Just imagine if you could make your own theme! You could make the graphics for the icons, change the colours of the menu bars and so on and so forth, that would be so cool! Oh, hang on, you can. Just not with Windows. It's all about brand recognition.
Except there are cases where the OEM subsidies offered by MS make the machine with Windows cheaper than without. The way I look at it is that if the machine is £10 cheaper with Windows then MS are essentially paying me to wipe their OS and install Linux, and at about 5 minutes real work (the rest being drinking tea and watching a progress bar) it's actually quite a good deal, certainly better than installing on a blank machine. Thanks Microsoft! (Not often you'll hear me say that).
If you want a proper analogy, this is like charging a customer more because they want to pay with Amex, which is quite common here because Amex costs retailers more than Mastercard or Visa transactions.
You know what would make me put up with it (if I were a Skype user)? If they just released the algorithm used, linguistic DB etc. There's enormous amounts of work going into advertising, marketing and proprietary devices that would be of great value to the AI crowd (I'm thinking part of a computer-linguistics library). Even if you put a three year delay on it to protect commercial interests, there's more of benefit to humanity here than just generating bits of green paper.
Rifling marks can only match the bullet to the gun when you also have the gun. This relies on a database, so you only need the bullet (or casing in this example).
In principle I'm all in favour of tracing firearms in this sort of way, it's very similar to car registration in my mind. I realise the US has the right to bear arms and all, but that doesn't seem to prevent tracking weapons in my mind.
I've always wondered what will happen when somebody invents a device that detonates all explosives (gunpowder included) within a one 1 mile radius - surely thats a weapon in exactly the same way and should be protected? (Good exploration of the idea in the book "The Trigger"). I target shoot incidentally, so I'm not anti gun, just pro-control.
I used to work for a bookshop specialising in academic books. We produced specialist textbooks for some courses at the professors request - eg chapters 9-12 from "Fundamentals of Physics", 1-3 of "Div, Grad, Curl" and 4-7 from "Elementary Matrix Algebra" (made up example). It all depended on the various publishers playing ball and allowing us to use their material. We also did textbook rental by the month.
Personally I don't believe DRM is going to work. The music industry couldn't get it to work and books are easier to copy than music. If I was a publisher I'd simply flood the torrent sites with subtly faulty versions of my books.
There's a very common style of dress here (Scotland) that will see you get some attention from the police: baseball cap, large zip-up tracksuit top, tracksuit trousers tucked into socks and trainers. Are the police paying attention to them because of how they dress? Yes, and rightly so. The cap is to hide the face from (usually high-mounted) cameras, top to sling over your arm to cover your hand while it steals goods/purses/phones, trousers in socks so you can simply drop the goods down your trousers, and trainers for running.
So yes, in some cases the way you dress is absolutely a reason for suspicion. Sometimes, not always, granted, but sometimes, if something looks like a duck it might just be a duck.
They also had problems with an intermittent "rogue signals" which later turned out to match the timetable of a nearby railway. I wonder whether it could, in theory at least, detect gravity waves?
Because without (as default) having cursor keys, a simple way to enter special characters without switching keyboard etc iPads are an utter nightmare. Try anything that involves more than simply writing standard emails and it'll have you throwing the thing through a window. (eg lots of special characters, tabs, copying and pasting from one window to another while viewing output in a third). An iPad is fine for just browsing web pages, but I wouldn't class it as a "productivity" machine unless it had a whole heap of extra apps installed, and even then I still prefer having a traditional keyboard and pointer.
By that argument, because many users use the same password for multiple services then there's no point in hashing passwords in the first place because "somebody else is bound to have a leak". Yes, if you have multiple instances of hash-x then it probably maps to "p433word" or something similar, but that's no reason to roll over and ignore a fairly standard security practice. A statement like this is far more worrying than "Sorry, we screwed up, we're fixing it."
We don't, we delay the effects by moving out of a tiny little closed system. Self-sustaining colonies off-Earth at least give us an insurance policy, but we'll have to get a move on while we still have the means to do it.
As is very common. I was asked to give a general science lesson to a class of Nepali schoolchildren, about 25 of them around 14 years old. I was only in for one class as a bit of a novelty for them, so I asked what they wanted to learn in the hour. The first response, and a very enthusiastic one, was "how do you make a bomb?"
Finding bomb making chemicals in Nepal isn't exactly difficult, so I went with nuclear (fission) devices. That lets you cover the basics of atoms, radioactivity, E=mc^2, chain reactions, a whole bunch of interesting physics, but without the worry that they're going to pop out and buy some U235 or Plutonium.
So I'd suggest a similar approach - find out why the kid is interested in chemistry and work from there. There will probably be a whole lot of "well, before you can understand X you need to know a little about Y...", but if the kid can see the end result of the study then it gives them a little more incentive and interest.
Chemistry experiments I enjoyed as a child:
Growing copper sulphate crystals and/or crystal gardens.
pH testing
Custard powder bombs (under supervision!)
Non-Newtonian fluids (custard again)
Acid/Alkali reactions (the usual volcano)
Producing Hydrogen by reaction or electrolysis and making it go POP!
It's a matter of economics - once the course is designed, written and recorded it doesn't scale up the same way - delivering it to 100,000 people isn't 100 times as costly as delivering it to 100 people. The lecturers and professors can make the same amount either way, with courses costing $100 or $100,000 respectively.
Agreed though, online courses do lack the face-to-face and practical elements in many ways, although alternatives can be found.
He later revealed that they didn't change the combinations, instead they sent a memo out instructing that Prof. Feynman was not to be left alone with a safe. "Security by missing the point entirely" I believe it's called.
"One Nation Under God", "In God We Trust", "...so help me God". We let the religious nitwits write the EULA for a lot of countries. The chickens are coming home to roost.
With the increasing use of drones and the fact that they're seemingly quite hard to counter, the birds may now be a white elephant, costing more money and being less useful. Plus, imagine how expensive maintenance is going to be without Shuttle.
He had some issues dealing with Goose's death, lost his "edge". If we're including large jetliners in this I'd include Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden frontman) before Travolta.
Slashdot Mirror
+1 "Clearly Worked At TGI Friday's" ;)
Just imagine if you could make your own theme! You could make the graphics for the icons, change the colours of the menu bars and so on and so forth, that would be so cool! Oh, hang on, you can. Just not with Windows. It's all about brand recognition.
Except there are cases where the OEM subsidies offered by MS make the machine with Windows cheaper than without. The way I look at it is that if the machine is £10 cheaper with Windows then MS are essentially paying me to wipe their OS and install Linux, and at about 5 minutes real work (the rest being drinking tea and watching a progress bar) it's actually quite a good deal, certainly better than installing on a blank machine. Thanks Microsoft! (Not often you'll hear me say that).
Skin pigmentation != Browser choice.
If you want a proper analogy, this is like charging a customer more because they want to pay with Amex, which is quite common here because Amex costs retailers more than Mastercard or Visa transactions.
You know what would make me put up with it (if I were a Skype user)? If they just released the algorithm used, linguistic DB etc. There's enormous amounts of work going into advertising, marketing and proprietary devices that would be of great value to the AI crowd (I'm thinking part of a computer-linguistics library). Even if you put a three year delay on it to protect commercial interests, there's more of benefit to humanity here than just generating bits of green paper.
Rifling marks can only match the bullet to the gun when you also have the gun. This relies on a database, so you only need the bullet (or casing in this example).
In principle I'm all in favour of tracing firearms in this sort of way, it's very similar to car registration in my mind. I realise the US has the right to bear arms and all, but that doesn't seem to prevent tracking weapons in my mind.
I've always wondered what will happen when somebody invents a device that detonates all explosives (gunpowder included) within a one 1 mile radius - surely thats a weapon in exactly the same way and should be protected? (Good exploration of the idea in the book "The Trigger"). I target shoot incidentally, so I'm not anti gun, just pro-control.
I used to work for a bookshop specialising in academic books. We produced specialist textbooks for some courses at the professors request - eg chapters 9-12 from "Fundamentals of Physics", 1-3 of "Div, Grad, Curl" and 4-7 from "Elementary Matrix Algebra" (made up example). It all depended on the various publishers playing ball and allowing us to use their material. We also did textbook rental by the month.
Personally I don't believe DRM is going to work. The music industry couldn't get it to work and books are easier to copy than music. If I was a publisher I'd simply flood the torrent sites with subtly faulty versions of my books.
My phone has a button that does that, and another that turns it off completely. I realise this isn't possible on flashy new iPhones and the like.
We've got Lyme disease here in the Highlands, but it's not so much of an issue in Edinburgh city centre where you find these types.
Well, that would be tricky as "pants" are underwear here, but yes, it does look as dumb as it sounds.
There's a very common style of dress here (Scotland) that will see you get some attention from the police: baseball cap, large zip-up tracksuit top, tracksuit trousers tucked into socks and trainers. Are the police paying attention to them because of how they dress? Yes, and rightly so. The cap is to hide the face from (usually high-mounted) cameras, top to sling over your arm to cover your hand while it steals goods/purses/phones, trousers in socks so you can simply drop the goods down your trousers, and trainers for running.
So yes, in some cases the way you dress is absolutely a reason for suspicion. Sometimes, not always, granted, but sometimes, if something looks like a duck it might just be a duck.
They also had problems with an intermittent "rogue signals" which later turned out to match the timetable of a nearby railway. I wonder whether it could, in theory at least, detect gravity waves?
Because without (as default) having cursor keys, a simple way to enter special characters without switching keyboard etc iPads are an utter nightmare. Try anything that involves more than simply writing standard emails and it'll have you throwing the thing through a window. (eg lots of special characters, tabs, copying and pasting from one window to another while viewing output in a third). An iPad is fine for just browsing web pages, but I wouldn't class it as a "productivity" machine unless it had a whole heap of extra apps installed, and even then I still prefer having a traditional keyboard and pointer.
By that argument, because many users use the same password for multiple services then there's no point in hashing passwords in the first place because "somebody else is bound to have a leak". Yes, if you have multiple instances of hash-x then it probably maps to "p433word" or something similar, but that's no reason to roll over and ignore a fairly standard security practice. A statement like this is far more worrying than "Sorry, we screwed up, we're fixing it."
We don't, we delay the effects by moving out of a tiny little closed system. Self-sustaining colonies off-Earth at least give us an insurance policy, but we'll have to get a move on while we still have the means to do it.
It's mostly lawyers fees for working out how much money they can make from the unusual conditions of space launches.
As is very common. I was asked to give a general science lesson to a class of Nepali schoolchildren, about 25 of them around 14 years old. I was only in for one class as a bit of a novelty for them, so I asked what they wanted to learn in the hour. The first response, and a very enthusiastic one, was "how do you make a bomb?"
Finding bomb making chemicals in Nepal isn't exactly difficult, so I went with nuclear (fission) devices. That lets you cover the basics of atoms, radioactivity, E=mc^2, chain reactions, a whole bunch of interesting physics, but without the worry that they're going to pop out and buy some U235 or Plutonium.
So I'd suggest a similar approach - find out why the kid is interested in chemistry and work from there. There will probably be a whole lot of "well, before you can understand X you need to know a little about Y...", but if the kid can see the end result of the study then it gives them a little more incentive and interest.
Chemistry experiments I enjoyed as a child:
Growing copper sulphate crystals and/or crystal gardens.
pH testing
Custard powder bombs (under supervision!)
Non-Newtonian fluids (custard again)
Acid/Alkali reactions (the usual volcano)
Producing Hydrogen by reaction or electrolysis and making it go POP!
It's a matter of economics - once the course is designed, written and recorded it doesn't scale up the same way - delivering it to 100,000 people isn't 100 times as costly as delivering it to 100 people. The lecturers and professors can make the same amount either way, with courses costing $100 or $100,000 respectively.
Agreed though, online courses do lack the face-to-face and practical elements in many ways, although alternatives can be found.
He later revealed that they didn't change the combinations, instead they sent a memo out instructing that Prof. Feynman was not to be left alone with a safe. "Security by missing the point entirely" I believe it's called.
You mean like Newton, who persevered with developing modern science while fending off attacks and institutional prejudice over his atheism?
"One Nation Under God", "In God We Trust", "...so help me God". We let the religious nitwits write the EULA for a lot of countries. The chickens are coming home to roost.
With the increasing use of drones and the fact that they're seemingly quite hard to counter, the birds may now be a white elephant, costing more money and being less useful. Plus, imagine how expensive maintenance is going to be without Shuttle.
He had some issues dealing with Goose's death, lost his "edge". If we're including large jetliners in this I'd include Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden frontman) before Travolta.
Good idea - better insert an animated gif of the Death Star while we're at it ;)
Contrails.