I thought the same at first, but then I searched around a bit. Plus, a half dozen other posters have pointed out that there are such things as American crocodiles. They are endangered - only about 1200 left in Florida.
It may be much ado about nothing today, but who's to say that text-to-speech software on a handheld won't be capable of proper inflection and emoting in 10 years? The difference in quality between the Kindle's text-to-speech and a voice actor is pretty clear, but I doubt that will be the case forever, or even for another decade or two.
I think more than anything else they want a court precedent, a line in the sand, before software gets that good.
Had the RIAA realized back in 1995 that people would be able to rip CDs to create files that can be played on a computer or traded across the internet, they might have been able to control it. [I'm not saying they should have done, or that the Author's Guild is right, though].
When you're buying an audiobook, you're paying for more than just having the book read to you. The reader (well, the GOOD ones, anyway) inject personality into them. You won't get that out of TTS
You don't get that now, but who's to say that text-to-speech software on a handheld won't be capable of proper inflection and emoting in 5 or 10 years? The different in quality between the Kindle's text-to-speech and a voice actor is pretty clear, but I doubt that will be the case forever, or even for another decade or two.
I think more than anything else they want a court precedent, a line in the sand, before software gets that good.
There is no reason to believe that the debris field will all remain in the orbits of the original satellites. When they collided, parts got thrown all over, radiating outward from the collision point. Some of those were thrown forward (faster along one orbital path than the original satellites), some were thrown backward (slower than the original orbit), some thrown up (away from earth), some down, and some sideways. The ones that were shot forward will end up in higher orbits, including some at the altitude of Hubble. The ones shot backwards will mostly deorbit and burn up. The others are a bit less predictable - their orbits will be eccentric and in different planes than either original satellite, with changes in altitude, too.
So, no, it isn't possible to rule out the risk because Hubble's orbit was drastically different. Moving from one orbit to another just takes some energy, and there was plenty of energy involved in the collision, and plenty of smaller bits to make it statistically possible for one to reach it.
Even if it weren't illegal, casinos really, really don't like card counters. Even those who do it entirely in their heads, if they are found out or simply start winning too consistently, can be asked to leave or escorted out of the casino. It's not a matter of legality or fairness; casinos regard it simply as cheating (anything that tips the odds they've established in their favor is cheating to them), barely above outright theft, and take action accordingly.
In extreme cases, they can add you to a blacklist that other casinos subscribe to. Enforcement of the blacklist starts getting into really impressive, and scary, Big-Brother stuff that governments could only dream of - automatic face recognition and tracking, cross-checking faces against the black list, logging time spent at such-and-such location (i.e., table), who happens to be around the person at the same time (to sniff out collaborative counting groups). Casinos can do it because they have lots of money and incentive to do so, plus they are working this stuff in a smaller environment that they design and control to the hilt.
About the only relationship to God the Higgs boson has is that there's a whole bunch of people that devote their lives to it, building temples, and yet so far have to take its existence of faith. I sometimes wonder if their zeal isn't more like idolatry than adoration.
Rather than searching for the thing itself, I think it better to reflect on what the thing's existence would mean in the grand scheme of things.
You've never been to Moab, have you? Hikers and partiers are one and the same there.
Beyond Arches, there's also Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, and Zion. Aside from national parks, there is also some killer skiing up in the mountains, and rivers to run. There's plenty of outdoorsy stuff to do in Utah. And while I'm sure people don't go to Utah specifically to drink, it is a nice thing to do after a long day enjoying the world, and the less hassle involved, the better.
I'm going to put in my grumpy old man dentures and rant on for a moment:
For f$ck's sake, if you are submitting an article with an acronym in it, expand it the first time so that everyone knows what the hell you are talking about. This goes not only for slashdot, but for articles in all technical venues. In some tight technical circles, some assumed knowledge and common language can be expected, but/. is a broad audience, and not everyone knows at first glance what a WISP is. This is specially true when used in the context of an article that is probably introducing it to people for the first time.
When you come down to it, there really isn't any significant difference between recording fingerprints and recording DNA.
Yes, there is a huge difference between fingerprints and DNA.
Fingerprints tell you nothing about a person other than what strange wavy patterns happen to be on their fingertips. Whatever palm-readers might say, fingerprints don't give insight into the person they belong to.
DNA, on the other hand, can tell you nearly infinite amounts about a person: sex, ethnicity, eye color, whether they are prone to depression, schizophrenia, cancer, violent tendencies, etc. And whereas fingerprints are not hereditary (your fingerprints have essentially no correlation to your parents' or siblings'), DNA is all about inheritance.
The potential for abuse here is incalculably greater than with fingerprints. Haven't you seen Gattaca? How much would a genocidal dictator love to have such a DNA database? He'd be able to figure out exactly who belongs to the race/ethnicity/tribe you despise most. Hitler is the prime example, but there are any number of other, more recent, genocides that it could apply to. One needn't go to the extreme of genocide to start getting the willies about the government having such comprehensive information about its people. And that's just what is available with what we know about DNA today - who can say what will be possible in a generation?
Some background on why an artificial liver is a really big deal, and why it has been really hard until now to produce one:
(Any doctors or biologists more knowledgeable can fill in the gaps and correct me)
The liver breaks down toxins in the blood by metabolizing them. That is, they get broken down into simpler compounds by chemical reactions that take place in and around living cells. Contrast this with dialysis - an artificial kidney - which is able to work by filtering out chemicals based on molecular weight. Dialysis uses bundles of membranes that allow relatively light molecules (such as water) to pass through, but block heavier ones. The stuff the liver breaks down are too unwieldy or complex to be filtered out based just on weight - there are lots of other, good things in the blood that are of similar weight or complexity. A simple filter can't distinguish them; hepatocytes (liver cell clusters) can.
The task of creating the filtering membrane of a dialysis machine is a relatively well understood materials and processing problem. An artificial liver, which usually has a mini dialysis unit on the front or back end, also requires you to have living clusters of cells, and keep them alive, nourished, and healthy long enough for them to do some effective and therapeutic blood filtering. That's a much trickier biological problem, and we are only now getting decent at it.
The uses for a bio-artificial liver is huge. It can help people with chronic liver failure live longer and healthier lives, true, but it has more uses than that. The liver, as it turns out, is one of the few organs that can regenerate itself. If it is damaged by disease or some toxic insult, it is possible for it to repair itself if given the chance (in normally healthy people - the liver can also be damaged beyond repair). The problem is that in lots of cases the patient will die before the liver gets a chance to heal, leaving two options: hope for a liver transplant on really short notice, or die. A device like this can be a bridge to transplant or, in some cases, take the burden off the liver long enough for it to heal itself.
Sooooo, the fact that he (or his company) doesn't need to worry about potential lawsuits or prosecution means that the company shouldn't want to correct the situation anyway? Is the risk of getting caught the only thing that keeps people following laws?
I don't think that we need blame the quality of the link in the summary on the physicist. He himself isn't the one guilty of self-publicity, nor I'm guessing is he responsible for the poorly-informed quality of the piece. You can see that it was put out from the UA Edmonton public relations office, which like other university PR offices, is in the business of promoting the institution, not necessarily well-informed journalism.
Look at it another way. 800 Watts times 24 hours is 19.2 kWh of energy consumption in a day. The typical home in the US uses about 30 kWh/day, my own uses less than 8 (and, yes, I have a fridge, and a microwave, and everything else you'd expect). So, 19.2 kWh/day for a Scottish home is probably not all that out of line.
Inefficient electrical devices are almost irrelevant to that problem, and pretty much miss the point.
The cleanest watt to generate is the watt you don't need in the first place. Energy efficiency, in consumer electronics as in everything else, isn't just some personal virtue - it's an important and cost-effective aspect of an effective energy strategy. If we had enforced energy efficiency standards for our consumer electronics, we simply wouldn't need to generate so much power, whether its from coal, nuclear, or unicorns and rainbows.
Maintaining power to a volatile memory certainly doesn't need to consume tens of watts, which is what a lot of TVs (including the article author's) consume when they're "off".
My old piece-of-crap CRT is on a power strip (along with the DVD and VCR). If I'm not watching it, off it goes.
One can argue the same distinction between the person who has or uses the gun to commit murder and the person who manufactured it. A person is not always responsible for what others do with their creations.
If it makes you feel better, one could argue a distribution charge for the girls involved. But I would not argue that taking and having pictures of oneself, even a young girl in nude provocative poses, makes that same person a child pornographer.
It's called in loco parentis. If a child's mother has a right to look through their child's cellphone and report anything fishy to the police, then generally so would a public school.
When a school searches or seizes from a child, they are doing so in loco parentis. In other words, they have almost as much legal authority to do so as one's own parents. If your mother can hand over your pot to the police, so can the school.
In the case of children, there is little (legal) separation between nude art and pornography, or personal expression (as these girls were apparently doing) and pornography. The separation is particularly small when it is film or video of an actual child, as opposed to those ridiculous peeing cherub fountains you see at garden stores.
One consideration when determining if the nudity is pornographic is the intent - is it meant to be sexually provocative, to turn you on? I'm guessing that these girls weren't sending high-art self portraits to these boys; they were sending sexually-intended images. I think it's reasonable to assume, too, that these boys weren't admiring these pictures as one would do with portraits in a gallery.
Based just on these two standards, it is reasonable to assume that these images meet the legal definition of child pornography, at least enough to charge someone and have a trial.
Whether a child taking self portraits makes them a child pornographer is, in my mind at least, a more dubious argument. I think the possession/distributing charge for the boys could hold up, though there may be some leeway as they are minors. When two minors have sex, they (usually) aren't charged with statutory rape.
Why the method is not more popular I do not know. Seems to be no brainer.
I can think of two reasons. The first is that manure digesters, like all energy infrastructure, requires a lot of money up front. Farms are strapped for capital as it is with buying seed, fertilizer, and equipment, so it's tough to come up with the necessary money, even if it pays for itself in X number of years. That doesn't explain why it isn't done on a municipal level, but at that scale the logistics of collecting the waste and bringing it to the plant may not be as advantageous.
The second reason is that plenty of folks are simply unwilling, or uneasy, about trying something different (or, at least, different to them). As far as I know, there aren't turnkey solutions for manure digesters - each one is more or less a custom job. So it entails more risk than, say, buying a generator and a tank of fuel. That won't always be the case, but for now it is unfamiliar enough that many would shy away from it.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the same at first, but then I searched around a bit. Plus, a half dozen other posters have pointed out that there are such things as American crocodiles. They are endangered - only about 1200 left in Florida.
It may be much ado about nothing today, but who's to say that text-to-speech software on a handheld won't be capable of proper inflection and emoting in 10 years? The difference in quality between the Kindle's text-to-speech and a voice actor is pretty clear, but I doubt that will be the case forever, or even for another decade or two.
I think more than anything else they want a court precedent, a line in the sand, before software gets that good.
Had the RIAA realized back in 1995 that people would be able to rip CDs to create files that can be played on a computer or traded across the internet, they might have been able to control it. [I'm not saying they should have done, or that the Author's Guild is right, though].
I only ever read books by Stephen Hawking, so this would be perfect.
You don't get that now, but who's to say that text-to-speech software on a handheld won't be capable of proper inflection and emoting in 5 or 10 years? The different in quality between the Kindle's text-to-speech and a voice actor is pretty clear, but I doubt that will be the case forever, or even for another decade or two.
I think more than anything else they want a court precedent, a line in the sand, before software gets that good.
There is no reason to believe that the debris field will all remain in the orbits of the original satellites. When they collided, parts got thrown all over, radiating outward from the collision point. Some of those were thrown forward (faster along one orbital path than the original satellites), some were thrown backward (slower than the original orbit), some thrown up (away from earth), some down, and some sideways. The ones that were shot forward will end up in higher orbits, including some at the altitude of Hubble. The ones shot backwards will mostly deorbit and burn up. The others are a bit less predictable - their orbits will be eccentric and in different planes than either original satellite, with changes in altitude, too.
So, no, it isn't possible to rule out the risk because Hubble's orbit was drastically different. Moving from one orbit to another just takes some energy, and there was plenty of energy involved in the collision, and plenty of smaller bits to make it statistically possible for one to reach it.
Even if it weren't illegal, casinos really, really don't like card counters. Even those who do it entirely in their heads, if they are found out or simply start winning too consistently, can be asked to leave or escorted out of the casino. It's not a matter of legality or fairness; casinos regard it simply as cheating (anything that tips the odds they've established in their favor is cheating to them), barely above outright theft, and take action accordingly.
In extreme cases, they can add you to a blacklist that other casinos subscribe to. Enforcement of the blacklist starts getting into really impressive, and scary, Big-Brother stuff that governments could only dream of - automatic face recognition and tracking, cross-checking faces against the black list, logging time spent at such-and-such location (i.e., table), who happens to be around the person at the same time (to sniff out collaborative counting groups). Casinos can do it because they have lots of money and incentive to do so, plus they are working this stuff in a smaller environment that they design and control to the hilt.
Because it's totally frickin' awesome, dude!
Here, here!
About the only relationship to God the Higgs boson has is that there's a whole bunch of people that devote their lives to it, building temples, and yet so far have to take its existence of faith. I sometimes wonder if their zeal isn't more like idolatry than adoration.
Rather than searching for the thing itself, I think it better to reflect on what the thing's existence would mean in the grand scheme of things.
you say that like it's nothing?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't you end up with a GoogleUpdaterService background process running in Windows, too?
You've never been to Moab, have you? Hikers and partiers are one and the same there.
Beyond Arches, there's also Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, and Zion. Aside from national parks, there is also some killer skiing up in the mountains, and rivers to run. There's plenty of outdoorsy stuff to do in Utah. And while I'm sure people don't go to Utah specifically to drink, it is a nice thing to do after a long day enjoying the world, and the less hassle involved, the better.
I'm going to put in my grumpy old man dentures and rant on for a moment:
/. is a broad audience, and not everyone knows at first glance what a WISP is. This is specially true when used in the context of an article that is probably introducing it to people for the first time.
For f$ck's sake, if you are submitting an article with an acronym in it, expand it the first time so that everyone knows what the hell you are talking about. This goes not only for slashdot, but for articles in all technical venues. In some tight technical circles, some assumed knowledge and common language can be expected, but
Yes, there is a huge difference between fingerprints and DNA.
Fingerprints tell you nothing about a person other than what strange wavy patterns happen to be on their fingertips. Whatever palm-readers might say, fingerprints don't give insight into the person they belong to. DNA, on the other hand, can tell you nearly infinite amounts about a person: sex, ethnicity, eye color, whether they are prone to depression, schizophrenia, cancer, violent tendencies, etc. And whereas fingerprints are not hereditary (your fingerprints have essentially no correlation to your parents' or siblings'), DNA is all about inheritance.
The potential for abuse here is incalculably greater than with fingerprints. Haven't you seen Gattaca ? How much would a genocidal dictator love to have such a DNA database? He'd be able to figure out exactly who belongs to the race/ethnicity/tribe you despise most. Hitler is the prime example, but there are any number of other, more recent, genocides that it could apply to. One needn't go to the extreme of genocide to start getting the willies about the government having such comprehensive information about its people. And that's just what is available with what we know about DNA today - who can say what will be possible in a generation?
Some background on why an artificial liver is a really big deal, and why it has been really hard until now to produce one:
(Any doctors or biologists more knowledgeable can fill in the gaps and correct me)
The liver breaks down toxins in the blood by metabolizing them. That is, they get broken down into simpler compounds by chemical reactions that take place in and around living cells. Contrast this with dialysis - an artificial kidney - which is able to work by filtering out chemicals based on molecular weight. Dialysis uses bundles of membranes that allow relatively light molecules (such as water) to pass through, but block heavier ones. The stuff the liver breaks down are too unwieldy or complex to be filtered out based just on weight - there are lots of other, good things in the blood that are of similar weight or complexity. A simple filter can't distinguish them; hepatocytes (liver cell clusters) can.
The task of creating the filtering membrane of a dialysis machine is a relatively well understood materials and processing problem. An artificial liver, which usually has a mini dialysis unit on the front or back end, also requires you to have living clusters of cells, and keep them alive, nourished, and healthy long enough for them to do some effective and therapeutic blood filtering. That's a much trickier biological problem, and we are only now getting decent at it.
The uses for a bio-artificial liver is huge. It can help people with chronic liver failure live longer and healthier lives, true, but it has more uses than that. The liver, as it turns out, is one of the few organs that can regenerate itself. If it is damaged by disease or some toxic insult, it is possible for it to repair itself if given the chance (in normally healthy people - the liver can also be damaged beyond repair). The problem is that in lots of cases the patient will die before the liver gets a chance to heal, leaving two options: hope for a liver transplant on really short notice, or die. A device like this can be a bridge to transplant or, in some cases, take the burden off the liver long enough for it to heal itself.
Sooooo, the fact that he (or his company) doesn't need to worry about potential lawsuits or prosecution means that the company shouldn't want to correct the situation anyway? Is the risk of getting caught the only thing that keeps people following laws?
I don't think that we need blame the quality of the link in the summary on the physicist. He himself isn't the one guilty of self-publicity, nor I'm guessing is he responsible for the poorly-informed quality of the piece. You can see that it was put out from the UA Edmonton public relations office, which like other university PR offices, is in the business of promoting the institution, not necessarily well-informed journalism.
Look at it another way. 800 Watts times 24 hours is 19.2 kWh of energy consumption in a day. The typical home in the US uses about 30 kWh/day, my own uses less than 8 (and, yes, I have a fridge, and a microwave, and everything else you'd expect). So, 19.2 kWh/day for a Scottish home is probably not all that out of line.
For a long while I parsed Signorney Weaver as saying "nuke the side for morbid." Then I got a DVD player and surround sound.
The cleanest watt to generate is the watt you don't need in the first place. Energy efficiency, in consumer electronics as in everything else, isn't just some personal virtue - it's an important and cost-effective aspect of an effective energy strategy. If we had enforced energy efficiency standards for our consumer electronics, we simply wouldn't need to generate so much power, whether its from coal, nuclear, or unicorns and rainbows.
Maintaining power to a volatile memory certainly doesn't need to consume tens of watts, which is what a lot of TVs (including the article author's) consume when they're "off".
My old piece-of-crap CRT is on a power strip (along with the DVD and VCR). If I'm not watching it, off it goes.
One can argue the same distinction between the person who has or uses the gun to commit murder and the person who manufactured it. A person is not always responsible for what others do with their creations.
If it makes you feel better, one could argue a distribution charge for the girls involved. But I would not argue that taking and having pictures of oneself, even a young girl in nude provocative poses, makes that same person a child pornographer.
It's called in loco parentis . If a child's mother has a right to look through their child's cellphone and report anything fishy to the police, then generally so would a public school.
When a school searches or seizes from a child, they are doing so in loco parentis. In other words, they have almost as much legal authority to do so as one's own parents. If your mother can hand over your pot to the police, so can the school.
In the case of children, there is little (legal) separation between nude art and pornography, or personal expression (as these girls were apparently doing) and pornography. The separation is particularly small when it is film or video of an actual child, as opposed to those ridiculous peeing cherub fountains you see at garden stores.
One consideration when determining if the nudity is pornographic is the intent - is it meant to be sexually provocative, to turn you on? I'm guessing that these girls weren't sending high-art self portraits to these boys; they were sending sexually-intended images. I think it's reasonable to assume, too, that these boys weren't admiring these pictures as one would do with portraits in a gallery.
Based just on these two standards, it is reasonable to assume that these images meet the legal definition of child pornography, at least enough to charge someone and have a trial.
Whether a child taking self portraits makes them a child pornographer is, in my mind at least, a more dubious argument. I think the possession/distributing charge for the boys could hold up, though there may be some leeway as they are minors. When two minors have sex, they (usually) aren't charged with statutory rape.
I can think of two reasons. The first is that manure digesters, like all energy infrastructure, requires a lot of money up front. Farms are strapped for capital as it is with buying seed, fertilizer, and equipment, so it's tough to come up with the necessary money, even if it pays for itself in X number of years. That doesn't explain why it isn't done on a municipal level, but at that scale the logistics of collecting the waste and bringing it to the plant may not be as advantageous.
The second reason is that plenty of folks are simply unwilling, or uneasy, about trying something different (or, at least, different to them). As far as I know, there aren't turnkey solutions for manure digesters - each one is more or less a custom job. So it entails more risk than, say, buying a generator and a tank of fuel. That won't always be the case, but for now it is unfamiliar enough that many would shy away from it.