At least they make something off of you - the coffee. Not much but it's something. And there is the off chance that you may actually buy a book or magazine there. Not so with my use of Yahoo: can't buy anything there to begin with. And the magazines you read will be read by someone else later I suppose.
I am one of those regular visitors to Yahoo. Use them (almost) daily to play online card games (bridge specifically). There probably are other board that offer it, but Yahoo works fine and I'm used to the culture and game play conventions (very important when playing bridge) on that board.
That said I always wonder how they make money off of that. There is an interstitial ad when navigating to the game room the proper way; I never see it because if I use that route it's blocked for being flash, and normally I access the room directly - just bookmarked it. Furthermore the game itself is free, just requires a Yahoo login which I have since the late 1990s. And occasionally I visit their finance page for forex rates, usually via a Google search.
From the summary & article I understand that the boxes look like they had not been opened before returning to the shop. So the staff in the shop had no reason to believe it had been tampered with.
When customer returns an unopened product, they can just restock it and sell it to someone else instead. Yet when the staff opens the as-yet unopened product for checking, they may not be able to sell it at full price again. So there is a clear incentive for staff not to open an as-yet unopened product.
Well cosmic radiation, at least the part that makes it through the atmosphere and which is powerful enough to do tamper with molecules, is gamma radiation.
It will definitely take longer - how long is anyone's guess. Nevertheless it'd be an interesting experiment.
Now a variation. Evolution involves random mutations: most don't do much if anything, others are lethal, and some will give a small advantage and giving those individuals an edge. These random mutations, mostly DNA copying errors, are thought to be caused by a.o. radiation. We are constantly bombarded by a low dose of cosmic radiation, and I would expect that is a major source of such errors. An impact by a cosmic ray at just the right moment and the wrong amino acid is built into the DNA.
Would it be possible to speed up such an experiment by adding a small dose of radiation in the mix? Maybe something like 10 times background radiation or so, or whatever is considered safe for life - after all you don't want to kill off the experiment right away. Such radiation levels should increase the number of mutations, putting more randomness in the mix, and a higher chance to change the behaviour of the organism.
I'm sure those intelligent design people will use this to support their theory, it's surely easier than to explain fossils etc in a young-earth theory: how can such a complex design come into being without a highly intelligent designer creating it?
The more you learn about it, the more complex life becomes!
Mitochondria and chloroplasts (and their less well-known cousins, chromoplasts and amyloplasts) actually started out as different kinds of bacteria and just got absorbed into a cell one day. They even have their own DNA, ribosomes, and reproductive cycle.
I am familiar with mitochondria having their own set of DNA, but that's pretty much how far my knowledge in the subject goes. And that this DNA is not shared through sexual reproduction: in case of human reproduction the mitochondrial DNA is exclusively the mother's, as sperm cells don't have any. But I've never heard about them having their own reproduction cycle etc - it seems like we could call mitochondria a separate life form, living in symbioses with us.
This has indeed been pondered! We're pretty sure that all life that presently exists all comes from one root, however.
That doesn't surprise me in the least. There are so many similarities between various life forms it almost has to have a single root. With that I'm thinking of e.g. DNA: all life forms use the same four aminoacids and the same basic mechanisms for handling DNA, with minor variations like viruses that use RNA iirc. It's been a while since I had my biology lessons.
Also the basic structure of cells is pretty much the same throughout all life forms. All cells have their mitochondria, their core, etc., often using the same proteins even. All those things already point to a single ancestor. Recently here on/. there were reports of extremophiles using arsenic in their DNA, that to me are still life forms very similar to the rest - still using DNA and proteins etc. They just adapted to live in a different environment, something that we call extreme, but what they would call home sweet home.
Can Office 2k open files saved in Office 2k10's default format? Having an older version of Word than the person sending you the file has always been a serious problem. And you can't tell even from the extension what format it really is. At least.odt is an actual standard.
And of course I'm under-appreciated, I'm the boss. With 1/2 staff. And not involved in programming at all (and honestly not sure if I would really want that, if offered a job). I program for fun, to get stuff done, or to make my server behave in a way that's convenient to me.
Why are you not qualified to do it professionally? The difference between a professional and a hobbyist is that the first gets paid for it. That's all. They're not necessarily better.
And why would you need to learn so much for writing software that people find useful? With no experience in Java I picked up programming for Android, and within a month I had an app on the Android Market that people find useful. Now I'm not making a penny off of it (free, open source, and no ads), as I did it for fun. But that's not the point here: the point is you don't need years of experience to make something useful. You just have to do it.
I'm one of those. Started to learn coding when I was about 12 years old, on an MSX home computer in BASIC. Did interesting stuff with it in the following years, that was fun.
Later in college and uni some more serious programming classes, teaching TurboPascal. I've put those skills to good use in my studies later, to operate certain machines. And now playing a lot with Python, and also Java (for Android phones).
All self-learned, with the use of online resources mainly.
But to say that I'm a good coder? Well that'd be far fetched. I get things done - but I bet many professional coders will look at my code in horror. I know bits and pieces about OO, again enough to make stuff work.
I know there is a lot that I don't know - there is much more to programming, especially I have no experience with (and no idea how to go about) projects that involve more than one person. Or anything really big, that is to be deployed on many different systems. I don't have that deep and background knowledge of programming and computers in general. I have once fiddled with IRQs and so - that was really interesting and fun to do. But nothing more. And that are the skills that one doesn't learn from a just-code type of course, or from coding books, that are the extra skills what you do get in university or any proper software development course.
After all, there is so much more to software development than coding.
Don't be misled by the summary: BREIN can only freely add IP addresses and web site names that are aliases for the pirate bay. If BREIN asks for IP addresses or web sites to be blocked that are not linked to TPB they are legally liable to fines.
I tried reading the article sorry press release. Which is mostly marketing speak, lots of talk about how great and innovative it is (and I don't take their word for it as it's a press release) and got barely halfway.
Then I checked out Wikipedia to get an idea of what it really is.
Any somewhat independent review of this one would be appreciated. From the looks of it, it sounds like a very interesting device indeed. Now if only Microsoft would put more of that innovative power in their other products... but well maybe this really is the only division in the company that has vision and creativity.
As argued many times before, that would make the IP of a company effectively worthless. You can't sell it so you can't put it on the balance sheet as asset. Patents have value: they give a monopoly, allow a company to produce a certain product, and make a good profit on that as they don't have direct competition. Or may license it to other companies and profit in that way. So the mere owning of a patent gives a value to a company, but if the patent is not transferable it has no value when a company goes bankrupt. So no value as company asset. Same accounts of course for copyrights.
Not true. Look at China. As you all know there's a lot of piracy going on there: and you know what? It's because there is money in it, big money. You could almost argue that China is an example on what would happen if there is no copyright law (China has copyright laws, they're just not enforced).
So there surely is a motive for killing an artist if that puts the work in the public domain. It means that you now suddenly can produce and sell say DVDs of that artist's movies, without any repercussions. Everyone else can do that too but the market is big enough for multiple players to make a profit.
People do, generally, follow copyright. Millions of people buy books or DVDs or music or software.
They do not buy the books/CDs because it has the copyright notice on it. They buy it because they want to read a book or listen to a CD. And buy the physical product because they like to hold a book, or look at the cover of a CD, or for whatever reason. Even out of habit maybe.
When I want a book or movie I go to a shop that sells it to me - and I don't worry about how that shop got its stocks. That's not my business - when it's in a shop I assume it's legit, it's not me duty to try to confirm it anyway. Nor could I really check this anyway. Copyright notices on packing anyone can print. Holograms and whatnot well besides that I wouldn't know how an original would look like or whether it should be there to begin with, can be copied too.
1976 is well before the era of the digital camera which started only just over a decade ago. If they lost all that market share between 1976 and mid 1990s then that was not due to the change to digital.
Knowing that they can bend that far doesn't make it look less disturbing. But that's just the conflict between reasonable scientist and unreasonable human. I'm quite sure I'm not the only one in that respect.
Even though I have a background in materials science, and know very well that everything moves and flexes all the time, I must say whenever I see the wings of an aircraft move seriously it does look kinda scary. Even though I know very well that there is no other way - it's impossible to make such long thin things so stiff they don't move visibly. And that the materials involved are perfectly capable of handling those stresses.
True. Saves them buying licenses to those stories. But they surely would also be profitable without those stories. The vast majority of their older work is original.
Yet they also own the rights to e.g. Winnie the Pooh (stories are afaik still under copyright). That's not their original creation, they bought the rights to the story, and are now profiting from it. They also have tons of original (self developed) characters.
Slashdot Mirror
At least they make something off of you - the coffee. Not much but it's something. And there is the off chance that you may actually buy a book or magazine there. Not so with my use of Yahoo: can't buy anything there to begin with. And the magazines you read will be read by someone else later I suppose.
I am one of those regular visitors to Yahoo. Use them (almost) daily to play online card games (bridge specifically). There probably are other board that offer it, but Yahoo works fine and I'm used to the culture and game play conventions (very important when playing bridge) on that board.
That said I always wonder how they make money off of that. There is an interstitial ad when navigating to the game room the proper way; I never see it because if I use that route it's blocked for being flash, and normally I access the room directly - just bookmarked it. Furthermore the game itself is free, just requires a Yahoo login which I have since the late 1990s. And occasionally I visit their finance page for forex rates, usually via a Google search.
Read TFA. The packing was, from the face of it, not opened. This product was returned as if it were unused.
You're talking about the battery life of the real thing I assume?
The battery of the fake sounds pretty dead to me.
From the summary & article I understand that the boxes look like they had not been opened before returning to the shop. So the staff in the shop had no reason to believe it had been tampered with.
When customer returns an unopened product, they can just restock it and sell it to someone else instead. Yet when the staff opens the as-yet unopened product for checking, they may not be able to sell it at full price again. So there is a clear incentive for staff not to open an as-yet unopened product.
Well cosmic radiation, at least the part that makes it through the atmosphere and which is powerful enough to do tamper with molecules, is gamma radiation.
It will definitely take longer - how long is anyone's guess. Nevertheless it'd be an interesting experiment.
Now a variation. Evolution involves random mutations: most don't do much if anything, others are lethal, and some will give a small advantage and giving those individuals an edge. These random mutations, mostly DNA copying errors, are thought to be caused by a.o. radiation. We are constantly bombarded by a low dose of cosmic radiation, and I would expect that is a major source of such errors. An impact by a cosmic ray at just the right moment and the wrong amino acid is built into the DNA.
Would it be possible to speed up such an experiment by adding a small dose of radiation in the mix? Maybe something like 10 times background radiation or so, or whatever is considered safe for life - after all you don't want to kill off the experiment right away. Such radiation levels should increase the number of mutations, putting more randomness in the mix, and a higher chance to change the behaviour of the organism.
I'm sure those intelligent design people will use this to support their theory, it's surely easier than to explain fossils etc in a young-earth theory: how can such a complex design come into being without a highly intelligent designer creating it?
The more you learn about it, the more complex life becomes!
Mitochondria and chloroplasts (and their less well-known cousins, chromoplasts and amyloplasts) actually started out as different kinds of bacteria and just got absorbed into a cell one day. They even have their own DNA, ribosomes, and reproductive cycle.
I am familiar with mitochondria having their own set of DNA, but that's pretty much how far my knowledge in the subject goes. And that this DNA is not shared through sexual reproduction: in case of human reproduction the mitochondrial DNA is exclusively the mother's, as sperm cells don't have any. But I've never heard about them having their own reproduction cycle etc - it seems like we could call mitochondria a separate life form, living in symbioses with us.
This has indeed been pondered! We're pretty sure that all life that presently exists all comes from one root, however.
That doesn't surprise me in the least. There are so many similarities between various life forms it almost has to have a single root. With that I'm thinking of e.g. DNA: all life forms use the same four aminoacids and the same basic mechanisms for handling DNA, with minor variations like viruses that use RNA iirc. It's been a while since I had my biology lessons.
Also the basic structure of cells is pretty much the same throughout all life forms. All cells have their mitochondria, their core, etc., often using the same proteins even. All those things already point to a single ancestor. Recently here on /. there were reports of extremophiles using arsenic in their DNA, that to me are still life forms very similar to the rest - still using DNA and proteins etc. They just adapted to live in a different environment, something that we call extreme, but what they would call home sweet home.
Can Office 2k open files saved in Office 2k10's default format? Having an older version of Word than the person sending you the file has always been a serious problem. And you can't tell even from the extension what format it really is. At least .odt is an actual standard.
LOL don't flatter me so much :)
And of course I'm under-appreciated, I'm the boss. With 1/2 staff. And not involved in programming at all (and honestly not sure if I would really want that, if offered a job). I program for fun, to get stuff done, or to make my server behave in a way that's convenient to me.
Why are you not qualified to do it professionally? The difference between a professional and a hobbyist is that the first gets paid for it. That's all. They're not necessarily better.
And why would you need to learn so much for writing software that people find useful? With no experience in Java I picked up programming for Android, and within a month I had an app on the Android Market that people find useful. Now I'm not making a penny off of it (free, open source, and no ads), as I did it for fun. But that's not the point here: the point is you don't need years of experience to make something useful. You just have to do it.
I'm one of those. Started to learn coding when I was about 12 years old, on an MSX home computer in BASIC. Did interesting stuff with it in the following years, that was fun.
Later in college and uni some more serious programming classes, teaching TurboPascal. I've put those skills to good use in my studies later, to operate certain machines. And now playing a lot with Python, and also Java (for Android phones).
All self-learned, with the use of online resources mainly.
But to say that I'm a good coder? Well that'd be far fetched. I get things done - but I bet many professional coders will look at my code in horror. I know bits and pieces about OO, again enough to make stuff work.
I know there is a lot that I don't know - there is much more to programming, especially I have no experience with (and no idea how to go about) projects that involve more than one person. Or anything really big, that is to be deployed on many different systems. I don't have that deep and background knowledge of programming and computers in general. I have once fiddled with IRQs and so - that was really interesting and fun to do. But nothing more. And that are the skills that one doesn't learn from a just-code type of course, or from coding books, that are the extra skills what you do get in university or any proper software development course.
After all, there is so much more to software development than coding.
Does not matter, tables are turned. Now the accuser (BREIN) can swiftly block you without order and you as an accused have to prove your innocence.
Wrong. Read TFA. They can ONLY add extra domains or IP addresses that lead to TPB. Any others they have to go to court again. Or risk fines.
They would have to go to court for that again.
Don't be misled by the summary: BREIN can only freely add IP addresses and web site names that are aliases for the pirate bay. If BREIN asks for IP addresses or web sites to be blocked that are not linked to TPB they are legally liable to fines.
I tried reading the article sorry press release. Which is mostly marketing speak, lots of talk about how great and innovative it is (and I don't take their word for it as it's a press release) and got barely halfway.
Then I checked out Wikipedia to get an idea of what it really is.
Any somewhat independent review of this one would be appreciated. From the looks of it, it sounds like a very interesting device indeed. Now if only Microsoft would put more of that innovative power in their other products... but well maybe this really is the only division in the company that has vision and creativity.
Sensible.
But: OP says he can get xbox+Kinect at $199, or even as low as $99.
Summary states just Kinect $249.
So even if you're just after the kinekt it's cheaper to buy the combo, and you can put the xbox itself on ebay afterwards.
Unless the hardware is radically different (the software to use it would be available for free) and presumably better it just doesn't make sense.
Bad idea.
As argued many times before, that would make the IP of a company effectively worthless. You can't sell it so you can't put it on the balance sheet as asset. Patents have value: they give a monopoly, allow a company to produce a certain product, and make a good profit on that as they don't have direct competition. Or may license it to other companies and profit in that way. So the mere owning of a patent gives a value to a company, but if the patent is not transferable it has no value when a company goes bankrupt. So no value as company asset. Same accounts of course for copyrights.
Not true. Look at China. As you all know there's a lot of piracy going on there: and you know what? It's because there is money in it, big money. You could almost argue that China is an example on what would happen if there is no copyright law (China has copyright laws, they're just not enforced).
So there surely is a motive for killing an artist if that puts the work in the public domain. It means that you now suddenly can produce and sell say DVDs of that artist's movies, without any repercussions. Everyone else can do that too but the market is big enough for multiple players to make a profit.
People do, generally, follow copyright. Millions of people buy books or DVDs or music or software.
They do not buy the books/CDs because it has the copyright notice on it. They buy it because they want to read a book or listen to a CD. And buy the physical product because they like to hold a book, or look at the cover of a CD, or for whatever reason. Even out of habit maybe.
When I want a book or movie I go to a shop that sells it to me - and I don't worry about how that shop got its stocks. That's not my business - when it's in a shop I assume it's legit, it's not me duty to try to confirm it anyway. Nor could I really check this anyway. Copyright notices on packing anyone can print. Holograms and whatnot well besides that I wouldn't know how an original would look like or whether it should be there to begin with, can be copied too.
1976 is well before the era of the digital camera which started only just over a decade ago. If they lost all that market share between 1976 and mid 1990s then that was not due to the change to digital.
Knowing that they can bend that far doesn't make it look less disturbing. But that's just the conflict between reasonable scientist and unreasonable human. I'm quite sure I'm not the only one in that respect.
Interesting.
Even though I have a background in materials science, and know very well that everything moves and flexes all the time, I must say whenever I see the wings of an aircraft move seriously it does look kinda scary. Even though I know very well that there is no other way - it's impossible to make such long thin things so stiff they don't move visibly. And that the materials involved are perfectly capable of handling those stresses.
True. Saves them buying licenses to those stories. But they surely would also be profitable without those stories. The vast majority of their older work is original.
Yet they also own the rights to e.g. Winnie the Pooh (stories are afaik still under copyright). That's not their original creation, they bought the rights to the story, and are now profiting from it. They also have tons of original (self developed) characters.