I'd bet $20 that out of the top 25% wealthiest people in America, most of them make their money via mind, rather than muscle.
And I'd bet that most of them weren't geeks, but intelligent and popular people (and that many were athletes). The mainstream* social skills that translate into high-school popularity are useful later in life. It's also thought that your position in the social hierarchy in adolescence shapes your personality; the people on top in high school will on average be more assertive later in life. (Which makes the awful social environment in most schools even more harmful.) Even athleticism in and of itself might be helpful, if fit-looking people get more (unconscious) respect from e.g. bosses.
* I'm not saying geeks don't have social skills, but that they have different social skills that allow them to fit in better with geeks than with non-geeks. Non-geeks would probably find themselves as marginalized in a mostly-geek group as geeks do in a 'normal' group.
The truth is that powerful Vista machines have nothing more to offer with respect to web browsing and editor capabilities,
Yes. Yes, they do.
Have you used an OLPC? I got one recently (through the Give 1 Get 1 program), and the software is crap. The browser doesn't have tabs, or even history besides Forward/Back, and it can't play YouTube videos (I don't know if this is just a software limitation or if the hardware is too weak). You can bet Firefox or IE on a full-size PC has "more to offer". The word processor isn't so bad, but (AFAIK) it can't open or save to a location in the file system - storage is accessed through a poorly-implemented "Journal" interface. (I know the intent is to be less confusing to new users, but a) it's still plenty confusing and underpowered and b) it's poorly integrated - f.ex., trying to upload a file to a web page opens a standard file selector dialog.) Applications are slow to start, and you can't view more than one window at once (or open new browser windows - you have to, slowly, start another browser process). Etc.
Don't get me wrong - I like the OLPC concept, and the hardware, and the idea of an OS more suited to children's use, and I'm sure future revisions of the software will fix some of these problems, but I'm in awe that these machines are actually being given to children in their current sorry state. The starry-eyed open-source idealism, overly-ambitious wheel-reinventing, and general amateurishness of their software development effort are pretty disappointing.
Hmm... you're right, I jumped. That's not a requirement, but a strong recommendation. However, no original research is a requirement, which has similar effect.
I do agree that "cite sources" should be an absolute requirement.
The contributors helped to build wikipedia, and now they are being blocked out of editing some of the content they may have even written themselves.
Unless they get accounts... which they should anyway if they intend to make serious positive contributions.
This isn't a 'rights' issue in any way. Nobody has a 'right' to edit Wikipedia. As a private organization, it can restrict whoever it wants from using its services. Wikipedia does an extremely admirable job of being open, but no site of its popularity can be perfectly open and survive, and so it is taking perfectly reasonable and necessary measures to prevent jerkoffs from making it utterly unusable.
There are already plans to do something along those lines, although not quite as sweeping. I do think this sounds like a good idea in general, but might lose two of Wikipedia's greatest assets, its fast response time and coverage of thousands of really obscure topics.
By that argument, you could say that Ray Davis's experiment didn't work, because it didn't agree with the Standard Model, so it obviously must have been wrong.
Which would have been a reasonable thing to say, until other experiments produced the same result. Of course, then, people argue (as you can see here) as to exactly what the results of further cold fusion experiments mean.
Because its generated nature is unusual. This is the first gravity ever to not have been produced by a mass. Perhaps if electricity were more obviously common in nature, we would call human-generated electricity "artificial".
Neither. Apparently, you've been asleep since the beginning of the 20th century: Newton is WRONG. Gravity is the bending of space, and it just happens that the main thing that bends space is mass - but not the only thing.
(But this device, apparently, isn't entirely consistent with General Relativity either. Nor does it generate gravity - it apparently creates a force that relates to gravity in the same way magnetism relates to electricity. I can't understand that.)
The whole point of artificial gravity is that you get a gravitational effect without more mass.
However, I'm not sure how they would ensure it isn't the "weak magnetic field" that the superconductor generates.
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That'd be a bit harsh on the people who visit them by mistake and then go to jail for having child porn in their browser cache.
The parent post.
"We now have AAC/MPEG-4 part 3 for audio and H.264/MPEG-4 part 10 for video"... both of which are patent-encumbered.
Alive or not, viruses are infective agents. Pheromones aren't.
And I'd bet that most of them weren't geeks, but intelligent and popular people (and that many were athletes). The mainstream* social skills that translate into high-school popularity are useful later in life. It's also thought that your position in the social hierarchy in adolescence shapes your personality; the people on top in high school will on average be more assertive later in life. (Which makes the awful social environment in most schools even more harmful.) Even athleticism in and of itself might be helpful, if fit-looking people get more (unconscious) respect from e.g. bosses.
* I'm not saying geeks don't have social skills, but that they have different social skills that allow them to fit in better with geeks than with non-geeks. Non-geeks would probably find themselves as marginalized in a mostly-geek group as geeks do in a 'normal' group.
Rather, more well-off, educated, cosmopolitan, etc. people both buy more technology and are more likely to be atheists.
How is giving away vaccinations profitable or anti-competitive?
The truth is that powerful Vista machines have nothing more to offer with respect to web browsing and editor capabilities,
Yes. Yes, they do.
Have you used an OLPC? I got one recently (through the Give 1 Get 1 program), and the software is crap. The browser doesn't have tabs, or even history besides Forward/Back, and it can't play YouTube videos (I don't know if this is just a software limitation or if the hardware is too weak). You can bet Firefox or IE on a full-size PC has "more to offer". The word processor isn't so bad, but (AFAIK) it can't open or save to a location in the file system - storage is accessed through a poorly-implemented "Journal" interface. (I know the intent is to be less confusing to new users, but a) it's still plenty confusing and underpowered and b) it's poorly integrated - f.ex., trying to upload a file to a web page opens a standard file selector dialog.) Applications are slow to start, and you can't view more than one window at once (or open new browser windows - you have to, slowly, start another browser process). Etc.
Don't get me wrong - I like the OLPC concept, and the hardware, and the idea of an OS more suited to children's use, and I'm sure future revisions of the software will fix some of these problems, but I'm in awe that these machines are actually being given to children in their current sorry state. The starry-eyed open-source idealism, overly-ambitious wheel-reinventing, and general amateurishness of their software development effort are pretty disappointing.
It's more likely that they don't actually have anything incriminating available.
Hmm... you're right, I jumped. That's not a requirement, but a strong recommendation. However, no original research is a requirement, which has similar effect.
I do agree that "cite sources" should be an absolute requirement.
The contributors helped to build wikipedia, and now they are being blocked out of editing some of the content they may have even written themselves.
Unless they get accounts... which they should anyway if they intend to make serious positive contributions.
This isn't a 'rights' issue in any way. Nobody has a 'right' to edit Wikipedia. As a private organization, it can restrict whoever it wants from using its services. Wikipedia does an extremely admirable job of being open, but no site of its popularity can be perfectly open and survive, and so it is taking perfectly reasonable and necessary measures to prevent jerkoffs from making it utterly unusable.
There are already plans to do something along those lines, although not quite as sweeping. I do think this sounds like a good idea in general, but might lose two of Wikipedia's greatest assets, its fast response time and coverage of thousands of really obscure topics.
It does. (When you accuse others of not checking facts, please check your facts.)
Which would have been a reasonable thing to say, until other experiments produced the same result. Of course, then, people argue (as you can see here) as to exactly what the results of further cold fusion experiments mean.
Not out of thin air. Look several posts up.
"Free fall in the strict sense is the condition of acceleration which is due only to gravity." This includes orbit. I was wrong, however, to imply that an anti-gravity device creates free fall.
Because its generated nature is unusual. This is the first gravity ever to not have been produced by a mass. Perhaps if electricity were more obviously common in nature, we would call human-generated electricity "artificial".
It seems to me that the problem with that analogy is that the smaller ball only goes into the dent because of the Earth's gravity...
Things that are producible in orbit are producible in orbit because they're in free fall.
If you can create gravity, it should be easy to create antigravity - i.e., free fall.
Neither. Apparently, you've been asleep since the beginning of the 20th century: Newton is WRONG. Gravity is the bending of space, and it just happens that the main thing that bends space is mass - but not the only thing.
(But this device, apparently, isn't entirely consistent with General Relativity either. Nor does it generate gravity - it apparently creates a force that relates to gravity in the same way magnetism relates to electricity. I can't understand that.)
The whole point of artificial gravity is that you get a gravitational effect without more mass. However, I'm not sure how they would ensure it isn't the "weak magnetic field" that the superconductor generates.
Does anybody who IAL know if this would be adequate grounds for an anti-trust suit?
Oh, yeah, it's easy to kill someone with a chest X-ray machine.
I should suppose so, since the p+p->D reaction (e.g. in the Sun) is exothermic.