I own a piece of software that converts images into a file format usable by my programmable embroidery machine. The software cost me $1000. It worked fine until the company folded. Now the software won't start up. I don't know why, but there isn't much I can do.
At this point I can either pay another $1000 for some other software, or I can illegally buy a cracked version of the software. In the latter case I have to take the chance that the seller will include a trojan in their software. I consider this totally unfair.
When a company goes belly up, the law should stipulate that copy protection mechanisms can be legally circumvented. In that case I could go and find a reputable company to get the crack from. As it stands I'm not sure what I'll do.
ETA. IRA. Ulster Unionists. Tamil Tigers. Aum Shinrikyo. RAF. Clinic bombers. Unabomber. Hate groups like Nazis attacking immigrants in some parts of Europe. KKK. FARC. Jewish Defense League.
How many of those have attacked planes? I'm not sure, but I don't recall anyone in that list attacking planes. My impression has been that although there are lots of terrorists around the world, the muslim terrorists disproportionally target passenger planes more than any other form of terrorist.
If that's true, then profiling for all types of terrorists doesn't make sense. Airport security should profile for those types of people who are most likely to attack planes.
This reminds me of the death of Douglas Adams. He was a funny writer and he died while exercising. Truly ironic. If one has to die then it's nice that the death be apropos to the type of person you are.
If I die an early death, I hope it's due to a meteorite hitting me while sitting at my computer.
Are you sure that "castigated" is the right word? I can imagine being playfully teased a bit perhaps (along the lines of "so no one here strikes your fancy?").
And, of course you can't assume a woman without a ring is looking for a guy. But, if a woman is wearing a ring then it's safe to assume that she isn't looking for a guy.
How about wearing a ring on one of the other fingers of the left hand?
Who the hell still buys porn on media? For the price of one DVD of porn you can get a one month subscription to a site that'll let you download thousands of porn videos.
If a woman doesn't want advances, couldn't she just wear a ring?
If she doesn't want to wear a ring then that must mean that she wants advances, but not from certain people that she wants to be friends with. That's a tricky problem.
To my mind, "going e-postal" would mean a DOS attack against their mail server. If they infected the mail servers with some sort of destructive virus then that'd be even closer.
We're the only species that has any potential of eventually extending the biosphere off of Earth.
Is that true? I thought that there were species of bacteria that could survive in outer space. Couldn't we load up a million boxes containing those sorts of bacteria and then launch them off the planet into the moons and atmospheres of the other planets?
If that's true then it might be possible for bacteria to get off the planet eventually. If a sufficiently large rock (like, say, the size of mars) were to hit the earth hard enough to bust it up then the bacteria might still make it through alive and some amount of that rock might make it to other planets and moons.
It's not a high probability chance, but I don't see why it couldn't happen in any given billion years.
Personally, just to be on the same side I think that if we can first determine that there is no bacterial life on a given planet then we should put some there. It's a hedge against destruction on earth.
The article says that Sony has 6 billion in cash reserves and that "Sony will lose nearly $2 billion on the PS3 by the end of this fiscal year in March".
Furthermore, the article says that Sony doesn't make a profit (overall across the entire company) in most years.
It's pretty amazing. They manufacture gobs and gobs of products and still do not make a profit in most years.
I don't know about make or break, but those numbers make it sound pretty significant.
Why do so many people think the abortion argument is complex? It's an axiomatic debate. You either believe that the fetus is a full fledged human with full rights or you believe that the fetus doesn't acquire those rights until it's old enough to survive on its own.
There is no philosophical argumentation involved. There is only endless debate decade after decade. The debate will never end because one side thinks it's horrible mass murder while the other side thinks it's an acceptable medical procedure.
As a practical person, I think that pro-lifers would make better use of their time if they did their best to massively subsidize all sorts of contraception options. I don't know why they don't do that. If they believe that preventing an abortion is saving a life then they should give out birth control pills at every street corner. They should provide for free vasectomies for anyone who wants them. And so on. I'll bet they could put a huge dent in the number of abortions performed if they tried that sort of reasonable approach rather than just railing against windmills for decade after decade.
There's no point in learning the platform of the party if you know that they'll never win. It's a protest vote. If you can't stomach Republicans or Democrats and you have a strong belief in smaller government then your only choice is to vote Libertarian even if it doesn't match your beliefs.
In any case, all the major parties have platforms that include extreme positions. Those positions are meaningless because they'll never get put into law, so you might as well ignore them.
The Green party advocates putting a max on the amount of money that people can make (the 10 to 1 rule or something like that). Goodbye economy if that ever happens. People will max out their wealth making power and then will just quit trying. No point in expanding your business if you can't make any more money than you are now.
The Democrat party think social security and Medicare, etc., were swell ideas and should be expanded until they encompass the entire budget (actually, they want them enlarged until poverty and sickness go away, so that means that it'll require an infinite amount of money.
I don't know what the Republican party believes anymore. They're all over the map. They want to reduce taxes on the most useless segment of society (the ones who inherit money) while at the same time they recently pushed through the largest increase in entitlement spending since LBJ. What the hell?
I used to be split between Republicans and Democrats (since I call myself a libertarian) and would vote based on how close to libertarian a candidate was. In a race between equal stupidities I'd just vote Libertarian. Now I'm voting Democrat across the board except for Arnold (a true fiscally conservative Republican and one of the few that seem to still exist). My goal is to see a split party at the top again.
Awesome! I've always said that I'll be the first one to sign up when cyborg technology becomes available. I had no idea that I was already a machine! Woot!
It's only possible for it to evolve that way from scratch when the solar system formed. It's probably exceedingly rare, but I can't think of any reason why some crazy sequence of events couldn't set up such a situation. If one star sideswipes another solar system (gravitationally) then anything could happen. (The star would need to go by at a distance such that it didn't totally destroy the solar system of course.)
Personally, I think they came up with something that's relatively ok, but I've decided that I would prefer an inheritance hierarchy. Just change the definition of planet to include absolutely everything that orbits a star. Then, create/modify the definitions of gas giant planets, small rocky planets, asteroids, comets, and human made space junk so that they are all sub-types of the Planet class.
People who want 9 planets can just refer to "the classical planets" and they'll be all set.
It'd turn the classification system for planets into something more like the species classification system.
Is there a way to buy this album without contributing to the RIAA? I'll definitely get it, but if I can't get it straight from a non-RIAA label then I'll have to wait until I can get it used.
I think of the universe in much the same way with regards to forces, but the idea of a substance that ignores some of the forces is not new. Light is a thing which pays attention to gravity (much like a coin does in those whirly coin machines). But, AFAIK, it isn't affected by nuclear forces.
I might be wrong about that. Are there any quantum physicists around here who can tell me if light is affected by nuclear forces?
Until this discovery I was pretty much on the fence regarding dark matter. The concept just seemed too squishy. But, assuming this discovery holds up, we now have some strong evidence that there is a substance in the universe that exerts and is affected by gravity but which is not affected by the other forces.
Re:I don't see any proof...
on
Dark Matter Exists
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· Score: 4, Informative
I didn't understand it until I watched the video.
Essentially it goes like this. They see a collision and make an assumption about what it was that collided.
Then, they looked over the area and determined where the mass is right now (from our point of view).
If the assumption about what collided is correct then the result should have been a mass of hot gas that is distributed like you'd expect if a ball of hot gas collided with another ball of hot gas.
Dark matter supposedly only interacts by gravity. Normal matter interacts by gravity plus nuclear and electromagnetic forces. That means that in a collision, normal matter collides with other normal matter while dark matter is merely slowed down and pulled by gravity.
The mass distribution that they observed matched up with the mass distribution implied by the dark matter theory. It can't be accounted for with just normal matter.
The parts of the theory that would need to hold up: - the assumed initial configuration of the matter before collision. - the current mass distribution that they observed. - the calculation about how the collision should behave if it's all normal matter. - the calculation about how the collision should behave if it's part dark matter.
If those parts hold up then it's a pretty striking discovery.
What does that make "AFAIK"? When I see that I read "as far as I know". I don't read it as "uff-ake" (so it's not an acronym) and I don't read it as "aay-eff-aay-eye-kay", so it's not an initalism.
I searched for this quote and found lots of references to it being on an Assyrian clay tablet from 2800 BC. I didn't find any hard evidence like an encyclopedia entry or a page at a reputable historical site.
However, I also was not able to find any reference to this on snopes.com or any page describing how this is an urban legend.
Does anyone have any hard references either way?
Regardless of the veracity of this quote, I did find a page describing similar quotes about Socrates. So, even if the original quote isn't a true quote, there are certainly similar examples that show the same silly "kids these days blah blah blah" mindset.
The funny thing is that I didn't actually see the "correct" interpretation until I read the responses. I first read it and thought "Who would ever comment that a piece of fruit flew like a banana?"
In other words, it's probably unfair to expect a program to understand that sentence when it can give humans difficulty.
I do it out of necessity. I measure my binders in feet (1 foot of DVD binders, 2 feet of PC applications). I used to keep the boxes in a separate huge box (one that originally had a TV in it), but after it filled up I decided it just wasn't worth it. I have to keep the instruction manuals for PC stuff of course, but I usually toss those if the app comes with good online help or a PDF of the manual on disc.
Do you care about the artwork? Personally, the first thing I do when I get a DVD is pull out the disc, stick it in a 3 ring binder sheet (4 discs per side per sheet) and throw away the box.
IANAP, but wouldn't any black hole created in a particle collider already be moving close to the speed of light when it collided?
I was initially confused as to how a black hole could be created when the amount of mass involved is trivial. It quickly occurred to me that if the particle was moving fast enough then it would acquire more mass the closer it was to light speed. But, if it collides then the energy will be released as heat or radiation or whatever and the mass would no longer be large enough to support a black hole.
Alternatively, if the black hole persists then wouldn't that imply that it had to retain a large amount of its velocity and thus would just travel away from earth?
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I feel your pain.
I own a piece of software that converts images into a file format usable by my programmable embroidery machine. The software cost me $1000. It worked fine until the company folded. Now the software won't start up. I don't know why, but there isn't much I can do.
At this point I can either pay another $1000 for some other software, or I can illegally buy a cracked version of the software. In the latter case I have to take the chance that the seller will include a trojan in their software. I consider this totally unfair.
When a company goes belly up, the law should stipulate that copy protection mechanisms can be legally circumvented. In that case I could go and find a reputable company to get the crack from. As it stands I'm not sure what I'll do.
If that's true, then profiling for all types of terrorists doesn't make sense. Airport security should profile for those types of people who are most likely to attack planes.
This reminds me of the death of Douglas Adams. He was a funny writer and he died while exercising. Truly ironic. If one has to die then it's nice that the death be apropos to the type of person you are.
If I die an early death, I hope it's due to a meteorite hitting me while sitting at my computer.
Are you sure that "castigated" is the right word? I can imagine being playfully teased a bit perhaps (along the lines of "so no one here strikes your fancy?").
And, of course you can't assume a woman without a ring is looking for a guy. But, if a woman is wearing a ring then it's safe to assume that she isn't looking for a guy.
How about wearing a ring on one of the other fingers of the left hand?
Porn isn't going to lead the way this time.
If a woman doesn't want advances, couldn't she just wear a ring? If she doesn't want to wear a ring then that must mean that she wants advances, but not from certain people that she wants to be friends with. That's a tricky problem.
To my mind, "going e-postal" would mean a DOS attack against their mail server. If they infected the mail servers with some sort of destructive virus then that'd be even closer.
If that's true then it might be possible for bacteria to get off the planet eventually. If a sufficiently large rock (like, say, the size of mars) were to hit the earth hard enough to bust it up then the bacteria might still make it through alive and some amount of that rock might make it to other planets and moons.
It's not a high probability chance, but I don't see why it couldn't happen in any given billion years.
Personally, just to be on the same side I think that if we can first determine that there is no bacterial life on a given planet then we should put some there. It's a hedge against destruction on earth.
The article says that Sony has 6 billion in cash reserves and that "Sony will lose nearly $2 billion on the PS3 by the end of this fiscal year in March".
Furthermore, the article says that Sony doesn't make a profit (overall across the entire company) in most years.
It's pretty amazing. They manufacture gobs and gobs of products and still do not make a profit in most years.
I don't know about make or break, but those numbers make it sound pretty significant.
Are there any CFLs that do not product the high pitched whine? I put one in and then quickly took it out. High pitched whines drive me nuts.
Why do so many people think the abortion argument is complex? It's an axiomatic debate. You either believe that the fetus is a full fledged human with full rights or you believe that the fetus doesn't acquire those rights until it's old enough to survive on its own.
There is no philosophical argumentation involved. There is only endless debate decade after decade. The debate will never end because one side thinks it's horrible mass murder while the other side thinks it's an acceptable medical procedure.
As a practical person, I think that pro-lifers would make better use of their time if they did their best to massively subsidize all sorts of contraception options. I don't know why they don't do that. If they believe that preventing an abortion is saving a life then they should give out birth control pills at every street corner. They should provide for free vasectomies for anyone who wants them. And so on. I'll bet they could put a huge dent in the number of abortions performed if they tried that sort of reasonable approach rather than just railing against windmills for decade after decade.
I could have sworn that I saw it on the list of 10 on the green party's page some years back. But, it's not there now. Nevertheless, seeM aximum_wage</a>. It talks about how it was on the Green Party's platform in 2000.
If there was a fair and systematic way to prevent mega corps then I might be in favor of that. Startups are a huge source of innovation that drives change in the economy. However, I don't see how a maximum wage would cause that to happen.
Working at a startup is hard work. You need to do a lot of work that you wouldn't do at a larger corp. The reason people go through that difficulty is so that they can strike it rich. That's not their only motivation, but there are plenty of outlets for creativity that do not involve 100 hour weeks where programmers also have to do janitorial work and sales work and paperwork in addition to their normal duties.
An alternative formulation that I might find interesting would be to put a cap on the maximum amount of money that a person can make based on the number of people at the company. The larger the company, the lower the max is. If the corporation is small enough then there wouldn't be a max. That might possibly work. All the best people who think they can make more would leave the big corps to start new startups. That seems risky to me, but it at least has the right sort of goals in mind. It's not about social justice, it's about lubricating the wheels of the economic machine. Trying to legislate social justice does not work. Trying to optimize the machine can work (although that usually fails too, which is why hands off is often the best policy).
There's no point in learning the platform of the party if you know that they'll never win. It's a protest vote. If you can't stomach Republicans or Democrats and you have a strong belief in smaller government then your only choice is to vote Libertarian even if it doesn't match your beliefs.
In any case, all the major parties have platforms that include extreme positions. Those positions are meaningless because they'll never get put into law, so you might as well ignore them.
The Green party advocates putting a max on the amount of money that people can make (the 10 to 1 rule or something like that). Goodbye economy if that ever happens. People will max out their wealth making power and then will just quit trying. No point in expanding your business if you can't make any more money than you are now.
The Democrat party think social security and Medicare, etc., were swell ideas and should be expanded until they encompass the entire budget (actually, they want them enlarged until poverty and sickness go away, so that means that it'll require an infinite amount of money.
I don't know what the Republican party believes anymore. They're all over the map. They want to reduce taxes on the most useless segment of society (the ones who inherit money) while at the same time they recently pushed through the largest increase in entitlement spending since LBJ. What the hell?
I used to be split between Republicans and Democrats (since I call myself a libertarian) and would vote based on how close to libertarian a candidate was. In a race between equal stupidities I'd just vote Libertarian. Now I'm voting Democrat across the board except for Arnold (a true fiscally conservative Republican and one of the few that seem to still exist). My goal is to see a split party at the top again.
Awesome! I've always said that I'll be the first one to sign up when cyborg technology becomes available. I had no idea that I was already a machine! Woot!
It's only possible for it to evolve that way from scratch when the solar system formed. It's probably exceedingly rare, but I can't think of any reason why some crazy sequence of events couldn't set up such a situation. If one star sideswipes another solar system (gravitationally) then anything could happen. (The star would need to go by at a distance such that it didn't totally destroy the solar system of course.)
Personally, I think they came up with something that's relatively ok, but I've decided that I would prefer an inheritance hierarchy. Just change the definition of planet to include absolutely everything that orbits a star. Then, create/modify the definitions of gas giant planets, small rocky planets, asteroids, comets, and human made space junk so that they are all sub-types of the Planet class.
People who want 9 planets can just refer to "the classical planets" and they'll be all set.
It'd turn the classification system for planets into something more like the species classification system.
Was all Apollo footage lost or just the Apollo 11 footage? If high quality footage exists of the other moon landings, can someone point me to it?
Is there a way to buy this album without contributing to the RIAA? I'll definitely get it, but if I can't get it straight from a non-RIAA label then I'll have to wait until I can get it used.
I think of the universe in much the same way with regards to forces, but the idea of a substance that ignores some of the forces is not new. Light is a thing which pays attention to gravity (much like a coin does in those whirly coin machines). But, AFAIK, it isn't affected by nuclear forces.
I might be wrong about that. Are there any quantum physicists around here who can tell me if light is affected by nuclear forces?
Until this discovery I was pretty much on the fence regarding dark matter. The concept just seemed too squishy. But, assuming this discovery holds up, we now have some strong evidence that there is a substance in the universe that exerts and is affected by gravity but which is not affected by the other forces.
I didn't understand it until I watched the video.
Essentially it goes like this. They see a collision and make an assumption about what it was that collided.
Then, they looked over the area and determined where the mass is right now (from our point of view).
If the assumption about what collided is correct then the result should have been a mass of hot gas that is distributed like you'd expect if a ball of hot gas collided with another ball of hot gas.
Dark matter supposedly only interacts by gravity. Normal matter interacts by gravity plus nuclear and electromagnetic forces. That means that in a collision, normal matter collides with other normal matter while dark matter is merely slowed down and pulled by gravity.
The mass distribution that they observed matched up with the mass distribution implied by the dark matter theory. It can't be accounted for with just normal matter.
The parts of the theory that would need to hold up:
- the assumed initial configuration of the matter before collision.
- the current mass distribution that they observed.
- the calculation about how the collision should behave if it's all normal matter.
- the calculation about how the collision should behave if it's part dark matter.
If those parts hold up then it's a pretty striking discovery.
What does that make "AFAIK"? When I see that I read "as far as I know". I don't read it as "uff-ake" (so it's not an acronym) and I don't read it as "aay-eff-aay-eye-kay", so it's not an initalism.
However, I also was not able to find any reference to this on snopes.com or any page describing how this is an urban legend.
Does anyone have any hard references either way?
Regardless of the veracity of this quote, I did find a page describing similar quotes about Socrates. So, even if the original quote isn't a true quote, there are certainly similar examples that show the same silly "kids these days blah blah blah" mindset.
The funny thing is that I didn't actually see the "correct" interpretation until I read the responses. I first read it and thought "Who would ever comment that a piece of fruit flew like a banana?"
In other words, it's probably unfair to expect a program to understand that sentence when it can give humans difficulty.
I do it out of necessity. I measure my binders in feet (1 foot of DVD binders, 2 feet of PC applications). I used to keep the boxes in a separate huge box (one that originally had a TV in it), but after it filled up I decided it just wasn't worth it. I have to keep the instruction manuals for PC stuff of course, but I usually toss those if the app comes with good online help or a PDF of the manual on disc.
Do you care about the artwork? Personally, the first thing I do when I get a DVD is pull out the disc, stick it in a 3 ring binder sheet (4 discs per side per sheet) and throw away the box.
IANAP, but wouldn't any black hole created in a particle collider already be moving close to the speed of light when it collided?
I was initially confused as to how a black hole could be created when the amount of mass involved is trivial. It quickly occurred to me that if the particle was moving fast enough then it would acquire more mass the closer it was to light speed. But, if it collides then the energy will be released as heat or radiation or whatever and the mass would no longer be large enough to support a black hole.
Alternatively, if the black hole persists then wouldn't that imply that it had to retain a large amount of its velocity and thus would just travel away from earth?