A lot of the collision sensor for airbags are just bits of mercury in a slanted tube. When there's a sudden enough deceleration, the mercury goes up the tube and makes a connection. But this can also happen if the car hits downwards fast enough. I had this happen in my 96 Camry when I was going quickly down a steep hill and there was suddenly a level train track crossing which acted like a jump ramp. I hit the brakes, but not in time and my front end was briefly airborne. It came down hard and bottomed out the suspension and hit the pavement. It wasn't a really hard hit on the pavement (no bend in the frame or even damage to the steering), but it was enough of a collision when it hit that the mercury got bounced up and Bam! airbags went off. I had my hands at about 3 and 9 or slightly lower and got the hell scrapped out of the skin on the inside of my arms and the whole thing scared the hell out of me, but otherwise, no problems.

I also initially thought that I'd killed the car because the whole thing was suddenly silent and filled with smoke. Of course, it wasn't actually smoke, just the corn starch that they use to lubricate the airbags. And the sudden silence wasn't entirely real. The engine was actually still idling quietly, I just didn't realize it. And the radio had shut off because the sudden pressure from the deploying airbags had pushed the knob in and turned it off. All I had to do was push it again to turn it back on. Really, aside from needing a new front-end alignment (done) and new airbags (which I haven't gotten because they'd cost more than a replacement car), the car was fine.

You're overstating things. Binary liquid explosives weren't even found in anyone's home. It was just an idea that they were considering and hadn't actually carried out at all.

You're going to blame the UN for the failure of Hans Blix to find all Iraqi weapons? If you've forgotten your history, the reason that Blix didn't do that was because the US got impatient and decided to start a war rather than waiting for the end result of the process. He and his team were still working until they got pulled out for their own safety once it looked like the US was going to invade.

And, in the end, after they invaded the country, none of the weapons that the US insisted that Hans Blix hadn't found ever showed up. No nuclear program. No mobile bioweapons labs. None of that stuff. The fact of the matter is that Blix and his team accounted for almost all of the biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, and there were no nuclear weapons. So how, exactly, is that a UN failure?

Please don't try and rewrite history. When the US declared war on Iraq, there had, in fact, been a UN weapons inspection team headed by Hans Blix operating in Iraq until just a few days before. They got pulled out by the UN because it looked like the US was about to declare war on Iraq, and they didn't want their weapons inspectors getting killed. The UN had said "let them in or else" and Iraq had let them in in November of 2002. The only issue which was in question was whether or not Iraq was being fully cooperative with the inspectors or not.

Really? With the train station in Kyoto? Seriously? I've been there, both in the train station and in the surrounding area. It's big, but it's not exactly skyline wrecking unless you happen to live in an apartment which directly faces it. There are plenty of other buildings nearby which are close to the same height and once you get about two blocks away, you can't even see it from the street. If you don't believe me, here's a picture from above which shows the surrounding area. Plenty of other 8+ story buildings in the area. Here's a view from the top of the hotel in the train station. What skyline is it that they're destroying exactly?

Kyoto is a lovely city. It has myriad beautiful temples and gardens and the nearby country-side is lovely. People flock to it to see the cherry trees when they are in bloom. But none of these things are very tall. Most of the famous temples aren't even visible when you're half a block away from them, nevermind part of the skyline. It does not now have an impressive skyline and if it ever did, it must have been centuries ago, and although the train station big enough to be clearly visible for a couple of blocks around, it's not exactly a sky-scraper. Honestly, its width and shininess stand out as much as its height. So, if the person writing the article thinks that the Kyoto train station (which has far more non-shinkansen platforms than shinkansen platforms) is too big or too shiny, then fine, but saying that it wrecks the skyline is just dumb.

For professors, post-docs, and most assistant positions, the standard university contract in the US tends to say that you own the copyright of everything you do and the university owns the patents. This is likely not the case if you're working as an in-house programmer or copywriter or other similar positions, but for academics, they usually own their own copyright.

The thing about this is that the law, as written agrees with you exactly. There's no stipulation in the law that if you own a legal copy of a piece of software that a license is required to use it any more than a license is required to read a book or listen to a CD. Some companies have argued that you need a license since you're copying it onto your hard drive or into RAM, but the actual copyright law says that you have the right to do this if you own a legal copy of the software per 17 USC 117.

So these licenses aren't granting you any rights which you don't already have. They're completely one-sided contracts and should be unenforceable, and yet this isn't how the courts have been finding, mostly because the side with more money to spend on lawyers often wins regardless of what the law says, which is unfortunate.

That's not really an analogy. It's just a hypothetical example of the problem. And I'm not assuming that all the claims are fraudulent. It's certainly true that the copyright status of all of fedflix's videos is not completely certain, but there are some where the specific details are known. Duck and Cover is one of these. It is definitely in the public domain. The claim against it is definitely fraudulent. So it's definitely the case that some of the claims are fraudulent. And regardless, the point wasn't about whether or not specific claims are fraudulent. The point is that YouTube has no system or mechanism available to dispute fraudulent claims of ownership and, as such, their system is vulnerable to fraudulent claims. So when you say that the real problem is not knowing the status, that's only a part of the problem. The other problem is that their system doesn't allow people to contest fraudulent claims of copyright ownership on the grounds that the material is actually public domain.

There is nothing stopping anyone who wants to from claiming the public domain footage he used for his Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse video and having his video yanked from YouTube. And if they do, he has no means to contest this. Certainly YouTube is not obligated to make his video or Duck and Cover or anything else available worldwide. They could shut down tomorrow if they'd like or switch to only videos of cats. That's their legal right. But that doesn't mean that we can't be critical of their systems or discuss their shortcomings especially when their model is being held up by some entertainment industry lobbyists as the "right way" for web sites to handle copyright violations (and held up by others as being insufficiently friendly to the big studios).

And, yes, I know that the videos blocked on YouTube are still available on archive.org. We all know that blocking something on YouTube isn't the same as erasing it from the world. But it's still troubling the YouTube is allowing fraudulent copyright claims to determine whether or not something is broadcast via YouTube.

Actually, it's much easier than this. We just wait for them to hit something and bounce back. Then we just have to record them.

I'm glad you've had good experiences and it's interesting to know what's happened to you, but none of that changes the fact that YouTube's content ownership framework doesn't allow people to dispute claims of ownership on public domain material. How would you feel if someone claimed ownership on your Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse footage you assembled and chose to block it worldwide?

Well, that's what's happened with the famous Duck and Cover educational video. It's public domain, but Image Entertainment (whoever that is) has claimed copyright of it and are blocking it from being seen in all countries except the United States. This is described in the report which Cory mentions.

The issue isn't really whether or not YouTube are good guys or bad guys. The issue is that the system they have in place doesn't effectively allow for disputing whether or not something is in the public domain. This allows people to claim content which they don't own and to profit from it. People like yourself who want to use that public domain content can have their accounts suspended or blocked for using video and audio content including content in the public domain. Now, in your case, someone made a legitimate claim to some of the content you used for your video and YouTube handled that appropriately. That's good. But when people make claims to things they don't own, they're handling that in exactly the same way, which isn't appropriate. So, if you worked hard and created an interesting video using public domain content, a random company can siphon off some of your revenue from it simply by falsely claiming that they own the copyright on something which is actually in the public domain.

The test he took is the FCAT. It has some multiple choice questions, but most questions allow you to input any number which fits in up to five characters (including fractions and decimals). So, answers like "12345" or "123.4" or "1.234" or "1/234" or "123/4" or shorter answers. Ignoring the use of leading zeros, there are 100000 non-decimal answers. There are 10000 answers with the decimal in the second place (answers with the decimal in the first place are not allowed), but 10 of those are integers, so 9990 new answers. There are 10000 answers with the decimal in the third place, but 1000 of those are zero-adjusted duplicates of answers with the decimal in the second place (1.230 is the same as 01.23) and 90 of those are integers which aren't zero-adjusted duplicates of the last group so 8910 new answers. There are 10000 answers with the decimal in the fourth place, but 1000 of those are zero-adjusted duplicates of the last group and 900 of those are integers which aren't zero-adjusted duplicates of the last group. so 8100 new numbers. So there are 10000+9990+8910+8100 = 37000 possible decimal and integer answers. And there are also 3000 possible fractional answers, some of which simplify to the same thing or are equal to decimal numbers. So, each question has 40000 possible distinct answers.

However, the odds of correctness when guessing randomly is not 1/40000 because many questions have more than 1 correct answer both because they'll accept fractions or decimals for some and because for others, they have a small range around the correct decimal answer which is still considered correct due to being close enough. But, realistically, I think that on average, you'd probably have about a 1/5000 chance of guessing correctly by guessing randomly on those.

So when he says he guessed and got things correct, he probably means that he didn't know the answer, but guessed how to solve the problem. There are also a few four-answer multiple choice questions involved, but not nearly so many as 40. More like 10 or so.

In the real world, none of that has been shown to reduce cheating. Sorry. I know that's depressing, but I'm afraid it's true.

Someone asked a very similar question on Stack Overflow. It's here. The short version is: if you're running KDE and can change the window manager configuration, no problem. If you can change which window manager, then sure. (Also, the previous "yank the ethernet cable" or "boot off of live CD/USB" suggestions are quite reasonable. However, it is possible to handle most of it in the application using JNI to write X-Windows code which will capture most all keystrokes. It doesn't get ctrl-alt-backspace, but it appears to get prevent most of the rest.

Well, there's lots of stuff which isn't released on any media. For example, late night talk shows. If you are a big fan of Conan or The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, those don't really get released on Blu-Ray. Also, less popular, but still awesome shows like Arrested Development or Community have never gotten Blu-Ray releases. And although I'm not a huge sports nut, it's not difficult to imagine people who want to record and save all of the high-definition games of their favorite team. Obviously, if it's broadcast unencrypted (like Community is), then it could be pulled down that way. But stuff which is only available over cable/satellite is usually HDMI'ed by the cable box.

Best estimates suggest that it can buy us several thousand years. I think that should be enough time.