressed! Come see the violence inherent in the system!"
If solar has no fuel cost then neither does fossil unless you are applying a double standard. Fossil energy has, in fact, zero fuel cost as far as solar has zero fuel cost.
So you can get crude oil out of the ground, transport it to your location, and process it to produce gasoline, all for free?
You can dig up coal, separate it from the dirt and the other things in the ground, transport it to your location, and pulverize it, all for free?
I have to pay for those things, but I've never paid to have sunlight fall on my house.
Please explain where the double standard is. Hint: The cost of converting the fuel to another form of energy doesn't count -- that's conversion cost, not fuel cost.
Ok - it's not solar cells they're using - they're making a big green house.
That depends on which part of the post you're reading. One project is solar cars that use solar cells, the other is the solar tower to which you refer. While the parent didn't specify, it certainly seemed to be referring to solar cells -- people regularly complain about the "chemical costs" of solar cells, thinking they're made just like ICs.
On the other hand, since only one solar tower of this type has previously been built (and on a much smaller scale at that), and few people know about it, it seemed very unlikely that the tower was what the parent was referring to.
Now ETFE and aluminium have extremely high embodied energy... I'm not trying to dismiss this project, but people should realise that it's going to be a long way from being "green".
AFAIK the designers have not released enough information for an independent analysis, but they claim an energy payback time of 2.5 years and 900,000 tonnes/year less CO2 release than similarly sized fossil fuel plants. I don't know how long they expect the plant to operate, but that has a major effect on the CO2 reduction calculation.
I saw this stuff on my almost 5 year old science text book, excatly the same car. Why are they still making a big deal out of this?
That's nothing -- my grandpa had a car with an internal combustion engine 70 years ago! Why are they still making a big deal out of those?
The point being, just because the car you saw 5 years ago looks similar to the cars teams are racing now doesn't mean the cars are the same. There is a huge difference in how the cars perform. When this race's predecessor began in 1990, the winning vehicles averaged speeds of about 20 mph. Now they're approaching 55 mph.
And it's still a big deal from an educational standpoint because it allows engineering students to get their hands dirty building a vehicle that has to survive thousands of miles on the road. Instead of learning about suspensions, motors, and circuits in a classroom, and maybe getting to touch one during a summer internship, they actually design and build something from scratch -- and the most successful teams often do so with little intervention from university faculty (who tend to think a bit small for these projects, IMO).
Let's just ignore the chemical costs of making solar collectors.
What chemical costs might those be? For solar cells, they're quite low -- nothing at all like integrated circuits, if that's what you had in mind. Last I looked, the only chemical waste that the larger plants in the US produced in large enough quantities to report to the EPA was a bit of sodium hydroxide. The plants are larger now than they were then, but the only other chemicals that are commonly used in significant quantities are glycol, sometimes hydrofluoric acid, phosphoric acid (or in some plants POCl3), silane, aluminum, silver, and silicone. Solvents are used only in very small quantities.
Chemical safety specialists generally regard silane as the most problematic chemical in a PV plant, and even then it is more of an occupational safety issue than a pollution or "chemical cost" issue.
France has the so called "Academie Francaise" which defines the official french dictionary definitions and which terms are what.
The fact is that France, because of the Academie Francaise, is preventing language degeneration, unlike in the US, where any word you want you can put in a dictionary and people will start to use it.
Oh, please. Word definitions are determined by usage, not the other way around. People don't use words because they are in the dictionary -- words are in the dictionary because people use them. That is a universal constant of lanugages, and the only way to stop it is to have widespread buy-in from the people who use the language (as they do in Iceland, which puts France to shame when it comes to language preservation). That's far easier to do when the populace is confined to a small geographic area, as with the French spoken in France, as opposed to spread all over the world, as with the English that you are complaining about.
The Academie Francaise is an anachronism.
French is still very much held together, and the ethymology of French words is easier to retrace, because in many cases the spelling still reflects the origin of a given word.
Don't forget that the tiny island where the English language developed was constantly raided, invaded, and attacked by nearby armies speaking a wide range of foreign languages, not to mention that it was a permanent home to at least three other languages. With so many people speaking so many languages over such a small area, it is hardly surprising that English absorbed a wide range of foreign words.
Most important of these foreign languages, of course, is the French introduced after the Norman invasion in 1066. Since the ruling class spoke French after that event, English was debased and acquired quite a large number of French words as upwardly mobile members of the lower classes attempted to make themselves sound important. IIRC, French was the official language of the British Parliament until sometime in the 16th century. Aside from Germanic, French has had more influence on the English language than any other. (In fact, most of the influence usually attributed to Latin can be traced to French.)
In other words, the French did more than anybody to ensure a seismic shift in the English language.:-)
Also, don't forget that French is spoken outside of France, and few of those speakers care a whit what the Academie Francaise has to say about their language. Have a listen to Quebecois, Haitian, or Beninese French sometime, then try to tell me that French is not every bit as "degenerate" as English.
This is a MUCH better deal than before, so to the fucking jerkoff suing them: "STOP IT"
Despite the misleading ad, this is way better than before, and i dont want to lose it because of some whiney malcontents and a money grubbing lawyer.
So companies should be allowed to lie in exchange for giving customers a better deal? I don't think so. And you're not going to lose this because of lawsuit -- Blockbuster can't afford to go back to the old system. The lawsuit seeks only to change the advertising to something more honest.
As for the "money grubbing lawyer," he happens to be the Attorney General of New Jersey, doing his job by enforcing the laws of that state. Oh, and he doesn't get any money out of this either -- just the same paycheck he gets whether he sues Blockbuster or not.
News Anchor: Scientists have successfully transplanted little Jango's brain into a robot monkey body. on a sad note, however, Jambo died late last night after drinking his own urine.
Sparks: Hey, Skip. What do you think about all this robot stuff?
Murphy: Why? Are we under attack?!
Sparks: No..but that robot monkey on the news..
Murphy: You're kidding! That guy's a robot monkey?
As far as I know, anything viewable from a public area may be photographed. If the artists want to enforce copyright, they should place their sculptures in an enclosed building.
Bert Krages, a photographer and attorney, publishes an online guide called The Photographer's Right that pretty well agrees with you. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before this matter ends up in court.
I'm no attorney, but it sure seems to me that this is a loaded comparison. Shoplifting is a criminal matter, while copyright violation is (usually) a civil matter. Each is handled by a different set of attorneys under a different set of procedures and governed by a different standard of guilt.
Not to mention that file-sharers are generally accused of "stealing" dozens, hundreds, or thousands of copies of a work. Not only would a shoplifter not likely be able to hide so many DVDs under his jacket, he would probably face charges of larceny or something much more serious than shoplifting. And if restitution were part of the sentence, he'd be facing a fine (theoretically) as large as that paid by file-sharers, plus statutory fines, plus jail time and/or probation.
Slashdot Mirror
To my knowledge, not only is that not the case, but it would be blasphemy for a Muslim to believe that. I'm quite sure they are much like many other religions in that they believe that only God is perfect.
Is that in the New Testament?Yep. Colossians. Timothy has additional instructions for how slaves should behave.
Genesis is in the Old Testament. All the other portions probably were as well.Nope. Matthew and Mark both describe the selling of slaves, and Mark describes a priest who owns a slave. In one of Jesus' parables (in Luke, I think), he says a slave who knowingly misbehaves will be heavily beaten, while one who unknowingly misbehaves will receive only a light beating. In the parable, he neither supports nor condemns slavery, but it is a parable. And in Ephesians, St. Paul says that slaves should obey their owners the way they would obey Christ himself (not surprisingly, that was a favorite of slave owners). And as I recall, somewhere in the New Testament it is said that a runaway slave should be returned to its owner.
The Roman Catholic church is not Christianity. It did not operate merely by Christian scripture, but also by its own personal teachings.That can be said of virtually any major religion, including Islam. Note the differences between Shi'ites, Sunnis, and Sufis. And the Roman Catholic church was virtually all of Christianity -- particularly in Europe -- for much of the past two millenia.
Have you ever heard the phrase "Life free or die"?Yep. It comes from a toast written by an American general in 1809 and is now plastered on the license plates of New Hampshire. Has nothing to do with slavery or religion.
Islam is the greatest religious threat to my wellbeing, not Christianity.Oh, please! You sound ... well, rather like a Muslim fundamentalist raving about the U.S.
If you want to pick on Muslims for being somehow immoral, you've picked the wrong battle. Black folks in West Africa were trading black slaves before any Europeans ever got there, and quite possibly well before Mohammed was even born. In fact, it was black folks who provided the black slaves that Europeans sent to the New World. Prior to that, Romans traded slaves of all colors -- heck, in Rome you could sell yourself into slavery -- as did Muslims and other North Africans. In the 6th century, Christians in England routinely enslaved pagan children. Slavery exisited in the Far East as well, and there is evidence that it existed in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans. That the Quran addresses it is a reflection of the times, not an indictment of Islam. Do note that the Bible addresses it too, among other things instructing slaves to perform their duties well. The portions of Genesis about Caanan were used as justification by Christians to enslave black people on the basis that they were descended from the Caananites, but other portions have been used to justify slavery of non-blacks.
Mind you, early Christians were anti-slavery, as many of them were slaves themselves, but about 300 years before Mohammed, Christians began to reverse their stance. Need some examples? Around the time Mohammed was born, to encourage celibacy, it was canon law that the children of Christian clerics be enslaved. In 1452, the Pope authorized the enslavement of all non-Christians by the Kings of Spain and Portugal. In the 17th century, at least three Popes personally bought and/or sold Muslim slaves. Late in the 17th century the Pope restricted Christians to owning non-Christian slaves who were the spoils of religious war. It wasn't until the 18th century that a groundswell of anti-slavery sentiment grew amongst Christians.
You'll note that a couple of those items sound an awful lot like the Muslim brand of slavery: Non-believers only, spoils of a religious war. Though Muslims beat Christians to those restrictions by a good 700 years; prior to that, it was perfectly acceptable for Christians to enslave other Christians (and became so again later, as American slaves began to convert to Christianity).
Mind you, the way slavery was practiced prior to the use of black slaves (or "savages," as the enlightened Europeans of the Renaissance referred to them) in the Americas was quite different from the way we think of it today. Nobody thinks it was a pleasant experience, but slaves were at least treated as humans (albeit the lowest class of humans), rather than animals, as they were so often treated in the Americas. In fact, a Muslim friend of mine claims that the Quran requires humane treatment of slaves, and that a true Muslim could never treat a slave the way slaves were often treated in the American South.
Pointing out that Muslims used to own slaves would be a much more compelling argument for how Christians are like Muslims, not unlike them.
What makes you think it has to be explicitly stated? The interpretation of what it does state is all that matters. Anybody who has spent much time in a Christian church is well aware of how that works, and it should hardly come as a surprise that Muslims are the same way. Christians have had their share of prohibitions based on non-literal interpretations of the Bible over the centuries. The de facto ban on science at the start of the Renaissance comes to mind.
You can buy pictures depicting Mohammed almost everywhere in the Islamic world.Well, according to the article you linked to, Shi'ites have less of a problem with it than Sunnis do. Again, an issue of interpretation. And I don't know where in the Islamic world you've been, but in the places I've been I've never seen an image of Mohammed. I won't claim to have been a lot of places, but I grew up near the largest Muslim population in the U.S., and I've visited Muslim-dominated areas of the largest Muslim country in the world....
Really? Consider an average workday. You drive to work, park your car for 8 hours, and drive home. Your hybrid gets 60 mpg and let's say you live 10 miles from work. That's 20 miles round-trip, consuming about 1/3 gallon of gas. But your solar panel has given you 1/3 gallon of gasoline equivalent, so you get to work using (essentially) no gasoline at all. How is that not much gain?
A solar panel on top of a hybrid is really just a special case of the plug-in hybrid, which is touted by many as having great promise for exactly this reason. It won't help heavy drivers, but it should be great for commuters.
And that reminds me of the idiots who stopped letting their children watch Barney when they found out the guy in the purple dinosaur costume was black!
I think you're missing the point. The comparison makes no pretense of describing the damage that the Kama Sutra worm might do, merely how common it is in the wild. That the worm dropped in prevalence over the past couple of days indicates that people are doing something about it and it is now likely to affect fewer computers. Likewise, comparing the prevalence of rainstorms to that of tornados says nothing about the damage likely to be done, but does indicate that you're more likely to get wet than to find yourself in a swirling vortex.
I don't about you, but while I'm prepared to handle a tornado, it's the rain that's on my mind when I wake up in the morning.
While opinions are protected, false 'facts' are not. The following (from the original) are not opinions, but were persented as statements of fact, not opinion:
The BoingBoing post is not, in fact, "the original." It quotes a post at another site that gives enough information about the problem for a knowledgeable person to reproduce it. IANAL, but I'm pretty certain that Doctorow's quoting of a source -- one that is fully cited via the link at the bottom of his post -- would not be enough for a successful lawsuit even if the source is incorrect, provided he believes it to be accurate. I'm also fairly certain that any opinions he forms and reports on the basis of information gathered from said source would not meet the legal standard for libel. Now toss in the fact that quite a few people have, in fact, reproduced the problem and it's pretty much impossible to claim libel against Doctorow, let alone his source.
Finally, if simply reporting a story can be called harassment, as the Starforce PR guy claims, then Bill Clinton is likely the most harassed person in American history and the FBI should be investigating virtually the entire American press. But reporting what is legitimately believed to be true is neither libel nor harassment, however much Starforce may dislike it. Furthermore, I highly doubt they intend to sue anybody -- it would be much cheaper for them to simply fix their code. I suspect they're looking to make a quick a buck and move on, and that the intimidation tactics are just to prolong the project.
Their "Schematics" clearly show that active ingredient is still SiO, Silicone. They designed a way to put it on flexible substrate. So did many other people. Perhaps they deliver excellent performance cells. However, it does not change the fact that it is still Silicone that moves electrons.
What you are looking at is a silicon oxide antireflection coating layer. It has nothing whatsoever to do with moving electrons -- in fact, it is an insulator. The active layer is the CIGS layer, with the electrical contacts being the ZnO and Mo layers. The amount of Si in this solar is a fraction of a percent of that in crystalline silicon solar cells, and it is likely deposited from silane and oxygen.
The interesting thing here is that the fastest growing solar cell market is not silicon: it's organic solar cells. They're incredibly cheap, but currently inefficient. However, their efficiency has been growing dramatically.
I suppose that's possible, given that there were no shipments of organic solar cells in 2003, so that if there were any shipments of them in 2004 the growth rate would be infinite. I have not yet seen the technology-by-technology breakdown for 2004, but if any organic solar cells were shipped last year it was in tiny quantities. Crystalline silicon is, in fact, the fastest-growing cell market and will very likely remain so for the foreseeable future.
As for the cost of organic solar cells, they are projected to be cheap, but nobody has really accurately priced out a commercial fab because the technology is still too immature to be thinking about large-scale production.
It's still like that. (What can I say, I live a few blocks away from it.) It's under new ownership now, but there was such an outcry about losing it that the new owners decided to keep it as-is. Wish they'd do something about the flophouse upstairs, though. But for dancing on a Saturday night, the Clairmont is a million times better than any Buckhead dance club I've been to.
I've also lived within blocks of the other club mentioned in the interview (The Blind Pig in Ann Arbor), and while I've had many a great night there, I can't say it's the spectacle that the Clairmont is....
The short answer is not that stealing IP from the record companies is justifiable, but rather that the record companies have acted like bastards and a lot of people would like to see them get screwed. It's not unlike stealing the bully's lunch money.
Now the long answer:
I think it's partly a haves vs. have-nots thing, but I also think it has a lot to do with the disingenuous way the music industry has tried to assert itself. It, along with its partners, has used strong-arm tactics to force changes in copyright law that are favorable to it; it has sued its customers; and it is trying to foist DRM on its customers that will force them to pay for the same music multiple times, just to name a few of its moves. All the while, it has claimed that it is only defending the rights of its musicians, and while a few musicians have sided with the RIAA, quite a large number of them have stepped forward with stories about how they get screwed by the record companies and actually make very little money themselves from record sales.
While I, personally, think downloading music illegally is wrong and don't engage in it myself, I have zero sympathy for the music industry because they have created the adversarial relationship with their customers that they now find themselves in. People would have much more sympathy for the record companies if they compensated artists fairly (so that they actually had the artists on their sides) and acted as if their customers are valuable to them, and I suspect illegal downloads would be much less of a problem for them to boot.
It's not unlike what happened to the tobacco industry. Had tobacco companies not been so disingenuous about their marketing practices and the dangers of smoking for so long, they likely would not have faced the penalties that have been levied against them over the past decade. Instead, they got royally screwed in a tremendous backlash -- made worse by their own actions -- and most people were happy to see it happen. It's not a perfect analogy -- music doesn't give you nic fits and lung cancer -- but you get my meaning.
Record companies want to control our listening habits and milk our pocketbooks; open-source software coders want to give us helpful, high-quality software for free. That's the difference, and while those statements may or may not reflect reality, those are the images they have. Public relations can turn people against you just as effectively as it can win them over to your side.
Now is it really any wonder that nobody gives a damn about the record companies?
My thoughts exactly. Plus, how would broadband movies be different from pay-per-view? Why would I choose to watch a movie on my computer screen when I can have the same movie sent to my TV screen instead?
Broadband won't kill the DVD for exactly the same reasons pay-per-view has not.
For me, it's more about DRM. I would be happy to buy music online, but I want to be able to listen to it when I want, where I want, on whatever device I want, without having to break laws, risk rendering the file unplayable while removing the DRM, or buy the same music more than once. And while I could always buy from AllofMP3.com, I'm a little wary of sending my credit card number to Russia (though, come to think of it, Aeroflot and a couple of shops in the Moscow airport have it...).
Of course, the music industry will soon distribute DRM on its CDs, at which point I will have to choose between being an unscrupulous lawbreaker, not spending money on music, and sending my credit card number to Russia.
Generally, increasing surface area on solar cells is detrimental to producing electricity, particularly if the semiconductor material is very thin. (Yes, I am well aware that it is more than counteracted by the additional light coupled into the cell, but the writer makes it sound as though increasing surface area is a magical formula for making more power. And the increase in surface area, by itself, is still detrimental.) I would very much like to know what are the "special" semiconductor materials they plan to coat the towers with.
I don't think this is so much a breakthrough as it is just another in a long line of textured substrates for thin-film solar cells that don't even work yet and won't be hitting the market for another 10 years.
Because their cells will be more efficient, Ready believes they can use older and more mature p/n-type material technologies and less costly silicon wafers to hold down costs and rapidly advance the project into products that can be used in the field.
If he is going to use silicon wafers as simple substrates then his cells had better be substantially more efficient than standard crystalline silicon solar cells -- otherwise, he is guaranteed to be priced out of the market. Silicon wafers make up half the cost of a solar module, and the module materials and assembly make up another 30-35%. Assuming he can actually deposit these nanotowers and their semiconductor coatings at a cost similar to that of converting a silicon wafer to a silicon solar cell, it doesn't give him much choice but to leverage efficiency to get a lower cost per watt.
I guess anti-federalism only goes so far when your morals and religion are different from those of the anti-federalists. Or when the anti-federalists see an opportunity to line the pocketbooks of themselves and/or their buddies.
What's next? Required religious programming during the "family hour," with mandatory tithing by all?
I guess this means Sir Bill will soon have all of us hauled off to the digital stockades screaming, "Help! I'm being oppressed! Come see the violence inherent in the system!"
So you can get crude oil out of the ground, transport it to your location, and process it to produce gasoline, all for free?
You can dig up coal, separate it from the dirt and the other things in the ground, transport it to your location, and pulverize it, all for free?
I have to pay for those things, but I've never paid to have sunlight fall on my house.
Please explain where the double standard is. Hint: The cost of converting the fuel to another form of energy doesn't count -- that's conversion cost, not fuel cost.
That depends on which part of the post you're reading. One project is solar cars that use solar cells, the other is the solar tower to which you refer. While the parent didn't specify, it certainly seemed to be referring to solar cells -- people regularly complain about the "chemical costs" of solar cells, thinking they're made just like ICs.
On the other hand, since only one solar tower of this type has previously been built (and on a much smaller scale at that), and few people know about it, it seemed very unlikely that the tower was what the parent was referring to. Now ETFE and aluminium have extremely high embodied energy ... I'm not trying to dismiss this project, but people should realise that it's going to be a long way from being "green".
AFAIK the designers have not released enough information for an independent analysis, but they claim an energy payback time of 2.5 years and 900,000 tonnes/year less CO2 release than similarly sized fossil fuel plants. I don't know how long they expect the plant to operate, but that has a major effect on the CO2 reduction calculation.
That's nothing -- my grandpa had a car with an internal combustion engine 70 years ago! Why are they still making a big deal out of those?
The point being, just because the car you saw 5 years ago looks similar to the cars teams are racing now doesn't mean the cars are the same. There is a huge difference in how the cars perform. When this race's predecessor began in 1990, the winning vehicles averaged speeds of about 20 mph. Now they're approaching 55 mph.
And it's still a big deal from an educational standpoint because it allows engineering students to get their hands dirty building a vehicle that has to survive thousands of miles on the road. Instead of learning about suspensions, motors, and circuits in a classroom, and maybe getting to touch one during a summer internship, they actually design and build something from scratch -- and the most successful teams often do so with little intervention from university faculty (who tend to think a bit small for these projects, IMO).
What chemical costs might those be? For solar cells, they're quite low -- nothing at all like integrated circuits, if that's what you had in mind. Last I looked, the only chemical waste that the larger plants in the US produced in large enough quantities to report to the EPA was a bit of sodium hydroxide. The plants are larger now than they were then, but the only other chemicals that are commonly used in significant quantities are glycol, sometimes hydrofluoric acid, phosphoric acid (or in some plants POCl3), silane, aluminum, silver, and silicone. Solvents are used only in very small quantities.
Chemical safety specialists generally regard silane as the most problematic chemical in a PV plant, and even then it is more of an occupational safety issue than a pollution or "chemical cost" issue.
The fact is that France, because of the Academie Francaise, is preventing language degeneration, unlike in the US, where any word you want you can put in a dictionary and people will start to use it.
Oh, please. Word definitions are determined by usage, not the other way around. People don't use words because they are in the dictionary -- words are in the dictionary because people use them. That is a universal constant of lanugages, and the only way to stop it is to have widespread buy-in from the people who use the language (as they do in Iceland, which puts France to shame when it comes to language preservation). That's far easier to do when the populace is confined to a small geographic area, as with the French spoken in France, as opposed to spread all over the world, as with the English that you are complaining about.
The Academie Francaise is an anachronism.
French is still very much held together, and the ethymology of French words is easier to retrace, because in many cases the spelling still reflects the origin of a given word.
Don't forget that the tiny island where the English language developed was constantly raided, invaded, and attacked by nearby armies speaking a wide range of foreign languages, not to mention that it was a permanent home to at least three other languages. With so many people speaking so many languages over such a small area, it is hardly surprising that English absorbed a wide range of foreign words.
Most important of these foreign languages, of course, is the French introduced after the Norman invasion in 1066. Since the ruling class spoke French after that event, English was debased and acquired quite a large number of French words as upwardly mobile members of the lower classes attempted to make themselves sound important. IIRC, French was the official language of the British Parliament until sometime in the 16th century. Aside from Germanic, French has had more influence on the English language than any other. (In fact, most of the influence usually attributed to Latin can be traced to French.)
In other words, the French did more than anybody to ensure a seismic shift in the English language. :-)
Also, don't forget that French is spoken outside of France, and few of those speakers care a whit what the Academie Francaise has to say about their language. Have a listen to Quebecois, Haitian, or Beninese French sometime, then try to tell me that French is not every bit as "degenerate" as English.
This is a MUCH better deal than before, so to the fucking jerkoff suing them: "STOP IT"
Despite the misleading ad, this is way better than before, and i dont want to lose it because of some whiney malcontents and a money grubbing lawyer.
So companies should be allowed to lie in exchange for giving customers a better deal? I don't think so. And you're not going to lose this because of lawsuit -- Blockbuster can't afford to go back to the old system. The lawsuit seeks only to change the advertising to something more honest.
As for the "money grubbing lawyer," he happens to be the Attorney General of New Jersey, doing his job by enforcing the laws of that state. Oh, and he doesn't get any money out of this either -- just the same paycheck he gets whether he sues Blockbuster or not.
News Anchor: In an unrelated story, Koko the gorilla has a nipple fetish.
Debbie (unzipping top): We're under attack by robot monkey nipple fetishists?!
Sparks: No!
Debbie: Damn! I haven't been touched in hours! (zips top)
Murphy: Sparks! I'll be in my quarters. No way those monkeys are stealing my nipples....
Bert Krages, a photographer and attorney, publishes an online guide called The Photographer's Right that pretty well agrees with you. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before this matter ends up in court.
I'm no attorney, but it sure seems to me that this is a loaded comparison. Shoplifting is a criminal matter, while copyright violation is (usually) a civil matter. Each is handled by a different set of attorneys under a different set of procedures and governed by a different standard of guilt.
Not to mention that file-sharers are generally accused of "stealing" dozens, hundreds, or thousands of copies of a work. Not only would a shoplifter not likely be able to hide so many DVDs under his jacket, he would probably face charges of larceny or something much more serious than shoplifting. And if restitution were part of the sentence, he'd be facing a fine (theoretically) as large as that paid by file-sharers, plus statutory fines, plus jail time and/or probation.