Somehow, I recall George Carlin's words on the topic: I don't understand why prostitution is illegal. Selling is legal. Fucking is legal. Why isn't selling fucking legal?
If selling fucking were legal (as in some other jusrisdictions of the world), the criminal in question would not be a criminal, and the perpetrators of the misdemeanor in question would not have committed a misdemeanor.
Sure, the news is interesting, but while we're getting used to spelling errors and broken links on the front page, a blatantly mis-formatted link is something new, I think.
Not in a Slashdot summary... The "editors" post them fairly regularly.
They buy quality/brand names when it matters or when they can afford it. If people only cared for the cheapest products available, there wouldn't quite be a market for organic free range cage free free trade products made without high fructose corn syrup.
First, the reputation of a brand name is indicative of the brand's value to consumers in the past. That value may continue today, or it may be subjected to some MBA "extract the value from the brand" type strategy - i.e. same shit as the others, but with a higher price and fatter profit margin. Shopping blindly by brand may be better than shopping blindly by price, but it's by no means guaranteed; without better product information, you're shopping blindly in both cases.
Secondly, feeding fish with shit instead of purchased feed sounds very organic to me. If the shit content is increased sufficiently, they may even merit a nice organic label. So in addition to reducing their costs, one might expect them to increase their prices. That's what any astute businessperson would do.
Just reading the title of her dissertation ("Person and conscience—Studies on conditions, need and requirements of today's consciences.") is enough to give me the giggles. Some of us got our PhD the hard way - by doing actual science or engineering that advanced the state of knowledge in their field. Just spewing some pseudo-intellectual waffle-gab should not count, except maybe towards a pseudo-PhD.
I checked your profile at shelfari, and you appear to read a lot of the science fiction that I also like. So I suspect you might enjoy Scalzi's Old Man's War and its offshoots. I was also unaware of that book until I came across this image of the alleged top 100 books in Fantasy (ugh) and Science Fiction (yea). I already had nearly all of the science fiction side of the chart, so Scalzi was quite an unexpected find.
I was going to completely agree but then you didn't mention one more thing -- weather control. Even though, the heat may not be produced that much, it still causes the (quite closed) environment around it to heat up a bit. Therefore, your a/c would turn on more often. Yes, it may not be that significant, but it could have more effect during summer. It is difficult to measure this effect though...
And it would presumably boost your heating in winter, thereby contributing little or nothing extra to your electric bill. Around the year, the effects would likely come close to cancellation. This depends a bit on your local climate (Alaska vs Florida), but would likely still be small even in extreme cases - a heat pump with effectiveness of 4 would consume only a fraction of the ejected heat as additional electrical energy.
FWIW, I live in Finland. Air conditioning is needed for maybe a week or two in most years, while heating is needed for more than half of the year. Many houses don't even bother with air conditioning, but every house has one or more heating systems.
What I want is a laptop with a WUXGA 17 inch screen, quad core hyperthreading beats-audio, and all that other great entertainment stuff.
But I want it to be super-thin and ultralight weight all but maybe 2 pounds tops.
Big screen, lots of power, feather light.
That way I can both work and stay entertained on-the-go without it weighing so much that its just too much trouble to have to carry it. As it is I have a machine with these specs already, but it weighs 7+ lbs. Its a brick to carry around NYC.
Nobody has made anything really light with this kinda power unfortunately.
In fact, try finding any laptop PC with a WUXGA display (1920x1200). There may be a Macbook thing available with WUXGA, but the PC laptops were down-specced to FHD (1920x1080) instead. This is posted from my 8+ year old laptop with a 17" WUXGA screen. I had hoped to replace it with something of higher screen resolution by now, but that plan got thwarted by the stupid manufacturers. Luckily, its pathetic processor (1.7GHz Celeron) and RAM (1GiB, not expandable) are still adequate for Xubuntu.
As of right now, something else is going on that's strange. Here's the OS breakdown:
Average Windows: $10.07
Average Mac: $13.09
Average Linux: $13.84
In every Humble Game Bundle that I recall, the spread was much wider, especially for Linux users. While I suppose part of it is that we're so happy to support games that support Linux, I wonder what else might be at work here.
Some of us Linux users already have John Scalzi's Old Man's War[*] and some edition of Neil Gaiman's Signal to Noise. So what's the point of spending extra to get something you've already got?
[*] And the other stuff by Scalzi set in the same story-line: Zoe's Tale and The Ghost Brigades. I also have three other Scalzi books, and one in the shopping basket at Amazon. This humble ebook bundle is a matter of too little or too late for bibliophiles.
Your NAS will cost more than $4 in electricity per month.
Not for a home NAS.
A monthly increment of $4 on a typical US utility bill is equal to about 29½kWh of energy usage (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average in the US was $0.135/kWh in summer 2012). Consider a Synology DS213 with 8TB in two disks. Even if the disks were perpetually spinning, it would consume 13kWh per month. If the disks were spun down the whole time, usage would be 6kWh per month. In fact, the disks spend the vast majority of the time spun down, so the energy usage is closer to the lower figure. So that $4 per month for electricity is equivalent to having three or four of these NAS units in typical use.
Even worse, many items are made from petroleum. Just think of plastics and everything made from plastic or incorporating bits of plastic (I see some vinyl in that there car, sonny, and the tires are made of rubber). Now some of the petroleum used in making those plastics and related synthetics might have come from wells in the USA, but some might not and it tends to get blended during or after refining. The provenance of such intermediate materials is not tracked.
So we have another question: how much transformation of a foreign-sourced raw material or intermediate material derived therefrom would be needed to escape the consequences of this putative ruling? Would shaping foreign wood into furniture be sufficient? What about polymerizing a foreign-sourced material (making an intermediate of plastic or ceramic or rubber)? Even supposing a strict boundary could be defined for the amount of processing or transformation required, it would just lead to the creation and feeding of loophole-finding (or making) industries.
So, at least for the movie industry, it was possible to avoid or minimize patent harassment by moving elsewhere. In today's world that's obviously impossible.
Actually, the movie makers moved to Jacksonville, FL in the early 20th century, before they moved to Hollywood.
Actually solving any problems will be left as an exercise to the readers.
Having suffered through all 12 minutes and 45 seconds of this rambling and pointless Skype video call, I suspect that actually solving any problems is like expecting a result from soft-willy masturbation by a eunuch.
Dear new owners of slashdot, please relegate stuff like this to somewhere else. It's not even close to being "news for nerds".
This is much better than the competitors walled garden(s). I'd much rather have control of my own landscape, weeds and all, than have a perfectly designed and maintained landscape that somehow still feels cold and sterile.
But Apple gives you a fully hoe'd garden! All they want is your money (and all of it).
With Android (S3 user here, my daughter got HTC), you get the garden you want.
Ah, the PDP-11/70. I got introduced to BASIC programming on one back in 1978.
Hah, my memories of the 11/70 involved C around 1980-ish. In the late 70s I think I was using a time-sharing PDP-8 with FOCAL (paper tape, teletypes, disturbing memories). Mind you, I was already at grad school after a 4-year university degree in Engineering at that point.
But, returning to topic. My exposure to computers and computer science in high school in the early 1970s was zero, nada, nothing. We had to do calculations with pencil and paper (and eraser). I got a state-of-the-art Sinclair Scientific calculator (only 4 functions, but RPN) on going to university, but was not allowed to use it at exams. The rule was you could use slide rules only in those days.
Excuse me while I wipe some drool off my gray beard.
I've got a compute-bound embarrassingly parallel problem at work (real-time image processing in a very compact unit). This bears looking at. What is its I/O potential?
If two individuals give fertile descendency, aren't they of the same species?
Well, yes and/or no (i.e. it's complicated). After all, canid hybrids are often fertile (at least, with their parent species or a like hybrid), but wolves, coyotes, dingoes, and jackals are generally considered to be different species. Similarly, felid hybrids such as ligers are fertile with other ligers and with both lion and tiger mates.
Check also the European Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-backed Gull for a ring distribution of species which are mutually fertile with their neighbors, but whose end-units overlap in range and are not mutually fertile. There have also been a few cases of a female mule being fertile when mated with either horse or donkey, despite the species having different numbers of chromosomes.
I am wondering why the Java plugin is not on the list. Its security track has been bad for quite a while, and its on way more PCs tha silverlight
If they put really insecure shit like Java on the list, several shady revenue streams might be threatened. And when that happens, the lucky ones get an unexpected visit from Fingers and Lefty and their baseball bats. The unlucky ones die slowly after a few bullets from an untraceable weapon.
You do realise this is like a report from a Saudi Arabian university proclaiming that electric vehicles will never work, right?
Hey, I read that report!
It said (with persuasive evidence to back its conclusions) that electric vehicles would work perfectly on electricity generated by burning oil. On electricity generated by burning coal or coming from nuclear or renewable sources, every conceivable kind of electric car would become appallingly bad - just a seized-up godless sputtering commie rustbucket for pedo terrorist file-sharers.
But for those of us living in Europe, owning a garage with electricity is a luxury item.
For those of us in Northern Europe, a garage without electricity is pointless for much of the year. Block heaters are not a luxury or an option, they're a necessity in winter.
In fact, the electricity is more important than the garage for much of the year. The garage is for convenience or comfort; the electricity is essential. Check any assigned parking place in Finland or Sweden, for example - most of them have electricity for plugging in a block heater, even if they are outdoors (exception: street parking meter places and other short-term-only parking). After a car has been parked a few hours at -30C, the motor won't turn unless it has been warmed somewhat above -20C. Snow can be shoveled away and brushed off, and ice can be chipped off windscreens, but the motor needs to be heated.
It's dumb to tax pollution as a punitive measure, or to encourage/discourage the use of certain technologies or behaviors, or to raise general revenue.
It's smart to tax pollution to offset the public-born costs of the thing which is taxed.
That's crazy talk!
Luckily, elected representatives everywhere know the purpose of taxation is to raise revenue for boondoggles, pork barrel projects, bribery, civil service bloat, and other wastrel activities.
Just look at the taxes on fuel in Europe as an example. The high taxes are ostensibly to promote economy, but the more economical vehicles become, the higher the taxes must be. It's the tax revenue that must be preserved.
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow, I recall George Carlin's words on the topic:
I don't understand why prostitution is illegal. Selling is legal. Fucking is legal. Why isn't selling fucking legal?
If selling fucking were legal (as in some other jusrisdictions of the world), the criminal in question would not be a criminal, and the perpetrators of the misdemeanor in question would not have committed a misdemeanor.
My guess is OP is hinting at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_A_Harsh_Mistress At least that is what the other replies are hinting at.
Nah, it's obviously an attempt to Godwin the discussion using this.
Sure, the news is interesting, but while we're getting used to spelling errors and broken links on the front page, a blatantly mis-formatted link is something new, I think.
Not in a Slashdot summary... The "editors" post them fairly regularly.
They buy quality/brand names when it matters or when they can afford it. If people only cared for the cheapest products available, there wouldn't quite be a market for organic free range cage free free trade products made without high fructose corn syrup.
First, the reputation of a brand name is indicative of the brand's value to consumers in the past. That value may continue today, or it may be subjected to some MBA "extract the value from the brand" type strategy - i.e. same shit as the others, but with a higher price and fatter profit margin. Shopping blindly by brand may be better than shopping blindly by price, but it's by no means guaranteed; without better product information, you're shopping blindly in both cases.
Secondly, feeding fish with shit instead of purchased feed sounds very organic to me. If the shit content is increased sufficiently, they may even merit a nice organic label. So in addition to reducing their costs, one might expect them to increase their prices. That's what any astute businessperson would do.
Actually, he's telling them that they can use DMA-BUF in their video drivers. And so can anyone else, provided those drivers are released under GPL.
Releasing the final bill as-passed by the legislature will probably not be "in the public interest" either.
Just reading the title of her dissertation ("Person and conscience—Studies on conditions, need and requirements of today's consciences.") is enough to give me the giggles. Some of us got our PhD the hard way - by doing actual science or engineering that advanced the state of knowledge in their field. Just spewing some pseudo-intellectual waffle-gab should not count, except maybe towards a pseudo-PhD.
The tachyon solution to relativity (actually to Lorentz factors) was known a long time ago. I learned of it in high school, back in the early 70s.
Agreed on the variety issue also.
I checked your profile at shelfari, and you appear to read a lot of the science fiction that I also like. So I suspect you might enjoy Scalzi's Old Man's War and its offshoots. I was also unaware of that book until I came across this image of the alleged top 100 books in Fantasy (ugh) and Science Fiction (yea). I already had nearly all of the science fiction side of the chart, so Scalzi was quite an unexpected find.
I was going to completely agree but then you didn't mention one more thing -- weather control. Even though, the heat may not be produced that much, it still causes the (quite closed) environment around it to heat up a bit. Therefore, your a/c would turn on more often. Yes, it may not be that significant, but it could have more effect during summer. It is difficult to measure this effect though...
And it would presumably boost your heating in winter, thereby contributing little or nothing extra to your electric bill. Around the year, the effects would likely come close to cancellation. This depends a bit on your local climate (Alaska vs Florida), but would likely still be small even in extreme cases - a heat pump with effectiveness of 4 would consume only a fraction of the ejected heat as additional electrical energy.
FWIW, I live in Finland. Air conditioning is needed for maybe a week or two in most years, while heating is needed for more than half of the year. Many houses don't even bother with air conditioning, but every house has one or more heating systems.
What I want is a laptop with a WUXGA 17 inch screen, quad core hyperthreading beats-audio, and all that other great entertainment stuff.
But I want it to be super-thin and ultralight weight all but maybe 2 pounds tops.
Big screen, lots of power, feather light.
That way I can both work and stay entertained on-the-go without it weighing so much that its just too much trouble to have to carry it. As it is I have a machine with these specs already, but it weighs 7+ lbs. Its a brick to carry around NYC.
Nobody has made anything really light with this kinda power unfortunately.
In fact, try finding any laptop PC with a WUXGA display (1920x1200). There may be a Macbook thing available with WUXGA, but the PC laptops were down-specced to FHD (1920x1080) instead. This is posted from my 8+ year old laptop with a 17" WUXGA screen. I had hoped to replace it with something of higher screen resolution by now, but that plan got thwarted by the stupid manufacturers. Luckily, its pathetic processor (1.7GHz Celeron) and RAM (1GiB, not expandable) are still adequate for Xubuntu.
As of right now, something else is going on that's strange. Here's the OS breakdown:
In every Humble Game Bundle that I recall, the spread was much wider, especially for Linux users. While I suppose part of it is that we're so happy to support games that support Linux, I wonder what else might be at work here.
Some of us Linux users already have John Scalzi's Old Man's War[*] and some edition of Neil Gaiman's Signal to Noise. So what's the point of spending extra to get something you've already got?
[*] And the other stuff by Scalzi set in the same story-line: Zoe's Tale and The Ghost Brigades. I also have three other Scalzi books, and one in the shopping basket at Amazon. This humble ebook bundle is a matter of too little or too late for bibliophiles.
Your NAS will cost more than $4 in electricity per month.
Not for a home NAS.
A monthly increment of $4 on a typical US utility bill is equal to about 29½kWh of energy usage (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average in the US was $0.135/kWh in summer 2012). Consider a Synology DS213 with 8TB in two disks. Even if the disks were perpetually spinning, it would consume 13kWh per month. If the disks were spun down the whole time, usage would be 6kWh per month. In fact, the disks spend the vast majority of the time spun down, so the energy usage is closer to the lower figure. So that $4 per month for electricity is equivalent to having three or four of these NAS units in typical use.
Even worse, many items are made from petroleum. Just think of plastics and everything made from plastic or incorporating bits of plastic (I see some vinyl in that there car, sonny, and the tires are made of rubber). Now some of the petroleum used in making those plastics and related synthetics might have come from wells in the USA, but some might not and it tends to get blended during or after refining. The provenance of such intermediate materials is not tracked.
So we have another question: how much transformation of a foreign-sourced raw material or intermediate material derived therefrom would be needed to escape the consequences of this putative ruling? Would shaping foreign wood into furniture be sufficient? What about polymerizing a foreign-sourced material (making an intermediate of plastic or ceramic or rubber)? Even supposing a strict boundary could be defined for the amount of processing or transformation required, it would just lead to the creation and feeding of loophole-finding (or making) industries.
So, at least for the movie industry, it was possible to avoid or minimize patent harassment by moving elsewhere. In today's world that's obviously impossible.
Actually, the movie makers moved to Jacksonville, FL in the early 20th century, before they moved to Hollywood.
Actually solving any problems will be left as an exercise to the readers.
Having suffered through all 12 minutes and 45 seconds of this rambling and pointless Skype video call, I suspect that actually solving any problems is like expecting a result from soft-willy masturbation by a eunuch.
Dear new owners of slashdot, please relegate stuff like this to somewhere else. It's not even close to being "news for nerds".
This is much better than the competitors walled garden(s). I'd much rather have control of my own landscape, weeds and all, than have a perfectly designed and maintained landscape that somehow still feels cold and sterile.
But Apple gives you a fully hoe'd garden! All they want is your money (and all of it).
With Android (S3 user here, my daughter got HTC), you get the garden you want.
Fortran 77 and UCSD Pascal on DEC PDP-11/70.
Ah, the PDP-11/70. I got introduced to BASIC programming on one back in 1978.
Hah, my memories of the 11/70 involved C around 1980-ish. In the late 70s I think I was using a time-sharing PDP-8 with FOCAL (paper tape, teletypes, disturbing memories). Mind you, I was already at grad school after a 4-year university degree in Engineering at that point.
But, returning to topic. My exposure to computers and computer science in high school in the early 1970s was zero, nada, nothing. We had to do calculations with pencil and paper (and eraser). I got a state-of-the-art Sinclair Scientific calculator (only 4 functions, but RPN) on going to university, but was not allowed to use it at exams. The rule was you could use slide rules only in those days.
Excuse me while I wipe some drool off my gray beard.
I've got a compute-bound embarrassingly parallel problem at work (real-time image processing in a very compact unit). This bears looking at. What is its I/O potential?
If two individuals give fertile descendency, aren't they of the same species?
Well, yes and/or no (i.e. it's complicated). After all, canid hybrids are often fertile (at least, with their parent species or a like hybrid), but wolves, coyotes, dingoes, and jackals are generally considered to be different species. Similarly, felid hybrids such as ligers are fertile with other ligers and with both lion and tiger mates.
Check also the European Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-backed Gull for a ring distribution of species which are mutually fertile with their neighbors, but whose end-units overlap in range and are not mutually fertile. There have also been a few cases of a female mule being fertile when mated with either horse or donkey, despite the species having different numbers of chromosomes.
I am wondering why the Java plugin is not on the list. Its security track has been bad for quite a while, and its on way more PCs tha silverlight
If they put really insecure shit like Java on the list, several shady revenue streams might be threatened. And when that happens, the lucky ones get an unexpected visit from Fingers and Lefty and their baseball bats. The unlucky ones die slowly after a few bullets from an untraceable weapon.
And added nothing of value.
Self-referential. Again.
You do realise this is like a report from a Saudi Arabian university proclaiming that electric vehicles will never work, right?
Hey, I read that report!
It said (with persuasive evidence to back its conclusions) that electric vehicles would work perfectly on electricity generated by burning oil. On electricity generated by burning coal or coming from nuclear or renewable sources, every conceivable kind of electric car would become appallingly bad - just a seized-up godless sputtering commie rustbucket for pedo terrorist file-sharers.
But for those of us living in Europe, owning a garage with electricity is a luxury item.
For those of us in Northern Europe, a garage without electricity is pointless for much of the year. Block heaters are not a luxury or an option, they're a necessity in winter.
In fact, the electricity is more important than the garage for much of the year. The garage is for convenience or comfort; the electricity is essential. Check any assigned parking place in Finland or Sweden, for example - most of them have electricity for plugging in a block heater, even if they are outdoors (exception: street parking meter places and other short-term-only parking). After a car has been parked a few hours at -30C, the motor won't turn unless it has been warmed somewhat above -20C. Snow can be shoveled away and brushed off, and ice can be chipped off windscreens, but the motor needs to be heated.
That's crazy talk!
Luckily, elected representatives everywhere know the purpose of taxation is to raise revenue for boondoggles, pork barrel projects, bribery, civil service bloat, and other wastrel activities.
Just look at the taxes on fuel in Europe as an example. The high taxes are ostensibly to promote economy, but the more economical vehicles become, the higher the taxes must be. It's the tax revenue that must be preserved.