This to me looks like its taking the general principle - drivers must be able to see behind them while backing up - and applying it to new technology. Rear-view and side mirrors are already legislated; why not this? It's an effective technological solution to the problem of blind spots.
I understand your argument about degrees of risk, but in this case two things argue against it: the victims are primarily the very young, making their deaths more terrible and more costly to society. And, the technology only advances an existing principle: that cars sold should be made to allow the drive to see where he is going, and what is in his way.
Speaking personally, backing up is one of the mos stressful things for me while driving. Not because I don't know how to point the car in the right direction, but because I'm never sure if there isn't a cat dog or toddler immediately behind my car. Short of getting out of the car, there's really no way of solving the problem of that behind-the-trunk blind spot. Until now.
I drove one of the new fords with the back-up camera not long ago. I tried and was able to drive backwards down a curvy country lane for a hundred yards or so, at a good speed too (probably 20kph). It was orders of magnitude easier to operate and it was clear throughout that I wasn't going to hit anything, be it a tree or fido.
Finally, an anecdote: there was a family that lived in my neighbourhood; I was friends with some of their kids (they had about 6 as I recall). The father was an professional, and as far as I could tell an intelligent and careful man. But, he ran over and killed one of his kids - a toddler playing in the driveway. That's the sort of risk that this legislation would prevent. And, to my mind, that sort of risk is more terrible and deserve more effort in preventing, than most other kinds.
The example in the article is that a lady searched for some brand of eyeglasses, and the scammer's site was the first result. Call me a populist, but I don't think people should be expected to learn how PageRank works in order to decipher the results of a simple search for some brandname. Google should have a mechanism to handle the bad-reviews-give-good-rank bug.
Educating people is still a good thing, but at first blush I would think teaching people to check the background of the sites they do buisness with would help more than teaching them how Google's sausage is made.
I'm a canuck and would be happy to celebrate a discovery by my compatriots, but it doesn't make much sense to say the team that made this ion-shattering discovery 'included canadians' when it included a lot of other nationalities too.
From TFA:
Canadians make up more than 150 of the researchers involved in ATLAS.
But putting McVeigh in jail and exectuing him didn't bring anyone back to life. It did not and will not in the future *prevent* it from happening.
Well, to be fair, it did deter McVeigh from doing it again.
I'd wager a guess that the fair way in which he was caught & convicted served to reinforce the moral force of the us government, which indirectly reduced the chance of terrorism By not turning new people into the kind of fema-camp paranoid terrorists of McVeigh's ilk.
Put another way, there's not much you can do about die-hard terrorists (usually people whose only skill is destroying things and/or sociopaths). But sticking to principals like fairness, justice, and proportionality helps stop otherwise normal people from becoming terrorists
This firefox extension from the EFF will force an HTTPS connection if possible. It works with Firefox (ie keeps the connection in https mode throughout the session, not just during the login).
Another big side-benefit touted in the early days was the fact that the ISS kept a lot of experienced Russian scientists & engineers occupied on productive work during the chaotic years after the Soviet Union collapsed, reducing the chance of them selling their skills to countries like North Korea and Iran.
Of course you can't prove a negative and it will always be impossible to say whether the ISS prevented countries like those developing missiles more quickly or better than they did in reality. Even so, it's a real possibility that the ISS saved us from a world where Kim Jong-Il has a working ICBM.
Re:So this is what passes for clever these days
on
USB 'Dead Drops'
·
· Score: 1
But as we say in Art: glad you don't like -- must mean its doing something right.
That's what the people of the time said about Bach, and Rembrandt, and Michelangelo. Oh wait, they didn't.
If you are now defining art as 'stuff the public doesn't like', then stop taking 'public funding'.
The closest analogy I've seen is the -1 Flamebait comment at the bottom of this article - stealing tapes from an unlocked car.
In this case, it's probably more like leaving notes in unlocked cars saying 'your car is unlocked'. IMHO leaving the note is creepy and intrusive; stealing the tape is criminal. Either way, you're poking your head around in places people want to keep private. Locks may keep honest people honest, but honest people shouldn't require locks to stay honest. Houses, cars, and facebook accounts are implicity private places, and you should never enter one without the conset of the owner, regardless of how well or poorly the thing is protected against intruders.
If you think about it, the only reason we nerds tell people to use SSL is to protect themselves against the kind of intrusion the author of TFA did. An unlocked door, or an open account, is not an invitation to snoop around. The analogy I gave above fails - the majority facebook users don't know their account are accessible to others. That doesn't change the fact that snooping is the wrong thing to do. If you find a public terminal with an open account, log it out. If you know someone or some group is vulnerable to snooping, warn them, do not snoop on them. There are a ton of ways to do this - letters to the editor, blog posts, mentioning it in conversation, formal requests to national privacy commissioners, meetings with local legislators, posters on telephone poles, soapboxes, whatever. Accessing personal facebook pages of a dozen random people at starbucks is not the way to do it.
1) Launch purpose-built exoplanet-finding 'scope into space (like the Kepler or TPF) 2) Find lots of exoplanets 3) Narrow down list to the small rockey goldilocks-zone planets 4) Do some spectroscopy 5) Find the 1 or 2 best hopes in terms of proximity & life-formation 6) Launch a few probes with 100 or 200 year mission life to each of the good candidates 7) Wait 100 or 200 years 8) ??? 9) Par-tay!
I don't know much about CC, but from what I understand there are a dozen or so licenses, some of which allow commercial use. If they're so concerned about commercial use down the line, why on earth couldn't they just pick and choose the licenses they want to support? It really can't be that difficult.
Likewise, they could allow music with commerce-restricted CC licenses for those shows which they know will not be used for commercial purposes. This would require flagging those shows in their own library, but that's not an impossible task.
They are a public broadcaster and CBC radio is a commercial-free broadcaster, over the airwaves at least. I've never heard of any CBC radio paid-for podcasts, but IMNSHO they shouldn't exist in the first place.
A 1 billion dollar fine is absurd. First, there's no way he can ever pay it. Second, it is way out of proportion to the harm caused. Third, it undermines respect for the courts by making them look out to lunch, foolish and/or vindictive.
Think about what a billion dollars represents: the lifetime's earnings of a hundreds of well-paid people, or a thousand low-wage people, or the GDP of a small city. Spam sucks, but the damage this guy caused doesn't measure up.
Think about it: in 2000 years, long after the American Empire collapses to the Canadian Hordes, scholars will look back at the US legal code and declare it to be the more comprehensive in existence, covering every conceivable eventuality, no matter how brain-dead.
Recently a lawyer in the UK was also targeted by the 4chan group.
What's notable is that he was in the same business as the law firm in this article - sending out compliance letters for alleged copyright infringement. As this article notes, lately the UK lawyer had only been getting business from porn movie producers; all his mainstream clients had stopped hiring him because they no longer saw a net benefit in suing their fans.
This might explain why the law firm was threatening people over a c-movie: the 'real' movie studios in the US might no longer want to work with people like them.
The law firm he ended up with was ACS Law, run by middle-aged lawyer Andrew Crossley. ACS Law had, after a process of attrition, become one of the only UK firms to engage in such work. Unfortunately for Crossley, mainstream film studios had decided that suing file-sharers brought little apart from negative publicity, and so Crossley was left defending a heap of pornography, some video games, and a few musical tracks.
Just for the heck of it, here is a video of the Bungie world headquarters from 1996, back when they were Mac developers, and before they moved to the dark side and joined Microsoft.
That's a nice thought, but in reality motorcycle are by far the most dangerous form of transport.
Measured per 100 million vehicle-miles, cars have 1.2 fatalities light trucks have 1.2 fatalities large trucks have 0.3 fatalities motorcycles have 38.4 fatalities
Likewise for me. I'm around your age and my maternal grandfather, who is in his early 90s now, served for about 3 years during the war. The only stories I've gotten out of him are of the humorous anecdote variety, and I've never pressed for more.
OTOH, my paternal grandfather, who I never saw, was a medic in Europe after d-day. We still have his personal diary from that time and , as you might imagine, it has some pretty unpleasant sections.
I suspect they don't tell us these things because we would see them differently if we knew what they had seen and what they had done. Fighting for your country is all well and good but shooting someone or blowing someone up is morally difficult, even in the context of war.
I'll bet there are about 100 million people who would like to test the security of Ron Bowes' nuts against a swift kick. I mean, he should be aware of the Extreme Pain vulnerability by now, and he should have taken the most basic security precautions by now, like wearing a cup. If not, well, he deserves what he gets, right?
This is spectroscopy. They've been doing it for years, and it is the reason we know the chemical composition of everything from stars to planets to gas clouds. It's a fundamental tool of astronomy. The only novelty re: extrasolar planets is the resolution required, but even that isn't new, afaik.
The article quotes the boffin as saying
"The surprise was that we succeeded with extremely sparse observations under relatively bad weather conditions," Vidal-Madjar says. "But seeing how easily oxygen was seen strongly argues in favor of high-spectral-resolution searches [of Earthlike extrasolar planets]."
So it seems that the news here is that it's easier than expected to measure oxygen.
Why not call it the Deepwater Horizon blowout? That's the phrase everyone else seems to be using.
It's more specific than 'BP Blowout' (for obvious reasons)
It's also more specific than 'Macondo Blowout' (The Macondo Prospect, as wikipedia tells me, is the name of the field, which presumably might still have another blowout at some point in the future. Deepwater Horizon, having sunk to the bottom of the ocean, is unlikely to have any future blowouts.)
Perchance I wonder how many outrageous statements I could attribute to US government back think tanks if I tried.
F this warmongering nonsense. There are fanatical Chinese nationalists, yes. What I don't appreciate is the fact that there are warmongering US nationalists who get their 'stories' posted to slashdot.
For all intents and purposes, the SI prefix system has served the scientific community extremely well since its inception. However, we believe there is one significant flaw in the system which demands immediate attention.
As you know, the largest number with a designated SI prefix is 10^24, which carries the name "yotta-". However, in our world of increasing physical awareness and experimental precision, this number is no longer a satisfactory "upper bound" in scientific nomenclature. The analysis of many physical phenomena reveals natural quantities in excess of 27 orders of magnitude, a number which is currently ignored by the SI system.
Designating a prefix for 10^27 is of critical importance for scientists in all fields. This number is significant in many crucial calculations, including the wattage of the sun, distances between galaxies, or the number of atoms in a large sample.
Addressing this issue presents an exciting opportunity. Since the SI system has traditionally adopted the last names of accomplished scientists for unit nomenclature, it follows that prefix designation should do the same. From this tradition comes the chance for the SI system to use nomenclature to honor a constantly overlooked scientific contributor: Northern California.
Northern California is home to many influential research institutions, including the University of California, Davis, the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Countless contributions to science have been made by these and other local schools; in fact, elements 93-103 were all discovered at UC Berkeley in a span of 21 years.
However, science isn't all that sets Northern California apart from the rest of the world. The area is also notorious for the creation and widespread usage of the English slang "hella," which typically means "very," or can refer to a large quantity (e.g. "there are hella stars out tonight").
Thus, we believe that the SI system can not only rectify their failing prefix system but also honor the scientific progress of Northern California by formally establishing "hella-" as the prefix for 10^27.
Under this designation, the complexity of high-magnitude nomenclature would be greatly reduced. For example, the number of atoms in 120 kg of carbon-12 would be simplified from 6,000 yottaatoms to 6 hellaatoms. Similarly, the sun (mass of 2.2 hellatons) would release energy at 0.3 hellawatts, rather than 300 yottawatts.
We believe the designation of the "hella-" prefix would have a positive impact on all parties involved, and thus warrants serious consideration. We thank you for your time.
Austin Sendek
Movement Founder
UC Davis Physics
List of current prefixes:
The International System of Units (abbr. SI, Systeme Internacional) has established standard prefixes for powers of ten from 10^-24 to 10^24. For example, one could say that the mass of 1.0 moles of carbon-12 is precisely 12 grams, 0.012 kilograms, 12000000 micrograms, or 0.000000000000000000000012 yottagrams. A list of these prefixes appears below.
Slashdot Mirror
This to me looks like its taking the general principle - drivers must be able to see behind them while backing up - and applying it to new technology. Rear-view and side mirrors are already legislated; why not this? It's an effective technological solution to the problem of blind spots.
I understand your argument about degrees of risk, but in this case two things argue against it: the victims are primarily the very young, making their deaths more terrible and more costly to society. And, the technology only advances an existing principle: that cars sold should be made to allow the drive to see where he is going, and what is in his way.
Speaking personally, backing up is one of the mos stressful things for me while driving. Not because I don't know how to point the car in the right direction, but because I'm never sure if there isn't a cat dog or toddler immediately behind my car. Short of getting out of the car, there's really no way of solving the problem of that behind-the-trunk blind spot. Until now.
I drove one of the new fords with the back-up camera not long ago. I tried and was able to drive backwards down a curvy country lane for a hundred yards or so, at a good speed too (probably 20kph). It was orders of magnitude easier to operate and it was clear throughout that I wasn't going to hit anything, be it a tree or fido.
Finally, an anecdote: there was a family that lived in my neighbourhood; I was friends with some of their kids (they had about 6 as I recall). The father was an professional, and as far as I could tell an intelligent and careful man. But, he ran over and killed one of his kids - a toddler playing in the driveway. That's the sort of risk that this legislation would prevent. And, to my mind, that sort of risk is more terrible and deserve more effort in preventing, than most other kinds.
The example in the article is that a lady searched for some brand of eyeglasses, and the scammer's site was the first result. Call me a populist, but I don't think people should be expected to learn how PageRank works in order to decipher the results of a simple search for some brandname. Google should have a mechanism to handle the bad-reviews-give-good-rank bug.
Educating people is still a good thing, but at first blush I would think teaching people to check the background of the sites they do buisness with would help more than teaching them how Google's sausage is made.
I'm a canuck and would be happy to celebrate a discovery by my compatriots, but it doesn't make much sense to say the team that made this ion-shattering discovery 'included canadians' when it included a lot of other nationalities too.
From TFA:
Canadians make up more than 150 of the researchers involved in ATLAS.
From Wiki:
The project is led by Fabiola Gianotti and involves roughly 2,000 scientists and engineers at 165 institutions in 35 countries.
So.. how about we say 'Horray for people!' or something like that.
But putting McVeigh in jail and exectuing him didn't bring anyone back to life. It did not and will not in the future *prevent* it from happening.
Well, to be fair, it did deter McVeigh from doing it again.
I'd wager a guess that the fair way in which he was caught & convicted served to reinforce the moral force of the us government, which indirectly reduced the chance of terrorism By not turning new people into the kind of fema-camp paranoid terrorists of McVeigh's ilk.
Put another way, there's not much you can do about die-hard terrorists (usually people whose only skill is destroying things and/or sociopaths). But sticking to principals like fairness, justice, and proportionality helps stop otherwise normal people from becoming terrorists
News for nerds who never took a biology course and are deeply suspicious of the so-called "sciences"
They didn't even read The Economist. In 2007.
This firefox extension from the EFF will force an HTTPS connection if possible. It works with Firefox (ie keeps the connection in https mode throughout the session, not just during the login).
Another big side-benefit touted in the early days was the fact that the ISS kept a lot of experienced Russian scientists & engineers occupied on productive work during the chaotic years after the Soviet Union collapsed, reducing the chance of them selling their skills to countries like North Korea and Iran.
Of course you can't prove a negative and it will always be impossible to say whether the ISS prevented countries like those developing missiles more quickly or better than they did in reality. Even so, it's a real possibility that the ISS saved us from a world where Kim Jong-Il has a working ICBM.
But as we say in Art: glad you don't like -- must mean its doing something right.
That's what the people of the time said about Bach, and Rembrandt, and Michelangelo. Oh wait, they didn't.
If you are now defining art as 'stuff the public doesn't like', then stop taking 'public funding'.
The closest analogy I've seen is the -1 Flamebait comment at the bottom of this article - stealing tapes from an unlocked car.
In this case, it's probably more like leaving notes in unlocked cars saying 'your car is unlocked'. IMHO leaving the note is creepy and intrusive; stealing the tape is criminal. Either way, you're poking your head around in places people want to keep private. Locks may keep honest people honest, but honest people shouldn't require locks to stay honest. Houses, cars, and facebook accounts are implicity private places, and you should never enter one without the conset of the owner, regardless of how well or poorly the thing is protected against intruders.
If you think about it, the only reason we nerds tell people to use SSL is to protect themselves against the kind of intrusion the author of TFA did. An unlocked door, or an open account, is not an invitation to snoop around. The analogy I gave above fails - the majority facebook users don't know their account are accessible to others. That doesn't change the fact that snooping is the wrong thing to do. If you find a public terminal with an open account, log it out. If you know someone or some group is vulnerable to snooping, warn them, do not snoop on them. There are a ton of ways to do this - letters to the editor, blog posts, mentioning it in conversation, formal requests to national privacy commissioners, meetings with local legislators, posters on telephone poles, soapboxes, whatever. Accessing personal facebook pages of a dozen random people at starbucks is not the way to do it.
1) Launch purpose-built exoplanet-finding 'scope into space (like the Kepler or TPF)
2) Find lots of exoplanets
3) Narrow down list to the small rockey goldilocks-zone planets
4) Do some spectroscopy
5) Find the 1 or 2 best hopes in terms of proximity & life-formation
6) Launch a few probes with 100 or 200 year mission life to each of the good candidates
7) Wait 100 or 200 years
8) ???
9) Par-tay!
I don't know much about CC, but from what I understand there are a dozen or so licenses, some of which allow commercial use. If they're so concerned about commercial use down the line, why on earth couldn't they just pick and choose the licenses they want to support? It really can't be that difficult.
Likewise, they could allow music with commerce-restricted CC licenses for those shows which they know will not be used for commercial purposes. This would require flagging those shows in their own library, but that's not an impossible task.
They are a public broadcaster and CBC radio is a commercial-free broadcaster, over the airwaves at least. I've never heard of any CBC radio paid-for podcasts, but IMNSHO they shouldn't exist in the first place.
A 1 billion dollar fine is absurd. First, there's no way he can ever pay it. Second, it is way out of proportion to the harm caused. Third, it undermines respect for the courts by making them look out to lunch, foolish and/or vindictive.
Think about what a billion dollars represents: the lifetime's earnings of a hundreds of well-paid people, or a thousand low-wage people, or the GDP of a small city. Spam sucks, but the damage this guy caused doesn't measure up.
Cases like this are good in a way.
Think about it: in 2000 years, long after the American Empire collapses to the Canadian Hordes, scholars will look back at the US legal code and declare it to be the more comprehensive in existence, covering every conceivable eventuality, no matter how brain-dead.
Recently a lawyer in the UK was also targeted by the 4chan group.
What's notable is that he was in the same business as the law firm in this article - sending out compliance letters for alleged copyright infringement. As this article notes, lately the UK lawyer had only been getting business from porn movie producers; all his mainstream clients had stopped hiring him because they no longer saw a net benefit in suing their fans.
This might explain why the law firm was threatening people over a c-movie: the 'real' movie studios in the US might no longer want to work with people like them.
The law firm he ended up with was ACS Law, run by middle-aged lawyer Andrew Crossley. ACS Law had, after a process of attrition, become one of the only UK firms to engage in such work. Unfortunately for Crossley, mainstream film studios had decided that suing file-sharers brought little apart from negative publicity, and so Crossley was left defending a heap of pornography, some video games, and a few musical tracks.
Can you explain, in layman's terms, how you determined the planet was tidally locked with its sun?
Just for the heck of it, here is a video of the Bungie world headquarters from 1996, back when they were Mac developers, and before they moved to the dark side and joined Microsoft.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFbrfmqOtbE
That's a nice thought, but in reality motorcycle are by far the most dangerous form of transport.
Measured per 100 million vehicle-miles,
cars have 1.2 fatalities
light trucks have 1.2 fatalities
large trucks have 0.3 fatalities
motorcycles have 38.4 fatalities
source
It's a well-known fact that God uses 3-space tabs. I don't want to go to hell, so that's what I use, but your eternal soul is your own call, buddy.
Likewise for me. I'm around your age and my maternal grandfather, who is in his early 90s now, served for about 3 years during the war. The only stories I've gotten out of him are of the humorous anecdote variety, and I've never pressed for more.
OTOH, my paternal grandfather, who I never saw, was a medic in Europe after d-day. We still have his personal diary from that time and , as you might imagine, it has some pretty unpleasant sections.
I suspect they don't tell us these things because we would see them differently if we knew what they had seen and what they had done. Fighting for your country is all well and good but shooting someone or blowing someone up is morally difficult, even in the context of war.
I'll bet there are about 100 million people who would like to test the security of Ron Bowes' nuts against a swift kick. I mean, he should be aware of the Extreme Pain vulnerability by now, and he should have taken the most basic security precautions by now, like wearing a cup. If not, well, he deserves what he gets, right?
This is spectroscopy. They've been doing it for years, and it is the reason we know the chemical composition of everything from stars to planets to gas clouds. It's a fundamental tool of astronomy. The only novelty re: extrasolar planets is the resolution required, but even that isn't new, afaik.
The article quotes the boffin as saying
"The surprise was that we succeeded with extremely sparse observations under relatively bad weather conditions," Vidal-Madjar says. "But seeing how easily oxygen was seen strongly argues in favor of high-spectral-resolution searches [of Earthlike extrasolar planets]."
So it seems that the news here is that it's easier than expected to measure oxygen.
Why not call it the Deepwater Horizon blowout? That's the phrase everyone else seems to be using.
It's more specific than 'BP Blowout' (for obvious reasons)
It's also more specific than 'Macondo Blowout' (The Macondo Prospect, as wikipedia tells me, is the name of the field, which presumably might still have another blowout at some point in the future. Deepwater Horizon, having sunk to the bottom of the ocean, is unlikely to have any future blowouts.)
or Chinese-government-backed-think-tank?
Perchance I wonder how many outrageous statements I could attribute to US government back think tanks if I tried.
F this warmongering nonsense. There are fanatical Chinese nationalists, yes. What I don't appreciate is the fact that there are warmongering US nationalists who get their 'stories' posted to slashdot.
Won't the rate of increase in the radius of the sphere decrease as a cube function of time? Or something like that? :)
The fine petition includes the following description:
Website:
http://www.wix.com/mhostore/makehellaoff...
http://www.makehellaofficial.blogspot.com/
Mission:
To Whom It May Concern:
For all intents and purposes, the SI prefix system has served the scientific community extremely well since its inception. However, we believe there is one significant flaw in the system which demands immediate attention.
As you know, the largest number with a designated SI prefix is 10^24, which carries the name "yotta-". However, in our world of increasing physical awareness and experimental precision, this number is no longer a satisfactory "upper bound" in scientific nomenclature. The analysis of many physical phenomena reveals natural quantities in excess of 27 orders of magnitude, a number which is currently ignored by the SI system.
Designating a prefix for 10^27 is of critical importance for scientists in all fields. This number is significant in many crucial calculations, including the wattage of the sun, distances between galaxies, or the number of atoms in a large sample.
Addressing this issue presents an exciting opportunity. Since the SI system has traditionally adopted the last names of accomplished scientists for unit nomenclature, it follows that prefix designation should do the same. From this tradition comes the chance for the SI system to use nomenclature to honor a constantly overlooked scientific contributor: Northern California.
Northern California is home to many influential research institutions, including the University of California, Davis, the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Countless contributions to science have been made by these and other local schools; in fact, elements 93-103 were all discovered at UC Berkeley in a span of 21 years.
However, science isn't all that sets Northern California apart from the rest of the world. The area is also notorious for the creation and widespread usage of the English slang "hella," which typically means "very," or can refer to a large quantity (e.g. "there are hella stars out tonight").
Thus, we believe that the SI system can not only rectify their failing prefix system but also honor the scientific progress of Northern California by formally establishing "hella-" as the prefix for 10^27.
Under this designation, the complexity of high-magnitude nomenclature would be greatly reduced. For example, the number of atoms in 120 kg of carbon-12 would be simplified from 6,000 yottaatoms to 6 hellaatoms. Similarly, the sun (mass of 2.2 hellatons) would release energy at 0.3 hellawatts, rather than 300 yottawatts.
We believe the designation of the "hella-" prefix would have a positive impact on all parties involved, and thus warrants serious consideration. We thank you for your time.
Austin Sendek
Movement Founder
UC Davis Physics
List of current prefixes:
The International System of Units (abbr. SI, Systeme Internacional) has established standard prefixes for powers of ten from 10^-24 to 10^24. For example, one could say that the mass of 1.0 moles of carbon-12 is precisely 12 grams, 0.012 kilograms, 12000000 micrograms, or 0.000000000000000000000012 yottagrams. A list of these prefixes appears below.
Factor Name
10^24 yotta
10