#22 Golpe: (cont'd)

Why is putting it on the government agency's web site not far more than enough control over versioning?

#22 Golpe:

"The wrong version" of the law and other government works is that which the state is allowed to extort money from you to see.

"[W]hen the authors in question are legally obligated to perform their creative effort, the Patents and Copyright Clause does not authorize a copyright. This is exactly the situation that exists for the work product of public officials. As long as they are not acting ultra vires, they are performing public duties when collecting and assembling information. Even if some of their selection andbarrangement would seem to qualify under the Feist originality test, the creative component of their selection and arrangement does not stem from the economic incentive provided by the copyright law because it is legally mandated and therefore fails to qualify under Feist. Whenever a public duty is the cause of the expression, the incentive justification under the copyrights and patent laws is absent, and any construction of the Copyright Act to protect such official work product would be unconstitutional." Henry H. Perritt, Jr., J.D. (1995) "Sources of Rights to Access Public Information" 4 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 179 (emphasis added.)

Perritt details that U.S. states have tried to assert copyright over their government work product, but have failed in every instance.

I love this thread so much.

TRR: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGqBbbECZxA

This would be nothing compared to 100 g granulated metallic potassium under oil inside a couple dozen condoms up the butt. Water is readily available on planes.

Contrary to what the cop said when he pulled them over, he would not be responsible if he, "let it go and it got into a wreck." Even if the car actually was unsafe, the cop is protected from civil and criminal prosecution as long as he is acting within his discretion. That the Montreal police let them go strongly suggests that an ordinary cop would not consider it an abuse of their discretion to deem it safe.

Of all the TED talks, I hope I don't get disemboweled for saying that this has to be the least interesting. I am tempted to say "because who cares" for a reason but that would be wrong because clearly the many comentors care. But still, this seems like the kind of vanity that can not possibly make any difference or actually matter in any way.

Cory, the first external link from Wikipedia's "Sign-off" article has the "WCBS-TV Channel 2, New York City. NY, Sign-Off and Sign-On 1977" at the top of their page. It literally took 20 seconds to find.

The couple in white suits look out of place to me.

covariation = correlation times the product of the populations' standard deviations

When I was there in '05, they had traffic lights at every intersection as you'd expect, but none of them were working; they were all dark in all directions.

Perhaps they will plug them in this year.

#4: conductive EEG electrode jelly to short a more conductive path between the contacts.

That will last just until someone is actually denied access to a federal courthouse.

It cites "U.S.C.A." which should be "U.S.C."

The analog phone ringing signal is an 88 V 20Hz A.C. signal superimposed on 48 V nominal D.C. Who uses Type 110 other than for phones? I need it with Type 66 (won't happen.)

Cool. What makes them want to? ("humanity"?)

Indeed, the hyperlinked web is one big CYOA.

I <3 ? lol

err. I ^lt;3 ... http://bp2.blogger.com/_ePazWbTrP9g/Rm6dU-oj-MI/AAAAAAAAAWM/UoNJZMHhlms/s400/LoliWikipetan.jpg

I loli Wikipe-tan

As though the future ruins of our civilization have traveled backward in time to the present day?

Wouldn't they be more futuristic looking?

That looks like a Farnsworth fusor to me. It can be a dangerous x-ray and neutron source.

Freakonomics is decent, but Krugman's weekly column is superior.

Who reads mentions Lolita post-2001? I guess people real close to their age of consent.

LOL at how people with increased risk of ischemic heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer have to call out "eating disorder" at people who, unlike them, are able to control their craving for meat.

The white-hot 1400 °C "main reaction zone" of a flame extends to its base. (graphic)

This is a terrible hoax. The temperature of the flame at the base is easily hot enough to give you serious burns. But worse, the lighter fluid will certainly stick to your fingers and burn them.

This video was made with compositing, as you can, see, for example, as the flame shows no lateral perturbation as it is tossed from hand to hand. Or, at 2:00, where after squirting a stream of fluid which is all magically absorbed without excess drips, the presenter squirts his thumb.

Note the commenters have been burning themselves.

If passages are quoted at length, fair use does enter in to the equation. However, it's unlikely that anything less than several paragraphs will be seen as anything other than commentary. From what I've seen of the Lexicon, there's nothing even approaching a long paragraph quoted.

This is perfectly reasonable to me, and I think it happens quite a bit more often than people think. It's a straightforward tort, and it doesn't open the dealer or the user up to criminal liability because there is still no way to prove exactly what the substance was as is required for possession charges.

#6 Takuan: Voluntary to get in, but getting out has been stop-lossed for years.

lol, people like to seem so certain about the things they admit they only know through "faith," i.e., making up stories about invisibul ppl.

Telling adoptees the names of their mom and dad is just good policy. What if they need a bone marrow transplant, or a kidney down the road? The option should at least be open.

Trains are more fun.

President Bush killed NASA's stellar-occluding coronagraph telescopes, the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF-C) and an even more capable interferometer (TPF-I). Both would be capable of finding Earth-like planets with oxygen and liquid water several dozen light-years away.

In 1999, those projects were being actively developed, but the most important project of the entire human race -- finding another place to live -- is not a priority for the Bush administration.

Now the only place those telescopes exist is in JPL's "Explorer Island" sim in Second Life. They are really amazing models, too. If you go inside the TPF-C, you can see the entire optics path including the occluding and sidelobe dots inside the optics box.

It's always good to try to get out of the rut. You can see this in the progression of the steam engine, when some of the largest advances were made by people who weren't very familiar with the state of the art at the time.

What are the big flaring swishy concrete things? Counterweights to minimize weight imbalances?

Personally I think they must be a joke by the designer, because the thing turns so slow.

If you want to "equalize the pressure" and open the door, just crack the window, well, preferably a different window. ~~~~

She wasn't working for the police. The police were "conducting surveillance" for a while before the man arrived.

Every few years there's a new search engine, but what really matters is coverage. Even if it starts out indexing half the pages Google does, that means it's going to have on average half the hits, which is a huge difference in the queries returning just a few hits.

Not exactly, Registrado. LQG says that spin networks have equivalence classes under diffeomorphisms on a 3-manifold that are isomorphic to knots, but all that means is that fermions aren't allowed to occupy the same place and state, per the usual Pauli exclusion principle, and when you view interactions from a different frame of reference, it has the same connectivity.

I loved knot theory as an undergrad, but I'm glad I didn't go into it, like, it would be less valuable than a history degree.

Our side has killed 1.2 million to their 4,000 or so, so we clearly won.

I feel sorry for so-called Christians who tie themselves in knots to repress the simple meaning of "Thou shalt not kill."

It's odd how Cal. Penal Code 247.5 goes to great lengths to define a laser, but ends the definition with, "and when discharged exceeds one milliwatt continuous wave."

Clearly pulsed lasers, which by their nature can do more damage (if they make it into a retina, which is less likely) are not covered by this law.

Such awesomeness! I would have loved to be that guard. I would have strung her long, "well, seein' as you're an expert ceramicist an' all, well, you can do the baby Jesus, Mary, two wise men, a donkey an' a camel, but that's it."

The "typical" transfer rate of 802.11g is 19 Mbps. Since the max DVD read (1x) is only 1.4 Mbps, you shouldn't need another network, even with multiple TVs. ~~~~

The right way to go about this is to mail-merge off a letter to the presidents of the top-several university's by enrollment explaining asking that they boycott the system until the offending terms are removed. The most important part is to put a cc of each letter in the mail to ApplyYourself's president.

The problem with the "by reading this mail..." sig, as clever as it is, doesn't leave the reader with the opportunity to un-read. Since you had the opportunity to refrain from clicking "I agree" on the site, there's a big difference.

Equal truth values.

Tom: Did you miss the part about "Over half the people arrested had no previous criminal record whatsoever"? Abandoned is abandoned. The law is that if you find a purse or wallet, you have 10 days to return it.

It makes me sad to see apologism for what the D.A. clearly considered misconduct, but only after NY1 reported the story.

"three teenagers (including the school custodian)"

The custodian is a teen too?

Nato: You can actually make pretty good backups with libsecondlife. Except for animations, which can't be downloaded once they are uploaded, you can copy any link set of prims, textures, sounds, scripts, notecards, clothing, and landmarks that you have full perms to. Prim inventories are a little tricky, but again, you can copy everything but animations.

That sounds pretty good to me, really. Don't tell us that you didn't taste it, Cory?

Someone tell me why we have leapseconds, which are a pain in the butt because they occur so often and won't be noticed by customers if their software forgets a few. Why not leap minutes 1/60th as often?

Simon: The amount is carefully calculated to be less than any stint though court.

[tasting needed]

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Also charisma.

UNICORN!!!!! UNICORN!!!!! UNICORN!!!!! UNICORN!!!!! UNICORN!!!!! UNICORN!!!!! UNICORN!!!!! UNICORN!!!!! UNICORN!!!!! UNICORN!!!!!

At 15 inches per second, if the dynamic range was actually better than red book (CDs) then they would say all over their site.

1/4 inch reel-to-reel has better SNR than red book audio?

What are the odd of an average adult having the hearing acuity necessary to notice any appreciable difference in quality?

Zero. All the difference is up above 22,050 Hz, and hardly any children can hear that high.

omg, I would pay good money for a nice long CD full of Xeni's "therapy" voice. omg omg

My amusement at the RTTY pr0n is surpassed only by my disgust that it was probably, er, used as such, and that only by my pity for those who did.

If you look at the "Guest Book" section of his web site, you see he has been answering posts as Don LaRose for a long time.

Reading the order, I am relieved to see that it is a total crock. Thankfully this can be reversed on appeal because the judge made some mistakes far above questions of fact that depend solely on his opinion of the witnesses' credibility, which can not usually be reversed on appeal.

But see for example, paragraph 4 on page 1 of the order in contrast to footnote 1 on page 9. There is no indication that the defendants' claim to have cut weeds, raked, and performed fire abatement on the property is in question at all. That is clearly "use" and not "mere casual entry" and so the use was not exclusive.

Throwing light on hate-mongering is only seen as an attempt to silence it because the bigots know in their heart that they are wrong.

To prove adverse possession in Colorado, the one claiming it must clearly show, not only that his possession was actual, adverse, hostile, and under claim of right, but that it has also been exclusive and uninterrupted for the statutory period. Segelke v. Atkins, 144 Colo. 558, 357 P.2d 636 (1960); Hayden v. Morrison, 152 Colo. 435, 382 P.2d 1003 (1963); Sanchez v. Taylor, 377 F.2d 733 (10th Cir. 1967); Dzuris v. Kucharik, 164 Colo. 278, 434 P.2d 414 (1967); Raftopoulos v. Monger, 656 P.2d 1308 (Colo. 1983); Matter of Estate of Qualteri, 757 P.2d 1093 (Colo. App. 1988); Schutten v. Beck, 757 P.2d 1139 (Colo. App. 1988); Smith v. Hayden, 772 P.2d 47 (Colo. 1989); Bd. of County Comm'rs v. Ritchey, 888 P.2d 298 (Colo. App. 1994); Goodwin v. Thieman, 74 P.3d 526 (Colo. App. 2003); Schuler v. Oldervik, 143 P.3d 1197 (Colo. App. 2006).

Mere occupancy is not sufficient to put any of the true owners on notice that the adverse claimant claimed the land, and the burden of proof, as to open, notorious, and hostile claim, is upon the adverse claimant when it claims title by adverse possession without color of title, and every reasonable presumption is made in favor of the true owner as against adverse possession. Lovejoy v. Sch. Dist. No. 46, 129 Colo. 306, 269 P.2d 1067 (1954).

How exactly was the possession exclusive or notorious?

Also note that the Wikipedia counts are per month, but the Conservapedia stats are totals since inception.

Believe me, the link is worth clicking on this one. What an amazing story!

Inertia is pointed in the wrong direction.

I love it, but I probably won't upgrade until some reasonable subset of what I consider to be these essential extensions are supported:

Adblock Plus
CustomizeGoogle
gTranslate
IE Tab

For what it's worth, I usually also install:

CookieCuller
Fasterfox
User Agent Switcher

Correction: Smolin admits, at the link above, that individual instantiations of free parameters in various kinds of string theories are sometimes testable, while maintaining that "string theory" as a whole is not falsifiable (because, for example, it encompasses an infinite number of specific theories, some of which are not testable; much like "logic" is an untestable-as-a-whole collection of different systems of reasoning).

@ZDepthCharge:

"I emphasize that string theory is among the ideas I believe are worth still exploring." -- Lee Smolin, http://www.thetroublewithphysics.com/Response%20to%20Polchinski.html

(in which he also admits that it is possibly falsifiable.)

Woah! I thought disemvoweling was for personal attacks and profanity. Was ordinary criticism and dissatisfaction disemvoweled above? Where are the guidelines for this?

Pinky severed? Must be time for lunch!

@jimh: The same sort of thing happens on Wikipedia, where people accuse dry facts of being biased ("POV") because they don't like them. Lots of eyes helps.

@FreedomJoyAdventure: If he isn't the racist who wrote that crap, then he delegated to someone who was and failed to supervise him.

Which is worse, as far as qualifications for the presidency?

Don't forget these gems:

"Black males age 13 are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult.... Actual and potential terrorists ... identified by the color of their skin are destroying America... 'Complex embezzling' is a 100 percent white and Asian crime...." -- Ron Paul Survival Report, 1992

Paul's "We the People Act" shows just how much of a libertarian he is. It would allow state and local governments to outlaw abortion, sex acts, and would let them use tax dollars for displays of religious text and images. It would prevent the federal courts from spending any money to enforce their judgments.

Paul is a damed authoritarian. There's a lot good about him, but he wants very different things than what his ill-informed supporters say.

That said, I am registering Republican and voting for him in the primaries. I'll do anything I can to motivate him to run as a third-party spoiler.

Eh, best to get it over with and make steganographic protocols indistinguishable from streaming video.

Shopping cart handles are the number one source of common infection contigation.

phasor3000, yes, almost. I guess that Lexicon, etc. don't use a sinc-shaped window, or don't propagate transient phases using spectral bin peak detection. That would not be surprising because efficient phase vocoders didn't even exist before the late '90s, and the typical attempt at it uses Hamming-shaped windows, or some half-assed attempt at phase propagation that screws up on sharp attacks.

I shouldn't say no artifacts, because any window-based STFT method loses high frequency detail if the windows are too long. But for professional audio applications you would typically use windows that only smear frequencies above adult hearing range or the resolution of the underlying audio format, whichever is lower. Maybe kids can hear the blurring at 15,000 Hz, but I doubt it.

Flying Squid:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_vocoder

I wrote the first one of those that was efficient *and* introduced no sound artifacts, posted it to usenet as public domain, and now it's in three dozen audio programs, maybe more.

I wish I had known about CC-BY back then.