There is nothing illegal about routinely shredding business documents you are no longer using. There is nothing wrong with some guy deleting files from his computer that he is no longer using. The case in this article is about someone maliciously destroying files they knew were relevent to a court proceeding with the intent of obstructing their prosecution. It's a pretty straightforward set of facts and not at all similar to what you've done.
But this presumes a certain order of things. Here I am, having seen the light about my copyright-violating ways, deleted everything, even ran a disk-cleaner to make sure there's no trace of this evil, filthy pirated stuff on my disk -- and as I'm watching it do its job, the doorbell rings and it's the mail guy and he hands me an envelope and I sign for it and open it and it turns out to be a subpoena regarding my P2P activities.
Who exactly determines when I erased the contents of my HDD? The article makes it seem as if they 'just kinda knew' that the deletion happened as a response to being served, but how would they know that? Who carries the burden of proof here? "Yes, I had BearShare installed once because I was curious what the hubbub was all about but then I deleted it again and all the deliberately erased space on my HDD is just where I tried to make sure my tax-data was securely erased" (or whatever). How would anybody know?
This article sure makes it seem as if the mere suspicion that someone might have deliberately destroyed evidence got them defaulted.
However, even with that, it's clearly not a very partisan issue.
Precisely.
Let me be another voice agreeing with that. In constant dollars or as a percentage of GDP, the NASA budget has been flat-to-slightly-declining for something like 35 years now, through Democrat or Republican majorities of congress or presidents. However...
And it's definitely NOT an issue that involves religious fundamentalism in any way, shape, or form.
This one is a lot less clear-cut than you seem to think. If the president decides tomorrow that he can buy the evangelical vote by zero-funding all science-related activities, then that's precisely what he's going to do. I do not think it would be a politically smart move, but the president has seen fit to make moves in the past that I wouldn't consider smart. It's his prerogative.
Let me stress that none of this has anything to do with whether they turn out to have been smart in hindsight. The president will disband NASA tomorrow if he thinks "his base" will profit from that move. That's it. Whether or not they actually do and whether or not it helps or hinders any one politician in actuality is completely divorced from that decision.
NASA has one and only one customer: the US government. That puts NASA into a precarious situation. On the other hand, they're the only supplier, which gives them a certain amount of leverage. Except that the customer doesn't actually understand most of the product and has a lot of other balls in the air as well. This does not exactly make for a stable relationship...
The problem is that "copying" the file without redistribution or profit is confused with "copy"right when it really is petty theft.
No, it is not. Copyright violation is not theft. Period. End of story. If copyright violations were theft, then we wouldn't have any copyright laws, because theft is already illegal (in case you hadn't noticed yet). It was already illegal long before the notion of "copyright" ever entered any legal text. As a matter of fact, copyright laws were created exactly because the existing laws about theft were not applicable in copyright cases.
The easiest way to demonstrate in a conversation about the RIAA that you don't even understand the problem at hand is to equate copyright violation to theft.
The notion of theft requires that something be removed somewhere. If I go to your house in the night and I take your car away: that is theft. But if I go to your house in the night and make a copy of your car and then I drive that car all over the neighborhood: that is NOT theft. We can haggle all day what precisely it is, but nothing was stolen from you, you still have everything you had before, therefore no theft has happened.
You can steal a CD. That would be theft. But making a copy of a CD is not. That's what copyright law is all about. That's why these legal cases exist. That's why there's legal struggles to redefine copyright in the age of the internet. Because all those age-old laws about "properety" and "theft" do not apply.
Now imagine Pluto has some valuable Ultra-rareium at its core. Is it OK for a company or a country to smash it to pieces?
Given that we appear to have no qualms about letting companies smash Earth to rubble to get to the "valuable stuff", I see reason why we should be concerned about pluto.
I'm kinda baffled by this: you don't punish a 16-year-old, you punish the people responsible for the actions of the 16-year-old and that means the parents, whos mandate clearly includes a minimum of oversight over their offspring at least to the degree of ensuring that they don't harm those around them.
If we actually held parents responsible for the actions of their children, maybe more parents would start taking the whole "parenting" thing seriously and these kinds of problems could be avoided in the first place.
Quick clarification up front: most universities will let you read their subscription to the appropriate journal either for free or for a modest fee. So it isn't as if there's some monumental hurdle here anywhere.
But yes -- I am definitely in favor of some kind of access system to the peer-reviewed literature that keeps the results that I produce on the public dime in the public domain. What good does it do me (and I'm strictly appealing to my own, personal selfishness here) to have reseaerchd X and Y and Z when I can't even prove that I've done it to anybody other than someone in the same field (who's probably my buddy anyways).
Science is, in the end, one big open source project. Where everybody is pooling their methods, their strategies, their ways of thinking, their experimental results. Science works because everybody can see what everybody else is doing and everybody can critique what everybody else has done (and ultimately improve upon it). Now, 99% of the population are plainly not qualified to comment on any one random scientific result -- but if we want to overcome this scientific illiteracy then it isn't going to happen by keeping scientific results out of the hands of people. It is going to happen by exposing them to them.
All progress humans have ever made is, in the end, scientific progress. And if we want for humanity to progress as a whole, we'll have to continue sharing that progress around.
Assuming the brick is significantly closer to us than the microwave source is (which they are), then the brick IS larger, from our point of view.
You are so mentally retarded that it hurts my teeth to read your nonsense. Go ahead and name ONE radio telescope that is smaller than a brick, ONE astronomical source that is smaller than a brick or ONE geometric configuration in which any one astronomical souce can appear to any radio telescope as smaller than a brick. You can't, of course. To a 50m telescope, a brick right in front of the aperture (doesn't get any closer than that) constitutes something like a 1/250000 area obstruction. That's it. There's nothing to see there. If you want the sub-arcsecond resolution neccessary to see a brick at radio wavelengths you'll need interferometry which utilizes more than one telescope to begin with.
A brick somewhere between here and the sun is invisible and undetectable to us. That's all there is to it. Go ahead and put it farther away and feel free to report to us what exact geometry you can suggest that would make a brick visible.
What? You're saying these bricks perfectly maintain their position in space, exactly between us and this microwave source?
No, that is what YOUR retarded fantasies require. A microwave source smaller than a brick is going to be invisible over cosmic distances NO MATTER whether or not there's anything absorbing in the way. Because there's limits to the power densities of a microwave emitter and because there's collimation limits set by interstellar and intergalactic radio-scintillation.
NAME one cosmic micowave source. One. Go ahead and name it. Then look up its size; Then look up the size of a radio telescope. Then TELL US where you'd put a brick so that it makes a detectable difference in the observation of that source by that radio telescope.
But of course you can't.
So you pretend indignation and you pretend that you're "dropping the subject" and "letting me have the last word" because "I'm just a troll". I guess you fantasize that you can somehow save face by pretending these things.
But of course you and I know that it's just pretense.
You are WAY out of your depth here. You have not the slightest shimmer of a clue what you're talking about. You have never in your life spent a second to think about any of this or even anything similar to this. You string words together as if they meant anything to you but you're just a brainless, mindless symbol-manipulation automaton pretending to have something to say.
Radio telescopes should be able to pick-up when a "brick" comes directly between it and a high-frequency (eg. microwave) source.
..if the brick happens to be larger in size than the microwave source. Which it isn't. Or otherwise the source would've been invisible to begin with.
Why do people who've never actually thought about anything at all think they should post absurd nonsense about topics that are really not that terribly hard to grasp?
No. We can also see things by the light they BLOCK from stars. If it was just matter, we would have seen it, and conclusively proved it's existance, long ago.
Actually that is not entirely correct. What we know is that it isn't a bunch of jupiter-sized things (which we would have been able to see) or large clouds of gas or dust. But there's a number of configurations of perfectly ordinary matter that are entirely allowed by the observations.
Consider, for example, that it's all in form of bricks. Run-of-the-mill bricks. Say two pints of volume, four pounds of mass. Compute how many you need and you get so-and-so many per cubic AU. Bricks per cubic AU!. We have 100-ton chunks of rock passing by the earth inside the moon's orbit and we only realize it after the fact -- something brick-sized somewhere between here and the sun would be completely undetectable. The low cross-section and low number-density would make it optically thin even at cosmological distances. The bricks would be essentially without interaction with each other (since they don't have enough gravity to attract each other and too thinly spread out to collide often enough to make a difference), but would be too massive to be noticably affected by the interstellar gas or dust. They would be in thermal equilibrium with their surroundings which means that most of them would be something like 3K and at best lead to a mild flattening of the observed CMB over hubble-distances. Over long time, they would aggregate in virial halos around galaxies and galaxy clusters.
There ya go: nothing terribly exotic, just bricks. And you'd get all the observed behaviour of dark matter. And I'm certainly not claiming that this is it, merely pointing out one perfectly mundane form of matter that would simply not be visible to us, other than through its gravitational effects on really large scales.
Why some crackpots insist that the universe is somehow obligated to contain only matter at sizes large enough to be visually detectable or otherwise gaseous of diffuse enough to be detectable is beyond me. Why some crackpots insist that there's something "mystical" or "unexplained" about dark matter is a riddle to me. The best theory of gravity known to us that works under all circumstances under which is has ever been tested indicates that there's some things in the universe that we haven't seen yet. Well, duh. And? Why could this possibly be controversial?
Before the 1950s we couldn't see giant molecular clouds - until we developed radio telescopes and found that there's as much matter in molecular form in the galaxy as in form of stars. What kind of utter hubris would drive someone to proclaim that we now surely must have seen all matter in the universe and that incorrect motions of galaxies must therefore indicate a flaw in our theory of gravity?
Re:Blog First, Then Scientific Journals.
on
Dark Matter Exists
·
· Score: 1
Riiiight, and if you state your opinion often enough without any argument or evidence, others might believe you?
While this appears to be YOUR philosophy, it has nothing to do with how I or any other scientist in the universe conduct our business. WE publish our methods, our evidence, out conclusions, our speculations, our interactions, our experiments, our findings -- all of them carefully labelled, thoroughly analyzed, painstakingly researched.
When was the last time YOU got something past peer-review?
Thought so.
I hope astronomers have a higher standard than you do, if nothing else!
I AM an astronomer. The lever of rigor involved before I make even the slightest claim about anything anywhere vastly exceeds anything you are capable of grasping.
Re:Blog First, Then Scientific Journals.
on
Dark Matter Exists
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Indeed - do we have "conclusive direct proof" that the Sun is made of mostly of hydrogen and helium?
Yes, we do.
It sounds like (these) astronomers have a different standard of evidence than I do.
Changes in travel direction w/o rotation of the whole bot.
So now the robot starts bumping because it has sensors only in one side of the system.
Or maybe you're willing to quadruple the sensory complexity for the marginal gain in mobility of an omnidirectional system? But then things like "pick up the thing in front of you" are going to become a nightmare and the whole question of control programming explodes in complexity. Contrary to your assumption, steering becomes much much harder. For a little RC car I have two sticks that say "forward/backward" and "left/right". What sticks should I have for the omnidirectional system? And when it finally arrives at the destination, you will still have to turn it to bring whatever arms or other actuators it has within reach of the object to be picked up (placed down, turned, manipulated etc).
If the robot has a preferred sensory direction and "turns it's head" when it changes direction, then it might as well turn the whole torso.
Not to mention that you always beat any omnidirectional system in speed with one that is optimized for speed in one particular direction. If you want fast, optimize for one-directional speed and accomodate turns.
Really -- I consider this an expensive gimmick at best.
Motorcycle insurance cheap? You must not have priced sportbike insurance lately. Even with only basic insurance, for the typical low 20's rider it is in the thousands per year.
You can avoid posting nonsensical gibberish like this by always keeping in mind that the earth is pretty big, many countries function different from yours, jurisdictions and corporations are not obligated to do things everywhere the same way they do it in your neighborhood.
I pay $149 every six months for alot more than just "minimal" coverage. Anybody who claims that motorcycle insurance costs more is either not grasping that this number is of course expressly tied to a certain particular location on the planet (and a certain insurance company etc.) or they're lying.
Well, belief that a human embryo IS a human has to be either naive or religious ("the embryo has the same soul as the grown-up human has or will have")
Every tool I've ever seen anywhere came in three price point: the cheap for the newbies, the medium for the professionals and the pricey for the amateurs. Yes, that is the correct order of things. A layman buys a $5 hammer because he doesn't understand what to look for and price is the only thing he has available to make a decision. The amateur understands things like features and ergonomics and promptly buys the $80 hammer with chrome-plated titanium shaft. The professional who actually uses a hammer on a dayly basis buys the $20 model -- not the cheap crap but certainly not the overpriced gimmick either.
I can see the same thing for cameras and for binoculars and watches and, well, as I said: every tool I've ever seen. The laymen fall for the "cheap" thing, the amateurs fall for the pretty polished gimmickery (and are mighty proud that they didn't fall for the low-price thing) and the professionals buy the product that actually gets the job done without any of the superflous bells and whistles that tend to attract the amateurs.
Now with computers you get the additional wrinkle of the hardware/software thing. Spend more on the HW and run a cheaper OS? Pay dearly for the OS in the hopes of squeezing the most out of less well-endowed hardware?
Personally I have reason to shun macs in any way. But I also see no reason whatsoever to prefer them.
I don't eat MacFood, I don't have a MacJob, why would I want a MacBook?
Where I am required to answer one of these "your pet's name" questions, I do so accurately, but with my hands slightly off. Let's say there's three tiers of paranoia about an account and for stuff I don't care about I just move both hands one charater to the right while typing my secret answer. For medium stuff I move them apart from each other and for what I deem critical i move the right hand up and the left one in (reality is different but that's the gist). Incidentily, I do the same thing for my passwords. Turns moderately secure passwords into sheer line-noise.
Thanks to these simple measures, my passwords are more secure than average which is all they need to be. There is no such thing as absolute security, but you only need to be more secure than the next guy. You'll never get rid of all termites, but you only need your house be less attractive than you neighbor's. You won't stop all burglaries, but you only need your house more burglar-proof than the one across the street. You cannot stop lightning, but you can make sure that you aren't the tallest thing out on the plain when the thunderstorm hits. All you have to do is be lower than a most other things and you're as safe as you could be.
Slashdot Mirror
A. There are 12 married
B. Four married posters under 40
B. Two guys that are dating (not each other)
C. Two girls who reads Slashdot.
E. An undetermined but very small number of folks who can keep the first FOUR letters of the alphabet straight...
B. Four married posters under 40
Wow -- I'm one of a very select elite. pheer me...
[...]the Google ePenis Store (Beta).
Who needs an ePenis, when you can have an iBrator?
Why the omnipresent need to analogize the most straightforward things? The world may never know.
Because a good analogy is like a diagonal frog.
Y'now: pixar made a movie about how you had to buy the book to beat Zurg. Since when is something news that was mainsteam entertainment years ago?
There is nothing illegal about routinely shredding business documents you are no longer using. There is nothing wrong with some guy deleting files from his computer that he is no longer using. The case in this article is about someone maliciously destroying files they knew were relevent to a court proceeding with the intent of obstructing their prosecution. It's a pretty straightforward set of facts and not at all similar to what you've done.
But this presumes a certain order of things. Here I am, having seen the light about my copyright-violating ways, deleted everything, even ran a disk-cleaner to make sure there's no trace of this evil, filthy pirated stuff on my disk -- and as I'm watching it do its job, the doorbell rings and it's the mail guy and he hands me an envelope and I sign for it and open it and it turns out to be a subpoena regarding my P2P activities.
Who exactly determines when I erased the contents of my HDD? The article makes it seem as if they 'just kinda knew' that the deletion happened as a response to being served, but how would they know that? Who carries the burden of proof here? "Yes, I had BearShare installed once because I was curious what the hubbub was all about but then I deleted it again and all the deliberately erased space on my HDD is just where I tried to make sure my tax-data was securely erased" (or whatever). How would anybody know?
This article sure makes it seem as if the mere suspicion that someone might have deliberately destroyed evidence got them defaulted.
However, even with that, it's clearly not a very partisan issue.
Precisely.
Let me be another voice agreeing with that. In constant dollars or as a percentage of GDP, the NASA budget has been flat-to-slightly-declining for something like 35 years now, through Democrat or Republican majorities of congress or presidents. However...
And it's definitely NOT an issue that involves religious fundamentalism in any way, shape, or form.
This one is a lot less clear-cut than you seem to think. If the president decides tomorrow that he can buy the evangelical vote by zero-funding all science-related activities, then that's precisely what he's going to do. I do not think it would be a politically smart move, but the president has seen fit to make moves in the past that I wouldn't consider smart. It's his prerogative.
Let me stress that none of this has anything to do with whether they turn out to have been smart in hindsight. The president will disband NASA tomorrow if he thinks "his base" will profit from that move. That's it. Whether or not they actually do and whether or not it helps or hinders any one politician in actuality is completely divorced from that decision.
NASA has one and only one customer: the US government. That puts NASA into a precarious situation. On the other hand, they're the only supplier, which gives them a certain amount of leverage. Except that the customer doesn't actually understand most of the product and has a lot of other balls in the air as well. This does not exactly make for a stable relationship...
The problem is that "copying" the file without redistribution or profit is confused with "copy"right when it really is petty theft.
No, it is not. Copyright violation is not theft. Period. End of story. If copyright violations were theft, then we wouldn't have any copyright laws, because theft is already illegal (in case you hadn't noticed yet). It was already illegal long before the notion of "copyright" ever entered any legal text. As a matter of fact, copyright laws were created exactly because the existing laws about theft were not applicable in copyright cases.
The easiest way to demonstrate in a conversation about the RIAA that you don't even understand the problem at hand is to equate copyright violation to theft.
The notion of theft requires that something be removed somewhere. If I go to your house in the night and I take your car away: that is theft. But if I go to your house in the night and make a copy of your car and then I drive that car all over the neighborhood: that is NOT theft. We can haggle all day what precisely it is, but nothing was stolen from you, you still have everything you had before, therefore no theft has happened.
You can steal a CD. That would be theft. But making a copy of a CD is not. That's what copyright law is all about. That's why these legal cases exist. That's why there's legal struggles to redefine copyright in the age of the internet. Because all those age-old laws about "properety" and "theft" do not apply.
Now imagine Pluto has some valuable Ultra-rareium at its core. Is it OK for a company or a country to smash it to pieces?
Given that we appear to have no qualms about letting companies smash Earth to rubble to get to the "valuable stuff", I see reason why we should be concerned about pluto.
I'm kinda baffled by this: you don't punish a 16-year-old, you punish the people responsible for the actions of the 16-year-old and that means the parents, whos mandate clearly includes a minimum of oversight over their offspring at least to the degree of ensuring that they don't harm those around them.
If we actually held parents responsible for the actions of their children, maybe more parents would start taking the whole "parenting" thing seriously and these kinds of problems could be avoided in the first place.
About time, I'd say.
Quick clarification up front: most universities will let you read their subscription to the appropriate journal either for free or for a modest fee. So it isn't as if there's some monumental hurdle here anywhere.
But yes -- I am definitely in favor of some kind of access system to the peer-reviewed literature that keeps the results that I produce on the public dime in the public domain. What good does it do me (and I'm strictly appealing to my own, personal selfishness here) to have reseaerchd X and Y and Z when I can't even prove that I've done it to anybody other than someone in the same field (who's probably my buddy anyways).
Science is, in the end, one big open source project. Where everybody is pooling their methods, their strategies, their ways of thinking, their experimental results. Science works because everybody can see what everybody else is doing and everybody can critique what everybody else has done (and ultimately improve upon it). Now, 99% of the population are plainly not qualified to comment on any one random scientific result -- but if we want to overcome this scientific illiteracy then it isn't going to happen by keeping scientific results out of the hands of people. It is going to happen by exposing them to them.
All progress humans have ever made is, in the end, scientific progress. And if we want for humanity to progress as a whole, we'll have to continue sharing that progress around.
Assuming the brick is significantly closer to us than the microwave source is (which they are), then the brick IS larger, from our point of view.
You are so mentally retarded that it hurts my teeth to read your nonsense. Go ahead and name ONE radio telescope that is smaller than a brick, ONE astronomical source that is smaller than a brick or ONE geometric configuration in which any one astronomical souce can appear to any radio telescope as smaller than a brick. You can't, of course. To a 50m telescope, a brick right in front of the aperture (doesn't get any closer than that) constitutes something like a 1/250000 area obstruction. That's it. There's nothing to see there. If you want the sub-arcsecond resolution neccessary to see a brick at radio wavelengths you'll need interferometry which utilizes more than one telescope to begin with.
A brick somewhere between here and the sun is invisible and undetectable to us. That's all there is to it. Go ahead and put it farther away and feel free to report to us what exact geometry you can suggest that would make a brick visible.
What? You're saying these bricks perfectly maintain their position in space, exactly between us and this microwave source?
No, that is what YOUR retarded fantasies require. A microwave source smaller than a brick is going to be invisible over cosmic distances NO MATTER whether or not there's anything absorbing in the way. Because there's limits to the power densities of a microwave emitter and because there's collimation limits set by interstellar and intergalactic radio-scintillation.
NAME one cosmic micowave source. One. Go ahead and name it. Then look up its size; Then look up the size of a radio telescope. Then TELL US where you'd put a brick so that it makes a detectable difference in the observation of that source by that radio telescope.
But of course you can't.
So you pretend indignation and you pretend that you're "dropping the subject" and "letting me have the last word" because "I'm just a troll". I guess you fantasize that you can somehow save face by pretending these things.
But of course you and I know that it's just pretense.
You are WAY out of your depth here. You have not the slightest shimmer of a clue what you're talking about. You have never in your life spent a second to think about any of this or even anything similar to this. You string words together as if they meant anything to you but you're just a brainless, mindless symbol-manipulation automaton pretending to have something to say.
You're pathetic.
Radio telescopes should be able to pick-up when a "brick" comes directly between it and a high-frequency (eg. microwave) source.
..if the brick happens to be larger in size than the microwave source. Which it isn't. Or otherwise the source would've been invisible to begin with.
Why do people who've never actually thought about anything at all think they should post absurd nonsense about topics that are really not that terribly hard to grasp?
No. We can also see things by the light they BLOCK from stars. If it was just matter, we would have seen it, and conclusively proved it's existance, long ago.
Actually that is not entirely correct. What we know is that it isn't a bunch of jupiter-sized things (which we would have been able to see) or large clouds of gas or dust. But there's a number of configurations of perfectly ordinary matter that are entirely allowed by the observations.
Consider, for example, that it's all in form of bricks. Run-of-the-mill bricks. Say two pints of volume, four pounds of mass. Compute how many you need and you get so-and-so many per cubic AU. Bricks per cubic AU!. We have 100-ton chunks of rock passing by the earth inside the moon's orbit and we only realize it after the fact -- something brick-sized somewhere between here and the sun would be completely undetectable. The low cross-section and low number-density would make it optically thin even at cosmological distances. The bricks would be essentially without interaction with each other (since they don't have enough gravity to attract each other and too thinly spread out to collide often enough to make a difference), but would be too massive to be noticably affected by the interstellar gas or dust. They would be in thermal equilibrium with their surroundings which means that most of them would be something like 3K and at best lead to a mild flattening of the observed CMB over hubble-distances. Over long time, they would aggregate in virial halos around galaxies and galaxy clusters.
There ya go: nothing terribly exotic, just bricks. And you'd get all the observed behaviour of dark matter. And I'm certainly not claiming that this is it, merely pointing out one perfectly mundane form of matter that would simply not be visible to us, other than through its gravitational effects on really large scales.
Why some crackpots insist that the universe is somehow obligated to contain only matter at sizes large enough to be visually detectable or otherwise gaseous of diffuse enough to be detectable is beyond me. Why some crackpots insist that there's something "mystical" or "unexplained" about dark matter is a riddle to me. The best theory of gravity known to us that works under all circumstances under which is has ever been tested indicates that there's some things in the universe that we haven't seen yet. Well, duh. And? Why could this possibly be controversial?
Before the 1950s we couldn't see giant molecular clouds - until we developed radio telescopes and found that there's as much matter in molecular form in the galaxy as in form of stars. What kind of utter hubris would drive someone to proclaim that we now surely must have seen all matter in the universe and that incorrect motions of galaxies must therefore indicate a flaw in our theory of gravity?
Riiiight, and if you state your opinion often enough without any argument or evidence, others might believe you?
While this appears to be YOUR philosophy, it has nothing to do with how I or any other scientist in the universe conduct our business. WE publish our methods, our evidence, out conclusions, our speculations, our interactions, our experiments, our findings -- all of them carefully labelled, thoroughly analyzed, painstakingly researched.
When was the last time YOU got something past peer-review?
Thought so.
I hope astronomers have a higher standard than you do, if nothing else!
I AM an astronomer. The lever of rigor involved before I make even the slightest claim about anything anywhere vastly exceeds anything you are capable of grasping.
Indeed - do we have "conclusive direct proof" that the Sun is made of mostly of hydrogen and helium?
Yes, we do.
It sounds like (these) astronomers have a different standard of evidence than I do.
Yes, a much, much, much tougher one.
Changes in travel direction w/o rotation of the whole bot.
So now the robot starts bumping because it has sensors only in one side of the system.
Or maybe you're willing to quadruple the sensory complexity for the marginal gain in mobility of an omnidirectional system? But then things like "pick up the thing in front of you" are going to become a nightmare and the whole question of control programming explodes in complexity. Contrary to your assumption, steering becomes much much harder. For a little RC car I have two sticks that say "forward/backward" and "left/right". What sticks should I have for the omnidirectional system? And when it finally arrives at the destination, you will still have to turn it to bring whatever arms or other actuators it has within reach of the object to be picked up (placed down, turned, manipulated etc).
If the robot has a preferred sensory direction and "turns it's head" when it changes direction, then it might as well turn the whole torso.
Not to mention that you always beat any omnidirectional system in speed with one that is optimized for speed in one particular direction. If you want fast, optimize for one-directional speed and accomodate turns.
Really -- I consider this an expensive gimmick at best.
This guy here: http://www.bostondynamics.com/content/sec.php?sect ion=BigDog can not just climb stairs but carry 120 pounds in the process. Click on the video for an eery demonstration of the uncanny valley effect.
Motorcycle insurance cheap? You must not have priced sportbike insurance lately. Even with only basic insurance, for the typical low 20's rider it is in the thousands per year.
You can avoid posting nonsensical gibberish like this by always keeping in mind that the earth is pretty big, many countries function different from yours, jurisdictions and corporations are not obligated to do things everywhere the same way they do it in your neighborhood.
I pay $149 every six months for alot more than just "minimal" coverage. Anybody who claims that motorcycle insurance costs more is either not grasping that this number is of course expressly tied to a certain particular location on the planet (and a certain insurance company etc.) or they're lying.
Well, belief that a human embryo IS a human has to be either naive or religious ("the embryo has the same soul as the grown-up human has or will have")
It doesn't matter whether it is "naive" or "religious". What matters is that it is a vile insult to every adult self-aware being to be told that an undifferentiated clump of cells is so much better than him that his rights somehow trump those of the adult.
It isn't really about religeon at all [...]
Yes, it is.
[...] these people are the merchants in the temple trying to make a buck out of belief.
Yes, that is precisely what religion is.
after all, it is much easier to do "fun stuff" on a Mac than on a PC
Like playing games?
Every tool I've ever seen anywhere came in three price point: the cheap for the newbies, the medium for the professionals and the pricey for the amateurs. Yes, that is the correct order of things. A layman buys a $5 hammer because he doesn't understand what to look for and price is the only thing he has available to make a decision. The amateur understands things like features and ergonomics and promptly buys the $80 hammer with chrome-plated titanium shaft. The professional who actually uses a hammer on a dayly basis buys the $20 model -- not the cheap crap but certainly not the overpriced gimmick either.
I can see the same thing for cameras and for binoculars and watches and, well, as I said: every tool I've ever seen. The laymen fall for the "cheap" thing, the amateurs fall for the pretty polished gimmickery (and are mighty proud that they didn't fall for the low-price thing) and the professionals buy the product that actually gets the job done without any of the superflous bells and whistles that tend to attract the amateurs.
Now with computers you get the additional wrinkle of the hardware/software thing. Spend more on the HW and run a cheaper OS? Pay dearly for the OS in the hopes of squeezing the most out of less well-endowed hardware?
Personally I have reason to shun macs in any way. But I also see no reason whatsoever to prefer them.
I don't eat MacFood, I don't have a MacJob, why would I want a MacBook?
...from one percent market share to TWO percent market share...
Two quick observations:
Where I am required to answer one of these "your pet's name" questions, I do so accurately, but with my hands slightly off. Let's say there's three tiers of paranoia about an account and for stuff I don't care about I just move both hands one charater to the right while typing my secret answer. For medium stuff I move them apart from each other and for what I deem critical i move the right hand up and the left one in (reality is different but that's the gist). Incidentily, I do the same thing for my passwords. Turns moderately secure passwords into sheer line-noise.
Thanks to these simple measures, my passwords are more secure than average which is all they need to be. There is no such thing as absolute security, but you only need to be more secure than the next guy. You'll never get rid of all termites, but you only need your house be less attractive than you neighbor's. You won't stop all burglaries, but you only need your house more burglar-proof than the one across the street. You cannot stop lightning, but you can make sure that you aren't the tallest thing out on the plain when the thunderstorm hits. All you have to do is be lower than a most other things and you're as safe as you could be.