This is really cool, but I must admit that the wiring and soldering made me want to cry. Why put so much work on the exterior appearance but do such a half-assed job on the electronics?

They did warn that the impact of Professor Duffy’s discovery could be cataclysmic for the patent world, casting “a cloud over many thousands of board decisions” and “unsettling the expectations of patent holders and licensees across the nation.”

This is so typical of this administration. When they screw up they immediately attack the person who pointed it out.

@9: Good answer! It definitely sounds like a plausible explanation.

I don't get it. Why does Mugabe need to win an election? His reputation wouldn't get any lower if he suddenly declared himself dictator. Tossing out all of the losing elections until he intimidates voters enough to win is probably worse for his reputation.

takuan:

Be careful with that excuse. If you are running a system that keeps track of the last time a file was modified, it will be hard for anybody to believe that you don't know the password or where the key is kept if it was accessed recently. The best thing would be to use a filesystem that doesn't keep that tracking information or that indicates that a file wasn't recently used. Then your excuse would be plausible.

Not that I think that would help. They'd probably still arrest you for obstruction. You could then spend a couple thousand dollars to get your name cleared in court.

The only safe way will be to keep your files encrypted online and access them when you need them.

I guess this explains Weird Al's song "Trigger Happy".

@6: Fair use was encoded by Congress based on a finding in a federal court in Folsom v. Marsh. This finding based fair use on common law. Congress is free to change the law at will, but the case would likely then again move through the court system. I think it would be difficult for fair use opponents to ward off the First Amendment arguments, especially at the Supreme Court level.

Ha ha! The torch has been put out in Paris! I am so proud of the French protesters. Too bad they weren't able to steal the torch and toss it in the Seine.

Maybe the people in the rally should bring water balloons and douse the damn torch. That will have a lot more effect than some peaceful protest China couldn't care about.

Or better than water they should bring some Purple-K extinguishers. That stuff will put out any fire. You can mix Purple-K with foam or water like they do to put out aircraft fires.

Ted Turner doesn't know what he is talking about. The IPCC report gives the range of temperature rise over the next 2 decades to be from 0.1 C to 0.2 C per decade. The temperature rise after that point depends a lot on greenhouse gas production, but it isn't going to suddenly jump up to 2 C per decade. A rise 4.5 C in 30 to 40 years is just silly. Ted Turner needs to lay off the booze. People aren't going to be eating each other like zombies due to global warming no matter how cool of a movie it would be.

markfrei :"600 Volts is so meaningless - it the current that will kill ya..."

I wish people would stop saying this. What kills you is the amount of current through the heart for a certain period of time (such as 0.1 A for 1 second).

I can easily build a 12 V battery with 1A going through a 12 Ω resistor. I won't die if I touch the wire. I can also build a 450 V power supply with 0.00001 A going through a resistor. In this case I very well could die if I touch the wire. Why? Your body touching the wire is a resistor in parallel. In the worst case you body resistance could be as low as 300 Ω. In that case 30 V can kill you. Normally it will be much higher. Additionally, lower current though your heart for longer periods of time can also kill you.

And why don't Tasers, touching van de Graaf generators, or touching doorknobs kill you? It is the time that the current can pass through your heart. Touching a lead to a large 450 V power supply is not going to appreciably change its operation and cause the voltage to drop. The opposite is true for a doorknob or a van de Graaf generator.

To summarize: don't touch high voltage equipment that can maintain the voltage over your body resistance for a significant period of time. It is impossible to calculate from the current in an object alone exactly how much current could go through your heart if you touch it. You would also need to know the resistances involved. On the other hand, you can estimate how much current can go through your heart based on the voltage alone (since your body resistance would be in parallel). Use voltage as your guide for safety.

Thank goodness we have the Bush Administration to tell us what the Constitution really means. Before they came into power I wouldn't have known that the prevention of suspending the writ of habeas corpus only applies to those to which it has already been granted (???), that searches don't require warrants if the government feels that they are really important, and that the military can be deployed to search homes domestically without a rebellion taking place. I feel so silly now! If it wasn't for the Bush Administration I would have thought that the meaning of the Constitution was contained in its wording.

Cpt. Tim:

Really? I figured that after a month of wearing a nuclear watch you'd be late.

Hmm, it seems to me that it is more likely that CMOT Dibbler is running a franchise in China with Disembowel-Meself-Honourably Dibhala.

Oh wait, they didn't build a cross with that statue. Fools!

g.park:

I wouldn't worry too much about a giant stone Jesus. Even if the statue comes alive, it will only be lucky enough to have come alive just to be crucified by the giant stone cross. This isn't as big of deal as when you have a giant stone Abe Lincoln come to life.

He used to work as a software engineer. This explains why he is following the Programmer Dress Code.

I like how this image looks like a piping diagram. Nonetheless, when I want a detailed schematic of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory I'll turn to Dante. A cosmology that doesn't have angels pushing crystal spheres and demons navigating the rivers of hell seems so amateurish. Dante made Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory look interesting. This image just makes it look like the schematic for my water heater (except that my water heater only occasionally taps into the Lake of Fire).

JakeTheSnake:

Oh yes, I see what you mean. I always take it too literally when someone talks about boiling water. Most people don't literally mean that they have boiled off water when they talk about boiling water. They only mean that the temperature has been raised to 100 C.

JakeTheSnake, yes you can heat water with your blender. This is similar to the experiment Joule performed to confirm the First Law of Thermodynamics.

Zan, you forgot the latent heat of vaporization. The correct value comes closer to 130 KW for a 5 second full boil of 250 g of water (with the approximation of a constant specific heat for liquid water and no superheating).

This is an incredibly steampunked way to mount your consoles. The only recommendation I would give is to add some valves on each pipe attached to a position switch that open circuits the data lines when the valve is shut. If possible a large relay or an electrically operated circuit breaker should be used for the characteristic ker-chunk sound.

As someone who has worked in electricity generation, I must say that the use of electrical tape with the wedge just warms my heart! The fact that they didn't use duct tape indicates that they realize that safety is important. Remember, half 'lap double wrap!

A lot of people here are claiming that Einstein disproved the ether with his special theory of relativity. I disagree. One of his postulates was that the speed of light is constant in all inertial reference frames. This postulate came from the work of Maxwell. Maxwellian electrodynamics showed that light did not need a medium to transfer through and that the speed of light is constant in all inertial reference frames even though it took physicists half a century to accept that. Einstein's contributions were immense, but the way they came from the Michelson-Morley experiment was due to Lorentz. The famous 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) term was invented by Lorenz to allow ether to exist and not contradict one of the early forms of the Michelson-Morley experiment. Einstein just took Lorentz's equations and used them to discuss mechanics in general. While Einstein had to argue for many years to show that his special theory of relativity was correct and that Lorentz's ether theory was wrong, Maxwellian electrodynamics was always firm on the question.

It looks like a Michelson–Morley interferometer. Well actually it looks like a crazy battleship cannon, but it most certainly is a Michelson-Morley interferometer.

Ah, the fun of measuring for ether. A substance that must be stiff so that it allowed light to be transmitted at incredible speeds yet at the same time somehow be fluid to allow the planets and other celestial objects to easily move through space. You have to love these ether measurement experiments--measuring zero to increasingly higher precision. I think they've got the ether drift measurement down to a precision of tens of meters per second now.

KurtMac:

Nuclear weapons make fighting between major world powers improbable, but the Cold War has shown us that fighting between major powers and proxies can occur and that the proxies will be armed by a major power. The US high kill/loss ratio of WWII was whittled away in the Korean and Vietnam Wars by advanced Soviet aircraft. And the Stinger missiles supplied by the US to Mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghanistan War were very effective. This only goes to show that even though you aren't fighting directly against another major power, you might still have to deal with their advanced weapons.

Additionally, while urban combat is certainly an important type of warfare, it isn't the only type of warfare. If an enemy can choose a battle, it will always choose your weak spot just as you would attack an enemy's weak spot if you had the choice.

theMage:

U-238 is fissionable. It just takes an incident neutron with a kinetic energy of about 6 MeV. U-238 isn't fissile, like U-235. This means that any energy neutron can destabilize the nucleus and cause fission (including thermal energies). This has to do with odd/even number of protons and neutrons in the atom. A nuclide with a high atomic mass number (above thorium) and an odd number of protons and neutrons in its nucleus is a fissile nuclide. An even number is just fissionable (and it will take a high energy neutron to cause fission, typically >5 MeV). U-233 is fissile, Pu-239 is fissile, but Th-232 isn't nor is Pu-238 (used for RTGs).

This is notable since some thermonuclear bombs actually use high energy neutrons from the fusion reactions to cause fission in a layer of U-238. The multi megaton bombs get most of their energy from this fission. It is also notable since U-238 will be transmuted to Pu-239 when it absorbs a neutron which is a fissile fuel (this is how breeder reactors work).

I believe this maneuver is called the Kulbit. A couple of Russian planes can do this as well as the US F-22. This will probably be a standard maneuver of fifth generation fighter aircraft.

jordan314:

There is certainly not a strong link.

Man On Pink Corner:

You noted the purposes that something may be used but you forgot the four factors that determine if something is fair use:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

If this compendium was made for pure literary research then it would probably be allowed. But since it is for profit it is not likely a fair use defense will work. I'm sure the other factors will be argued as well (especially #4).

Pyros, sometimes a thermonuclear weapon is just a thermonuclear weapon. It really isn't necessary to assign it a gender.

One of the things that I find so striking about people who fixate on assigning gender motivations for every object or action is how Aristotelian they go about it. It isn't about defending their theory about gender motivations--it is more about assuming that their theory is correct and then taking it to the logical conclusion regardless of how silly the explanation sounds. Aristotle's "Problems Connected with the Drinking of Wine and Drunkenness" is a good example of this. I suggest you read it to see how silly your statements might appear to others.

The only crime here is that the man had to go the night without a beer. Does anybody really want to live in a world where you can't call 911 to get a beer delivered right away? I sure don't.

I almost want to hug some of the posters here! The fact that so many people latched onto the horrible term 'de-evolution' warms my heart. If a creature that is dumber and ugly is able to reproduce and survive in an environment where a "higher being" goes extinct then that creature has evolved.

This entire prediction is sort of silly in my opinion. It is hard to quantify the evolution of a creature that is itself conscious of its evolving and may in the future be able to change the genetic code of its offspring as it desires. Adding intelligent beings into the equation screws up all sorts of evolutionary predictions. I mean who would have predicted that dogs would have become as varied as they are today in basically a split second in evolutionary time (a Chihuahua and a German Shepherd are the same species and could theoretically mate).

Add in the possibility in the creation of AI and advances in medicine to dramatically increase the age that humans can live *and* mate (which has already achieved amazing successes) and you have to wonder why anybody would think that they would have any credibility in predicting the future of human evolution. This almost sounds as silly as the 18th, 19th, and 20th century scientists who thought that population growth was going to exceed the worldwide food supply. Of course, most of them ignored the possibilities of technological advancement screwing up their predictions.

The latest IPCC report estimated that sea levels would likely rise 18 to 59 cm in the entire 21st century. This amount of sea level rise is unlikely to imperil the major cities.

There are a lot of dangers with climate change, but the damage due to sea level increases is exaggerated. Major melting in Greenland and Antarctica (the vast majority of land-bound ice in the world) is not expected until at least the 22nd century.

At least most of them are unpaid; no doubt, some of the loudest are working as contractors for the same agencies whose activities they pretend to deconstruct.

The real government conspiracy is the government conspiracy! This seems to be along the mindset that the best way for a government to protect itself is to invent its own enemy which it can control from behind the scenes. But what if the real conspiracy is the government conspiring to create its own government conspiracy? Then the real enemy is the original conspiracy theorists themselves! Would it not be logical for those conspiracy theorists to create Al-Qaeda just so that they could make their conspiracy theories? Well probably not, but it isn't any more crazy than the rest of this nest of theories.

Ceronomus:

The disease that killed Robert Jordan was only detected last year. When he began writing the prequel in 2003 or so he had no reason to believe that he wouldn't have another 15 productive years of writing. In fact, prior to the detection of the disease he was planning on starting a new series after concluding The Wheel of Time.

I think the reason the series stalled out in the middle is because with such an expansive series with interconnecting plotlines and characters, you almost suffer from geometric growth. If your goal is for all of the plotlines to converge at or near the end, you have to deal with the incredible volume of plotlines in the middle without losing focus. For a trilogy, this is fairly easy because the number of plotlines is limited. For something that was originally intended to be 9 books, it is almost impossible. Books 9-11 were basically just one book plus the added management of these open plotlines. It is easy to criticize this decision, but if you decide to kill plotlines as fast as you create them you risk losing a lot of depth. I don't know of any author who has managed to keep the depth while not lagging in the middle for anything larger than a 3 part series.

Most authors that write a long series tend to only keep open a couple of central plotlines in each book and close all newly opened plotlines in the individual book or in the subsequent book in the series. This makes it easy to bring readers in mid-series but as I mentioned before, it greatly limits the depth of your world. I think The Wheel of Time should be a lesson to writers on the dangers associated with maintaining depth and trying to document it all in a long series. The ending may be fantastic, but you risk losing a lot of your readers in the middle when you are performing your bookkeeping.

Silly monks. Using a lawsuit because of an Internet posting will only cause the pirates to sympathize with the ninjas, ending their age old battle. Those monks might have some impressive kung fu fighting, but they will hardly be able to defend against pirates who are a little bit frightening and ninjas who are fast as lightning!