Correct (I was being facetious about the trademark isue, but not about the staggering lack of uniqueness or originality behind the Red Cross's complaint).
At any rate, someone posted a US Code citation below that suggests there's a completely-unique species of Federal law dedicated specifically to protect that symbol. If I don't hear anything dumber than that this week, I guess I should count myself lucky...
That symbol is at least as old as the Knights Templar. I don't think you can trademark a 900-year-old symbol, even in the post-Sonny Bono era.
Just another great argument in favor of finding a more effective beneficiary for your donations. Time and again, the Red Cross have proven to be assholes with a red capital 'A' on a white background.
Sure I have some nearsightedness, but why should I want to start etching away at 2 healthy lenses without knowing how they might end up 20 years from now?
What a load of FUD. For one thing, LASIK alters the cornea, not the lens. For another thing, cornea surgery in one form or another has been around for decades, if not close to a century. There's nothing we don't know about how the corneal epithelium heals. (The truth is, it never really does... which is fine unless your pupil size in dim light is large enough to cross the ablation-zone boundary.)
Meanwhile, peoples' eyes are being damaged every day by eye infections and neovascularization caused by contact lenses.
In short, no, we are not going to see any mysterious maladies emerge in LASIK patients who were properly screened for corneal thickness. We'd have already seen those maladies in other contexts. (And, parenthetically, relying on an optometrist for advice on this is about like asking the kid down at Jiffy Lube if your air filter needs changing.)
One of my professors today went into depth about cell phones. From what he said, Microwave ovens heat up food by sending waves with a very specific frequency. This frequency which supposedly has to be right around 2.43GHz excites the hydrogen particles in a water molecule, creating heat, and warming up the food.
How does anyone get out of high school without the ability to call bullshit on stuff like this?
It takes one calorie to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree C. To a first approximation, an egg weighs about 50 grams, and is full of stuff whose specific heat is probably not too different from that of water. Let's say cooking an egg at room temperature requires you to raise its temperature by 50 degrees C for one minute. You will need something on the order of 2500 calories to do this, or about 10,000 joules. This energy will have to be transferred to the egg over a one-minute interval, assuming 100% efficiency.
A joule is one watt-second, so this cooking process is going to require exposing the egg to about 166 watts for one minute. At 100% efficiency.
A cell phone puts out about one watt, and good luck funnelling all of its output into an egg. (For extra credit, calculate the impedance of a chicken egg in free space, and design a suitable matching network).
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to my public-safety campaign, warning gullible Americans about dangerous levels of radiation in voting booths.
Here's one in particular, for the Seattle area. It has a seriously-wimpy indoor antenna at the moment, so there's no guarantee it'll hear the SuitSat pass.
Too much later in life I discovered the connection between the school math and the computer programming that occupied my childhood.
It's not too late. Back in the 8-bit days, computers sucked at math even more than you did. If you think carefully about what you were doing back then, most of your programming time was focused on avoiding math, not doing it.
These days, computers no longer suck at math, and the math geeks are in the process of inheriting the earth... even if they don't know it yet.
Why should I have to use a CDR and five minutes of my life because of artificial limitations?
Because you need to back up your purchased music anyway, and burning a Red Book CDR kills two birds with one stone. It only takes a couple of extra clicks of the mouse to delete the DRM-encumbered AAC files and re-rip the CD you just burned.
Works fine for me. All in all, it's a lot less trouble than opening the shrink wrap on a retail-purchased CD that contains God-only-knows-what malware.
Yes. I don't get to control how the money I've paid for a CD or DVD is used, so how can it be fair for the seller to control how the content I've licensed is used?
Especially in cases where shrink-wrap license terms deny me the ability to decline an implied contract; e.g., the recent Coldplay CD license.
If I had to choose between one 30" or my two 19" monitors, I'd choose the pair, rather than just one.
I was faced with upgrading my Samsung monitor from a 1280x1024 170T to a 1920x1200 243T on my home machine awhile back. I was all set to flash the plastic when I stopped and did the math. I could go from 1.3 to 2.3 megapixels for (at the time) about $1500... or I could keep the 170T as a secondary monitor and buy a 1600x1200 213T instead for about $800.
1.9 megapixels plus 1.3 megapixels >> 2.3 megapixels.... duh. I've been very happy with the 213T/170T combo.
Until applications emerge that actually need a contiguous 30" hunk of screen real estate, I think the parent poster has the right idea. Dual monitors have a lot of advantages over buying a single humongous one at the pointy end of the price/pixel curve. Sure, I appreciate a panoramic gaming experience as much as the next guy, but Q4 and HL2 are already choppy when I run them on the 213T with all rendering features cranked up. A 30" display would be like watching King Kong at 12 FPS from the front row.
... at all these "helpful" opinions from clueful-sounding people who have no clue what the problem actually is.
"Pay for a real mail service" is not the answer. It doesn't matter if I use GMail. If the client uses GMail, I can't send them a zipfile with an.EXE inside. If you don't write code for a living, you'd probably be surprised at how convenient, and occasionally necessary, this is.
"Zip the.EXE file up with WinZip/7Zip/bzip/whatever" is not the answer, for the same reason.
Using FTP and wget is not the answer for some clients who are behind a corporate firewall. (And wasn't GMail celebrated at one point as an alternative for archiving and even sharing content? Google maintains a wee bit more server space than I tend to keep around.)
"Rename the file" is a crappy answer that doesn't solve a damned thing. If I can convince Grandma to unzip and run an unsolicited.EXE, I can convince her to rename it, too.
"Scan for viruses on the server side, and don't mess with my message content otherwise," is the answer. That, for the record, is what Hotmail does, and the world doesn't seem to have come to an end as a result.
Why do you need to send an EXE attachment? Seems like a sane thing to forbid.
Some people actually work with.EXEs for a living. GMail is worthless to those people.
Before Microsoft started allowing email to execute code, email viruses were impossible.
You don't have to prohibit executable attachments to disallow automatically-executing content. Google has thrown out the baby, bathtub, and half of the house's indoor plumbing.
Microsoft's dumbass move was making everything executable. It's easy enough to tell Grandma not to click on.EXE files, but not so easy when the OS vendor chooses to hide the suffix from her, provides easy ways to disguise the suffix, adds support for some arbitrarily-large number of additional executable file types, and ships a macro engine designed to run the content automatically without asking first.
It's not appropriate to fix any of those problems by preventing me from sending my customers a.ZIP file containing an.EXE. This is a case where Microsoft did some stupid things and Google responded with a hearty, "Hey, wait for me, guys!"
They are just listening in the case that you are acting strange and trying to make sure you aren't going to kill someone.
Wonder if they heard anything interesting when they focused their energies on strange-acting sorts like John Lennon and Martin Luther King? Do you even realize why laws requiring judicial oversight were passed in the first place?
What in the world makes people like you so eager to fall into the "But... but... but Big Brother is working for me this time!" trap? Is it something akin to battered-spouse syndrome? Some sense of repressed self-blame, sublimated as patriotism? I seriously, genuinely feel like I'm missing a clue here. Help me out?
I've considered subscribing to their print magazine more than once, because they are usually pretty damned cogent. This is the biggest exception I've seen, and there's no indication that it's guest editorial/opinion content rather than the official position of the magazine.
... if only for its homebrew-deco appeal. According to the.PDF copy of the user manual on the site, the software that runs it is GPL'ed and fully user-compilable/modifiable. The complete schematic is provided with a nifty discussion of the underlying circuit theory.
Aesthetically, yeah, it's hard to argue that it's not a piece of junk. The first thing you notice -- because your eye expects to see two more Nixie tubes -- is the huge battery next to the two that are present. That should have been a stack of heavy-duty lithium coin cells mounted out of sight. If they'd gone that route, then the housing could have accommodated three tubes... which 85% of the time is all you need, right?
It doesn't deserve the bashing it's getting on a "News for Nerds" site, at any rate. Everybody reading Slashdot has scarier stuff than this in their (psychic?) basements.
Really, I'm talking to people that are incapable of understanding the problems of society because they know nothing but self indulgence and self gratification.
It's hard to imagine an act of greater self-indulgence than telling other people what they can write, speak, or draw.
Bad idea. This is like the Jews of Lódz demanding their own part of town.
Re:Starbucks is good coffee
on
Drink Decaf and Die
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Starbucks recently (within the last couple years) bought one of the major local chains, called Seattle's Best Coffee. The obvious fear was that SBC, which wasn't a bad place at all, would start serving burned coffee. While that didn't happen, their franchises have been slowly disappearing... which sucks, because I always liked their coffee much better than Starbucks'.
However, the other side of the equation is that at least here in Seattle, the Starbucks espresso blend seems to be growing closer and closer over time to SBC's. When I drink Starbucks, I'm finding that I no longer notice the charred/burned taste to any great extent. I've almost reached the point at which I don't really care if I'm drinking Starbucks or SBC. Not that I'm any sort of coffee connoisseur like some of the posters in this thread... but still. Whether the change is in Starbucks' coffee or my perception of it, it does seem to be tasting better these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct (I was being facetious about the trademark isue, but not about the staggering lack of uniqueness or originality behind the Red Cross's complaint).
At any rate, someone posted a US Code citation below that suggests there's a completely-unique species of Federal law dedicated specifically to protect that symbol. If I don't hear anything dumber than that this week, I guess I should count myself lucky...
That symbol is at least as old as the Knights Templar. I don't think you can trademark a 900-year-old symbol, even in the post-Sonny Bono era.
Just another great argument in favor of finding a more effective beneficiary for your donations. Time and again, the Red Cross have proven to be assholes with a red capital 'A' on a white background.
Sure I have some nearsightedness, but why should I want to start etching away at 2 healthy lenses without knowing how they might end up 20 years from now?
What a load of FUD. For one thing, LASIK alters the cornea, not the lens. For another thing, cornea surgery in one form or another has been around for decades, if not close to a century. There's nothing we don't know about how the corneal epithelium heals. (The truth is, it never really does... which is fine unless your pupil size in dim light is large enough to cross the ablation-zone boundary.)
Meanwhile, peoples' eyes are being damaged every day by eye infections and neovascularization caused by contact lenses.
In short, no, we are not going to see any mysterious maladies emerge in LASIK patients who were properly screened for corneal thickness. We'd have already seen those maladies in other contexts. (And, parenthetically, relying on an optometrist for advice on this is about like asking the kid down at Jiffy Lube if your air filter needs changing.)
One of my professors today went into depth about cell phones. From what he said, Microwave ovens heat up food by sending waves with a very specific frequency. This frequency which supposedly has to be right around 2.43GHz excites the hydrogen particles in a water molecule, creating heat, and warming up the food.
You need to find a new professor.
How does anyone get out of high school without the ability to call bullshit on stuff like this?
It takes one calorie to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree C. To a first approximation, an egg weighs about 50 grams, and is full of stuff whose specific heat is probably not too different from that of water. Let's say cooking an egg at room temperature requires you to raise its temperature by 50 degrees C for one minute. You will need something on the order of 2500 calories to do this, or about 10,000 joules. This energy will have to be transferred to the egg over a one-minute interval, assuming 100% efficiency.
A joule is one watt-second, so this cooking process is going to require exposing the egg to about 166 watts for one minute. At 100% efficiency.
A cell phone puts out about one watt, and good luck funnelling all of its output into an egg. (For extra credit, calculate the impedance of a chicken egg in free space, and design a suitable matching network).
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to my public-safety campaign, warning gullible Americans about dangerous levels of radiation in voting booths.
... who argued that video and computer games could not possibly rise to the level of an art form?
If so, what does he care who directs a movie based on his game? That's quite an affectation on Kojima-san's part, isn't it?
Here's one in particular, for the Seattle area. It has a seriously-wimpy indoor antenna at the moment, so there's no guarantee it'll hear the SuitSat pass.
Too much later in life I discovered the connection between the school math and the computer programming that occupied my childhood.
It's not too late. Back in the 8-bit days, computers sucked at math even more than you did. If you think carefully about what you were doing back then, most of your programming time was focused on avoiding math, not doing it.
These days, computers no longer suck at math, and the math geeks are in the process of inheriting the earth... even if they don't know it yet.
They exposed it to UVA radiation in a hard vacuum for 4.5 billion years.
Why should I have to use a CDR and five minutes of my life because of artificial limitations?
Because you need to back up your purchased music anyway, and burning a Red Book CDR kills two birds with one stone. It only takes a couple of extra clicks of the mouse to delete the DRM-encumbered AAC files and re-rip the CD you just burned.
Works fine for me. All in all, it's a lot less trouble than opening the shrink wrap on a retail-purchased CD that contains God-only-knows-what malware.
Is it always evil to use DRM?
Yes. I don't get to control how the money I've paid for a CD or DVD is used, so how can it be fair for the seller to control how the content I've licensed is used?
Especially in cases where shrink-wrap license terms deny me the ability to decline an implied contract; e.g., the recent Coldplay CD license.
If I had to choose between one 30" or my two 19" monitors, I'd choose the pair, rather than just one.
I was faced with upgrading my Samsung monitor from a 1280x1024 170T to a 1920x1200 243T on my home machine awhile back. I was all set to flash the plastic when I stopped and did the math. I could go from 1.3 to 2.3 megapixels for (at the time) about $1500... or I could keep the 170T as a secondary monitor and buy a 1600x1200 213T instead for about $800.
1.9 megapixels plus 1.3 megapixels >> 2.3 megapixels.... duh. I've been very happy with the 213T/170T combo.
Until applications emerge that actually need a contiguous 30" hunk of screen real estate, I think the parent poster has the right idea. Dual monitors have a lot of advantages over buying a single humongous one at the pointy end of the price/pixel curve. Sure, I appreciate a panoramic gaming experience as much as the next guy, but Q4 and HL2 are already choppy when I run them on the 213T with all rendering features cranked up. A 30" display would be like watching King Kong at 12 FPS from the front row.
Anyone remember the day when you bought a creative soundcard because it had proper midi support
No.
... at all these "helpful" opinions from clueful-sounding people who have no clue what the problem actually is.
.EXE inside. If you don't write code for a living, you'd probably be surprised at how convenient, and occasionally necessary, this is.
.EXE file up with WinZip/7Zip/bzip/whatever" is not the answer, for the same reason.
.EXE, I can convince her to rename it, too.
"Pay for a real mail service" is not the answer. It doesn't matter if I use GMail. If the client uses GMail, I can't send them a zipfile with an
"Zip the
Using FTP and wget is not the answer for some clients who are behind a corporate firewall. (And wasn't GMail celebrated at one point as an alternative for archiving and even sharing content? Google maintains a wee bit more server space than I tend to keep around.)
"Rename the file" is a crappy answer that doesn't solve a damned thing. If I can convince Grandma to unzip and run an unsolicited
"Scan for viruses on the server side, and don't mess with my message content otherwise," is the answer. That, for the record, is what Hotmail does, and the world doesn't seem to have come to an end as a result.
Why do you need to send an EXE attachment? Seems like a sane thing to forbid.
.EXEs for a living. GMail is worthless to those people.
.EXE files, but not so easy when the OS vendor chooses to hide the suffix from her, provides easy ways to disguise the suffix, adds support for some arbitrarily-large number of additional executable file types, and ships a macro engine designed to run the content automatically without asking first.
.ZIP file containing an .EXE. This is a case where Microsoft did some stupid things and Google responded with a hearty, "Hey, wait for me, guys!"
Some people actually work with
Before Microsoft started allowing email to execute code, email viruses were impossible.
You don't have to prohibit executable attachments to disallow automatically-executing content. Google has thrown out the baby, bathtub, and half of the house's indoor plumbing.
Microsoft's dumbass move was making everything executable. It's easy enough to tell Grandma not to click on
It's not appropriate to fix any of those problems by preventing me from sending my customers a
Help me out... what's interesting about that equation?
They are just listening in the case that you are acting strange and trying to make sure you aren't going to kill someone.
Wonder if they heard anything interesting when they focused their energies on strange-acting sorts like John Lennon and Martin Luther King? Do you even realize why laws requiring judicial oversight were passed in the first place?
What in the world makes people like you so eager to fall into the "But... but... but Big Brother is working for me this time!" trap? Is it something akin to battered-spouse syndrome? Some sense of repressed self-blame, sublimated as patriotism? I seriously, genuinely feel like I'm missing a clue here. Help me out?
What a shallow, misguided opinion piece. :-(
I've considered subscribing to their print magazine more than once, because they are usually pretty damned cogent. This is the biggest exception I've seen, and there's no indication that it's guest editorial/opinion content rather than the official position of the magazine.
... if only for its homebrew-deco appeal. According to the .PDF copy of the user manual on the site, the software that runs it is GPL'ed and fully user-compilable/modifiable. The complete schematic is provided with a nifty discussion of the underlying circuit theory.
Aesthetically, yeah, it's hard to argue that it's not a piece of junk. The first thing you notice -- because your eye expects to see two more Nixie tubes -- is the huge battery next to the two that are present. That should have been a stack of heavy-duty lithium coin cells mounted out of sight. If they'd gone that route, then the housing could have accommodated three tubes... which 85% of the time is all you need, right?
It doesn't deserve the bashing it's getting on a "News for Nerds" site, at any rate. Everybody reading Slashdot has scarier stuff than this in their (psychic?) basements.
Really, I'm talking to people that are incapable of understanding the problems of society because they know nothing but self indulgence and self gratification.
It's hard to imagine an act of greater self-indulgence than telling other people what they can write, speak, or draw.
Give it to the people or we'll riot to get it!
Bad idea. This is like the Jews of Lódz demanding their own part of town.
Starbucks recently (within the last couple years) bought one of the major local chains, called Seattle's Best Coffee. The obvious fear was that SBC, which wasn't a bad place at all, would start serving burned coffee. While that didn't happen, their franchises have been slowly disappearing... which sucks, because I always liked their coffee much better than Starbucks'.
However, the other side of the equation is that at least here in Seattle, the Starbucks espresso blend seems to be growing closer and closer over time to SBC's. When I drink Starbucks, I'm finding that I no longer notice the charred/burned taste to any great extent. I've almost reached the point at which I don't really care if I'm drinking Starbucks or SBC. Not that I'm any sort of coffee connoisseur like some of the posters in this thread... but still. Whether the change is in Starbucks' coffee or my perception of it, it does seem to be tasting better these days.
The funny thing is, this analysis may apply to the real estate market in the real world, as well.
Not exactly. A $25K/year intern with a warezed copy of 3DSMax can't create a new resort island in the real world.
You can (and clearly do) believe anything you want, but at the end of the day, the idea was just to make the PC act more like a game console. :-P
Enjoy your life of unending persecution.
It's a horrific security hole, as this whole Sony rootkit debacle shows.
Horrific security holes don't usually take ten years to become apparent, do they?
Blaming Microsoft for this is like blaming a woman in a short skirt for being raped.