Forgot your password?

typodupeerror
Music

Astronaut Sues Dido For Album Cover 264

Posted by samzenpus
from the get-me-off-that-thing dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Astronaut Bruce McCandless is suing Dido for her album cover that uses a famous NASA photograph of a tiny, tiny, tiny McCandless floating in space. McCandless doesn't own the copyright on the photo, so he's claiming it's a violation of his publicity rights ... except that he's so tiny in the photo, it's not like anyone's going to recognize him."

Comment: Re:They don't say who they think it is (Score 1) 261

by san (#33772024) Attached to: Iran Arrests Alleged Spies Over Stuxnet Worm

No, they didn't break the treaty. Iran is only required by the NPT to inform the IAEA 6 months before such a site goes operational. Iran insists that no nuclear enrichment had yet taken place at Qom. Despite being caught red-handed by the US for having the plant, once Iran publicly confirmed its existence they informed the IAEA that they would soon be enriching from there in the future. Like I said, they broke their word, not the treaty.

Sure, but accepting that reasoning would mean accepting Iran's own definition of whether or not they're breaking the NPT.

I wasn't going for moral relativism, I was faulting the people who keep spouting that "Iran is irrational" because of religion. It isn't, and there are other parties more apocalypticly-minded than Iran is.

True, the danger in Iran isn't millenarianism. It's the fact that the people who are leading the various factions won't have anything to lose once they feel their power (and by extension their very lives) is at stake.

Comment: Re:They don't say who they think it is (Score 1) 261

by san (#33771688) Attached to: Iran Arrests Alleged Spies Over Stuxnet Worm

So far they haven't broken the treaty. Have they broken their word? Yes, by building the Qom facility when they told the IAEA they would announce any new developments.

By building a nuclear facility in secret they have broken the treaty. That's what the sanctions are about.

 

Iran is not stupid and not that crazy; they are rational and pragmatic.

The regime appears to be locked in a power struggle between the 'regular government' (for lack of a better term) and the Revolutionary Guard. Last week's on the media has a good analysis on how Iran has now become a dangerous place even for those who vocally support its policies because of this. Regimes that feel threatened in their existence are generally not known for the rationality of their actions.

Christian Zionists they do not believe they can "speed the coming of the apocalypse" by their actions

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but at best it smells of moral relativism stemming from a laziness to think or to get informed (I'm sure there's a term for that).

Comment: Re:They don't say who they think it is (Score 5, Interesting) 261

by san (#33771094) Attached to: Iran Arrests Alleged Spies Over Stuxnet Worm

Iran is a ratified signatory to the Nuclear Non-Profileration Treaty, so: they certainly don't have the right to develop nuclear weapons or even nuclear facilities except with IAEA oversight. Iran's nuclear activity is pretty clearly in contravention of this (they built a nuclear facility in secret near Qom, for example), and there are now several UN sanctions in force against Iran because of this.

Is it 'Western hubris' to demand that a country abide by treaties it ratified? Especially a treaty on a matter as important as nuclear armament...

The reason the West is so hostile to the possibility of a nuclear Iran is that the only peaceful doctrine nuclear weapons allow, MAD, assumes rational actors on all sides. In Iran that rationality might well be subservient to theology.

Image

Study Says Your Personality Doesn't Change After 1st Grade 221

Posted by samzenpus
from the everybody-I-ever-needed-to-be-I-was-in-first-grade dept.
A study authored by Christopher Nave, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, says that our personalities stay pretty much the same from early childhood all the way through old age. From the article: "Using data from a 1960s study of approximately 2,400 ethnically diverse schoolchildren (grades 1 - 6) in Hawaii, researchers compared teacher personality ratings of the students with videotaped interviews of 144 of those individuals 40 years later. They examined four personality attributes - talkativeness (called verbal fluency), adaptability (cope well with new situations), impulsiveness and self-minimizing behavior (essentially being humble to the point of minimizing one's importance)." This must explain my overriding need to be first captain when we pick kickball teams at the office.

Comment: Re:European Commission SUCKS (Score 2, Insightful) 409

by san (#29304149) Attached to: Slow Oracle Merger Leads To Outflow of Sun Projects, Coders

They don't have any obligations outside the US whatsoever, of course. Until they want to do business in the biggest economy of the world. Then they have to play by their rules.

I really don't understand how this is so hard to fathom - the biggest market in the world is not something a business like Oracle can ignore, even if they share your misguided xenophobia.

BTW, movie industries sell regionally because they can make more that way, not less.

Comment: Re:complex finance math (Score 1) 683

by san (#29224345) Attached to: Dirty Coding Tricks To Make a Deadline

You don't seem to understand the difference between financial modeling and financial transactions.

Apparently your dumb ignorant ass missed the part where square roots of dollar amounts were taken, which clearly points towards some kind of random walk diffusional modeling which has nothing to do with financial transactions and pennies.

If you would have been really clever, you would have noted that what he wanted (complex values for dollars) is mathematically the same as asking for imaginary negative time. The GGP should have been talking about logarithmic dollars to begin with to just avoid this whole issue. It's the only quantity where such quantities make sense.

You're completely right, though, in asserting that distributed computing clients don't need numerical accuracy per se. Getting an estimate of the size of phase space is often more than enough - it's what makes simulation different from single-point energy evaluations, it's exactly what makes CPU time useful for scientific applications.

I'd still advise anybody against working with you, or for you, for the sole reason that the pedantry you're bringing forward in your arguments would seem to make you a very poor manager of actual people. There's an aggression there that is simply not professional.

Peace be to this house, and all that dwell in it.

Working...