I have something to hide. And I am not alone: my credit card number, my medical history, and commercially sensitive projects I'm working on, to name but three.
No, of course I don't trust the government not to leak that information like water from a sive — as someone with qualifications, I know how incompetent they are with IT.
I've just watched the cartoon version of Terry Pratchetts' Soul Music. It features a corrupt and over-strong Musicians' Guild, who (violently) prevent anyone playing music within their city unless they are paid a significant "membership fee".
About ten years ago, my dad came home from work and told me about a practical joke someone had played at work.
Some engineers had called the technician, complaining that the light in their office wouldn't turn off. The technician came, and no, it didn't turn the bulb off. He attached the multimeter to the switch... the power was being turned on and off by the switch. He attached it to the bulb itself... power was being cut. So he removed the bulb: it stayed on even when unplugged.
The engineers had pointed an active magnetron at the bulb.
It could work as well as the normal method, but if it catches on, it will mostly be used as an excuse to not do anything until publicly shamed. Call me cynical.
"Nuclear catalyst" the most sensible phrase, given the theory (false or not) is that palladium can be used as a nuclear equivalent to a chemical catalyst (i.e. not used up in the reaction it assists). This "misue" of catalyst is also found in other approaches to fusion, such muon-catalyzed fusion and antimatter catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion.
"A series of tubes" isn't to daft a description (electricity, also flowing in wires, often has water pressure==voltage and current==flow rate as an analogy). The problem was everything else he said. Tubes empty themselves, trucks don't. Tubes leak/break (packet loss) far more often than trucks get stolen or break down explosively. Trucks also get delayed by too much traffic. Obviously there are flaws with the "tubes" analogy (like WiFi, which would have to be a magic invisible intangible tube that connects itself to your computer), but for the layman, it's not that bad.
Um, how many people here are saying Todd Goldman is bad based soley on the content of the linked article he's suing over? I don't know if anything in that article is true or not. If it's not true, Goldman has every right to sue. Of course, if the article is true, then everyone else has a right to sue him instead:)
It doesn't matter how short patent terms are if it's still possible to get new patents on inventions that have already been patented one or more times before. Patent offices need more appropriate targets than the "how many have you dealt with this week" I've heard about; if court processes were not so slow, I would suggest penalties for patent examiners who pass patents that are subsequently invalidated.
the light can't bounce around the barrier that your feet make with the ground
Sure it can. You just make your shoes out of the same thing as the rest of the "cloak". Light goes in, bounces around in the material of the cloak itself, hits the ground, bounces straight back into the "cloak" material, bounces around some more, and leaves again.
A well thought out and informative post. I wish I had mod points to give you.
Just for the record, I have no idea what goes on in Canada regarding free speech. The only news (other than elections) I have of the entire country is the livejournal of a friend who lives there. It's kind of odd, now I think about it...
Section 505 of the USA PATRIOT Act, which was ruled to be in violation of the First (AKA free speech) and Fourth (AKA searches and seizures) amendments of the US constitution on the 29th of September 2004, by U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in the case ACLU v. Ashcroft (2004).
In addition, the phrase "expert advice or assistance" in section 805 of the same was ruled to be impermissibly vague on 23rd January 2004, by U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins.
Another good exmaple is when the ACLU sued the FBI over the USA PATRIOT Act's authority to demand that a business hand over records that may contain private financial or business information that is not pertinent to an ongoing investigation, only for the Department of Justice to prevent the ACLU from releasing the text of a countersuit. It took three weeks and judicial and congressional oversight before sections of the countersuit that "did not violate secrecy rules of the USA PATRIOT Act" were released.
Every country which has ratified the UN declaration on human rights (and followed through on their obligations, for example the UK) has equal free-speech to the USA. We just have different bugbears to you (in Europe, this is mainly we-hate-Nazis instead of we-hate-Terrorists).
Games take as long as you want to make them take, and cost as much as you want to spend on them. Minesweeper, as we all know, is fun. It takes about two days to fully design, test, add "alternate modes of play", make decent graphics for, include crude DRM, and add to an online store (I know because I've done it). Total cost? In business terms, about £300UK ($600US) including the rent on your office. Now admitedly, the total earnings were $15US with no real advertising, but the point remains: make a game on a movie budget and you have movie-style effects, plot and everything else. Make a game on a shoestring, and it's a whole different ball game.
A lack of growth is not the same as crisis. I download videos as fast as I can play them now; if bandwidth doesn't go up I still will; hell, if bandwith halves I still will! Most of the online games I play will run on 56k modems, the only reason against them is that they are metered connections. There is no bandwidth crisis.
Main topic: I've not had any problem with HostIreland, though as you may be able to guess from the name they like to combine domain registration with hosting. One (host) to avoid at all costs is NetPivotal: they reverted my site to a week-old backup without telling me, then randomly merged the front page with my first page, a placeholder that had only been up for a few days. Oh, and to upload pages securely, the only option is* a bloated geocities-style file manager.
Aside: I can understand being upset by the MySpace issue, but seriosuly, a High Court order? They have to simultaneously obey all laws of every country in which they operate.
*or was, at the time.
I don't care in the slighest either way. On the one hand, $4.99 is literally and figuratively peanuts (about what I earn in 12 minutes, or a massive half hour if I were on national minimum wage); and on the other, even low-speed WiFi is still faster than my high-speed internet connection.
I don't care about upgrading, but if I did, their price is lower than the cost of my time to find a trustworthy 3rd party.
It may not be a mountain, but it snowed in Canberra the first December my uncle moved there. The Australian climate is weird. Or possibly just the Canberra one, which is what my cousins thought.
That claim depends on what you mean by "working" — JET never produced sustained over-unity fusion power. If you don't require breakeven to count it as working, then a great many people have built working IEC fusion devices over the years. You could even buy one of them on eBay. Myself, I count these home built devices as "working" in the exact same way I count amateur rocketiers' launch pads as "rocket launch facilities".
Facinating. Your post demonstrates a weakness in the code used to identify link targets here on slashdot. The bracket says "example.com", but the link goes to it.slashdot.org! I wonder if that could be abused... (and no, I don't have time to look at the slashcode source code to find out!)
Real scientists are not primarily known by the fact that they 'look into the original papers'. If that were really the main work of real science, nothing new would ever be discovered. In fact, the truly essential element of real science is the original work of performing experiments and making nontrivial calculations.
On the contrary, real scientists frequently look into other papers, especially before opening their mouths to comment on the conclusions of the paper. One reason for this is to see if anyone has already solved the problem they're working on. I know this because I have worked in a real scientific lab.
Oh come on, everone knows the oil ran out in 2000, wait 2003, wait 2005, wait 2012, it's absolutely 2012.
Nobody ever said we would run out of oil by those dates, they said we would reach peak oil production, based on the seemingly reasonable assumption that the world as a whole will behave like every subpart of it had already been observed to. Some groups are now saying peak oil has already occured, but everyone agrees we will only know for sure a few years after the event.
Slashdot Mirror
I have something to hide. And I am not alone: my credit card number, my medical history, and commercially sensitive projects I'm working on, to name but three.
No, of course I don't trust the government not to leak that information like water from a sive — as someone with qualifications, I know how incompetent they are with IT.
I've just watched the cartoon version of Terry Pratchetts' Soul Music. It features a corrupt and over-strong Musicians' Guild, who (violently) prevent anyone playing music within their city unless they are paid a significant "membership fee".
While I have no doubt that the stoy is nonsense, isn't the Big Bang an instance of the "spontaneous creation of radiation and perhaps even matter"?
About ten years ago, my dad came home from work and told me about a practical joke someone had played at work.
Some engineers had called the technician, complaining that the light in their office wouldn't turn off. The technician came, and no, it didn't turn the bulb off. He attached the multimeter to the switch... the power was being turned on and off by the switch. He attached it to the bulb itself... power was being cut. So he removed the bulb: it stayed on even when unplugged.
The engineers had pointed an active magnetron at the bulb.
It could work as well as the normal method, but if it catches on, it will mostly be used as an excuse to not do anything until publicly shamed. Call me cynical.
"Nuclear catalyst" the most sensible phrase, given the theory (false or not) is that palladium can be used as a nuclear equivalent to a chemical catalyst (i.e. not used up in the reaction it assists). This "misue" of catalyst is also found in other approaches to fusion, such muon-catalyzed fusion and antimatter catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion.
"A series of tubes" isn't to daft a description (electricity, also flowing in wires, often has water pressure==voltage and current==flow rate as an analogy). The problem was everything else he said. Tubes empty themselves, trucks don't. Tubes leak/break (packet loss) far more often than trucks get stolen or break down explosively. Trucks also get delayed by too much traffic. Obviously there are flaws with the "tubes" analogy (like WiFi, which would have to be a magic invisible intangible tube that connects itself to your computer), but for the layman, it's not that bad.
Um, how many people here are saying Todd Goldman is bad based soley on the content of the linked article he's suing over? I don't know if anything in that article is true or not. If it's not true, Goldman has every right to sue. Of course, if the article is true, then everyone else has a right to sue him instead :)
Bagels test positive for opiates. Well, they do if they're covered in poppy seeds.
It doesn't matter how short patent terms are if it's still possible to get new patents on inventions that have already been patented one or more times before. Patent offices need more appropriate targets than the "how many have you dealt with this week" I've heard about; if court processes were not so slow, I would suggest penalties for patent examiners who pass patents that are subsequently invalidated.
Sure it can. You just make your shoes out of the same thing as the rest of the "cloak". Light goes in, bounces around in the material of the cloak itself, hits the ground, bounces straight back into the "cloak" material, bounces around some more, and leaves again.
A well thought out and informative post. I wish I had mod points to give you.
Just for the record, I have no idea what goes on in Canada regarding free speech. The only news (other than elections) I have of the entire country is the livejournal of a friend who lives there. It's kind of odd, now I think about it...
Section 505 of the USA PATRIOT Act, which was ruled to be in violation of the First (AKA free speech) and Fourth (AKA searches and seizures) amendments of the US constitution on the 29th of September 2004, by U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in the case ACLU v. Ashcroft (2004).
In addition, the phrase "expert advice or assistance" in section 805 of the same was ruled to be impermissibly vague on 23rd January 2004, by U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins.
Another good exmaple is when the ACLU sued the FBI over the USA PATRIOT Act's authority to demand that a business hand over records that may contain private financial or business information that is not pertinent to an ongoing investigation, only for the Department of Justice to prevent the ACLU from releasing the text of a countersuit. It took three weeks and judicial and congressional oversight before sections of the countersuit that "did not violate secrecy rules of the USA PATRIOT Act" were released.
Every country which has ratified the UN declaration on human rights (and followed through on their obligations, for example the UK) has equal free-speech to the USA. We just have different bugbears to you (in Europe, this is mainly we-hate-Nazis instead of we-hate-Terrorists).
Games take as long as you want to make them take, and cost as much as you want to spend on them. Minesweeper, as we all know, is fun. It takes about two days to fully design, test, add "alternate modes of play", make decent graphics for, include crude DRM, and add to an online store (I know because I've done it). Total cost? In business terms, about £300UK ($600US) including the rent on your office. Now admitedly, the total earnings were $15US with no real advertising, but the point remains: make a game on a movie budget and you have movie-style effects, plot and everything else. Make a game on a shoestring, and it's a whole different ball game.
A lack of growth is not the same as crisis. I download videos as fast as I can play them now; if bandwidth doesn't go up I still will; hell, if bandwith halves I still will! Most of the online games I play will run on 56k modems, the only reason against them is that they are metered connections. There is no bandwidth crisis.
I really can't wait for Taliban-style fundamentalist Sharia-law Muslims to use the same approach...</sarcasm>
Main topic: I've not had any problem with HostIreland, though as you may be able to guess from the name they like to combine domain registration with hosting. One (host) to avoid at all costs is NetPivotal: they reverted my site to a week-old backup without telling me, then randomly merged the front page with my first page, a placeholder that had only been up for a few days. Oh, and to upload pages securely, the only option is* a bloated geocities-style file manager. Aside: I can understand being upset by the MySpace issue, but seriosuly, a High Court order? They have to simultaneously obey all laws of every country in which they operate. *or was, at the time.
I don't care in the slighest either way. On the one hand, $4.99 is literally and figuratively peanuts (about what I earn in 12 minutes, or a massive half hour if I were on national minimum wage); and on the other, even low-speed WiFi is still faster than my high-speed internet connection.
I don't care about upgrading, but if I did, their price is lower than the cost of my time to find a trustworthy 3rd party.
It may not be a mountain, but it snowed in Canberra the first December my uncle moved there. The Australian climate is weird. Or possibly just the Canberra one, which is what my cousins thought.
That claim depends on what you mean by "working" — JET never produced sustained over-unity fusion power. If you don't require breakeven to count it as working, then a great many people have built working IEC fusion devices over the years. You could even buy one of them on eBay. Myself, I count these home built devices as "working" in the exact same way I count amateur rocketiers' launch pads as "rocket launch facilities".
Facinating. Your post demonstrates a weakness in the code used to identify link targets here on slashdot. The bracket says "example.com", but the link goes to it.slashdot.org! I wonder if that could be abused... (and no, I don't have time to look at the slashcode source code to find out!)
Very soon the cat will not only be out of the bag, but it will have shredded it on the way out.