Yeah, as I understand it, it's mainly because the NRA is such a prominent force that the ACLU ignores the issue and concentrates on other rights. There's not much they could do which the NRA hasn't already got covered.
Uh, the article says that they aim to be complete at 9 am EST. While that might mean an American time zone in America, in Australia that means an Australian time zone (specifically, AEST, or GMT+10, aka their local time). So they're actually aiming to finish on Thursday afternoon Eastern American time.
Just a FYI, unless there's clarification somewhere that they were speaking of the American EST.
To be honest, I seriously doubt they actually care - popular peripherals can only increase the demand for their products. All they're doing is ensuring that there's a clear gap between them so that if some think-of-the-children types kick up a fuss then they can say 'We have nothing to do with them - look, we even tried to shut them down via lawsuit.'
This kind of publicity helps both parties, and I say more power to them if the media is running with it.
If you want to stay, encourage her to start her own business. Seriously, if she's generating income without taking one of the 'American jobs' that some people seem to value so highly (or, better yet, employing Americans herself), then she should be in a strong position to stay on her own terms. I'm not talking tech-style insane-growth entrepreneurship, just something smallish that generates a reasonable income - selling books online or something like that.
Note that I'm not a lawyer and know little of the American visa system so do some research on the subject yourself first, but I would assume that there are processes in place to attract and keep entrepreneurs (who are highly valued by every country).
Hmm, I'd say he's got a good point - there's simply not a culture of privilege awareness in Windows developers.
Perhaps Microsoft should set up an audit unit and start giving software a 'UAC-compatible' tick if a piece of software has minimised how much UAC approval is required if its turned on, allowing the publisher to put it on their box so that the customers can tell. Who knows, perhaps one day the UAC system might actually be viable.
On that note, this has certainly provided publicity for Digg - I hadn't spent more than about 5 minutes at the site before the fiasco, but spent some time watching the chaos on the day. Admittedly, I've no plans to go back there, but it certainly kept my interest for a little while.
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
To be honest, I'd say he's missed the point. The primary reason that his readers aren't unhappy isn't because of his team's moderating of the HD DVD code; at least, not directly. They're unhappy because the stories were taken down without explanation, users were apparently banned for simply doing what one is supposed to do on the site, and generally gave the impression that he had sided with them over us, which is never going to go down well.
If he'd just been more up-front and honest about what was going on, things would have gone much more smoothly. Sure, there would have been grumbling and a few irrepressible rebels would have posted the stuff anyway, but I seriously doubt that the reader base would have caught fire like it did. The biggest issue, IMO, was that it gave the impression (if not the reality) of a breach of trust, and trust is possibly the key thing to have in any sort of community.
Hmm, I can see how you misinterpreted that, but I was actually saying that if you increase your exposure to sunlight (in order to get more vitamin D) then you increase your risk of skin cancer.
Well, yes, that's how evolution works. But do you really want to have go through all that every time you want to note an evolutionary phenomena? Obviously, since evolution works in a Darwinistic rather than Lamarckian form, life forms cannot 'develop' traits in the usual sense of the word, but if you assume in your audience an understanding of how evolution works, using words like 'develop' is a useful shorthand.
The Inuits' darker skin can be explained by the fact that they've historically lived in the snow, which reflects UV light, doubling their intake. I don't know under which definition you're calling Mongols dark skinned, because they certainly don't look it to me, nor do the similarly coloured Ainu.
This isn't exactly my field, though - do you have an example of why you'd call them dark skinned?
Skin cancer is only relevent when moving from less light to more light - I.e. whites moving back into Africa. Vitamin D deficiencies have impacts your entire life. Most of the peoples that moved north are lighter skinned across all three northern hemisphere continents except where snow is heavy (causing people to get hit by UV from two directions), so a simple explanation like that doesn't really add up.
I don't give a damn about eye colour in this context - as far as I know, that's irrelevent to the topic.
Now I'm waiting for another research showing that the intake of vitamin D causes some other serious illness...
OK. Skin cancer. The main source of vitamin D in humans is through exposure to sunlight. Increase that without being careful and your risk of skin cancer goes up. Also, vitamin D overdosing from supplements is entirely possible and does have nasty side effects, although it's not possible from natural production due to exposure to sunlight.
There we go, cynicism confirmed, and it wasn't as bad as all that. Now, let's get down to reality: as vitamins, the vitamin D group have been identified as essential for human nutrition. Not useful, essential. As in, we would die without it. There's strong evidence, in fact, that the reason people that moved away from the equator developed paler skin was to maintain high production rates of vitamin D. So, quite frankly, even if the intake of vitamin D killed us, we'd have to have it as if we don't take it we die anyway, therefore the entire point is moot.
For an example of how this is done, look at the VCE system of Victoria, Australia. The subjects are ranked against each other depending on how the students in them perform in one subject versus another. So (to look at it simplistically) if those people who took both history and geography get an average of 5% higher in geography than history, then history is ranked higher and you get a higher ENTER score from getting the same mark in it (obviously it has to be more complicated than this with multiple subjects, but that's the general idea). The only exceptions to this are languages other than English, which has a government-mandated boost to encourage people to take a language.
As it turns out, this system naturally gives a major boost to people taking hard sciences and maths. With a maximum unaltered score of 50, a person who gets a raw score of 35 in standard maths (Maths Methods) gets it boosted to an effective score of 42, while someone who gets the same raw score in higher maths (Specialist Maths) gets it boosted to 47. On the flipside, someone who gets a raw 35 in standard English classes gets it lowered to 34.
Ah, but there's a slight problem with that - let's assume that the observation has an effect on the rock and there are two states that the rock could be in depending on what it observed of the particle. Now, what state is the rock in? Is it in one, or the other? The answer is both, of course, as per Schrodinger's Cat, until it is observed. But then what state is whatever it is that observed the rock?
As you can see, things get very complicated, quickly. The ramifications of this problem are pretty much meaningless for physicists, which is useful (the wavefunction resulting from any experiment is assumed to collapse when viewed by the human observer), but it provides quite a head-trip for philosophers working in metaphysics, bringing up all sorts of questions about conciousness and subjectivity (eg. Is reality only firmed when I observe it? How does my reality intersect with other peoples'? Is there anything special about a conciousness observing, or are we actually part of an uncollapsed wavefunction?). It's definitely a fun topic for contemplation on a rainy afternoon.
I point the M-4 across the lot at a row of rental cars. I wait -- and wait -- for the enhanced gunsight to focus. It responds more like a cheap digital camera than an advanced piece of military gear. At this speed, the sight would be nearly useless in fast-moving urban combat.
The map showing soldiers' locations isn't exactly quick, either. I walk around the lot. My position on the map lags about a minute behind where I am in real time. That kind of delay wouldn't be too important in a long-range duel of sharpshooters. But in an Iraq-style firefight it could be lethal.
Somewhat useful for officers and NCOs perhaps, but really not much use for regular infantry.
** -- I learned on BASIC, but something like Python would probably work well. A fun language with a useful syntax would be LPC (a MUD-coding language), since you can "visualize" and "handle" everything that you code, everyone has an avatar in the same virtual world, and it's based on C, so it would make switching to C easier. Another option that would probably help attract teens is Javascript -- relatively simple if you stick to a single browser, and definitely useful since webpages are really popular among teenagers.
Heh, speaking as someone who did learn first in LPC (discounting BASIC), I can assure you that it certainly did help with learning C at university - I ended up with a 98%, well and truly my highest score in my time studying there.
Learning in an environment with easily accessible examples and expert assistance on-hand makes it almost too easy. Learning the quasi-OO LPC also made it very easy to grasp the OO paradigm later down the track.
Just to clarify (I'm an insta-buff on the subject from the wikipedia article), despite having RAM in its name this is more a storage solution than a memory solution.
I'm generally more a software person than hardware, but there's a lot to be excited about with this. It's apparently got a r/w time only 2-3 times the time of DRAM, and holds a lot of potential for things like paging files and storing frequently used software since there doesn't seem to be a limitation on the number of writes that can be applied. Once things develop, the technology might even be a ludicrous-speed replacement for hard-drives, as the storage mechanism is quite stable (more so than flash). I can definitely see this taking off in the future, if it delivers what it promises (and nothing else supercedes it in the meantime).
Not that I disagree with the sentiment, the ABC doesn't really care whether or not it was taken down. As presumably the majority of viewers of the show on YouTube are international, it wouldn't really make a huge difference to their next budget review.
Yep, that's because their charter (as a government agency) gives them no direction to distribute their shows internationally, so they can't be seen to be spending money on bandwidth for international viewers. Therefore they allow it to be uploaded to YouTube (or maybe do it themselves) so that they can avoid being investigated for misuse of funds.
Heh. But from your title, I thought you were making a dig at the parents with Aparent (without parent) Boy. Which is certainly warrented in this case - seriously, is it that big a problem to spend a few hours dedicated to playing with your kids on a rainy weekend?
What do political parties want cash for? To buy votes. If you can supply the votes directly by being able to say that x people have registered their support of your position, then you should have some clout.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, as I understand it, it's mainly because the NRA is such a prominent force that the ACLU ignores the issue and concentrates on other rights. There's not much they could do which the NRA hasn't already got covered.
Uh, the article says that they aim to be complete at 9 am EST. While that might mean an American time zone in America, in Australia that means an Australian time zone (specifically, AEST, or GMT+10, aka their local time). So they're actually aiming to finish on Thursday afternoon Eastern American time.
Just a FYI, unless there's clarification somewhere that they were speaking of the American EST.
To be honest, I seriously doubt they actually care - popular peripherals can only increase the demand for their products. All they're doing is ensuring that there's a clear gap between them so that if some think-of-the-children types kick up a fuss then they can say 'We have nothing to do with them - look, we even tried to shut them down via lawsuit.'
This kind of publicity helps both parties, and I say more power to them if the media is running with it.
If you want to stay, encourage her to start her own business. Seriously, if she's generating income without taking one of the 'American jobs' that some people seem to value so highly (or, better yet, employing Americans herself), then she should be in a strong position to stay on her own terms. I'm not talking tech-style insane-growth entrepreneurship, just something smallish that generates a reasonable income - selling books online or something like that.
Note that I'm not a lawyer and know little of the American visa system so do some research on the subject yourself first, but I would assume that there are processes in place to attract and keep entrepreneurs (who are highly valued by every country).
Hmm, I'd say he's got a good point - there's simply not a culture of privilege awareness in Windows developers.
Perhaps Microsoft should set up an audit unit and start giving software a 'UAC-compatible' tick if a piece of software has minimised how much UAC approval is required if its turned on, allowing the publisher to put it on their box so that the customers can tell. Who knows, perhaps one day the UAC system might actually be viable.
Look for stuff dated 5 days ago. For the most part, the code is in the comments or the story rather than the summary.
You can find a few of them here.
On that note, this has certainly provided publicity for Digg - I hadn't spent more than about 5 minutes at the site before the fiasco, but spent some time watching the chaos on the day. Admittedly, I've no plans to go back there, but it certainly kept my interest for a little while.
Hey, don't worry - pretty soon heart disease won't be too much of a problem either.
The commonly accepted path to immortality is to get rid of all the things that kill you, one at a time. This is just another step.
To be honest, I'd say he's missed the point. The primary reason that his readers aren't unhappy isn't because of his team's moderating of the HD DVD code; at least, not directly. They're unhappy because the stories were taken down without explanation, users were apparently banned for simply doing what one is supposed to do on the site, and generally gave the impression that he had sided with them over us, which is never going to go down well.
If he'd just been more up-front and honest about what was going on, things would have gone much more smoothly. Sure, there would have been grumbling and a few irrepressible rebels would have posted the stuff anyway, but I seriously doubt that the reader base would have caught fire like it did. The biggest issue, IMO, was that it gave the impression (if not the reality) of a breach of trust, and trust is possibly the key thing to have in any sort of community.
Hmm, I can see how you misinterpreted that, but I was actually saying that if you increase your exposure to sunlight (in order to get more vitamin D) then you increase your risk of skin cancer.
Well, yes, that's how evolution works. But do you really want to have go through all that every time you want to note an evolutionary phenomena? Obviously, since evolution works in a Darwinistic rather than Lamarckian form, life forms cannot 'develop' traits in the usual sense of the word, but if you assume in your audience an understanding of how evolution works, using words like 'develop' is a useful shorthand.
The Inuits' darker skin can be explained by the fact that they've historically lived in the snow, which reflects UV light, doubling their intake. I don't know under which definition you're calling Mongols dark skinned, because they certainly don't look it to me, nor do the similarly coloured Ainu.
This isn't exactly my field, though - do you have an example of why you'd call them dark skinned?
Skin cancer is only relevent when moving from less light to more light - I.e. whites moving back into Africa. Vitamin D deficiencies have impacts your entire life. Most of the peoples that moved north are lighter skinned across all three northern hemisphere continents except where snow is heavy (causing people to get hit by UV from two directions), so a simple explanation like that doesn't really add up.
I don't give a damn about eye colour in this context - as far as I know, that's irrelevent to the topic.
OK. Skin cancer. The main source of vitamin D in humans is through exposure to sunlight. Increase that without being careful and your risk of skin cancer goes up. Also, vitamin D overdosing from supplements is entirely possible and does have nasty side effects, although it's not possible from natural production due to exposure to sunlight.
There we go, cynicism confirmed, and it wasn't as bad as all that. Now, let's get down to reality: as vitamins, the vitamin D group have been identified as essential for human nutrition. Not useful, essential. As in, we would die without it. There's strong evidence, in fact, that the reason people that moved away from the equator developed paler skin was to maintain high production rates of vitamin D. So, quite frankly, even if the intake of vitamin D killed us, we'd have to have it as if we don't take it we die anyway, therefore the entire point is moot.
For an example of how this is done, look at the VCE system of Victoria, Australia. The subjects are ranked against each other depending on how the students in them perform in one subject versus another. So (to look at it simplistically) if those people who took both history and geography get an average of 5% higher in geography than history, then history is ranked higher and you get a higher ENTER score from getting the same mark in it (obviously it has to be more complicated than this with multiple subjects, but that's the general idea). The only exceptions to this are languages other than English, which has a government-mandated boost to encourage people to take a language.
As it turns out, this system naturally gives a major boost to people taking hard sciences and maths. With a maximum unaltered score of 50, a person who gets a raw score of 35 in standard maths (Maths Methods) gets it boosted to an effective score of 42, while someone who gets the same raw score in higher maths (Specialist Maths) gets it boosted to 47. On the flipside, someone who gets a raw 35 in standard English classes gets it lowered to 34.
Ah, but there's a slight problem with that - let's assume that the observation has an effect on the rock and there are two states that the rock could be in depending on what it observed of the particle. Now, what state is the rock in? Is it in one, or the other? The answer is both, of course, as per Schrodinger's Cat, until it is observed. But then what state is whatever it is that observed the rock?
As you can see, things get very complicated, quickly. The ramifications of this problem are pretty much meaningless for physicists, which is useful (the wavefunction resulting from any experiment is assumed to collapse when viewed by the human observer), but it provides quite a head-trip for philosophers working in metaphysics, bringing up all sorts of questions about conciousness and subjectivity (eg. Is reality only firmed when I observe it? How does my reality intersect with other peoples'? Is there anything special about a conciousness observing, or are we actually part of an uncollapsed wavefunction?). It's definitely a fun topic for contemplation on a rainy afternoon.
** -- I learned on BASIC, but something like Python would probably work well. A fun language with a useful syntax would be LPC (a MUD-coding language), since you can "visualize" and "handle" everything that you code, everyone has an avatar in the same virtual world, and it's based on C, so it would make switching to C easier. Another option that would probably help attract teens is Javascript -- relatively simple if you stick to a single browser, and definitely useful since webpages are really popular among teenagers.
Heh, speaking as someone who did learn first in LPC (discounting BASIC), I can assure you that it certainly did help with learning C at university - I ended up with a 98%, well and truly my highest score in my time studying there.
Learning in an environment with easily accessible examples and expert assistance on-hand makes it almost too easy. Learning the quasi-OO LPC also made it very easy to grasp the OO paradigm later down the track.
Just to clarify (I'm an insta-buff on the subject from the wikipedia article), despite having RAM in its name this is more a storage solution than a memory solution.
I'm generally more a software person than hardware, but there's a lot to be excited about with this. It's apparently got a r/w time only 2-3 times the time of DRAM, and holds a lot of potential for things like paging files and storing frequently used software since there doesn't seem to be a limitation on the number of writes that can be applied. Once things develop, the technology might even be a ludicrous-speed replacement for hard-drives, as the storage mechanism is quite stable (more so than flash). I can definitely see this taking off in the future, if it delivers what it promises (and nothing else supercedes it in the meantime).
Not that I disagree with the sentiment, the ABC doesn't really care whether or not it was taken down. As presumably the majority of viewers of the show on YouTube are international, it wouldn't really make a huge difference to their next budget review.
Yep, that's because their charter (as a government agency) gives them no direction to distribute their shows internationally, so they can't be seen to be spending money on bandwidth for international viewers. Therefore they allow it to be uploaded to YouTube (or maybe do it themselves) so that they can avoid being investigated for misuse of funds.
Heh. But from your title, I thought you were making a dig at the parents with Aparent (without parent) Boy. Which is certainly warrented in this case - seriously, is it that big a problem to spend a few hours dedicated to playing with your kids on a rainy weekend?
Grr, I'm a damn fool. Link to raw poll results.
That was actually misreported in the article - apparently the journalist misread the organisation's own poll.
They are the one that should be fired.
Uh...you do realise how big your government deficit is, don't you? The US is getting money from other countries, not the other way around.
What do political parties want cash for? To buy votes. If you can supply the votes directly by being able to say that x people have registered their support of your position, then you should have some clout.