You don't even even seem to know what the passport card is or you would realize why it will never be mandatory. It's a passport replacement for people who live near the border, who frequently need to travel accross the border. It allows you to get into/out of Canada, Mexico, Bermuda, and a couple of Carribean countries. Making it required would just be silly. Get a clue.
And about regular passports...
You missed the point entirely. I wasn't saying the passport card would be mandatory, but that they'll try to make having a RFID enabled passport mandatory. That is, there' won't be a "regular passport", only RFID passports.
Do you have any evidence at all to support the "destroying the RFID chip will invalidate the passport" claim? I think you're just making shit up to scare people.
I'm not claiming it's currently illegal to do so, or that doing so will invalidate the passport currently, I'm just saying that's the way I think they'll steer it. If it becomes regular practice to destroy the RFID chip they'll pass legislation making it illegal to destroy it, and if it isn't a regular thing, doing so is guaranteed to earn you extra scrutiny at security checks. At the very least they could claim a fried RFID as probable cause for any search they feel like carrying out. That's just the way the government works, they pass a vague ill-defined law and when people object that it will have all kinds of side effects they get told "don't worry, we won't use it that way", which lasts all of about 10 minutes before yes, they use it in exactly that way.
That's just not true. Maybe *you* should check the rest of the web for more info. The RFID chip only stores a database key - everything else is grabbed from the database using that key. In other words cloning somebody else's RFID is pointless because then it'll be showing the original owner's photo on the security guy's computer display. If the security guy isn't paying attention, then that's a problem with or without the RFID.
Ok, so instead of grabbing the RFID of the first guy that walks past, instead they wait around until they see someone that fairly closely resembles them and take that RFID instead.
Passports aren't even the biggest concern here though, it's more the move to put RFID into all manner if inappropriate items like credit cards, phones (which are then tied to credit cards), clothing (yes really, and not just for inventory tracking), and probably lots of other things we haven't thought of yet. It's one thing for them to clone your passport, it's another entirely for them to clone your credit card.
Also, the passport card isn't even required.
... yet. Pretty soon it will be mandatory, and destroying the RFID chip in your passport will invalidate the passport and earn you a full body cavity search for your trouble no doubt.
No, but to think that people (not just kids) aren't affected by the stuff they experience in their daily environment is just as short-sighted.
People are affected by everything they experience, daily or otherwise, but how that experience affects them is non-obvious and varies massively from person to person. As such, trying to lay the blame for anything at the feet of one particular source (be it music, game, show, movie, book, or person) is to ignore the real problem. People do things for a variety of highly complex reasons, sometimes physical in nature (chemical imbalance), other times psychological (PTS, indoctrination of various kinds, various abuses [somewhat related to PTS], poor reasoning skills). You cannot legislate away crazy, immoral, illegal, or just plain stupid behavior, there will always be those that do bad things, no matter what they are or aren't exposed to, and what is and isn't illegal, to believe otherwise is to believe a fiction, and those that operate in ignorance of reality do so at their own peril.
While most believe Google qualifies as an ISP (instead of an ICP)
Who, in God's name, believes that? Please tell us who gets their internet service from Google.
They aren't using ISP in the traditional sense of a company that provides a connection to the internet, but rather as a company that provides a service to the internet. It's a case of Internet (Service Provider) as opposed to (Internet Service) Provider. This is differentiated from a Internet Content Provider which not being defined in TFA I'm going to assume is a company that posts its own content rather than providing the services for others in the internet to do the posting. The line between ISP and ICP however seems a bit fuzzy, for instance how would one classify news sites that have user comments (seeing as it's primarily a ICP, but also provides a service for users to post there own content in the form of comments)?
If I hadn't already used my mod points I'd give you a +1 insightful. Asking for content to be removed (or destroyed), no matter what it is, is censorship. If you doubt this, look up the definition of censorship. Now, some people (most?) believe some forms of censorship are acceptable (certainly in the USA they do), but that others are not. Different people, and different governments have different sets of content that they deem acceptable to censor, and most of these sorts of issues stem from mismatches between those sets. Personally I don't believe in censorship of any sort, although I'm not entirely opposed to content labeling systems so long as they don't unduly burden the distributor/provider and that there are no criminal penalties for mislabeling or not labeling content appropriately (also the labeling should be advisory in nature, not a part of a restriction system).
Are you assuming that they would have discovered some sort of FTL transport? Without a viable FTL drive, or a sufficiently compelling reason to establish what would essentially be splinter colonies colonization of even nearby star systems(relatively speaking) would be unlikely. Assuming no FTL drive, the race would have to progress to the point of having technology to at least be fairly certain that a system contained a habitable planet, and then be willing to devote a not inconsiderable amount of time and effort into building and launching a colony ship to establish a colony that for all intents and purposes they won't have any meaningful contact with. The colony will also have the problem of essentially needing to be self sufficient from the very start, which means any and all supplies they might ever need they need to either carry with them, or be able to manufacture from unknown local materials.
Yes, fans in a water-cooled system. You need fans on the radiators to extract the waste heat from the water. You can do it passively but that's massively inefficient. There are really two reasons to go with water cooling on a PC. You can do it to give yourself a bit more overhead in the overclocking department (since you can move a bit more heat using water and massive radiators, versus a individual heatsinks and fans), or you can do it for a silent system in which case you often need to under-clock the system and rely on convection either to cool the radiator, to circulate the water, or both. My gaming system is water cooled and overclocked and has 8 120mm fans, 6 on the radiators and 2 on the front intake grill (one of the radiators is setup as an intake as well, so it's actually 5 intakes, 3 exhaust).
Am I the only one who was expecting a statement from Nemesysco advertising "Our products are for entertainment purposes only." ?
They couldn't do that as their major contracts are with military, intelligence, and police organizations. Labeling their product as an entertainment device would be to more or less admit that the paper is correct and most likely cost them all of their contracts (and future sales).
This isn't about censorship or intellectual property laws, it's about a company protecting its image from mudslinging.
Truth is an absolute defense to libel. Also if it can't be shown one way or another to be fact or not it's not libel as libel only concerns factual matters not opinions. If the paper is even reasonably well written they have little to worry about. What happened is they published a paper that shows the "science" behind lie detectors to be questionable at best, and a company that makes lie detectors threatened to sue them because the paper shows their product to be useless. A better approach (read more effective) would have been if they used the money they paid those lawyers to instead commission their own study of the effectiveness of lie detectors. This of course assumes that they actually believe in their own product, and don't already know it to be a scam.
Mathematically that might work, but realistically it's nonsense. You might as well say worst case scenario is the earth gets blown up to make way for an interdimensional bypass and your tire never has a chance to go flat. I mean, can you show that the odds of the earth being destroyed by vogons is less than the worst case scenario of the flat assuming Jimbo is wrong?
The whole point of using the statistics is to try to quantify the risk of something, while full well knowing that since you're using statistics in the first place you cannot guarantee that it won't happen. That fact alone means that you're already unsure of the outcome and are essentially making a guess based on what you believe to be true. At some point you really do just need to ignore the "worst case scenario" otherwise there's little point in doing the calculation, as you can always come up with a worse "worst case scenario".
If you took the ten seconds needed to read the abstract, you'd clearly see it's the former:
...
Bad journalism, solid (enough) science. As always...
My comments were based on the article and the summary rather than the abstract of the paper. Looking at the abstract it does appear to be an argument for formally factoring in something akin to a "chance we fucked something up somewhere" factor into the confidence of the prediction, with a particular emphasis on cases where the result of the event happening would be particularly bad.
So, yes, as you put it, bad journalism, solid (enough) science. I still take issue with the article (and summary) as they paint a completely different picture from the one in the abstract, so I still say the article is bunk, but the paper itself seems ok enough.
To use your example, whether or not Jimbo is wrong 50% of the time does not make the odds 50.5%, as what your changing is the uncertainty, not the probability. Jimbos ability or lack thereof to calculate a probability has no impact on the actual outcome of the probability, just the likelihood that said probability is correct (or not). I'm sure the level of certainty in those calculations is already listed, and they might have a point if they tried to claim that the level of uncertainty for the calculations should factor in the probability that the paper(s) it's based on are incorrect, but the way the article is written (and the even more inflammatory summary) makes it sound like they are arguing that the calculated probability of the event should be changed.
Essentially their argument boils down to because people make mistakes and we can calculate the odds of them making a mistake, if they calculate the odds of something and it's greater than the odds of them having made a mistake then you have to use the odds of them making a mistake as the probability of the event happening. Of course this reasoning is total bullshit, and just the sort of abuse statistics gets a bad name for. By that sort of reasoning we should all go play the lotto as clearly the odds of someone miscalculating the chances of winning the lottery are much better than the calculated odds of winning, never mind the fact that even if they made a mistake in calculating the odds it wouldn't shift the calculation enough either way to get it anywhere near the odds of them having made a mistake.
The second thing I thought was "good, can we just clone cow flesh now instead of raising cows?"
First a minor nitpick, what you're describing isn't cloning, but more accurately described as vat growing. Cloning implies you'd reproduce the entire animal which defeats the purpose as you'd still need to raise the cloned animal. On the topic of vat grown meat, it's currently not economically viable (or maybe even technically possible, I don't know, haven't really researched it) as you would need an entire support system to provide nutrients to the cells and carry away wastes while it's growing. Not to mention you'd also need to develop some sort of re-usable support structure to grow the meat on, and possibly an exercise system to ensure the muscle develops properly. Plus you would need a system to process and distribute nutrients for the muscle tissue.
In other words, you'd spend a lot of money and effort re-producing all the things naturally provided by the rest of the cow.
I traced the backlink to this place I'd never heard of, where an intelligent Talmudic discussion was going on, among a bunch of people who seemed kind of like lawyers, but who clearly were not lawyers, but who seemed smarter than lawyers.
We, generally speaking, are only smarter than your average lawyer as pertains to computers, the internet, technology, or other generally geeky/nerdy topic. I'm sure your average lawyer would thoroughly trounce us on other less geek-centric topics. Of course, your presence here, as well as the exposure to the legal world we've all received on account of groklaw and the SCO debacle has contributed greatly to the general improvement of all of our legal knowledge.
If they had 100% confidence in this property of black holes, why are they studying them?
Short answer, they aren't. Longer answer is they've run the numbers because one of them did a little figuring and went "hey, there's a possibility if x, y, and z are correct that we might create miniature black holes with this thing, wouldn't that be cool", and then someone with a high school level of physics got hold of the quote and went "ZOMG!!! BLACK HOLES!!! WE'RE ALL DOOMED!!!". Queue a bunch of physicists going "WTF? Damnit, now we need to waste time proving why this isn't a problem." followed by multiple articles in the general press going back and forth where some scientist says "We've run the numbers, we don't need to worry about this, the black holes if they form are going to be microscopic and hardly exist for anytime at all" and then some moron puts up an article talking about how we're all going to die from black holes, and the scientists have confirmed it.
I doubt you're awake during brain surgery, but I'd rather hear a urologist say "oops" than a brain surgeon. After all, they can sew your penis back on, but there's no fixing a torn or cut brain.
Actually it's pretty standard to be conscious during brain surgery. The reason being that once they start poking around in your brain they don't really have much feedback on what's going on unless you're able to tell them what your experiencing, so if you suddenly say something like "I taste blue" they may know they're in the right ballpark area or not.
Perhaps he's counting on the phones being so locked down that you must buy the songs from MS?
Seems likely, although I must confess a lack of knowledge as concerns the mobile phone industry in the UK. Going by the example set in the USA (which I understand is somewhat unique as pertains to mobile phone providers) it's not uncommon to be forced into getting everything from the carrier, or to have to simply do without. Perhaps MS is planning on cutting a deal with the carriers to force usage of their service inside of the carriers walled garden (Verizon would probably do it if they weren't so adamant about wringing the necks of their customers themselves). They might also be counting on the relative naivete of the most lucrative mobile phone demographic, that being primarily
the teens and tweens who quite often will run up quite massive bills with overages in both voice and texting.
Even if that is the case however, I don't see any of the major carriers jumping at this as they already have their own services in place and have no reason to want to switch to anything approaching a "standardized" format that would only serve to lower the barrier to switching to another carriers. There's also the not insignificant chance that their customers will balk at the high prices being demanded and cut back on music purchases (traditionally one of the big moneymakers for mobile providers in the form of ring-tones).
Has Microsoft secretly stumbled onto some previously unknown technique for making money off of doomed products that none of us have heard of? That's the only explanation for the constant parade of suck that's been pouring out of Microsoft in the recent years. I mean, they've never really been known for doing a quality job, but at least they've traditionally made products that have sold if for no other reason than Microsoft's standard unsavory practices. Now comes the Zune, Vista, "new" hotmail (on par with "New Coke" it seems), and now these plans for what sounds to be one of the worst DRM implementations ever at a time when their competitors are moving to distance themselves from DRM and the recent customer backlash surrounding it. I honestly can't understand how Microsoft could possibly be this boneheaded. At least things are looking, if not exactly good, at least encouraging on the Windows 7 front.
Wright did find that multiple passes do make it harder to recover data...
In other news, leaving out important details found to increase click-through.
He also mentioned that even one write makes it incredibly difficult to recover any meaningful data. That is, doing one write you might be able to accurately recover a bit here or a bit there, at most an entire byte, but not enough to reconstruct any real data (and anything worth recovering is going to require more than just the odd byte to be retrieved). So yes, doing multiple writes will reduce the chances of recovering anything accurately, but even a single write is more then sufficient to prevent recovery of useful data.
Different matter has different absorption properties. Visible light can travel through quite a few kinds of matter, such as certain plastics and glasses. Likewise infrared light travels through other materials. There are materials that block other wavelengths as well, although a lot of them we probably aren't as aware of because their absorption properties for non-visible wavelengths probably haven't been thoroughly tested.
Or they could *gasp* run a fscking cable and not worry about a glorified IR link. Once you've gone to something like IR you're already dealing with a limited area so mobility isn't really a prime factor (ok, yeah, you could string a whole sequence of these along the roof and work out some system to migrate from one to another as the person walks around the building, but that's not exactly practical), and there's still a chance that someone could eavesdrop on the network by say strategically placing a mirror to bounce the signal out a window. Just running a length of Cat6 gives you all the security and then some.
Please be advised that person prone to seizures should not be in the same room as the access point as the natural oscillations in the carrier wave have been shown to cause seizures.
I define service as actually knowing details about the products you sale and whether you stock something or not. If I come in looking for a particular part I should be able to pull aside someone in that department as say "Do you have ____" and they should be able to tell me yes or no, and if yes show me where it is. I consider very good service being able to answer a technical question, such as if a piece comes with an adapter for something, or if it has to be purchased separately. Crap service is when they don't even know what it is they're selling. I'm willing to accept that they might have to lookup in the computer to know if they have something in particular in stock, but they should at least know enough about what they stock to have a general idea what it is I'm looking for. If you work in the computer department you damn well better know what the difference between DDR2 and DDR3 is, and at least have an inkling of what RAID is. Not knowing the exact performance characteristics of say a RAID1+0 array versus a RAID5 is I can live with, but they should at least have heard of RAID even if only in passing or absolute bare minimum be able to point me to the RAID controllers on the shelf.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't even even seem to know what the passport card is or you would realize why it will never be mandatory. It's a passport replacement for people who live near the border, who frequently need to travel accross the border. It allows you to get into/out of Canada, Mexico, Bermuda, and a couple of Carribean countries. Making it required would just be silly. Get a clue.
And about regular passports...
You missed the point entirely. I wasn't saying the passport card would be mandatory, but that they'll try to make having a RFID enabled passport mandatory. That is, there' won't be a "regular passport", only RFID passports.
Do you have any evidence at all to support the "destroying the RFID chip will invalidate the passport" claim? I think you're just making shit up to scare people.
I'm not claiming it's currently illegal to do so, or that doing so will invalidate the passport currently, I'm just saying that's the way I think they'll steer it. If it becomes regular practice to destroy the RFID chip they'll pass legislation making it illegal to destroy it, and if it isn't a regular thing, doing so is guaranteed to earn you extra scrutiny at security checks. At the very least they could claim a fried RFID as probable cause for any search they feel like carrying out. That's just the way the government works, they pass a vague ill-defined law and when people object that it will have all kinds of side effects they get told "don't worry, we won't use it that way", which lasts all of about 10 minutes before yes, they use it in exactly that way.
That's just not true. Maybe *you* should check the rest of the web for more info. The RFID chip only stores a database key - everything else is grabbed from the database using that key. In other words cloning somebody else's RFID is pointless because then it'll be showing the original owner's photo on the security guy's computer display. If the security guy isn't paying attention, then that's a problem with or without the RFID.
Ok, so instead of grabbing the RFID of the first guy that walks past, instead they wait around until they see someone that fairly closely resembles them and take that RFID instead.
Passports aren't even the biggest concern here though, it's more the move to put RFID into all manner if inappropriate items like credit cards, phones (which are then tied to credit cards), clothing (yes really, and not just for inventory tracking), and probably lots of other things we haven't thought of yet. It's one thing for them to clone your passport, it's another entirely for them to clone your credit card.
Also, the passport card isn't even required.
No, but to think that people (not just kids) aren't affected by the stuff they experience in their daily environment is just as short-sighted.
People are affected by everything they experience, daily or otherwise, but how that experience affects them is non-obvious and varies massively from person to person. As such, trying to lay the blame for anything at the feet of one particular source (be it music, game, show, movie, book, or person) is to ignore the real problem. People do things for a variety of highly complex reasons, sometimes physical in nature (chemical imbalance), other times psychological (PTS, indoctrination of various kinds, various abuses [somewhat related to PTS], poor reasoning skills). You cannot legislate away crazy, immoral, illegal, or just plain stupid behavior, there will always be those that do bad things, no matter what they are or aren't exposed to, and what is and isn't illegal, to believe otherwise is to believe a fiction, and those that operate in ignorance of reality do so at their own peril.
Who, in God's name, believes that? Please tell us who gets their internet service from Google.
They aren't using ISP in the traditional sense of a company that provides a connection to the internet, but rather as a company that provides a service to the internet. It's a case of Internet (Service Provider) as opposed to (Internet Service) Provider. This is differentiated from a Internet Content Provider which not being defined in TFA I'm going to assume is a company that posts its own content rather than providing the services for others in the internet to do the posting. The line between ISP and ICP however seems a bit fuzzy, for instance how would one classify news sites that have user comments (seeing as it's primarily a ICP, but also provides a service for users to post there own content in the form of comments)?
If I hadn't already used my mod points I'd give you a +1 insightful. Asking for content to be removed (or destroyed), no matter what it is, is censorship. If you doubt this, look up the definition of censorship. Now, some people (most?) believe some forms of censorship are acceptable (certainly in the USA they do), but that others are not. Different people, and different governments have different sets of content that they deem acceptable to censor, and most of these sorts of issues stem from mismatches between those sets. Personally I don't believe in censorship of any sort, although I'm not entirely opposed to content labeling systems so long as they don't unduly burden the distributor/provider and that there are no criminal penalties for mislabeling or not labeling content appropriately (also the labeling should be advisory in nature, not a part of a restriction system).
Are you assuming that they would have discovered some sort of FTL transport? Without a viable FTL drive, or a sufficiently compelling reason to establish what would essentially be splinter colonies colonization of even nearby star systems(relatively speaking) would be unlikely. Assuming no FTL drive, the race would have to progress to the point of having technology to at least be fairly certain that a system contained a habitable planet, and then be willing to devote a not inconsiderable amount of time and effort into building and launching a colony ship to establish a colony that for all intents and purposes they won't have any meaningful contact with. The colony will also have the problem of essentially needing to be self sufficient from the very start, which means any and all supplies they might ever need they need to either carry with them, or be able to manufacture from unknown local materials.
Also, fans in a water-cooled system?
Yes, fans in a water-cooled system. You need fans on the radiators to extract the waste heat from the water. You can do it passively but that's massively inefficient. There are really two reasons to go with water cooling on a PC. You can do it to give yourself a bit more overhead in the overclocking department (since you can move a bit more heat using water and massive radiators, versus a individual heatsinks and fans), or you can do it for a silent system in which case you often need to under-clock the system and rely on convection either to cool the radiator, to circulate the water, or both. My gaming system is water cooled and overclocked and has 8 120mm fans, 6 on the radiators and 2 on the front intake grill (one of the radiators is setup as an intake as well, so it's actually 5 intakes, 3 exhaust).
Am I the only one who was expecting a statement from Nemesysco advertising "Our products are for entertainment purposes only." ?
They couldn't do that as their major contracts are with military, intelligence, and police organizations. Labeling their product as an entertainment device would be to more or less admit that the paper is correct and most likely cost them all of their contracts (and future sales).
This isn't about censorship or intellectual property laws, it's about a company protecting its image from mudslinging.
Truth is an absolute defense to libel. Also if it can't be shown one way or another to be fact or not it's not libel as libel only concerns factual matters not opinions. If the paper is even reasonably well written they have little to worry about. What happened is they published a paper that shows the "science" behind lie detectors to be questionable at best, and a company that makes lie detectors threatened to sue them because the paper shows their product to be useless. A better approach (read more effective) would have been if they used the money they paid those lawyers to instead commission their own study of the effectiveness of lie detectors. This of course assumes that they actually believe in their own product, and don't already know it to be a scam.
Mathematically that might work, but realistically it's nonsense. You might as well say worst case scenario is the earth gets blown up to make way for an interdimensional bypass and your tire never has a chance to go flat. I mean, can you show that the odds of the earth being destroyed by vogons is less than the worst case scenario of the flat assuming Jimbo is wrong?
The whole point of using the statistics is to try to quantify the risk of something, while full well knowing that since you're using statistics in the first place you cannot guarantee that it won't happen. That fact alone means that you're already unsure of the outcome and are essentially making a guess based on what you believe to be true. At some point you really do just need to ignore the "worst case scenario" otherwise there's little point in doing the calculation, as you can always come up with a worse "worst case scenario".
If you took the ten seconds needed to read the abstract, you'd clearly see it's the former:
...
Bad journalism, solid (enough) science. As always...
My comments were based on the article and the summary rather than the abstract of the paper. Looking at the abstract it does appear to be an argument for formally factoring in something akin to a "chance we fucked something up somewhere" factor into the confidence of the prediction, with a particular emphasis on cases where the result of the event happening would be particularly bad.
So, yes, as you put it, bad journalism, solid (enough) science. I still take issue with the article (and summary) as they paint a completely different picture from the one in the abstract, so I still say the article is bunk, but the paper itself seems ok enough.
To use your example, whether or not Jimbo is wrong 50% of the time does not make the odds 50.5%, as what your changing is the uncertainty, not the probability. Jimbos ability or lack thereof to calculate a probability has no impact on the actual outcome of the probability, just the likelihood that said probability is correct (or not). I'm sure the level of certainty in those calculations is already listed, and they might have a point if they tried to claim that the level of uncertainty for the calculations should factor in the probability that the paper(s) it's based on are incorrect, but the way the article is written (and the even more inflammatory summary) makes it sound like they are arguing that the calculated probability of the event should be changed.
Essentially their argument boils down to because people make mistakes and we can calculate the odds of them making a mistake, if they calculate the odds of something and it's greater than the odds of them having made a mistake then you have to use the odds of them making a mistake as the probability of the event happening. Of course this reasoning is total bullshit, and just the sort of abuse statistics gets a bad name for. By that sort of reasoning we should all go play the lotto as clearly the odds of someone miscalculating the chances of winning the lottery are much better than the calculated odds of winning, never mind the fact that even if they made a mistake in calculating the odds it wouldn't shift the calculation enough either way to get it anywhere near the odds of them having made a mistake.
The second thing I thought was "good, can we just clone cow flesh now instead of raising cows?"
First a minor nitpick, what you're describing isn't cloning, but more accurately described as vat growing. Cloning implies you'd reproduce the entire animal which defeats the purpose as you'd still need to raise the cloned animal. On the topic of vat grown meat, it's currently not economically viable (or maybe even technically possible, I don't know, haven't really researched it) as you would need an entire support system to provide nutrients to the cells and carry away wastes while it's growing. Not to mention you'd also need to develop some sort of re-usable support structure to grow the meat on, and possibly an exercise system to ensure the muscle develops properly. Plus you would need a system to process and distribute nutrients for the muscle tissue.
In other words, you'd spend a lot of money and effort re-producing all the things naturally provided by the rest of the cow.
I traced the backlink to this place I'd never heard of, where an intelligent Talmudic discussion was going on, among a bunch of people who seemed kind of like lawyers, but who clearly were not lawyers, but who seemed smarter than lawyers.
We, generally speaking, are only smarter than your average lawyer as pertains to computers, the internet, technology, or other generally geeky/nerdy topic. I'm sure your average lawyer would thoroughly trounce us on other less geek-centric topics. Of course, your presence here, as well as the exposure to the legal world we've all received on account of groklaw and the SCO debacle has contributed greatly to the general improvement of all of our legal knowledge.
If they had 100% confidence in this property of black holes, why are they studying them?
Short answer, they aren't. Longer answer is they've run the numbers because one of them did a little figuring and went "hey, there's a possibility if x, y, and z are correct that we might create miniature black holes with this thing, wouldn't that be cool", and then someone with a high school level of physics got hold of the quote and went "ZOMG!!! BLACK HOLES!!! WE'RE ALL DOOMED!!!". Queue a bunch of physicists going "WTF? Damnit, now we need to waste time proving why this isn't a problem." followed by multiple articles in the general press going back and forth where some scientist says "We've run the numbers, we don't need to worry about this, the black holes if they form are going to be microscopic and hardly exist for anytime at all" and then some moron puts up an article talking about how we're all going to die from black holes, and the scientists have confirmed it.
I doubt you're awake during brain surgery, but I'd rather hear a urologist say "oops" than a brain surgeon. After all, they can sew your penis back on, but there's no fixing a torn or cut brain.
Actually it's pretty standard to be conscious during brain surgery. The reason being that once they start poking around in your brain they don't really have much feedback on what's going on unless you're able to tell them what your experiencing, so if you suddenly say something like "I taste blue" they may know they're in the right ballpark area or not.
That's always good advice!
What, watching porn, or the virtual machine?
Perhaps he's counting on the phones being so locked down that you must buy the songs from MS?
Seems likely, although I must confess a lack of knowledge as concerns the mobile phone industry in the UK. Going by the example set in the USA (which I understand is somewhat unique as pertains to mobile phone providers) it's not uncommon to be forced into getting everything from the carrier, or to have to simply do without. Perhaps MS is planning on cutting a deal with the carriers to force usage of their service inside of the carriers walled garden (Verizon would probably do it if they weren't so adamant about wringing the necks of their customers themselves). They might also be counting on the relative naivete of the most lucrative mobile phone demographic, that being primarily the teens and tweens who quite often will run up quite massive bills with overages in both voice and texting.
Even if that is the case however, I don't see any of the major carriers jumping at this as they already have their own services in place and have no reason to want to switch to anything approaching a "standardized" format that would only serve to lower the barrier to switching to another carriers. There's also the not insignificant chance that their customers will balk at the high prices being demanded and cut back on music purchases (traditionally one of the big moneymakers for mobile providers in the form of ring-tones).
Has Microsoft secretly stumbled onto some previously unknown technique for making money off of doomed products that none of us have heard of? That's the only explanation for the constant parade of suck that's been pouring out of Microsoft in the recent years. I mean, they've never really been known for doing a quality job, but at least they've traditionally made products that have sold if for no other reason than Microsoft's standard unsavory practices. Now comes the Zune, Vista, "new" hotmail (on par with "New Coke" it seems), and now these plans for what sounds to be one of the worst DRM implementations ever at a time when their competitors are moving to distance themselves from DRM and the recent customer backlash surrounding it. I honestly can't understand how Microsoft could possibly be this boneheaded. At least things are looking, if not exactly good, at least encouraging on the Windows 7 front.
From TFA:
Wright did find that multiple passes do make it harder to recover data...
In other news, leaving out important details found to increase click-through.
He also mentioned that even one write makes it incredibly difficult to recover any meaningful data. That is, doing one write you might be able to accurately recover a bit here or a bit there, at most an entire byte, but not enough to reconstruct any real data (and anything worth recovering is going to require more than just the odd byte to be retrieved). So yes, doing multiple writes will reduce the chances of recovering anything accurately, but even a single write is more then sufficient to prevent recovery of useful data.
Different matter has different absorption properties. Visible light can travel through quite a few kinds of matter, such as certain plastics and glasses. Likewise infrared light travels through other materials. There are materials that block other wavelengths as well, although a lot of them we probably aren't as aware of because their absorption properties for non-visible wavelengths probably haven't been thoroughly tested.
Or they could *gasp* run a fscking cable and not worry about a glorified IR link. Once you've gone to something like IR you're already dealing with a limited area so mobility isn't really a prime factor (ok, yeah, you could string a whole sequence of these along the roof and work out some system to migrate from one to another as the person walks around the building, but that's not exactly practical), and there's still a chance that someone could eavesdrop on the network by say strategically placing a mirror to bounce the signal out a window. Just running a length of Cat6 gives you all the security and then some.
Please be advised that person prone to seizures should not be in the same room as the access point as the natural oscillations in the carrier wave have been shown to cause seizures.
I define service as actually knowing details about the products you sale and whether you stock something or not. If I come in looking for a particular part I should be able to pull aside someone in that department as say "Do you have ____" and they should be able to tell me yes or no, and if yes show me where it is. I consider very good service being able to answer a technical question, such as if a piece comes with an adapter for something, or if it has to be purchased separately. Crap service is when they don't even know what it is they're selling. I'm willing to accept that they might have to lookup in the computer to know if they have something in particular in stock, but they should at least know enough about what they stock to have a general idea what it is I'm looking for. If you work in the computer department you damn well better know what the difference between DDR2 and DDR3 is, and at least have an inkling of what RAID is. Not knowing the exact performance characteristics of say a RAID1+0 array versus a RAID5 is I can live with, but they should at least have heard of RAID even if only in passing or absolute bare minimum be able to point me to the RAID controllers on the shelf.