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Comment Re:What a nonsense (Score 1) 179

Planes and Ships don't rely on GPS.

If you have a license to pilot any of them, you have learned how to navigate without.

Right you are. My sextant, watch, Nautical Almanac, and H.O. 249 Sight Reduction Tables laugh at these puny exploits. Let me know when researchers have found flaws in the apparent motion of the celestial spheres.

Comment Re:Right on (Score 1) 257

Fifth Amendment, maybe? "Private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation." It's certainly arguable that patent rights, as a form of IP, constitute some form of "private property". If one takes the position that IP does constitute "property", then it's possible that abolishing existing patents (essentially, releasing those ideas to the public domain) would be considered a taking for Fifth Amendment purposes, requiring compensation. It's iffy, but possible.

Comment Re:I really really hope this is appealed (Score 3, Informative) 473

Unless we're living in Bizarro World, the cop's not going to get charged with anything. Why would the DA punish one of his own thugs? A more likely scenario, if the law is eventually held unconstitutional, is that the cop in question might draw a civil suit under 42 USC 1983 (establishes civil liability for those who violate the civil rights of others "under color of law"), but it'd probably settle out for the cost of the phone stolen and Court costs incurred, which can be billed to the taxpayers. Either way, everyone's getting off essentially scot-free.

Comment Depends on the type. (Score 1) 116

If you're fraking your significant other, I doubt that'll do any damage to the water table, unless you produce volume like Peter "Two Quarts" North, in which case there's a slight risk of organic contamination.

As for hydraulic fracturing, there is no such thing as "drinking-water-safe", just like there's no such thing as "clean coal". Cracks in the bedrock resulting from the frackage can propagate for thousands of feet above the well pipe, often unpredictably. That's kind of the point; the longer the cracks, the more gas-bearing rock is opened for collection in the well. Even if the well is drilled far below the water table, the cracks can still reach it, thus allowing hydrocarbon gases to enter and poison the water. Then there's the risk that the well casing can fail at the point where it crosses the water table, thus releasing gas and "frack fluid" (which is significantly more toxic than your "frack fluid" referenced above) into the environment.

Submission + - Jury Acquits Citizens of Illegally Filming Police (masslive.com)

sexybomber writes: The Springfield (MA) Republican reports that two men accused of illegally filming the process as they bailed friends out of jail last summer, were acquitted of all charges Tuesday. Pete Eyre and Adam Mueller initially were granted permission to film the bail process, but later were forbidden by jail officials from recording the procedure. When they continued to digitally recording their encounter with jail officials, they were arrested by police. Eyre and Mueller testified that they never attempted to hide the fact that they were recording at the jail. Not only did they ask permission to film the bail-out process — which initially was granted — but their recording devices were "out in the open," Eyre said. The Jury found the defendants not guilty of three criminal counts: Each was acquitted of unlawful wiretapping, while Mueller also was acquitted of a charge of resisting arrest.

Comment Re:rerip your CD collection (Score 1) 758

WAV stores absolute values of the samples, but it seems to me that it would be far more efficient to store the difference between two adjoining samples, rather than the absolute value, so you could store a 16 bit sample in a single byte, or even less; look at any sampled waveform and there isn't much difference between one sample and the following sample. Rather than storing a 237 and 242, where the 242 would be would be a 5, only three bits (four counting the flag that shows whether it's a positive or negative value). When the waveform is descending, you would store a negative value. With this scheme, the higher the sampling rate, the greater the compression would be, since the higher the sampling rate the closer the two adjoining samples' values would be.

I believe you've just described the derivative function of the waveform ... Slope of a function at a given point, if I remember my high school calc right.

It'd probably take longer for the machine to process it, but assuming you start at zero and go from there, it sounds possible ... I know nothing about codecs, but it's an interesting theory.

Comment Re:What is the process to impeach such a judge? (Score 1) 333

Depends on whether "reeking so badly of corruption as to blanket a mile radius with the stench" constitutes bad Behaviour on the part of a Federal judge (U.S. Const. Art. III Sec. 1) and whether two-thirds of the Senate agrees with the proposition. (Art. I Sec. 3 cl. 6). Yeah, that's... not gonna happen anytime soon.

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