Ah, but as we live in a quantum world, at the very core level there is either a particle there, or there is not, and therefore it must be digital
But the signal might not be carried by the presence or absence of a particular, but rather by the probability that a particle is present. That is analog.
Unless you have so much money that you have no interest in getting a bargain on your purchases, or have such complete knowledge of all fields in which you purchase that you are aware of the prices from all suppliers of your goods, why would you want to get rid of all ads, rather than just the ones that are intrusive or off target?
MITRE is probably best known as "that contractor who decided that Windows NT should run that battleship that was stranded when Windows NT BSODed on its test run".)
Nonsense. There was no BSOD. What happened was that the system was using a client/server architecture. An application program on the server was given invalid data from an operator on a client, and divided by zero. That caused the application to exit, just like it would have on any other operating system, such as Linux.
While I personally would not use Windows in this application, Windows had absolutely nothing to do with this problem.
The article's conclusion is misleading. It makes it sounds like your choice is between iTunes for iPods and everything else for MP3 players.
However, all of the stores that offer more than a tiny amount of music (and are not of fuzzy legality) other than iTunes aren't offering most of their music as MP3. It is usually WMA.
And what about this. You get a call on the phone mid movie...get up and get the phone, and forget to pause the movie. Now you want to re-watch the part you missed. Can you?
That problem exists for "pay per view" programming, and yet it is popular. This seems like basically a way to deliver "pay per view" that is more convenient for the consumer, in that the consumer can pick when it starts.
It's what Star Wars would have been without the Jedi, the Force, or Aliens, and if it was all about Han Solo
Yup. Consider that in Serenity, there is a Parliment that is behind the bad guys. Yet, there is not a single scene of that Parliment meeting. In Star Wars, half the movie would have been meetings of Parliment.
I don't see how any of this gets around the fact that no State has the right to tax interstate commerce. Call it whatever kind of tax you want to; Sales, Use, Excise, whatever, it is still a tax on interstate commerce and a State has no right to collect it
Not according to the Supreme Court. As long as the state does not treat interstate commerce different than it treats intrastate commerce, it is OK.
Where the commerce clause becomes involved is in determining who the state can force to collect a tax for them.
Here in my country the looser has to pay the attorney fees. This is really a crazy thing in American law
The problem with doing that in the United States is that the United States uses private lawsuits to enforce many things that in most other countries are enforced by government agencies. For example, most civil rights laws in the US are enforced by having the people who are discriminated against sue the people who discriminated against them. In most of the rest of the world, there would be some Department of Civil Rights or some such that would be in charge of that kind of enforcement.
For this to work, we have to make it fairly easy to sue, and a "loser pays" system would discourage a lot of legitimate lawsuits, because even when you have a good case, you occasioally lose, and a lot of people would not be willing to take that risk.
If we combined "loser pays" with a more direct government role in enforcing the various laws that are now enforced by private action, it could work, but expanding government into those areas seems unpopular.
I don't know how they do DNA matching now, but a few years ago, they only matched on a few sites on the DNA.
What this meant was that there could be several people that would match a given DNA sample.
That was no problem when DNA testing was used correctly. For example, suppose you have a rape/murder, and you have a semen sample. If you do a normal investigation, and come up with several suspects, and THEN do a DNA test, and one of them matches the semen, than to a very high degree of certainty he's the criminal.
However, if instead you start with the DNA, and just check your database of all people whose DNA you happen to have on file, and come up with a match, that is NOT a very good indication that the matching person is the criminal. There could be dozens or even hundreds of people who match, and so the chances are actually rather low that someone you pick just on the basis of a match is the right person.
Here's an analogy to make this clearer. Suppose you have a crime scene, and somehow are able to get from something left on the crime scene the last 3 digits of the criminal's social security number. If you investigate, and come up with three suspects, and then check their social security numbers, and find one of them matches and the other two do not, then you can be pretty confident that the one who matches is the criminal.
On the other hand, if you stop random people on the street and check social security numbers until you find someone who matches, and you are in a city with 10 million people with social security numbers, then that match you found only has around a 1 in a 10000 chance of being the criminal.
So, a DNA database frightens me, because I don't think they will use it properly.
(Or has DNA testing advanced to the point where they do test enough to really uniquely identify a person (except for twins)?)
Why even bother with word processors these days when LaTeX is more than capable of the vast majority of document typesetting needs?
Because producing a document involves far more than typesetting. For example, a good word processor provides tools to help with writing the document, such as outline modes or views. All the great typesetting in the world is useless if the words you are typesetting are poor.
Another issue with public transportation is, at least here, that they don't run when you need them
Yes, this is a big problem with buses. The people that run these mass transit systems just don't get it (or aren't given the budgets to get it). To get people to use mass transit, it has to consistent and reliable and fairly convenient.
The mass transit system needs to be consistent and reliable enough that people can plan their lives around it. People need to be able to look at the routes and schedules, and pick their housing based on that, and have those routes and schedules stay that way for decades.
This means that routes should not be eliminated due to low ridership. The system needs to be dealt with as a whole, rather than as a collection of individual routes that are each supposed to pay for themselves. Even if a particular route has only a handful of riders (or even NO riders most of the time), it needs to keep running, just so people will be able to count on the system as a whole.
Second, and most importantly, we (the city) have voted by popular referendum 4 TIMES to have the monorail. Each time, large property holders in conjunction with the paid-off officials in the city government have waged a fierce battle to prevent this
That first sentence is correct. The second sentence should have been, "Each time, the vote did not take into account at all whether it is actually feasible from a financial point of view".
Those votes are about as useful and meaningful as putting a referendum on the ballot calling for the city to have more sunny days.
after a truck drives over the watch, not only does it "keep on ticking," but it shows no scratching or damage
I think that is one of those demos that looks impressive, but really isn't, as far as scratches go. A truck driving over something will put a fair amount of pressure on it, but won't cause much, if any, scraping, and so little or no scratching.
how did this product get shipped with such a glaringly obvious flaw?
What flaw? By now, nearly everyone should know that things in pockets are very prone to getting scratched, just by observing their cell phones.
With an iPod, they should notice how rapidly the shiny metal back acquires scratches, then say to themselves "OH MY GOD! I NEED TO PROTECT MY SCREEN BEFORE IT GETS SCRATCHED!" and go get a protector or case.
Well, by 2045, it should be easy. First, they will take a photo of the CD with the digital camera in their iPod/PDA/cellphone/tricorder (we'll finally have device convergence by then). The digital camera will have trillions of pixels--enough to resolve the pits and lands on the CD.
Then they'll do a search on Yahoogle to find out what the format of a CD is, and write a program to scan that photo and reconstruct the data.
why the heck the iPod doesn't have a radio is completely beyond my understanding
Actually, I believe the iPod Shuffle hardware does have a radio, and a voice recorder, and a display driver. So, the better question is why did Apple choose not to expose them?
The answer was given in an article whose location I don't remember, soon after the Shuffle came out. Apple could not think of a good interface that would fit on a display small enough for the Shuffle, nor could they think of a good interface for the radio and voice recorder. So, unlike most companies (and this is what makes Apple stuff generally better), they left out features rather than make a kitchen-sink player that would do everything, but do nothing well.
The key to good design is often to leave things out.
The biggest problem they have is signing all the checks Apple sends them
Someone (I think it was Dvorak) on the "This Week in Tech" podcast a couple weeks or so ago talked about the real problem the music companies have with iTMS. It's that it provides numbers that aren't under their control.
You can look at the charts on iTMS and see what is popular and what s not, and this is independent of the numbers the music companies release--and doesn't always match. The music companies like to fiddle with the numbers, for assorted shady reasons, and iTMS is making that harder. You can't tell a band that their album tanked and didn't even make enough to cover the advance when it has been sitting in the top 5 on iTMS for a month.
I've looked briefly into this, at a much smaller scale--I just wanted something where I can have a centralized email server that receives my home and work email, and allows me to access that mail from home and work, securely, using regular email clients (no webmail).
What puzzled me was how to get information into the directory. Say I receive an email from bob@sub.genius, and he is not in my directory. All the common email clients seem able to consult a directory, such as an LDAP server, but none seemed to have the ability to add to the directory. It appears that you have to use some other program to add, so in this example, I'd have to run some other program, paste in "bob@sub.genius", and tell that program to update the directory.
I have only looked at open source stuff for this. Is this something an MS solution would make easier?
Or did I just miss how to do this with open source email clients and directories?
I really can't understand why this audiophile crap has infected almost everyone. Just try it yourself people. Try it with *your* ears. I'm pretty sure you won't hear any difference
You haven't tried this, have you? I don't have golden ears, and normally find 128 kbit/second MP3 indistinguisable from the CD (and I've done blind A/B testing to confirm this). However, if something that was compressed to that level is expanded and recompressed, I can easily spot problems.
If the Apple and Windows userbases suddenly became equal, you'd see copy protection for both platforms
How so? To make system-specific copy protection requires two things. First, the record company has to want to do it. That indeed might depend on userbase size. Second, however, the platform has to support it.
The Mac doesn't have a mechanism for an inserted CD to automatically install software, like Windows does. It is that mechanism that is used to install the copy protection.
Yeah, and 9 times out of 10 I will have run my program, got the runtime exception, seen the stack trace, spotted the error and fixed it by the time your compiler has finished spitting out its litany of obscure type errors for you to work through
In other words, your bugs show up after deployment, his bugs are found before deployment. Guess which one of you I'd hire to write my critical systems?
Slashdot Mirror
But the signal might not be carried by the presence or absence of a particular, but rather by the probability that a particle is present. That is analog.
Isn't that kind of an irrational attitude?
Unless you have so much money that you have no interest in getting a bargain on your purchases, or have such complete knowledge of all fields in which you purchase that you are aware of the prices from all suppliers of your goods, why would you want to get rid of all ads, rather than just the ones that are intrusive or off target?
Uh oh...someone needs to visit Applied Cryogenics and knock 700 years off Fry's timer then.
Nonsense. There was no BSOD. What happened was that the system was using a client/server architecture. An application program on the server was given invalid data from an operator on a client, and divided by zero. That caused the application to exit, just like it would have on any other operating system, such as Linux.
While I personally would not use Windows in this application, Windows had absolutely nothing to do with this problem.
It plays MP3s.
However, all of the stores that offer more than a tiny amount of music (and are not of fuzzy legality) other than iTunes aren't offering most of their music as MP3. It is usually WMA.
That problem exists for "pay per view" programming, and yet it is popular. This seems like basically a way to deliver "pay per view" that is more convenient for the consumer, in that the consumer can pick when it starts.
Yup. Consider that in Serenity, there is a Parliment that is behind the bad guys. Yet, there is not a single scene of that Parliment meeting. In Star Wars, half the movie would have been meetings of Parliment.
Not according to the Supreme Court. As long as the state does not treat interstate commerce different than it treats intrastate commerce, it is OK.
Where the commerce clause becomes involved is in determining who the state can force to collect a tax for them.
The problem with doing that in the United States is that the United States uses private lawsuits to enforce many things that in most other countries are enforced by government agencies. For example, most civil rights laws in the US are enforced by having the people who are discriminated against sue the people who discriminated against them. In most of the rest of the world, there would be some Department of Civil Rights or some such that would be in charge of that kind of enforcement.
For this to work, we have to make it fairly easy to sue, and a "loser pays" system would discourage a lot of legitimate lawsuits, because even when you have a good case, you occasioally lose, and a lot of people would not be willing to take that risk.
If we combined "loser pays" with a more direct government role in enforcing the various laws that are now enforced by private action, it could work, but expanding government into those areas seems unpopular.
What this meant was that there could be several people that would match a given DNA sample.
That was no problem when DNA testing was used correctly. For example, suppose you have a rape/murder, and you have a semen sample. If you do a normal investigation, and come up with several suspects, and THEN do a DNA test, and one of them matches the semen, than to a very high degree of certainty he's the criminal.
However, if instead you start with the DNA, and just check your database of all people whose DNA you happen to have on file, and come up with a match, that is NOT a very good indication that the matching person is the criminal. There could be dozens or even hundreds of people who match, and so the chances are actually rather low that someone you pick just on the basis of a match is the right person.
Here's an analogy to make this clearer. Suppose you have a crime scene, and somehow are able to get from something left on the crime scene the last 3 digits of the criminal's social security number. If you investigate, and come up with three suspects, and then check their social security numbers, and find one of them matches and the other two do not, then you can be pretty confident that the one who matches is the criminal.
On the other hand, if you stop random people on the street and check social security numbers until you find someone who matches, and you are in a city with 10 million people with social security numbers, then that match you found only has around a 1 in a 10000 chance of being the criminal.
So, a DNA database frightens me, because I don't think they will use it properly.
(Or has DNA testing advanced to the point where they do test enough to really uniquely identify a person (except for twins)?)
Because producing a document involves far more than typesetting. For example, a good word processor provides tools to help with writing the document, such as outline modes or views. All the great typesetting in the world is useless if the words you are typesetting are poor.
Yes, this is a big problem with buses. The people that run these mass transit systems just don't get it (or aren't given the budgets to get it). To get people to use mass transit, it has to consistent and reliable and fairly convenient.
The mass transit system needs to be consistent and reliable enough that people can plan their lives around it. People need to be able to look at the routes and schedules, and pick their housing based on that, and have those routes and schedules stay that way for decades.
This means that routes should not be eliminated due to low ridership. The system needs to be dealt with as a whole, rather than as a collection of individual routes that are each supposed to pay for themselves. Even if a particular route has only a handful of riders (or even NO riders most of the time), it needs to keep running, just so people will be able to count on the system as a whole.
That first sentence is correct. The second sentence should have been, "Each time, the vote did not take into account at all whether it is actually feasible from a financial point of view".
Those votes are about as useful and meaningful as putting a referendum on the ballot calling for the city to have more sunny days.
OK, that InvisiShield looks pretty impressive. Finally, it may be possible to make a condom that will work for Clark Kent.
I think that is one of those demos that looks impressive, but really isn't, as far as scratches go. A truck driving over something will put a fair amount of pressure on it, but won't cause much, if any, scraping, and so little or no scratching.
What flaw? By now, nearly everyone should know that things in pockets are very prone to getting scratched, just by observing their cell phones.
With an iPod, they should notice how rapidly the shiny metal back acquires scratches, then say to themselves "OH MY GOD! I NEED TO PROTECT MY SCREEN BEFORE IT GETS SCRATCHED!" and go get a protector or case.
I find this hard to believe. Can you find a cite?
The reason I find it hard to believe is that without copyright, everyone would be free to release binary-only versions of any GPL code.
Then they'll do a search on Yahoogle to find out what the format of a CD is, and write a program to scan that photo and reconstruct the data.
Then the RIAA will sue them.
Actually, I believe the iPod Shuffle hardware does have a radio, and a voice recorder, and a display driver. So, the better question is why did Apple choose not to expose them?
The answer was given in an article whose location I don't remember, soon after the Shuffle came out. Apple could not think of a good interface that would fit on a display small enough for the Shuffle, nor could they think of a good interface for the radio and voice recorder. So, unlike most companies (and this is what makes Apple stuff generally better), they left out features rather than make a kitchen-sink player that would do everything, but do nothing well.
The key to good design is often to leave things out.
Someone (I think it was Dvorak) on the "This Week in Tech" podcast a couple weeks or so ago talked about the real problem the music companies have with iTMS. It's that it provides numbers that aren't under their control.
You can look at the charts on iTMS and see what is popular and what s not, and this is independent of the numbers the music companies release--and doesn't always match. The music companies like to fiddle with the numbers, for assorted shady reasons, and iTMS is making that harder. You can't tell a band that their album tanked and didn't even make enough to cover the advance when it has been sitting in the top 5 on iTMS for a month.
Interesting theory.
What puzzled me was how to get information into the directory. Say I receive an email from bob@sub.genius, and he is not in my directory. All the common email clients seem able to consult a directory, such as an LDAP server, but none seemed to have the ability to add to the directory. It appears that you have to use some other program to add, so in this example, I'd have to run some other program, paste in "bob@sub.genius", and tell that program to update the directory.
I have only looked at open source stuff for this. Is this something an MS solution would make easier?
Or did I just miss how to do this with open source email clients and directories?
You haven't tried this, have you? I don't have golden ears, and normally find 128 kbit/second MP3 indistinguisable from the CD (and I've done blind A/B testing to confirm this). However, if something that was compressed to that level is expanded and recompressed, I can easily spot problems.
How so? To make system-specific copy protection requires two things. First, the record company has to want to do it. That indeed might depend on userbase size. Second, however, the platform has to support it.
The Mac doesn't have a mechanism for an inserted CD to automatically install software, like Windows does. It is that mechanism that is used to install the copy protection.
In other words, your bugs show up after deployment, his bugs are found before deployment. Guess which one of you I'd hire to write my critical systems?